Susan Kenney

Seventeen-year-old Sara's visit to Manhattan with her mother illuminates her mother's past, leading Sara to a better understanding and more sympathetic view of her mother's eccentricities. This novella details events involving Sara and her mother that precede, intertwine and connect with the first three chapters of the novel In Another Country. "Escape" was named a notable story in the 2006 Pushcart Prize Awards. This 2010 version is slightly revised and updated from the earlier version printed in EPOCH: Vol. 54, No 1:2005 series.

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(Excerpt from the revised version, 2010)

Escape

Under The Clock: New York 1958

    "Meet me under the clock at the Biltmore!" says Sara's mother on her way out of the hotel suite. She waggles her dark eyebrows up and down, twiddles her fingers as if to tap the ash off an imaginary cigar, and knees bent, scoots out the door.
    Sara squeezes her eyes shut. Not a bad exit line; the only problem is, they're already at the Biltmore. She opens her eyes and stares out the window at the top of the Chrysler Building, its scalloped metallic profile a spear of chrome-plated asparagus. She wonders what the guy from Michigan makes of all this, but she's afraid to look.
    "Your mother is quite a fascinating person, isn't she?" he says. "A real live wire."
    That's a polite way of putting it, Sara thinks. She fakes a smile and nods in agreement. This is the last of her informal college interviews with the Big Ten schools currently holding court in New York City--or “chats” as they call them if you're one of the so-called promising juniors they've invited for the weekend so they can look you over. She's already done Ohio, Indiana, and Purdue. She'd had high hopes for Michigan--the farthest away from home she can afford to go--but that was before Mom weighed in with the Groucho impression.
    "Where did your mother go to school?"
    "Syracuse, er. . .she went to Syracuse University," Sara replies. "She could have gone to Smith, but she graduated from high school early and didn't have four years of English, so . . ." Sara's voice trails off; she can't believe she's telling Mr. Michigan one of her mother's stories during her college interview. "So. . . anyway, she was in a hurry so she decided to go to
Syracuse instead."
    "Oh, really? How interesting. And what was her field of study?"
    "English," Sara says in despair. Once again her mother has grabbed the limelight, and she's not even here.
    "Aha." Mr. Michigan nods sagely, then consults a notepad in his lap. "I see from the questionnaire you filled out for us that's one of your interests as well. English literature, art history, sculpture, writing--quite a broad range." The interviewer—his name is actually Douglas "Call me Doug" Campbell--chuckles. "Like mother, like daughter, hum?"
    Sara sits rigid in her tailored pink seersucker shirtwaist, legs crossed at the ankles, hands folded in her lap, eyes fixed on the floor. She can feel the ridiculous little clamp-on hat with the wired-on flowers and skimpy veil (Mom: "No lady ever goes without a hat in the city!") creeping up her scalp on its way to popping right off the top of her head. At least she managed to squelch the last-minute attempt to buy her a corsage at the flower shop downstairs in the lobby ("Mom, please. This is a college interview, not the prom.") Ha, ha, all part of the comedy routine; like mother, like daughter.
    The last thing Sara wants is to be like her, worse yet, become her, which seems to be the whole idea. More and more it seems her mother wants to take over Sara's life so she can relive hers. Ever since they moved back to Skaneateles it’s been push push push to do all the stuff her mother did—Hey! Watch me become the champion speller, class valedictorian, knock their socks off at Syracuse and so on—and even the stuff she didn't, such as become a famous writer and so forth. And now this. Sara had tried to talk her mother into letting her come to the city by herself--she's taken the train to New Jersey to visit her aunt and uncle any number of times (well, twice)--but no such luck. Mom had to horn in on everything, use this opportunity to revisit the haunts of her youth, the scene of all her triumphs, and drag Sara around with her. "Hey, kid, we'll do it up brown, stay in a hotel, get show tickets, the whole shebang. I wouldn't miss it for the world!"
    So here they are at the Biltmore, with Mom doing it up brown all right, whatever that means. Given her loony exit with the invisible cigar, as far as Sara’s concerned what it means is that she can forget about Michigan. Goodbye Big Ten, Hello Syracuse. Now she’ll never get away from that dumb old backwater village her family has lived in going on forever. Which Mom of course had to spell out for him (as well pronounce twice in true spelling champ fashion) when he hesitated over the name. "That's Skan-ee-AT-less! S.K.A.N.E.A.T.E.L.E.S! Skan-ee-AT-less!" At least she didn't go straight into her cheerleader routine with "Ma! Pa! Sis-Boom-Bah! Skaneateles-High-School-Rah-Rah-Rah!" That would have been even worse than the Marx Brothers act.
    Mr. Doug leans forward and smiles. "But enough of that; I'm here to learn more about you. Apropos of your mom’s charming tribute to the famous cultural icon downstairs," he says amiably, "what do you think of Holden Caulfield as the most compelling representative voice of modern postwar youth?"

