Freedom [94]
Jessica stood at some distance and regarded her guardedly. “William and I need to study tonight,” she said. “Normally I would have been studying all yesterday and today.”
“I’m sorry I kept you from that,” Patty said with depressive sincerity.
“No, it’s fine,” Jessica said. “I really wanted you to be here. I really wanted you to see where I’m spending four years of my life. It’s just that the workload’s pretty intense.”
“No, of course. It’s great. It’s great that you can handle that. I’m so proud of you. I really am, Jessica. I think the world of you.”
“Well, thank you.”
“It’s just—how about if we go to my hotel room? It’s a really fun room. We can order room service and watch movies and drink from the minibar. I mean, you can drink from the minibar, I’m not going to drink tonight. But just to have a girls’ night, just the two of us, for one night. You can study the whole rest of the fall.”
She kept her eyes on the ground, awaiting Jessica’s judgment. She was painfully aware of proposing something new for them.
“I really think I’d better work,” Jessica said. “I already promised William.”
“Oh, please, though, Jessie. One night’s not going to kill you. It would mean a lot to me.”
When Jessica did not reply to this, Patty forced herself to look up. Her daughter was gazing with desolate self-control at the main college building, on an outside wall of which Patty had noticed a stone graven with words of wisdom from the Class of 1920: USE WELL THY FREEDOM.
“Please?” she said.
“No,” Jessica said, not looking at her. “No! I don’t feel like it.”
“I’m sorry I drank too much and said those stupid things last night. I wish you’d let me make it up to you.”
“I’m not trying to punish you,” Jessica said. “It’s just, you obviously don’t like my school, you obviously don’t like my boyfriend—”
“No, he’s fine, he’s nice, I do like him. It’s just that I came here to see you, not him.”
“Mom, I make your life so easy for you. Do you have any idea how easy? I don’t do drugs, I don’t do any of the shit that Joey does, I don’t embarrass you, I don’t create scenes, I never did any of that—”
“I know! And I am truly grateful for it.”
“OK, but then don’t complain if I have my own life and my own friends and don’t feel like suddenly rearranging everything for you. You get all the benefits of me taking care of myself, the least you can do is not make me feel guilty about it.”
“Jessie, though, we’re talking about one night. It’s silly to make such a big deal of it.”
“Then don’t make a big deal of it.”
Jessica’s self-control and coolness toward her seemed to Patty a just punishment for how rule-bound and cold to her mother she herself had been at nineteen. She was feeling so bad about herself, indeed, that almost any punishment would have seemed appropriate to her. Saving her tears for later—feeling as if she didn’t deserve whatever emotional advantage she might have gained by crying, or by running off in a sulk to the train station—she exercised her own self-control and ate an early dining-hall dinner with Jessica and her roommate. She behaved like a grownup even though she felt that Jessica was the real grownup of the two of them.
Back in St. Paul, she continued her plunge down the mental-health mine shaft, and there were no more e-mails from Richard. The autobiographer wishes she could report that Patty didn’t send him any e-mails, either, but it should be clear by now that her capacity for error, agonizing, and self-humiliation is boundless. The one message she feels OK about sending was written after Walter