“I don’t know,” I had snapped back angrily. “It’s all a mess.”
In a few minutes Margaret came back from the chem labs. She wheeled her ten-speed bicycle into the hallway of the little suite and threw down her book bag, looking wan and disheveled from an evening spent poring over enzymes and fatty acids. When I told her what had happened, she looked at me silently for a minute, her blue eyes brilliant and wide. Still without saying anything, she pulled off her big Mexican sweater and turned on the hot plate under the teakettle. She brewed a pot of Twinings Gunpowder Green, bitter and strong enough to take the skin off the insides of our mouths; we took the tea, a couple of mugs, and a bottle of Barbadian rum that had been gathering dust on Margaret’s bookshelf and went out onto the balcony of the suite. We sat down on the edge of the balcony, sticking our legs through the railing so that they hung down in the darkness over Linnaean Street. It was about midnight on the Tuesday of a March week in which the weather had been warm and chaotic—sudden rains, wet winds, and languorous afternoons so sunny that Cambridge townies hung out smoking weed in the Common as if it were already May.
That night low clouds were passing on a brownish sky, and the two of us sat swinging our legs and peering through the leafless trees at a set of brick faculty apartments behind the dorm. We sipped the rum and bitter tea and gossiped about our friends and boyfriends and ex-boyfriends—especially the obnoxious Kiri—and about what we were going to do after commencement. Margaret was going to take six months off to travel through the Yucatán with some friends who owned a beat-up VW camper, and then she was going to go to grad school in chemistry at Penn. I had made no plans at all, except to write away halfheartedly, back in September, to a couple of European universities. All year, until that night, I had found it hard to believe that I would be leaving college, but there on the balcony after the phone call about my father, I had a small, gradual but continuous sensation of removal, as if filament after filament of the ties that had bound me to my previous life of school and family were breaking. Since I had spoken to my mother, a tremendous calm had taken possession of me; I saw clearly, as if at a great distance, that this hour marked a change in everything, as inconspicuous and profound as the change a tincturing drop makes in a glass of water.
I was surprised at how little alarmed I felt as I sat with no idea of what would happen, and not even a comfortable room to return to. Margaret and I talked for almost three hours, and our conversation seemed to me afterward to have been extraordinarily sweet: witty, frivolous, daring—the kind of conversation one always hopes to have in college. It was exciting to be outside at night, and so far aloft; the weirdly shifting clouds above the trees and roofs made me feel that I was in a crow’s nest, looking out over unfamiliar country. Every half hour or so, Margaret would push back her long hair, touch me on the shoulder, and say, in a voice at once sympathetic and sleepy, “Sarah, you have to get up early for your flight.” But neither of us really wanted to put an end to a time that it suddenly seemed we might never have again. So until the Memorial Church bell rang four o’clock, we went on sitting on the windy balcony, swinging our legs high in the darkness, while below us, one by one, the lights went out.
2
Back in Philadelphia, every familiar person I met and everything around me seemed slightly skewed, a few degrees off normal. It reminded me of a science-fiction story I’d read about a planet identical to Earth, except that every proportion was subtly different—landing there drove human space travelers insane. Life at home seemed funny or tediously queer; I found myself in fits of inappropriate laughter, or filled with the impatience one feels when someone goes on and on with a boring joke. My aunt Lily, normally impeccably groomed, picked me up at the airport with her hair flattened on one side of her head, and lipstick blurred on the same side of her handsome, olive-skinned face, so that she had a Cubist look. “Sarah, you’ll have to be very brave,” she murmured, hugging me, and I said flippantly into the side of her perfumed neck, “I’m not the brave type.”
At home Mama went around answering the doorbell and the interminably ringing telephone with a weird vivacious smile on her face; Matthew, home from law school, had the moony, famished look of a child in a UNICEF brochure. The three of us sat eating lunch without the vaguest idea of what to talk about: the web of assumptions, memories, and old associations that makes conversations within families as automatic as breathing had abruptly been ruptured for us, and we had to find new ways to behave toward one another.
After lunch we went to the hospital, which was a very modern suburban one, set like a country club on top of rolling turf hills that intersected the golf course of an actual country club next door. There in a small white room lay my father, absurdest of anyone in the
