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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?”

“NO,” Virgie yelled. She called Betsy and James into the kitchen, and her youngest trudged in holding her stomach, still looking pale.

“Do I have to?” Betsy complained.

“Yes,” Virgie said. “Take a seat.” Betsy and James slid into the banquette.

Louisa shrugged. “I don’t want to be a doctor. I can’t even look at a cut on my own finger, and I’m not a good writer like you.” Then she brightened, and Louisa picked up her pencil and wrote, Get straight A’s .

Virgie put a check-plus next to A’s , then she said, “Yes, yes, but think bigger. You too, Aggie. Getting good grades is essential. You’re right.

Think harder though. You live in a world where men tell us that we cannot buy a couch on credit because we’re women.

In some states, women who don’t change their name after marriage can lose their driver’s licenses.

Their driver’s license! So tell me. What will make you happy? What would make all women happy?”

Louisa posed it like a question. “Having people take us seriously?”

Holding a hand up to her ear, Virgie said, “Can you repeat that?”

It might have been frustration that made Louisa yell, but she yelled, “Having people take us seriously.”

“Now both of you say it,” Virgie instructed, an electricity spreading through her, and as they did, the sisters smiled out of embarrassment.

“Ding, ding. Congratulations. You got the right answer, and if people take you seriously, what do you want to be?”

Louisa raised her hand like they were in school. “A lawyer? I like to argue my points.”

A crisp nod. “You’re on the debate team at school. That makes perfect sense.”

Virgie watched her daughter smile at her pencil marks. 1 was to get straight A’s. 2 become a lawyer. “But what about this summer? You need a goal for summer,” Virgie said.

“That’s easy,” Louisa said. “I want to take more flying lessons.”

A smile spread on Virgie’s face. She wanted to get back up on that airplane too.

Shifting her attention to Aggie, Virgie said a quick prayer that her middle daughter had thought beyond the conventions of “wife and mother.” Aggie had been erasing and rewriting her answers since the discussion had started, and Virgie tapped her pencil on the paper as she read them.

Her middle daughter often surprised her, and she had now too:

train for the NYC marathon

golf with Daddy

convince parents to let me join the Bethesda–Chevy Chase Women’s Basketball Team

“I really like the first one,” Virgie said, thinking back to those days when Agatha would set up obstacle courses in the living room and make her sisters compete for the best times.

“We should come up with a running plan. I know a gentleman who ran a marathon. Do you want me to call him and ask about training?”

“Nope. I want you to convince Daddy to let me play basketball. I have a book about it from the library.”

“Oh, Aggie. Stop. I already told you, you’ll be the laughingstock of the boys at school.”

In a notebook Betsy doodled a small bunny munching on a carrot. Now that her mother crouched beside her, Betsy tried to hide it. “I’m too little for this.”

Louisa and Aggie laughed, and Virgie began to braid Betsy’s long, knotty hair. “Ten? Absolutely not.”

James held up his piece of paper. “My goal is to find my father.”

The Wiffle ball careened into their yard, a grade-school-aged boy running across the lawn to retrieve it. “Oh, honey, your father was lost at sea years ago.”

Betsy added whiskers to her bunny. “James thinks his father might be stuck on Nomans, and he might be right.”

“What’s Nomans?” Louisa shook her head like it was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard. Aggie asked what happened to his father as if she was asking about the weather, and as the boy explained it, Virgie fetched a package of Oreo Cremes. She gave each child three.

James licked his lips. “Anyway, Nomans is the tiny island off Chilmark. They did war exercises there, and my father fished in the waters off it. What if he’s been living as a castaway?”

“I’ve always wondered if you could swim out there,” Aggie said.

“We should form a search party and go out to find him,” said Betsy, making it sound like an installment of The Hardy Boys .

“No, no,” Virgie said, waving off the idea. “Let’s not mistake false hope with ambition. Now back to the question at hand.” But Betsy and James had already slinked off to the sofa, whispering more about Nomans Island.