Empty by Susan Burton

Author:Susan Burton [Burton, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

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THE WEEK AFTER I brought the beer cans home, my mother and I went on a college tour. We flew into Bradley and picked up a rental car. Though this region was my parents’ orientation, the New England landscape was largely unfamiliar to me. The roads were narrow, the states close, and whenever NPR faded out, I could always find another NPR elsewhere on the dial. There was so much more of everything here.

We worked our way through the Massachusetts schools and crossed into Connecticut. On a blue, sparkling afternoon, we stopped at an orchard’s roadside stand. There were doughnuts, cider, and apples in dark-green buckets. We bought two apples.

“Yum,” my mother said in the car.

I said, “This is even better than Gala,” which was the most popular apple variety at Alfalfa’s. When it was four o’clock, time for All Things Considered, the familiar trumpets announced the show, and there was the teletype fade into the stories. I felt cozy in the car then, as I did in our kitchen at this moment of the fading day. If my mother was drinking in secret at night on the college tour, I didn’t know it. On this trip we were our old selves.

My mother and I had traveled together like this once before. The summer I was twelve, we visited Andover. We drove down from the Adirondacks and stayed overnight at an inn. In the morning I went to my interview. The admissions office was in an old house, and the interview room had an Oriental rug, a fireplace, and lamps with fluted shades. A window-unit air conditioner was going. The two interviewers pulled their chairs close. At my father’s insistence, I had brought the Sunday-magazine insert in which my story “Bellamys” had been published. One of the interviewers said, “I love it when people bring stuff.” He picked up the insert. “Do you know who this is on the cover?” He pointed to an illustration of a long-haired scribe dipping a fountain pen in a barrel of ink. “I don’t think it’s anyone,” I said. “I think it’s just a guy they put on there to, you know, show writing.” The man nodded. “Actually, it’s Shakespeare,” he said. “It is?” I said. “Oh, wow.”

“Oh, no!” said my mother when I told her. We were walking into town to buy my father a T-shirt. “You didn’t know that was Shakespeare?”

“How was I supposed to know?” I said.

But, still, I got in.

Recently I’d asked my mother if I could say on my college applications that I’d gotten into Andover. “Why would you put that down?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just to show, you know.”

“No,” said my mother. “You can’t put it down. It would only matter if you’d gone.”

It should have been obvious: The only version of your life that counted was the one that had happened. Or it was the version that counted to other people, at least, even if something you hadn’t lived counted just as much to you.

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