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Over vacation, I went home to New Jersey. Everything was at once overwhelmingly the same and ever so slightly different. The Oliveri sisters’ plaster donkey was still standing in the driveway under the willow tree, just a little smaller than it had been. Inside, the house was incredibly clean, like a crime scene. My mother had started hiring a cleaner. There was basmati rice in the cabinet—a thing I had never seen there before. Since I had left, my mother said, the water bill had gone down by 80 percent.
My mother invited some colleagues to dinner. There was some reason they had to be invited. She had planned the menu from The New Basics Cookbook. I was supposed to make the dessert, a raspberry angel food cake with raspberry amaretto sauce. I had never made an angel food cake before, and got really excited when it started to rise, but then I opened the oven too soon and it fell down in the middle, like a collapsing civilization.
My mother’s colleagues were cartoonishly awful. It was hard to believe they were hematologists—the idea that they were supposed to make sick people feel better was comical. “Fifteen years from now, the department will be nothing but beige faces,” declared the department head, who was wearing a bow tie. I burst out laughing. Everyone looked at me. “I just can’t believe you just said that,” I said. My mother brought out the cake, which was by then completely flat.
“I see you have a flat cake for us, is that on purpose?” one of the hematologists asked. My mother’s boyfriend, Steve, said it was a Fallen Angel cake. We ate it with the raspberry sauce. It was good, if you thought of it as a sort of pancake.
Another evening, my mother and I watched The Sound of Music. Because of commercials, it took more than four hours. Julie Andrews sang about how she must have done something good in her youth or childhood, and my mother sang along. She said she had probably done something good in my childhood, because I had turned out so well.
I was interested when the nuns sang about solving a problem like Maria. It seemed that “Maria” was actually a problem they had—that it was a code word for something.
My mother was rereading Anna Karenina. She said that Anna Karenina was about how there were two kinds of men: men who liked women (Vronsky, Oblonsky) and men who didn’t really like women (Levin). Vronsky made Anna feel good about herself, at first, because he loved women so much, but he didn’t love her in particular enough, so she had to kill herself. Levin, by contrast, was awkward, boring, and kind of a pain, seemingly more interested in agriculture than in Kitty, but in fact he was a more reliable partner, because in the bottom of his heart he didn’t really like women. So Anna made the wrong choice and Kitty made the right choice. That was what my mother thought that Anna Karenina was about.
I took the train to New York and looked at the tree in Rockefeller Center: a thing that millions of other people had also seen, unlike the Oliveris’ donkey. Then I saw some Soviet propaganda posters at the Museum of Modern Art. One poster, for a railway line called Turksib, showed some Turkic-looking guys’ heads apparently getting run over by a train. I wondered which had been seen by more people in the history of time: the tree, or that poster.
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Final exams were after the vacation instead of before. Anyone who was in a seminar or language class had to be back on campus for reading period, which started on January 2. My mother was full of outrage and pity that my vacation was so short, but I was mostly glad to go back.
The atmosphere on the train in early January was totally different than it had been in mid-December. In December the train had been full of students—students slumped in a fetal position, or cross-legged on the floor, students with all their accessories: sleeping bags, guitars, graphing calculators, sandwiches that were 99 percent lettuce, the Viking Portable Jung. I had listened to my Walkman while reading Père Goriot. Père Goriot’s previous owner, Brian Kennedy, had systematically underlined what seemed to be the most meaningless and disconnected sentences in the whole book. Thank God I wasn’t in love with Brian Kennedy, and didn’t feel any mania to decipher his thoughts.
In January the passengers were sparser, older, more sober. I thought about how the baby turned into an old man. That was the riddle of the sphinx. It certainly wasn’t very challenging. In Connecticut, the flurries turned into snow, swiftly fluttering down and down, like the night watchman’s eyelashes. I went to the café car, which had bigger windows. It smelled of coffee—of the striving toward consciousness. In one booth, a man in a suit was eating a Danish. In another, three girls were studying.
“Hey, Selin!” one girl said, and I realized she was Svetlana, sitting with Fern and Valerie. Seeing them together like that, I was struck by how much larger Svetlana’s head was than her roommates’. It really was strange that some people were physically larger than others. Svetlana said she usually took the shuttle back, but Logan was snowed in. Apparently the shuttle was an airplane. “Now I think I’ll always take the train, it’s so peaceful,” she said. “It’s embarrassing, but I’m terrified of flying, even for just an hour.”
We talked about what we had to do over reading period. Svetlana and I had Russian class, while Valerie had a physics seminar—the one where the Nobelist made you clean lab equipment. “It’s so unfair,” she said cheerfully. “My brother has a whole month off, and I have to go back the day after New Year’s to pour acid on used-up cathodes, just because the professor is too cheap to buy new cathodes.”
“He makes them use carcinogenic solvents,” Svetlana said.
“They aren’t proven to be carcinogenic,” said Valerie.
Fern was taking only lecture and lab classes, and said she was coming back mostly to look after the plants. “I guess I don’t enjoy being at home all that much,” she added.
Dusk was falling in Boston, which lay under eight inches of snow. We made a series of bad decisions, taking the subway instead of a cab, then riding for several stops toward Braintree instead of Alewife.
“North Quincy,” said a digital voice as the doors opened onto glittering blackness.
“Isn’t that in the opposite direction?” asked Valerie.
We all looked out the open door. The door closed. “Next stop, Wollaston,” said the robot.
In Wollaston it took us a long time to find the stairs to the opposite platform. Svetlana had two big duffel bags in addition to her suitcase. “I don’t know why I brought all this stuff,” she sighed. Valerie and I dragged the heaviest bag up the stairs.
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