“Most people?” Harriet had extracted an open box of Entenmann’s orange donuts from the fridge and put it on the table between them. She started eating one right away.
“Oh, well, your basic Cornell student has everything planned out to retirement. My roommate’s going to be a lawyer. I have a brother who’s plotting world domination, God help us.”
Harriet laughed, showing gray teeth. “Older brother?”
“I wish. He’d have been out of my life sooner. No, he’s my…” Annoyingly, there was no simple word for this. You couldn’t say twin; it wasn’t that simple. “Actually, we’re triplets. Came out of a test tube.”
“Test tube!” Harriet looked mildly scandalized. “I’ve heard about that. I never thought I’d meet one…” She trailed off. “Sorry. My mother used to tell me I was so rude, I’d offend Jesus.”
“It’s okay,” said Sally, trying to excavate a teaspoonful of sugar. It was rocklike in its bowl. Evidently Harriet Greene didn’t take sugar in her own tea, or have frequent guests who did. “Actually, it’s not all that uncommon where I come from. The sidewalks are crowded with double strollers. Of course my parents had to go even further and have three of us.”
Harriet pursed her lips, though whether in disapproval or to simply blow over her tea, Sally wasn’t sure. The wrinkles along her cheeks deepened into ridges.
“Well, that couldn’t have been cheap. Sorry. There I go again.”
Of course it hadn’t been cheap. “I imagine,” was all she said.
“So,” Harriet added half-and-half to her tea, “you and the world domination one. What about the third?”
“He’s a little … off. I mean, not crazy or anything. Just weird. Doesn’t play well with others.” She gave up on the ossified sugar and took a bite of a donut. Maybe the excessive sweetness of that would magically merge with the tea. “What did you…” She was going to ask what Harriet had studied in college, but it occurred to her that the question might be offensive. Had women her age gone to college? Could she have gone to Cornell, in fact? There’d been women there since the 1870s, after all.
“What did I what?” Harriet said. The table was a far cry from the glorious Shaker she had plucked from something called a “backhouse” in someplace called “Homer,” but it was lovely in its own way: dark, with legs of twisted wood and a surface that was honestly marked by age.
“Um … I was going to ask what you studied in college? Did you study furniture?”
“God no!” Harriet yelped, finding this, apparently, hilarious. “Nursing at the University of Rochester. I was a nurse for nearly forty years. I stayed up near Rochester for a lot of that time, but I started picking around on the weekends. Didn’t do a course or anything, just learned as I went. I’d plan my shifts so I could take off for three or four days at a time, all the way out to Buffalo and up to the Canadian border, knocking on doors. I just loved everything about it. The driving and the little towns and the people you met. How strange people are. Always so mystified when they figured out you’re offering actual cash for old stuff they consider junk.”
“Did they just say come on in, help yourself to whatever?”
“Almost never,” Harriet said. She was on her second orange donut. Sally broke her own into smaller and smaller sections on her plate. “Best-case scenario, they get the basic idea you’re there to offer money for something they might have, and they’re willing to let you inside. Worst-case, they got an arsenal and they think you’re from the government or a holy roller or something. Got chased away from people’s houses, more than a few times. Once, this old guy on a farm up near Geneseo nearly shot at me when I drove up his driveway. Didn’t believe I wasn’t a missionary from Palmyra! Just kept yelling he was going to shoot me if I took another step. Less than a month later they wheeled him into my cardiac intensive care unit. I had to take care of that old man for seven weeks, but he finally apologized to me. Actually, he ended up having a nice Sheraton table and a very early piece of mourning silk work. He sold them to me for so little even he must’ve known he was getting the short end. I guess he was embarrassed about the shotgun.”
“Wow,” Sally said. Everything about this story was fascinating to her.
“Did you find this in a house somewhere?” she asked, tapping the table.
“No. Family piece. From my father’s side. I’m not sentimental. I’d sell it if there was anyone to buy it, but nobody wants this stuff now. Victorian, Empire. All pretty worthless. They call it ‘brown furniture.’ When this was my grandparents’ house the table was in the dining room. We had Christmas dinner here.”
“Wow,” Sally said again. She was starting to feel ridiculous. To be so moved? By a table? Or was it imagining the Christmas dinner in the once-formal dining room next door, now crammed with draped furniture? Covered in an embroidered linen tablecloth, set with china, silver, glass. To sit at a table one’s ancestors had sat at; it was an insane notion, and it thrilled her. This humble example of “brown furniture” was singing to her just as sweetly as the Shaker table had, albeit a subtler tune.
Harriet was extracting another orange donut from the box. She was a solid woman, thick in the middle, with her white hair (loose that day in the museum) now in a single braid pinned to her head in a coil. She looked intrinsically out of place in the year 2001, as if she knew she would not tread too far into the new century and wasn’t overly interested in acclimatizing herself. She must be … Sally wasn’t good at guessing people’s ages past twenty or so. Then again, few women in her hometown went naturally into the good night of aging. The moms of Walden wouldn’t have dreamed of greeting the day without a slather of sunblock, preferably at blackout SPF, and if they ate Entenmann’s orange donuts they did it in secret. She wanted to know how old Harriet was, and she opened her mouth to ask this very thing, but what actually came out was something else entirely.
“Say what?” Harriet turned her head. Evidently, one ear was sharper than the other.
“I said: Next time you go out picking, can I come with you?”
Chapter Seventeen
Messy Things
In which Harrison Oppenheimer briefly considers escape,
and a surprising invitation materializes from an equally surprising source
In the wake of Eli’s accusation and Carlos’s denial, everything began to unravel.
There was debate, then argument, then outright fighting, with roughly one half of the students arrayed in vigorous defense of the accused plagiarist, roughly the other half crouched in an outraged scrum around the alleged victim, and a few leftover guys with their fingers in their ears, trying vainly to tend their gardens and get in some quality time with the Stoics until this messy thing resolved itself.