The Graduation 

The families arrive and settle in around us, the bleachers rattling as they lumber up the stairs, an excitement to their steps. Some bring bags of sandwiches and snacks, thermoses of coffee, bottles of lemonade. On the row below, a young woman wrapped in a sari of muted blues opens a container of biscuits and passes it on to four generations spread along the metal bench. Strapped to her back is a newborn asleep in a denim papoose, her perfect lips suckling the air.  

We are sitting at a perilous height, my once-husband, his new love, and I. Our daughter is somewhere far below, standing in a queue which winds from the 50-yard line podium, down the length of the football field, across Bancroft and Durant then onward still, she one of several thousand, waiting for her moment.

After a week of rain and chill, the sun owns the sky. Somewhere in the stands, a throng hoots again and again as the graduands begin their approach—a steady, joyous, single-file stream of black robes and caps—each one holding a card on which they’ve written their name to be called out. The announcements begin, booming through stadium speakers as one after another they step onto the stage, shake a hand, take a set in the field. 

I listen. I watch. The momentousness afloat.    

“Mom,” she texts, “I don’t know where I am in line, but I’m behind a string of Patels. When you hear six in a row, ha!, I’m next.”  

Four years ago when I’d first brought her to Berkeley, we’d driven up from LA in the Honda van packed full. Her dorm room was on the 6th floor. One elevator and hundreds of students. How we’d laughed. Lynda was with us; she’d flown up to help unload and drive home with me. Our love was new and unexpected; after a year of friendship, suddenly it was there, undeniable. We spent the night in a funky B&B on campus: rose print wallpaper, blush upholstery, pink sheets. How we’d laughed again, Lynda so hated pink.

The names a chant almost, from readers on stage. Umbrellas pop open against the burn. Nearly an hour already.

“Don’t’ forget the camera,” Lynda said days ago as I packed for this trip. “Capture everything.” And how she cried then, so much she wanted to come back to Berkeley with me, share this day, believe still that it might be possible. Even with her brother Bill—her favorite, whom she hadn’t seen in months—having just arrived at our home, she did not want me to go. She was failing. It was happening quickly now.

He stands up, this man I passed half my life with, travel weary from his round-the-world career.  “Too hot,” he says, and clomps down the metal stairs eyeing a square of shade by the goal posts at the end of the field. His girlfriend gets up. She is the one who follows him now. A guard confronts them, there is a brief altercation, and they wander off.

I lift a wrap onto reddening shoulders. A couple rows back, a cork pops on a bottle of champagne. From around the stadium, continued bursts of celebratory cheers.

Another half hour. 

I think of my parents, both gone years already. I imagine them, how they’d be sitting here with me. My mother, beaming her pride, wearing her favorite neon plum, my father in a knit sport shirt, a suit jacket draped over his knees. I turn to the empty seats to the left and right of me. “If only you could see her now,” I whisper.

She is nearing the stage. The first pure joy in my life, radiant smile, blond hair. Her flowing, graceful stance, the way she turns her head—I would spot her if she were another hundred yards away.

She sways her arms toward the bleachers. I stand and wildly wave back, an impossible speck in the upper left of the stadium, a pale yellow sundress draped in a floral wrap.

My cell rings. It’s Bill. “God, this is difficult,” he begins, his words rushing out. “I mean, Lynnie’s not with it. The nurse tried to show me the morphine. I couldn’t listen, not even look. I mean... god. When will you be back?”

Together Lynda and I lived one day, then the next, making dreamy plans about what we’ll do once the cancer is gone, death’s image rolling in and out for months already, like the tide, unstoppable, unassailable.  And yet as I drove away from our home to the airport yesterday, I felt a relief that shocked me.

I slip from my sandals, feel the metal scorch my feet. “Day after tomorrow,” I say, although he knows this.

A text: MOM!  Her father hasn’t returned, his sweater, wool, tossed over the metal beside me. I jump up. The baby below me scrunches her face, threatening a wail.

Bill continues to rant, breathless. He gives up and hangs up. Or maybe I do.

I count out the six Patels, and then her name—five syllables and a brief pause, together just shy of three seconds—stuns the air. 

Both empty and filled to bursting: how does a body negotiate both? I stand, sit, stand, sit. I scan the families near me, aching to be held, to have someone listen and nod as I say to the generations, My daughter.