Page 28 of Our Last Vineyard Summer

“Keep killing the mood, Mom.” Louisa straightened her arms overhead, yawning.

Had the kitchen always needed a paint job? There were cracks in the wall, narrow hairlines where the plaster had settled under the weight of the house. “You need this the most,” Virgie gently scolded Louisa. “Start jotting.”

Louisa drew spirals in the notebook. “I’m thinking!”

This was an exercise that had come out of the essay she would write her girls, the one she planned to give to Wiley for consideration. She’d penned the beginning.Just because my firstborn was a girl didn’t mean I didn’t have dreams for her. While a boy can come into this world and his mother can cradle him, believing he can be anything he wants, mothers of daughters begin the journey with more trepidation. Because at some point, our daughter may ask us to do something, and we’ll have to break her heart by saying, “No. Girls can’t do that.” As my eldest daughter approaches the ripe age of sixteen this year, a time when she wants to hear nothing from me, I find myself wanting to tell her everything.

The ideas came quickly then, like they’d been welled up inside her and only now did they have a reason to come out.

Don’t believe the classified ad pages. Just because a job is listed on the men’s side of the ad pages doesn’t mean you can’t apply for it. Women can do any job listed, evenwelding and plumbing. You only must ask a man to train you.

You will be measured by a different yardstick. A professor in college told me once that unless I was going to do 110 percent of the work of a political science major, I should major in home economics. He’s right. Don’t let them believe you won’t work harder than the smartest boy.

Education first. Always. If a man loves you, he will wait for you to finish.

If a boyfriend is awful to you or someone mistreats you at work, the police may not protect you, but your mother will. Know that you can always go home.

Fight for what you believe in, even when everyone around you doesn’t agree with what you’re saying.

There was so much more she wanted to say but she lowered her pencil when she saw Louisa get up to pour herself orange juice.

“Okay, I’m ready, Mom.” Louisa had been the least excited to go up in the plane, but when she’d descended, she’d run into Virgie’s arms with the corners of her eyes glistening.

“I will never say that an airplane doesn’t have a spirit,” Louisa had said, trading her cool teenage remove for an open heart. Virgie didn’t let go of her daughter’s embrace until Louisa did.

“I’ve been so upset,” her daughter had said, standing in her white knee socks and sneakers in the airfield, her expression pleading with her mother to understand. “I’ve been so disappointed and ashamed about everything with Brandon, having to visit the clinic and getting rid of, you know. But I’m more than Brandon Millerton. Someday I will be someone else entirely, and I don’t care if he thinks I’m disgusting or not.”

“You’re not disgusting. You’re human, and he took advantage of you, coming on that strong.” If Virgie could erase the Brandon Millerton situation entirely from her daughter’s memory, she would. She hated that Louisa would carry everything about that procedure for the rest of her life: the smell of the sterile office, the whir of the suction, how she’d curled into a ball in her bed when they got home and refused to leave for a week, eating only chicken and rice soup.

Angling the yellow pad off the kitchen table, Virgie read Louisa’s words, hoping to glimpse the ambition of Athena, the determination of Demeter, in her teen daughter.

“?‘One: become a wife. Two: have a baby. Three: speak my truth.’?”

Virgie lowered the notepad, sagging against the table. “I’m intrigued by number three, ‘speak my truth.’ It’s something your generation will do better than mine.” She crossed out Louisa’s first two answers with big black Xs. “You just flew an airplane, like gosh-darn Amelia Earhart, and all you can think about is being a proper wife?”

Louisa tipped her chin with pride. “What is wrong with that? You’re a wife and mother.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

Louisa squinted at her. “Are we so terrible?”

Virgie frowned. “No, that is why I’m doing this. You’re everything to me.”

It was maddening the way children listened to the wrong things and never the right ones, Virgie thought. How it could make her heart feel like it was shrinking to the size of a pea. Ripping a fresh piece of paper out of the notepad, Virgie slid the blank lined sheet in front of her eldest daughter, still sitting at the table. She emitted a long, low sigh.

“Think bigger.” Virgie handed her back the pencil.

Opposite Louisa, Aggie erased whatever she had written, her cheeks flushed. They could hear the squeals of young children playing Wiffle ball two doors down, the whiz of the plastic ball.

Louisa pushed the notebook away. “I don’t know what the right answer is!”

Virgie snatched the pencil and numbered the first three lines, hoping it would trigger an idea in her almost-sixteen-year-old. “The right answer is what’s inside you. When you lay in bed at night, what do you think will make you happiest? Think of one thing.”

Louisa wrung her hands. “Making you and Daddy happy.”

This felt like waiting in line at Cronig’s on a summer Saturday. “Not us. YOU. Do you know that you girls live in a country where the dean of a prominent medical school was recently asked if they have a quota for the number of women admitted to the school, and the dean said, ‘Yes, we do. We admit as few women as we can.’ It’s not funny, and he thought it was, and it was presented in a national newspaper as such. You need goals, girls, so that you can look that bozo in the face someday and say: you can’t stop me.”

Aggie blew the eraser shavings off the pad. “But if they won’t let women into med school, he can stop me. Right?”

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