    Sara spots her mother as soon as the elevator doors open. Good as her word, she's at the far end of the Palm Court, strolling back and forth under the aforementioned cultural icon, arms clasped behind her, clutching her pocketbook. From this distance, in the dim light with her white gloves, little pillbox hat and still-dark hair, her brown polka-dot dress with the short sleeves and narrow belt, she looks so slim and expectant she could pass for a college student about to meet her date for an outing in the city. Overhead looms the huge startled-looking clock face, two nearly life-sized bronze nymphs on either side hanging on for dear life, the whole thing encased in a huge baroque fixture the size and shape of a flattened Liberty bell.
    The clock reads ten minutes after noon. Sara starts down the length of the crowded lobby toward her mother, dodging low-hanging palm fronds and skirting gaggles of young things lounging against lattice partitions and rows of elderly gentlemen ensconced in padded rattan chairs reading The Wall Street Journal, wreathed in cigar smoke. Just the way she always imagined it, right down to the layers of pungent smoke drifting in and around the potted palms, the rattle of newspapers being folded back, the constant buzz of conversation, of people hurrying here and there to their various destinations--or else pacing back and forth, waiting, as her mother has been for nearly an hour, Sara presumes, under the clock.
    Just then her mother wheels around. "Oh, hi!" she calls out as if she's just glimpsed a long-lost friend. She rushes forward so eagerly with such a delighted smile on her face that for an instant Sara thinks her mother has taken her for someone else, especially since she's not wearing her glasses, a small vanity she continues to indulge in whenever she goes out in public. But who else would it be?
    "Your mummsie's been waiting right here like a good girl," she flutes as she comes up to Sara, then adds in her regular slightly gruff-sounding voice, "I don't know about you, but I sure could use some lunch."
    Sara turns toward the escalator, thinking they can just go to that cafe she remembers seeing on the mezzanine. "Psst! Not that way!" her mother says in a stage whisper. "That's the Men's Bar--ladies not welcome, doncha know. But who cares? There's a Schrafft's only a few blocks up, and I'm dying for a frosted coffee. Then I'll show you around,” she says, hiking up a corner of her mouth in an exaggerated "Hotcha!" wink. “These are my old stomping grounds, remember?" With that, her mother links a skinny arm with hers, twirling the pair of them into a tandem about-face as they hightail it out the door onto Madison Avenue. For a moment Sara feels like Dorothy skipping off down the Yellow Brick Road arm-in-arm with the Scarecrow. Except that her mother is much better dressed.

