Book club is every three weeks. A month was too long, by group consensus. You lost momentum. You didn’t want to get together, or you didn’t remember that you were supposed to or the nuances of the relationships in the group. Two weeks isn’t long enough to read a book, or it can’t be guaranteed. Three weeks is just about right. There’s a page limit on the books they’ll read. They’re on Didion now. It’s fine, but it’s irritating, somehow. Part of Sarah suspects people only like to read Joan Didion because she’s thin and glamorous, or was, anyway. The edition she’s reading has a prominent photo of the author on the cover, looking chic.
Sarah’s hosting tonight. It’s good timing. The cleaning lady comes alternate Wednesdays, so it’s only been a day, and the bathroom isn’t covered in errant blond hairs, which proliferate, surprising even her, and the stove gleams. Even the inside of the refrigerator is orderly, clean, everything lined up in order of descending height. The cleaning lady has a touch of the obsessive-compulsive. Sarah leaves the house with a list: wine (there’s always wine at book club), snacks savory and sweet (everyone will bring something, but her conscience won’t allow her to be caught unawares should everyone forget their obligations), flowers (you can’t have people into your house without buying flowers first, it’s like putting on lipstick before a meeting).
She’s read the Didion before: She went to college. Arrived there with dreams of reading books, smoking cigarettes, having sex, staying up into the night feverishly discussing something, anything, with someone, anyone. Lauren had gone into it with much the same expectation. They’d been on the same page about it. They’d chosen the college together.
High school was demanding, of course; they’d read Pale Fire, they knew about Marx, Ned Rorem, Watson and Crick, and the salon at 27 rue de Fleurus. Sarah didn’t need to discover too much, didn’t need scales to fall from her eyes, didn’t need Judy Chicago or Cindy Sherman or Mary McCarthy (well, not her; they didn’t read her at their college) or John Cage to give her a whole new way of thinking. She had that way of thinking. Mostly, Sarah looked forward to more of the same—lots of A’s, the respectful pride of the professors—while she indulged herself in a little badness. A little exploration. A little shedding of inhibition. She could never get up to that, in high school. Her heart wasn’t in it. But she would go to college, and no one would know what she was already like, no one but Lauren. So she’d cut her hair, maybe, or wear peasanty dresses, or learn to sing Joni Mitchell songs in a quavering, quiet soprano, or fuck a girl.
They knew so many girls like that. That’s the thing about clichés. There’s a reason they persist. So many girls—women, they were women, everyone said so, some of them even proclaimed themselves womyn—from so many schools like their own, from their city or other cities or other places, who arrived on a campus still drunk on summer, verdant and sunshiny. Thirty thousand dollars a head got you a lot in terms of landscaping: flowers everywhere, popping through fresh mulch. Huck, conservative hero, wasn’t expecting much in the way of a welcome. He was used to visiting campuses and being met with creatively angry signs, or students disrupting his discourses to stand, turn their backs to him. They never discussed this, but he treated it, as he treated everything, with a mild bemusement, and preferred to spend his time with graduate students.
“You see, the drive is not so long,” Lulu kept saying, then sighing because it was, actually, sort of long, the traffic of matriculating teenagers and their parents like the salmon congesting a stream. Her meaning was clear though: You’ll come home, often. It was forbidden for freshmen to bring cars of their own, but the train was more than serviceable.
This parting was hard on Huck and Lulu. They were a small family, just the three of them, now, and of course, things had gone so horribly wrong with Christopher. Sarah was their second child and their second chance, the opportunity to redeem themselves, to do it right.