That spring the perennial books of Tom Robbins had swept through the fifth-form girls—Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume—and I finished them at home. How could we not have loved madcap mentions of hot, unpunished sex and actual menstrual periods? These books were ziplines over the tundra of the theologian Paul Tillich—look, there’s grief, there’s death, there’s faith! Everything in the Robbins canon signified, in a zany way, and I tried to imagine that this kaleidoscopic scattering of meaning could extend to the entire world. For example: the heroine in Jitterbug Perfume receives curious deliveries of beets, and I had read, in English class, Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen. Therefore, beets. A small confluence had to mean something—whether it was about crops and sugar, sweetness and sun, the relevance of the earth to writers, or something else entirely, I didn’t ask and I didn’t care. Ideas were roads out of town. Where next?
I drove myself everywhere, preferring to be out of the house, where I couldn’t sense my mother’s agony. I leaped at the chance to pick up two onions for supper and drove three towns over to buy them. I entered a large tennis tournament—one I’d done very well in the year before, held on concrete courts behind a prairie high school two hours west of the city. The fencing around the courts was twelve feet high to keep the wind from blowing balls a mile east, and crabgrass bowed against it. The other competitors were all regulars on the scene. My first-round match was at eight a.m. I met my opponent, set up my rackets and water bottle, and lost the toss. She served. A not particularly strong first serve, hard and flat. I was ready. When the ball hit my strings, my hand failed. My racket flew, twirling, and clattered on the ground. The ball lolled at my feet.
I picked it up, walked to the net, and waited for her to approach. When I shook her hand, my thumb was shaking so hard she jerked back, as though I’d stung her.
“That’s it?” asked the girl, a leggy fighter with a low ranking from a southern suburb.
I said, “Congratulations.”
“But you don’t even want—”
“I can’t.”
She had twin ponytails and the hair leading to them was ribbed with bobby pins. Sweatbands on both wrists. Some good-luck charm glinting around her neck. “You’re a terrible sport,” she said, more curious than cruel.
“You won. Be happy.”
I retrieved my things and walked back to the car.
In town one day I ran into the mother of a grade school classmate. Phoenix Weinberg had joined our class just before we all scattered for high school, but I’d liked her, and I’d really liked her mom. Like my mother, Mrs. Weinberg had been a model before having her daughter. Unlike my mother, she’d married a Jewish architect and moved into a rural farmhouse where the displayed prints from her modeling years included a nude photo of her draped by a python. Mom never saw this, but she didn’t have to. Mrs. Weinberg told people she had only one child because she would “try anything once.” She’d survived late-stage cancer before having Phoenix, and her daughter grew up knowing it might come back. Fee was a girl in a hurry, the first to have a boyfriend, the first to flirt and flatter. She was also the first in any moment to laugh. To the farmhouse Fee’s father attached a lofted great room with globe lights and slices of sky. In the raftered kitchen, from a free perch, a parrot teased the dog by name. The original butcher block still bore a fretwork of ax marks. Mrs. Weinberg had pointed these out to us when we were in the seventh grade: “You’d hold the chicken’s head right there.”
Even more fantastic to my eleven-year-old self had been the multiple ropes of pastel fairy lights in Fee’s room. Mom scowled. “But why? Do they even celebrate Christmas?” Dad suggested these likely posed a fire hazard. I didn’t bother describing the long, ribboned mobiles that hung ceiling to floor and which Fee passed through like a fish does a wave.
Mrs. Weinberg was running errands in town, heading straight for me on the sidewalk, statuesque as ever. In equal measure I wanted to hug her and I wanted to hide.
“Please call me Barbara!” she said, seeing me. She still had her aviator sunglasses with laced-leather guards at the sides, the ones she might have taken off the face of a fighter pilot. Her tulip lipstick broke around a smile I studied but could not crack. She seemed genuinely happy to see me. She must not have heard a thing.
“Where’s Fee?” I asked.
She was traveling with her dad. Phoenix was fine, Phoenix was great. How was I? How was school? A senior now! How could that be?
I must have shown her something, because she pulled off her sunglasses and lowered her head to me. Her beauty was almost awkward up close—the size of her lips, the planes of her cheeks.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
Something bad, actually, I said, almost involuntarily. Something actually pretty bad had happened to me at school, and now the police were getting involved, and I didn’t know how to talk to my parents about any of it.
We were standing in front of the bank in my little town. Mrs. Weinberg didn’t shiver and she didn’t look around. She said, “Would you like to come over sometime and have a cup of tea and talk about it?”
I drove out to the farmhouse without
