Today Ashley turns eighteen. We are home and she is surrounded by her close group of friends, girls she has spent years with, giggling, talking about boys, talking about college, talking about problems with their parents. We are gathered in the living room as Ashley opens her gifts, most of them geared toward the next stage of her life. In three weeks she enters Penn State, the alma mater of both my parents. Paper flies as each gift is unveiled: a new Bose stereo system, a set of matching bedding, a new contraption for her iPod. There are picture frames filled with photographs of her best friends to take with her. A collective 'Oooooh'� rises up as she unwraps the Apple laptop from me.

My father sits in the big green armchair, 'his'� chair when he is visiting. He watches his granddaughter, his only grandchild, with pride.

'Excuse me, but I think something is missing.'�
'Now what could that be, Grandpa?'� Ashley smiles knowingly because my father has yet to give his gift. He's always the holdout, mostly for effect, but today is special so we indulge him. He is holding a small box delicately wrapped in a lilac paper with a gold filigree ribbon. You can tell he has wrapped it himself. He holds it out to her, hoping she will not make him unfold himself from his chair.

'Happy birthday, my girl. Be it ever so humble!'�

Ashley goes to her grandfather, bends down and gives his scratchy face a wet kiss and takes the small box from his hands. She sits down across from him and takes great care in the unwrapping, knowing my father expects a certain amount of theatric decorum surrounding his gift. Ever the showman, I think. She is very careful to untie the ribbon and not just wrest it from the box, unpeels the tape gingerly so as not to tear the paper. It is a small white box, no store logos or fancy gold scrolling. It is modest in its simplicity. Ashley takes off the lid and looks inside. She looks up at my father, tilts her head and puts on her warmest smile, the smile that has won her hundreds of friends throughout the years.

'Grandpa.'�

My father has tears in his eyes. The whites have turned a painful-looking red which makes the pupils startling sapphires.

'Your Grandma wore those on our wedding day. She wanted you to have them on your eighteenth birthday. She is watching you, my girl, and she is damned proud.'� A solitary tear slips silently from his right eye. He does not move to wipe it away.

Ashley gets up from her chair and walks toward my father, bends and kisses the tear away. 'Thank you, Grandpa, this means so much to me. I love you.'� She takes his hand and gives it a tug. 'C'mon. We have some partying to attend to!'� He braces his legs beneath him for the big push, locks his elbows at right angles and in one swift heave his body is out of the chair and ready for motion. I don't think he is as feeble as he puts on because he doesn't miss a beat and off he goes, arm in arm with my daughter, into the kitchen. His booming voice melds with the other higher voices and a wave of laughter rises and falls.

I sit alone in the living room, listening to the sounds of my perfect daughter's life.





Hours later, I return home. The evening has been a huge success. I am tired and only want to feel the pillow beneath my head. I make my rounds to switch off lights, reset the thermostat. Ashley is staying at a friend's where they will be continuing the party. I beg off to cries of 'Aw, Mom. I only turn eighteen once, you know!'� I know she is just trying to be nice because the last thing my eighteen-year-old daughter and her friends want around is that eighteen-year-old's mom. I do remember a thing or two from my youth.

As I go to switch off the light in the living room, I see it ' the small white box on the table. Since Ashley has already stowed away all the birthday gifts, most of them packed meticulously to join her at Penn State, I think it odd that she has left this behind. I sit in the green armchair and take the white box off the table, lift off the lid and peer down at the lustrous beads, still perfectly coiled. I pick them up as if they are the most fragile of things, as if they could crumble at my touch. I hold them to the light and move them slowly to pick up the hint of pink here, the lovely ivory there. My mother cherished this strand as she had cherished nothing else in her life. I remember those nights watching her clasp them around her neck, thinking my mother the most beautiful magical creature of all. She would replace the pearls delicately in her mahogany jewelry box in the top drawer, a place of honor. Then she would lightly kiss me on the tip of my nose saying, 'These pearls will be yours when you turn eighteen, my darling.'� Little did she know.

Adolescence stormed on me, stinging and painful. Acne waged a purple battle across my face. I never seemed to be able to do anything right and lived in constant fear of doing everything wrong. My father, a gregarious achiever, expected nothing short of perfection and I was nowhere near that mark. Friendships were difficult as I was sensitive and sullen. I never seemed to possess the gift of social grace or the thick skin to wade through the years of petty cattiness that seemed to permeate girl-culture. Through the years of high school, I found my friends among the outcasts and potheads. Alcohol became my courage and my slurring, stumbling escapades my own version of social interaction. My parents chose to pretend I wasn't their only chance at producing a shining example to society. They poured their free time into charity events to help the people who were expected to produce social misfits in hopes they could save those children from a life like mine. I was left to my friends and my bottle and the mean voices in my head.

I remember very little of my own eighteenth birthday. What I do remember is spending it in much the same way as I did the rest of my time. The crowning moment of my day of emancipation came when my parents were called by the local police to pick up their drunken and disorderly daughter, slumped in a holding cell in the back of our little police station. My father walked in, anger behind his eyes, a man who refused to be beaten down by his only child. My mother had quit coming. The cops all knew us by then, my angry father, my forlorn mother. This was the movie of our lives and we replayed it so many times, so many weekends. We had all given up on me by then and were just moving out of habit.

A lifetime later, it is now the eighteenth birthday of my own only child. I can only marvel at how I managed to bear such a remarkable person out of my womb. Now, she is the recipient of my coveted pearls, the pearls my own mother promised me when I was just a small, innocent child, before I became the wedge of pain in their lives. It is a trophy to Ashley's perfection.

'I finally did something right, huh, Dad?'� I speak to the dark room.

Now I clutch the pearls in my hands, forgetting the fragility of the tiny beads hand strung on a wisp of filament, close my eyes and weep for the person I could never be.

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