How could anyone not born into instantaneous, enforced, and eternal siblinghood, as the three of them had been, understand the joy of turning to one’s left, and then to one’s right, and seeing neither of them there? She had been irritated to discover that Lewyn was applying to Cornell, and enraged to learn that he would be matriculating. Of all the colleges! And it wasn’t as if he had some academic or life goal that required this particular institution! (That she, herself, was also basically directionless when it came to her own education, let alone life plans, was not relevant here.) Mainly, Sally was furious at her brother for not just letting her go.
She understood, though, why he seemed determined to hold on. She and Lewyn had been cemented in their auxiliary orbit of two since infancy, which was when Harrison had effectively and permanently renounced them, jettisoning his siblings like some no longer necessary engine to his rocket ship, and consigning his sister and brother to the far side of his personal barricade. Harrison being Harrison, it was not enough to merely separate himself; he’d fueled that separation with icy moods and glowering expressions, punctuating it with constant disparagement, loudly or silently doing everything possible to convey to them how eminently superior he was. This intra-triplet excision might have brought the rejected parties closer together, but not even the shared experience of their brother’s dismissal had been enough to accomplish that. Sally and Lewyn had learned to vote in tandem on all issues, trivial or profound (travel plans, restaurant choices, kid activities), and it was always gratifying to see the impact of their majority on their brother, but they both understood that they were motivated solely by an aversion to Harrison, rather than any real affinity for each other. In other words, neither their brother’s rejection nor their shared loathing of him could make Lewyn and Sally actually like each other.
Now she had gone to this great trouble of leaving home, only to find her brother still beside her, his dormitory literally next door to Balch Hall on the handy campus map in her packet. This was intolerable, obviously, but she would tolerate it. And she had already decided how. She would not volunteer, to any of the friends, classmates, dormmates, or study partners she was about to meet, the fact that she had a brother similarly matriculated at the university. Lewyn knew where she was. If he cut off a hand or drank himself into a coma in one of Cornell’s fine fraternal organizations, he could come and find her and she would (probably) not turn him away. Short of that, her brother was on his own.
Sally got rid of Johanna as soon as she could by dispatching her to Lewyn’s dorm (to have, presumably, a more lachrymose farewell), then she rushed around, trying to get things sorted before her roommate, a Rochelle Steiner of Ellesmere, Long Island, (and possibly additional Steiners) could materialize and potentially express her own opinions about how things in the room should be established. She moved the beds into an L formation, which doubled the usable space of the room, and dragged one of the desks out into the hall and left it there, because (a) it was unbelievably ugly and (b) she wasn’t really a desk person. Her sacrifice would be a gift to 213 Balch Hall, she thought. You’re welcome.
“There’s a desk out in the hall,” her father said, when he arrived a few moments later, ostensibly to say his own good-bye.
“Yes,” Sally agreed.
“Is that your desk? You don’t want a desk?”
Obviously, she thought. Her nerves were fraying.
Salo continued to inspect 213 Balch Hall: the Bed Bath & Beyond sheets (denim blue, extra-long), the aqua plastic shower caddy, the brand-new Cornell mug and water bottle.
“I had a girlfriend who lived in this dorm,” he said, apropos of nothing.
Sally didn’t react. She was, of course, far less concerned with some long-ago Cornell girlfriend than with the girlfriend of right this minute. But clearly this wasn’t the time. Not now, with escape so near.
She hugged him. She had to. She also had to confirm, before he would go, that she would check in on her brother that very night, a promise she obviously had no intention of keeping. (Had our father extracted the same promise from Lewyn? Somehow she thought not. It was ever thus, probably because she was the girl.) Then, mercifully, he too was gone. She unpacked her clothes and put them away. She broke down the boxes, cleared away the wrappings. She studied the campus map.
Before the hour was out, the Steiners arrived: one slight, intense girl in braids and one fragile and emoting mother, both of them bearing heavy-duty contractor bags, shiny and bulging. Rochelle had a spray of acne across her chin and a cheery voice of Long Island–ese. She hurled her stuff on the unclaimed bed, uttered not a murmur of objection to the desk in the hall or the configuration of the remaining furniture, and reached for Sally’s hand. It could have been worse.
“No family pictures?” said Steiner mère, right away.
“Mom,” said Rochelle Steiner.
“Not yet!” said Sally, with all the cheer she could muster. “I just got here a little before you.”
Her own parents had already left, she informed them, but Mrs. Steiner wasn’t quite through with Sally, not yet.
“You’re from New York City?” she asked. “Long Island?”
Sally shook her head.
“New Jersey? Westchester?”
“Mom,” said Rochelle Steiner again.
“No, no. The city.”
Mrs. Steiner gaped, trying to process this apparently incomprehensible information.
“You mean … Manhattan?”
“Well, Brooklyn.”
What could be more baffling to a Long Island mom than Manhattan? Brooklyn, apparently.
“And you grew up there? And went to school there, and everything? In Brooklyn?”
Yes, she had gone to school there, and everything.
(To be fair to Mrs. Steiner, Sally was about to have essentially this same conversation with many others, equally perplexed and equally aghast. In the world beyond the five boroughs, apparently, “New York” meant Long Island, Westchester, even, counterintuitively, New Jersey. “New York”—as in “the city”—was apparently considered a place one went to work, shop, or possibly see a Broadway show, before “going home,” while the notion of actually inhabiting the metropolis was both nonsensical and alarming. Also, Brooklyn—which had only just begun its Great Hipster Renaissance—was still an outer-borough equivalent of Siberia.) “What does your father do?” said Mrs. Steiner.
“Mom!” her daughter said, with finality. “I’m going to walk you out.”
And she did just that. And it should be noted that Rochelle Steiner (though under some considerable strain of her own, particularly with regard to her mother) had chosen to act, at this delicate moment, in deference to her own new life, which would bind her so deeply to the fractured heart of the Oppenheimers. In other words, it would all work out far better than Sally had dared to hope, though with far stranger implications than she, on that first day of her long-awaited new life, was capable of imagining.
Chapter Ten
Designated Martyrs and Angelic Forms
In which Lewyn Oppenheimer hears an epic and unsettling story