The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

“I am missing it.”

“You mean now in particular?”

Julia was putting her things back into the knapsack haphazardly- phone, cigarettes, datebook, Chap Stick. She squinted at the window, as if the light were too bright. “I mean, I don’t even know what I’m missing.”

Homesickness was like any other illness: you couldn’t remember it properly. You knew you’d had the flu, and that you’d suffered, but you didn’t have access to the symptoms themselves: the chills, the swollen throat, the heavy ache in your arms and legs as if they’d been split open and something-sacks of rock-had been sewn up inside. He had been eighteen, and in America for only the second time. It was cold. The sweaters he’d bought in Bombay looked wrong-he saw that the first week-and they weren’t warm enough anyway. He saw the same sweaters, of cheap, shiny wool, in too-bright colors, at the “international” table in the Freshman Union. He would not sit there.

His roommate saw him go out in his T-shirt and windcheater, and offered to loan him one of what seemed like dozens of sweaters: brown or black or wheat-colored, the thickest, softest wool Zubin had ever seen. He went to the Harvard Co-op, where they had a clothing section, and looked at the sweaters. He did the calculation several times: the sweaters were “on sale” for eighty dollars, which worked out to roughly 3,300 rupees. If it had been a question of just one he might have managed, but you needed a minimum of three. When the salesperson came over, Zubin said that he was just looking around.

It snowed early that year.

“It gets, like, how cold in the winter in India?” his roommate, Bennet, asked.

Zubin didn’t feel like explaining the varied geography of India, the mountains and the coasts. “About sixty degrees Fahrenheit,” he said.

“Man,” said Bennet. Jason Bennet was a nice guy, an athlete from Nat-ick, Massachusetts. He took Zubin to eat at the lacrosse table, where Zubin looked not just foreign, but as if he were another species-he weighed at least ten kilos less than the smallest guy, and felt hundreds of years older. He felt as if he were surrounded by enormous and powerful children. They were hungry, and then they were restless; they ran around and around in circles, and then they were tired. Five nights a week they’d pledged to keep sober; on the other two they drank systematically until they passed out.

He remembered the day in October that he’d accepted the sweater (it was raining) and how he’d waited until Jason left for practice before putting it on. He pulled the sweater over his head and saw, in the second of wooly darkness, his father. Or rather, he saw his father's face, floating in his mind's eye like the Cheshire Cat. The face was making an expression that Zubin remembered from the time he was ten, and had proudly revealed the thousand rupees he’d made by organizing a betting pool on the horse races among the boys in the fifth standard.

He’d resolved immediately to return the sweater, and then he had looked in the mirror. What he saw surprised him: someone small but good-looking, with fine features and dark, intense eyes, the kind of guy a girl, not just a girl from home but any girl-an American girl-might find attractive.

And he wanted one of those: there was no use pretending he didn’t. He watched them from his first-floor window, as close as fish in an aquarium tank. They hurried past him, laughing and calling out to one another, in their boys’ clothes: boots, T-shirts with cryptic messages, jeans worn low and tight across the hips. You thought of the panties underneath those jeans, and in the laundry room you often saw those panties: impossibly sheer, in incredible colors, occasionally, delightfully torn. The girls folding their laundry next to him were entirely different from the ones at home. They were clearly free to do whatever they wanted-a possibility that often hit him, in class or the library or on the historic brick walkways of the Radcliffe Quad, so intensely that he had to stop and take a deep breath, as if he were on the point of blacking out.

He wore Jason's sweater every day, and was often too warm; the classrooms were overheated and dry as furnaces. He almost never ran into Jason, who had an active and effortless social schedule to complement his rigorous athletic one. And so it was a surprise, one day in late October, to come back to the room and find his roommate hunched miserably over a textbook at his desk.

“Midterms,” Jason said, by way of an explanation. Zubin went over and looked at the problem set, from an introductory physics class. He’d taken a similar class at Cathedral; now he laid out the equations and watched as Jason completed them, correcting his roommate's mistakes as they went along. After the third problem Jason looked up.

“Man, thanks.” And then, as if it had just occurred to him. “Hey, if you want to keep that-”

He had managed so completely to forget about the sweater that he almost didn’t know what Jason meant.

“It's too small for me anyway.”

“No,” Zubin said.

“Seriously. I may have a couple of others too. Coach has been making us eat like hogs.”

“Thanks,” Zubin said. “But I want something less preppy.”

Jason looked at him.

“No offense,” Zubin said. “I’ve just been too fucking lazy. I’ll go tomorrow.”

The next day he went back to the Co-op with his almost-new textbooks in a bag. These were for his required classes (what they called the Core, or general knowledge), as well as organic chemistry. If you got to the reserve reading room at nine, the textbooks were almost always there. He told himself that the paperbacks for his nineteenth-century novel class weren’t worth selling-he’d bought them used anyway-and when he took the rest of the books out and put them on the counter, he realized he had forgotten the Norton Anthology of American Literature in his dorm room. But the books came to $477.80 without it. He took the T downtown to a mall where he bought a down jacket for $300, as warm as a sleeping bag, the same thing the black kids wore. He got a wool watchman's cap with a Nike swoosh.

When he got home, Jason laughed. “Dude, what happened? You’re totally ghetto.” But there was approval in it. Folding the brown sweater on Jason's bed, Zubin felt strong and relieved, as if he had narrowly avoided a terrible mistake.

Julia had been having a dream about losing it. There was no sex in the dream; she couldn’t remember whom she’d slept with, or when. All she experienced was the frustrating impossibility of getting it back, like watching an earring drop and scatter in the bathroom sink, roll and clink down the drain before she could put her hand on it. The relief she felt on waking up every time was like a warning.

She had almost lost it in Paris, before they moved. He was German, not French, gangly but still handsome, with brown eyes and blondish hair. His name was Markus. He was a year ahead of her at the American School and he already knew that he wanted to go back to Berlin for university, and then join the Peace Corps. On the phone at night, he tried to get her to come with him.

At dinner Julia mentioned this idea to her family.

“You in the Peace Corps?” said her sister Claudia, who was visiting from New York. “I wonder if Agnes B. makes a safari line?”

When Claudia came home, she stayed with Julia on the fourth floor, in the chambre de bonne where she had twin beds and her Radiohead poster, all her CDs organized by record label and a very old stuffed monkey named Frank. The apartment was half a block from the Seine, in an old hotel on the Rue des Saint-Peres; in the living room were two antique chairs, upholstered in red-and-gold-striped brocade, and a porcelain clock with shepherdesses on it. The chairs and the clock were Louis XVI, the rugs were from Tehran, and everything else was beige linen.

Claudia, who now lived with her boyfriend in a railroad apartment on the Lower East Side, liked to pretend she was poor. She talked about erratic hot water and rent control and cockroaches, and when she came to visit them in Paris she acted surprised, as if the houses she’d grown up in-first San Francisco, then Delhi, then Dallas, Moscow and Paris-hadn’t been in the same kind of neighborhood, with the same pair of Louis XVI chairs.

“I can’t believe you have a Prada backpack,” she said to Julia. Claudia had been sitting at the table in the kitchen, drinking espresso and eating an orange indifferently, section by section. “Mom's going crazy in her old age.”

“I bought it,” Julia said.

“Yeah, but with what?”

“I’ve been selling my body on the side-after school.”