    "And how did your little tetta-tet go after I left?" her mother inquires once they've been seated in one of the mahogany-paneled booths at Schrafft's and given the waitress their order--two frosted coffees and two chicken-salad sandwiches. "That Michigan fellow was a little stiff, if you ask me. That's why I tried to liven things up a little, break the ice, so to speak."
    "It was fine. We talked about architectural symbolism as a manifestation of social commentary in The Catcher in the Rye."
    "Phew. Well, fan my brow." Her mother picks up the menu card and fans her brow.
    Sara picks up her napkin and discreetly shakes it open, spreads it in her lap. She doesn't feel like going into the whole thing, though she's quite pleased with the way she managed to turn her mother's zany performance to good use. "Well, I must say," Mr. Call me Doug Campbell had said in parting, "you and your mother do make quite a team."
    "I think he was impressed," Sara tells her mother.
    "Well, he darn well ought to be. By the way, where's your hat?"
    Sara carefully lines up the silverware along either side of her plate. "It was so tight it pinched my head, and then it started to ride up during the interview. So I just pulled it off.” She smoothes the napkin creases down over her knees. “I left it by the elevator in that little sand thing."
    "Oh, Sara." Her mother sighs. "Even if you didn't want it anymore, Francie could always have worn it next Easter."
    "Well, it made me feel like a soufflé."
    Her mother turns her head away and shrugs, then shrugs again. Then snorts. Sara looks over at her; her mother's shoulders are jerking up and down. She glances over at Sara with bright, dancing eyes and snorts again, then picks up her napkin and presses it to her mouth. “Ha. Soufflé. That’s good,” she gasps. “That’s really good.”
    Sara gazes at her in wonderment. She hasn’t seen her mother this animated--jolly, even-- since before Sara’s father died of a heart attack five years ago next month, June 19th to be precise. Things had been pretty rocky for a while, but as summer wore on into fall, life in Toledo seemed to be going along pretty well, considering.
    Or so Sara thought. Then all of a sudden in the middle of November Mom’s next older sister Rosie appeared on the doorstep, packed them all off to Skaneateles to live with Sara’s grandmother and Aunt Daisy, then hotfooted it back to her dogs and horses and Uncle Ted in South Carolina, only to be killed in a car crash less than six months later. So there they were, Sara, her mother and the two little kids all crammed willy-nilly into the rambling old house at 36 State (which Sara would later refer to as the House of Widows), her mother subdued and weepy in the thrall of those two imperious, bossy women, and no beloved husband Jimmie or sister Rosie to rescue her.
She’d cheered up considerably once the four of them moved into their own house next door (originally built for Sara's great-grandparents and still in the family), even showed signs of getting back to her old self, but then Aunt Daisy died, so now they're back in jail at 36 State, taking care of Gommie, who has gone pretty much completely ga-ga. So Sara can see how for her mother this New York trip is a welcome escape; she just wishes it didn't have to be at the same time she's plotting her own. Still, it’s good to see her mother looking happy again. She’ll just have to pull up her socks and go along for the ride. At least the interviews are over.
    "Never mind, it's all right," her mother says finally, picking up one triangle of her sandwich with delicate fingers. "Say, did I ever tell you the one about the chicken sandwich they served me the first time I ate lunch at the Gamma Phi house?"
    Sara knows the story well--it ends with the punch line: "I knew it was a chicken sandwich because it had a feather in it!" It's one of many anecdotes her mother has a tendency to trot out in lieu of actual conversation. Her own sandwich tastes as dry as an old dance card. It's not all right, even though not ten minutes ago she was wishing she could ditch her mother the way she'd ditched the hat. Her mother put a lot of time into that silly hat, wiring on the perky pink rosebuds and white daisies to go with the pink-striped Jonathan Logan shirtwaist with the self-belt, fitted bodice and circle skirt Sara simply had to have after she saw it advertised the February Seventeen, and which had cost the earth--$25--in the Junior Miss department at Flah's, the department store that caters to the upper crust in Syracuse. "But Mom," she'd pleaded over the pay phone, plunking in dime after dime while she made her case, "it's a classic; I can wear it everywhere. Please?" Finally a sigh from her mother. "All right, if it's that important to you, I'll find the money somehow. But it will have to hold you for a while." So she'd gotten the dress--along with her mother's repeated reminder that she herself has only one good dress, the one she's wearing now, which she's proud to say has held her for nearly eight years and will for many more.
    Sara knows they don't have much money--in fact she's not really sure how her mother is paying for this trip, hotel, theater tickets, dinners out, even though they're not staying at the Biltmore but in a much cheaper hotel down the street and eating breakfast at the counter in Walgreen's. "An egg on toast is an egg on toast " is her mother's philosophy. "Why pay upwards of $15.00 a night for a room when all we're going to do is sleep in it and hang our clothes?"
    Now Sara feels wasteful, worse than that, ungrateful. She resolves that later, when they're on their way back to their hotel, she'll stop by the Biltmore and see if anyone's turned the hat in to Lost and Found.

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