Page 14 - WTP Vol. IX #5

Mid-July, college visit number seven or eight, I’m not sure. This is Vanderbilt, expensive and statusy but with a splash of southern earthiness and charm. Parents and kids are sitting in rows, fidgeting, whispering. My oldest is beside me and we are too road-weary to say anything. It feels better to sit in silence, the sun pouring in from arched windows, the bushes outside motionless, blanketed into submis- sion by the humid heat.
An admissions officer appears at the front, and he begins the session by asking prospective students to share their name, hometown, and what they wanted to be when they were five. When it is my daughter’s turn, she stands and says she wanted to be a pirate. And suddenly I am not here but back in Iowa in a kitchen we no longer inhabit, watching her through the window. She’s standing in the backyard, touching the handle of a wooden sword tied to her waist, her translucent blue eyes, fearful and expectant, fixed on a spot before her.
After the session we are led on a tour across campus, over lawns simmering in afternoon heat, past mag- nolias and hackberries and sugar maples shading lush beds of monkey grass. If I could, I would curl
up under one of these trees and drift off, but we are walking faster, with so much ground to cover. We stop at an intersection of sidewalks. A drop of sweat slides down my spine. The guide is talking about the number of majors and degree programs, and the fact that Vanderbilt students are the sixth happiest in
the country or world or something, I can’t recall. The details of these college visits are washing together
in my brain, creating a slurry of facts about dorm life and financial aid and academic calendars, semester versus trimester. I’m too overwhelmed to parse it out. My daughter can go wherever, I’ve decided. But she
is determined to make the right choice. As a young person, she believes in the concept of right choices, and I do too, I guess, though I’m increasingly aware that so much of life comes from a place ungoverned by choice. It just happens. One minute a child is five, playing in the backyard, tendrils of hair fusing to her temples, and the next minute she is seventeen and standing beside you, over you, contemplating a school six hundred miles from home.
~
April. We are back in Nashville for another look at Vanderbilt. We eat dinner in a restaurant on West End Avenue and then walk toward campus for what
we believe is a 9 P.M. appointment with a professor of philosophy. I don’t know why we think a professor would want to meet us so late in the evening, why neither of us considers the possibility that we’ve made a mistake (we have: the meeting is for 9 A.M. the next day). It’s as though the months of school visits and applications and deliberations have eroded our common sense, and we have fallen into a state of perpetual confusion, a place where late-night meet- ings with faculty seem plausible.
We turn onto a walk leading to campus, passing through an entrance in an iron fence overtaken by thick leafy hedges. The noise and harsh orange light- ing of West End Avenue disappear, and we are sub- mersed in a quiet dark. An unusually tall dogwood looms ahead, holding its breath, and when we walk by, it shudders, releasing a flurry of blossoms. I am suddenly very tired, so it’s almost a relief when we climb the steps to a castle-like building and find the door locked. We have no choice but to give up and slip back, drop into a hotel bed and surrender to the sweet illogic of dreams.
Reality rushes back the next morning. We eat quickly and race through Nashville’s intricate web of free- way, park near campus, and walk quickly to the castle building, almost getting there on time. When the professor sees us, he pulls some things off the chairs, using his own chair to move about, his feet
in tennis shoes pedaling him around. His silver hair has arranged itself, and he speaks with a lyrical southern accent. When my daughter sits opposite him, he rears back wide-eyed, as if she isn’t what he was expecting. Perhaps this is how he reacts to everyone who visits. His office is darkened by walls of exposed brick and a scarcity of windows, just a
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