“I had a really nice time,” I said. We looked at each other and I took my tray to the conveyor belt that went to the dishwashing room.
I ran to my dorm, changed into the only dress I owned, and ran back downstairs. The guy was at the door. I barely recognized him: in addition to being someone I hardly knew, he was now wearing a tuxedo. “I really owe you big time,” he said, and launched into a long story that I couldn’t follow about someone whose mother played the tuba.
The theater was concrete, chilly, with an echo, full of girls’ self-important singsongy voices. There were boys there, too, but you mostly heard the girls. Where did they get so much confidence, so many opinions, such complicated dresses? Every dress was made with multiple fabrics, or had slits or straps or an asymmetrical skirt. One girl was wearing a fake, gauzy, see-through dress, with a whole other tiny dress, the real and concealing one, underneath. My dress was black jersey. I had bought it on sale at the Gap.
The curtain came up. A bare-legged girl was swinging on a swing. Speaking in a loud, knowing voice, she said witty and cynical things about some man.
Afterward there was a reception with champagne and strawberries. “These strawberries are so clean,” I said. I wanted to tell the guy about the afternoon I had spent walking around a highway with Ivan, but didn’t know how to bring it up. We talked briefly to the sound engineer, the one he had a crush on. We complimented her on the sound. There had been some loud atonal noises at different points during the play. “I think that went really well,” the guy said excitedly, as she walked away.
He offered to walk me back to my dorm, but seemed relieved when I said I could get back by myself. The minute I was alone, I felt a hollow bereft feeling in my chest, and I realized that I missed Ivan. How could I miss him? I didn’t even know him.
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Here’s what I learned about random walks: If you were standing at a tree and started taking steps in random directions, you would eventually end up back at that tree. It could take a really long time, during which you could get really far away—but if you kept it up for longer still, you would eventually get back there. There it is again—that incredibly old tree.
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“Strawberries,” I read in the Encyclop?dia Britannica, “are low-growing herbaceous plants with a fibrous root system and a crown from which arise basal leaves.”
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The psycholinguistics professor was talking about his email correspondence with a colleague in Paris. Because UNIX didn’t support diacritics, á became a, and so did à. “Are the ‘invisible’ diacritics still being processed?” he asked. “If so, how could we test whether this processing occurs on a graphemic or a phonemic level?”
Two grad students started to debate how to test where the processing was taking place. But I couldn’t stop thinking about á and à—about Europe, where even the alphabet emitted exuberant sparks—about Ivan’s mother’s Mazda, and how you were always sad when you left Rome.
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In Russian class we had to retell the plot of Lermontov’s “The Fatalist.” The big question was whether our fate was written in the sky. The story made no sense to me, and I didn’t retell it well. I kept saying “He threw himself onto the table,” instead of “He threw the card onto the table.” There was a one-syllable difference. I said it wrong seven times. Irina kept correcting me—she mimed someone throwing herself on the table so I would see my mistake. I didn’t hear the difference until the eighth time.
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Hannah came with me to the reception at the literary magazine, wearing penny loafers with white socks and a black blazer with shoulder pads. She was the only person I had told. She said when I was famous she would tell everyone she had known me in freshman year.
Helen, the fiction editor, was petite and cute, with a down-to-earth manner. I could see she wanted me to like her, and I did like her. Without knowing how to demonstrate it through any speech act, I towered over her mutely, trying to project goodwill.
The third-place fiction winner read from his story about a woman who had night sweats and then found out her grandmother had been in the Holocaust. The second-place winner read from an allegorical text in which a man woke up one morning to find that his head had been replaced by a gigantic butt. I understood right away that, although my story wasn’t good, these were at least equally bad. This was partly a relief, but not entirely. Why were we all so bad at writing stories? When would we get better?
After the reading, someone put on an Ella Fitzgerald CD, and Helen introduced me to the other editors. They were all witty and urbane, somehow uniformly so—they all seemed to have the same collectively self-deprecating sense of humor. The funniest and most caustic guy, a poetry editor, was wearing a trench coat and sunglasses indoors. Helen said his name somehow ironically, as if he was some kind of celebrity. He briefly shook my hand before turning to say something funny to someone else.
There was only one editor I recognized, Lakshmi, who was also a freshman and lived in my building. All I knew about her was that she was beautiful, did drugs, spoke with a British accent, and had grown up in different foreign countries. She seemed really impressed that I had won this prize. “Still waters run deep,” she kept saying. She was nice, but I felt relieved when she left to talk to a guy wearing a bandanna, leaving me free to sit on a sofa and look at people. As usual, the girls were more interesting to look at. The features editor had chestnut hair, mobile features, and a rich, drawling voice that seemed to go over more registers than most people’s, like a clarinet. Then there was a girl whose slender neck, emerging from a collar edged with layered purple and black ruffles, clearly had no idea what ruffles were, or that they were there; it was just peacefully going about its business, holding up the Muppety head with the eyes and all that hair.
Helen handed me a plastic cup of red wine—my first glass of wine. It was completely different from how wine was when you took only a sip. It tasted completely different when you drank it in a quantity and swallowed it down.
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When I got to our meeting the next afternoon, Dinah was already waiting in the classroom. “Hi, how are you, I’m fine but I didn’t do my homework,” she said, and put a textbook on the table. It read Introductory Accounting.
“Accounting?” I said.
“Oh, did I say ‘accounting’?” she said. “I meant algebra. I mean—I forgot my book. Oh, Lord, I forgot my book!” She started hitting herself on the head.