We made it to the kitchen, picked up our trays, and skipped the hot meal line for the coffee and tea tanks. I popped a frozen waffle into the toaster. Caroline made her tea. She had a green apple on her tray, and she stood with me by the bread and toasters and gobbed some peanut butter onto her plate with a spoon.
Ordinarily she’d wait for me there, chatting, while my waffle wound its way beneath the heating coils. But today she picked up her tray and walked off toward our friends.
By the time my waffle dropped down I was no longer hungry. I buttered and loaded it with cinnamon sugar anyway. I always ate like a toddler. I wore my parka and gloves, like a girl visiting Grandma. I was ridiculous. I set my tray down at my friends’ table, ashamed of my own food, and dropped into the seat behind it.
I got a few strained smiles. My heart might have stopped. The news had reached my friends; here it was.
My throat had been hurting for a few days, which was a good enough reason not to eat. Brooke was complaining about a class, and Maddy was giggling. Caroline hacked slices off her apple with a dull cafeteria knife. I scoured my brain for a clue about how to handle this, the slipping away of my confidants, but I couldn’t find any solution save saying the thing I absolutely could not say. There was nothing else that could cause them to see.
At five minutes to eight we tossed our trays on the belt, slung our bags off the floor and onto our shoulders, and pressed out the door onto the path. Students were everywhere, surging into the day, and if you’d been watching, you’d have seen me walking with a bunch of girls, as though I belonged. But the stain had touched them, and now I had failed Caroline, too. I sensed that from here the descent would be rapid indeed. I had no idea where it would lead.
As I’ve said, first, I got sick.
My initial visit to the infirmary was useless. I have only slivers of memory of being feverish in an infirmary bed, shades drawn against the fall blaze, hearing the voices of my schoolmates on the walks. I thought I was crazy, and that my throat was either swelling up to suffocate me or peeling away to rawness, as though what had passed there had to be sloughed off indefinitely.
Finally they prescribed the medication I needed, but without telling me why I needed it. The Zovirax, an antiviral, did its job. I never saw a sore (I still never have; there is no way I can examine a place so deep). The outbreaks would recur every six weeks or so, because I was not taking Zovirax prophylactically, which would have been medical protocol for my diagnosis. But the doctor at St. Paul’s did not, would not, tell me what was wrong.
When I arrived home for Thanksgiving, Mom was there in the pickup lane at O’Hare, hazards flashing, with a basket of strawberries waiting for me in the car. She hugged me quickly in the pools of exhaust. “Get in, get in! It’s cold! You’re home!” She handed me the fruit. “Figure we’ll start getting you vitamin C right away!” I had been so sick, after all.
Her face betrayed nothing but pleasure, so neither did mine.
That year we spent the day of Thanksgiving itself at the house in St. Louis where my father’s parents had lived for more than thirty years. Our family traveled to accommodate the varying urges of an extended group much longer on obligation than affection. What was inviolable was that my father should snap his Christmas card picture of his children before Thanksgiving weekend got away from him. He’d have forgone the feast if necessary, but never the three-by-five matte of his two redheaded, freckled children in their holiday finest. He’d then spend every evening of the first week of Advent humming carols and pasting copies of the photograph into hundreds of cards. His list, groomed from year to year, included fellow parishioners from the Episcopal church in town, club friends, parents of our childhood classmates, tennis partners, colleagues on charitable boards, and certain business associates and old classmates (including Mr. and Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton). I wasn’t wild about the thought of Jed Lane having a picture of me, but how could my parents leave family friends off the list? Many of us were subjected to this, growing up in my town and in towns like mine. I might have been okay. But then I put on the dress.
Mom tightened up her face and said, “Oh.”
Dad said, “Gosh.”
“What?” I asked. That summer Mom had accommodated my adolescence by buying me a black velvet Christmas dress with a square neckline that belted tightly at the waist. I was quite thin—I couldn’t think what was wrong.
“Just…bodacious ta-tas,” Mom said. She covered her mouth with her hand.
I worked out what that meant. My skin flushed sharply, and I shivered into the velvet. I looked down so my hair hung across my chest.
“You can say that again,” said Dad.
Now, I have never been buxom. In spite of my fervent youthful hope, that is not my fate. I was raised on the old line about needing no more bosom than could fill a champagne flute (a very narrow vessel in my home) and had resigned myself to a braless existence. I’d started the physical process of puberty relatively late, and consequently my body had continued to change while I was away at school. Some combination of being almost sixteen and losing some weight around the rest of me had given the impression of larger breasts than my
