“Then I’m not concerned. You know what does concern me, Brian?”
Brian stared at him insolently.
“That is the best cut of meat north of Fourteenth Street. Eat up.”
* * *
For some reason, I turned right out of the restaurant. Right was uptown, away from Penn Station. Brian trailed me in a stewing silence, unaware for the first few blocks. “Hey,” he said, pawing at my arm, trying to get me to stop. “We’re going the wrong way.”
But I wasn’t, I realized with razored clarity. I was planning to grab the crosstown bus at 66th Street, then an uptown train to 116th Street, where the sanctity of the Columbia campus waited for me.
“I want to go to Columbia,” I said, shaking him off me.
Brian peered up the street. “Isn’t that a long walk from here?”
“I mean for school,” I said. “Next year.” I turned and faced him. Pedestrians were barreling toward us like goats with their heads lowered, muttering obscenities when they were forced to weave around us. I put my palms on Brian’s chest, gently but firmly, and maneuvered us closer to the curb.
“I think that’s a great idea,” Brian said, all soft and supportive. “Let’s do our first year at Shorebird. Then we reapply to Columbia. They will see it as a commitment, to reapply, and maybe this time your father can put in a word for me too.”
I looked up at him, agog. “What are you talking about? Who would Dad put a word in with? He went to Rutgers.”
“Right, but…” Brian made a face, one that begged me not to make him say it.
“But what?”
“They know who he is.”
“Dad’s successful, sure, but this is New York. Trust me, he’s not on anyone’s radar.”
Brian smirked. “If you say so.”
I was filled with rampant loathing for him. “I have a four-point-two GPA. I’m the president of the top sorority on campus, and I’m one of three women congressional pages out of thirty. I scored in the ninety-fifth percentile on the admissions—”
“Jesus!” Brian shouted. “I know!”
I kept my voice calm. “Actually,” I said, “you don’t know. I made a point of not telling you my score. Because I didn’t want you to feel bad.”
We stared at the pavement, both of us oddly shy about what was happening. We knew lots of couples who split up and got back together, rinse and repeat, but that had never been us. We did not know how the other would act, would be, in this scenario. I was standing at the curb with a perfect stranger.
A man walking by spit something green and gelatinous onto the pavement. In the street, a horn blasted, then another, like wolves howling to their pack members, communicating the location of a predator.
“This is where you want to spend the next three years of your life?” Brian gestured incredulously.
It felt like all of Third Avenue was impatiently cheering me on. What had taken me so long to get here? And now that I had, could I hurry the fuck up?
I could not tell him yes fast enough.
RUTH
Issaquah
Summer 1974
I prepared for the dinner party the way I had my driver’s exam, studying the July issue of Good Housekeeping like it was the Washington DMV handbook, and then I got behind the wheel and practiced with about eighteen whole chickens until I nailed the temperature and roasting time. I’d serve the protein alongside buttered purple carrots and small potatoes, a fresh green salad sprinkled with California walnuts. If you couldn’t find them from California, the magazine said, imported would do fine. But I wasn’t one to cut corners.
Nature’s Mart was a clay-red structure, about half the size of the grocery store in Clyde Hill, that carried all manner of mysterious “health food” ingredients. They hadn’t yet removed the Easter Bunny from the roof or the clever sale sign for eggs. Before my nephew, Allen, became so cruel, we used to dye eggs in the bathtub and hide them around the house for the younger kids in the neighborhood. I wondered if he was disappointed that I wasn’t around for Easter this year, or if he even remembered that he used to like me. I grabbed a basket from the stand and asked the cashier which aisle for the nuts. He had a long gray beard and a turban around his head. “Aisle three, dear,” he said, and I don’t know why, but something about the way he called me “dear” made me want to cry.
Who knew there were so many nuts! Of course I knew about cashews and peanuts, but not Brazil and pumpkin. I found three varieties of walnuts on the bottom shelf, and I crouched down to read the labels. I was trying to determine which walnuts were from California and which were imported when someone spoke my name. I looked up and saw my sister-in-law. She was bouncing the new baby girl on her hip, the one for whom she made her own baby food, and pushing a cart filled with organic vegetables and fruits. For all the healthy eating she’d been doing, she didn’t look too well. Rebecca had dark rings under her eyes and frizzy, grown-out roots. When I stood, she took me in from head to toe, my leather shoes that matched my leather purse, the freshwater pearls in my ears, and she shifted the baby to the other hip, positioning her in such a way that she covered a stain on her shapeless old shirt.
“Ruth,” she said with a thin smile. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”
* * *
Tina put the herbs in the refrigerator and said ominously, “So now we’re thirteen.”
I took the herbs out of the refrigerator and arranged them in a cup of cold water like the cashier recommended I do as soon as I got home. “You should have seen her face when I mentioned the party. It was like…” I saw that strand of hair, the one that was always stuck to her lips. “Unadulterated longing.”
Tina went around me to the bin where she stored her mail. She shuffled through a few things, then extended an envelope my way. “This came for you,” she said.
I saw my mother’s name and address in the upper-left-hand corner. I ripped it open and inhaled sharply. It was the invitation to my father’s garden-naming ceremony. At the bottom, there was a handwritten note: Your dad would want you there.
Tina hoisted herself onto the countertop and bit into an apple, waiting for me to explain why I was struggling to breathe.
“It’s the thing I told you about,” I said, showing her. “The garden ceremony for my dad.”
“Don’t go,” Tina said simply. She set the invitation on the countertop without even reading it.
Something flared in me at her dismissiveness. “You didn’t even look at it.”
“Why did you look at it? It’s just going to make you want to go.”
“I do want to go.”
“Why?”
“Because someone should be there who really loved him.”
“There are other ways to honor your father,” Tina said.
I opened the bag of California walnuts and bit into one. I couldn’t understand what made them so special. They tasted the way I knew walnuts to taste. Crunchy and bland.
* * *
Tina had this ice-blue silk sheath dress with darker blue feathers at the wrists. I thought I had managed to conceal my admiration for it—it was a gorgeous, silly thing that people wore in magazines, not anywhere near Washington State—but she suggested I wear it to host the dinner party. I reminded her I was roasting a chicken and there would be grease as I pulled it over my head. We stood next to each other before her full-length mirror and stared.
“You look like a snow queen out of a Tolkien story,” Tina said.
On the hanger, the dress didn’t appear half as iridescent as it looked against my white skin and black hair, eyes bluer than they had any right to be. I was tempted to put it back on the hanger. I didn’t trust that I could look that good for longer than five minutes. But then the doorbell rang downstairs, and it was too late to change.
I felt ridiculous when I opened the door to find Frances in tan slacks and a turtleneck sweater, standing alongside the six-foot-tall woman with the waist-length gray hair whom I now knew to be Irene, Frances’s partner.