EPISODE 16 EPISODE 16“Do you want that apple now?” I asked Anna, for the third time since boarding the train to New York City. I brought her favorite snack in my backpack, hoping a Granny Smith might keep my temperamental teen satisfied on our trip to visit colleges.
“No, Mom,” Anna huffed, “I told you, I’m not hungry.”
As I turned toward the window, my mind wandered to a decade ago when Anna, our fiercely independent middle child, disappeared.
She was one of those kids who would go off with a box of toys and play for hours. Francis or I would find her somewhere in our house, surrounded by her characters, her huge brown eyes flitting from one to the other, her wee lips muttering their voices in her imagined scenario.
On one particular occasion, she’d been off playing by herself so long, I became concerned.
“Anna?!” I bellowed, hoping to find her in a corner, lost in a complex drama involving Buzz Lightyear, Polly Pockets, and My Little Pony. Just as my mothering instinct was about to mobilize a grid search of our entire neighborhood, I heard something in the bonus room over our garage.
Sure enough, there she was, sitting in a heap of paper, pencils, yarn, fabric, and my sewing basket dumped upside down. “Lookit what I made, Mom,” she coughed out, her voice box sluggish from hours of dormancy.
Anna, age eight, held up her creation, a full-length garment of white fleece. After making sketches in a Hello Kitty notebook, she settled on a sleek one-shoulder design with an elegant neckline and fitted skirt. Anna modeled her gown for us, and we looked on in amazement at the sophisticated silhouette and meticulous hand-stitching. Apparently, Anna had seen someone do it on TV, and was now determined to be a fashion designer.
Nearly ten years later, we were on our way to the Big Apple to follow Anna’s dream.
Sitting beside my seventeen-year-old daughter, I still saw her big brown eyes flitting, lost in thought. Intuitively, I knew she was envisioning what it would be like to be a fashion design student in NYC, walking city streets in stylish outfits, sketching on sunlight-dappled park benches, and hailing cabs to meet friends for lunch in SoHo.
My baggy brown eyes were flitting too, but I was imagining rat-infested alleys, marauding pick-pocketers, subway stairwells reeking of urine, and catcalling ne’er-do-wells. Francis and I would much rather send our daughter to college somewhere in rural Vermont or Wisconsin, where sleepy campus police officers busy themselves writing citations for spitting on the sidewalk. But we knew Anna must see for herself.
Emerging from the subterranean chaos of Penn Station, we began our two-day odyssey. Piles of old snow were melting, revealing a winter’s worth of grit, grime, and garbage. Dirty water dripped from scaffoldings and fire escapes above us, sometimes landing in our hair. The subway stations were a hideous cornucopia of acrid odors and filthy corners piled with discarded cigarette butts.
The housewife in me wanted to spray the whole place with bleach and give it a good scrubbing. Anna, on the other hand, was mortified her mother acted like a quintessential tourist, fiddling clumsily with my maps and subway diagrams, stopping every few blocks to mutter, “Now, which street is this?”
Despite her embarrassment, we managed to visit all the fashion design schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn in two days, using only a Metrocard, one twelve-dollar cab ride, and just under 42,000 Fitbit steps. After our last tour at Parsons School of Design, Anna slumped over a chair in the admissions office, sore, tired, and overwhelmed with the realities of the big city college experience.
I thought I’d be relieved if Anna was disappointed with urban life, but my parental instinct to protect my daughter from danger was tempered by my need to support her dreams.
“Hey, you want that apple now?” I offered, groping in my backpack. As I handed over the once flawlessly crisp Granny Smith, I saw it had become a mushy, oozing ball of bruises. I tossed it in the trash and improvised.
“Whaddya say we take a cab and go get chocolate shakes?” I said. “I know a great place on the Upper East Side.” As we walked out into bustling Greenwich Village, I realized that no matter where my daughter’s aspirations take her, she’ll always be the apple of my eye.