Rochelle had left early in the week, directly after her econ midterm, but Sally had a term paper due for her Writing and Sexual Politics class. When she finished it a couple of days later, she walked it over to the office of her women’s studies professor, dropped it through the slot in the door, and went directly to the student center to pick up the next New York–bound bus. Five hours later, still full of fire and intention, she boarded the LIRR at Penn. Destination: Ellesmere.
Sally might have been a lifelong New Yorker, but Long Island remained a land of mystery. She knew F. Scott Fitzgerald characters lived at one end and Oliver Stone characters at the other, but in between the two was truly a foreign country, and as far as Ellesmere itself was concerned, Rochelle had told her very little: a few choice anecdotes about her big public high school (the degenerate football team routinely harassing the girls from the Catholic school across town, and a single college counselor for the entire grade!). The Ellesmere skating rink and bowling alley had been mentioned, and Sally had heard about the basements of certain friends, where herbals were smoked (though not by Rochelle), and the Saturday-night pack gatherings at the almighty Ellesmere Marketfair Mall, to which the girls wore Ralph Lauren polo shirts and Mudd jeans and the boys dressed like Kurt Cobain. It was this exotic Shangri-la of Rochelle’s past that Sally found herself summoning as the train wound eastward, a pastiche of teen movies and magazine stories about bad behavior in the suburbs. But the skies were gray and the afternoon already well underway, and she felt the first stirrings of apprehension, because Rochelle did not have any idea she was coming, and no one would be waiting for her at the Ellesmere station.
There were a few SUVs in the parking lot when the train pulled in, but they picked up their passengers and moved off quickly, leaving a disassociated woman in a trench coat, walking up and down the aisle of cars in a stiff, internally regimented gait. There was a single taxi, which Sally approached.
“Do you know where this is?” she asked the driver, showing him the piece of paper on which she’d written Rochelle’s home address hours earlier in their dorm room.
“Yeah,” said the man, who might have hailed from Long Island central casting: intentional mullet, chains of gold nestled comfortably in abundant chest hair. “Five bucks. Hop in.”
Five bucks sounded pretty good. At home, five bucks wouldn’t have gotten her to the Brooklyn Bridge.
They set off, away from the miniscule downtown and along streets of small houses. Eventually the road began to coil through woodland, passing gated communities with names from an Anglophilic epic: Hunter’s Chase, Squire Estates. Some of the houses glimpsed past the guard booths were huge. Some had gates of their own. Then, on the right, a football field with a billboard of an Indian brandishing a tomahawk and the legend: Redskins on the Warpath! (At Walden this would have instigated a school-wide crisis. Then again, Walden didn’t have a football team.)
“And here we are,” the driver announced, turning into a cul-de-sac called Lorelei Circle. He came to a stop in front of the farthest house.
“Thanks,” Sally said, paying him. She pulled her bag from the trunk and got out.
Five houses facing one another: white, white, white, light blue, and white, all split-levels, all with black shutters. Rochelle’s house had a miniscule front porch and, though it was too early for flowers, tidy beds where flowers had once, obviously, grown. No one seemed to be home anywhere, but inside one of the other houses a dog was yapping. Sally looked around, then back, and in that single, small moment of distraction she understood what was different. In the other houses, windows showed glimpses of rooms: a living room, an entryway, a lit kitchen. At Rochelle’s house, every curtain was drawn.
She knocked gently, and after a very long while heard sounds from inside.
“Yes?” Rochelle’s mother’s upper half emerged from the crack of the open front door. “What is it?”
“Mrs. Steiner?”
Sally saw relief on the woman’s face. Though it didn’t last.
“Mrs. Steiner? I’m Sally. Rochelle’s roommate.”
“Sally!” She stepped out all the way, onto the doorstep: a slender woman in khaki pants and a Fair Isle sweater. And slippers. “Of course! Sally! But Rochelle didn’t tell me.”
She took Sally in her open arms and squeezed, and there was the briefest emanation of something sour and sharp. “I thought of surprising her,” Sally said.
Rochelle’s mother stiffened. “Then she doesn’t know you’re here?”
“I … well, no. Surprise! I mean, I thought, I’d love to see my roommate’s hometown…”
And I knew she’d say no if I suggested it, Sally thought, or rather, she admitted to herself for the first time. Because this had been a mistake, she already understood. A bad one. Rochelle would not be happily surprised to have her turn up unannounced this way, with a bag on wheels and a full ten days of uncommitted time until they both had to be back in Ithaca. All at once, she wanted to get away from this oddly different house before Rochelle emerged.
“She’s gone into town,” Rochelle’s mother said. “But she won’t be long. Would you like to wait for her on the porch?”
Sally frowned. It wasn’t precisely cold outside, but it wasn’t porch weather, either. And it was now undeniably getting on toward evening. “Uh … okay,” she managed. She took the handle of her bag and walked behind Mrs. Steiner to the little porch. There were two plastic chairs there, behind the railing, with a small wooden table between them.
“I’ll bring you out some tea!” said Mrs. Steiner, as if this hospitable gesture offset the strangeness of not being invited … actually … inside.
Sally sat, the old plastic giving, slightly, beneath her. She drew her wool cardigan around her shoulders, pretending she was comfortable—which, as the sun’s warmth continued to drain, became increasingly challenging. After a few moments, Mrs. Steiner emerged with a green ceramic mug full of tea, or more accurately, water with a tea bag trailing from it. The water was barely hot.
“Now, you come from the city, I remember.”
“Oh. Yes,” Sally said. She wondered if she should take a sip to be polite.
“I met you, the day you girls moved in?”
She seemed to be reminding Sally, or herself. “Yes.”
Mrs. Steiner nodded. Sally wasn’t sure what she was agreeing with, exactly.
“It makes a difference, seeing the sort of person your child will be living with. You’ll see one day, when you take your daughter to college.”
Sally made herself nod. In the dark obscurity of her own future, this was one scenario she felt certain would never occur.
“I’m sure that’s true,” she said instead. “You know, Mrs. Steiner, this was kind of a last-minute idea, this visit, and I’m thinking I’d better be getting on home. I didn’t have a very good grasp of how far out of the city Ellesmere was, so I miscalculated how long it would take to get back. If you could tell Rochelle I just stopped to say hi, that would be great…”
“Oh no! Don’t go,” said Rochelle’s mother. “That’s her now, I think. That’s our car.”
And there was indeed a car, a once-white station wagon, turning slowly into the cul-de-sac and drawing nearer, and then pulling into the driveway. On the front seat, an indelible view of Rochelle, staring at them both, but especially her, in utter bafflement and dismay. Sally felt ill. She thought and for the first time ever truly understood the words: I wish I could disappear. But some other force took hold of her right hand, the one not clutching the mug of tepid tea, and waved it in the air. “Surprise!” she heard herself call, like an idiot.
Rochelle got out of the car. She had her customary red nylon backpack slung over her shoulder, and reached back into the passenger seat for a plastic shopping bag: ShopRite.
“Okay. I’m surprised,” she said.
“Your roommate came all the way from the city!” Rochelle’s mother said. Her nervousness, always discernible, had slipped some bond. It was fear, obvious fear.
“Um … from Ithaca, actually,” Sally interjected. “I mean, I was on my way home, and just, suddenly at Penn, I saw a sign for the Babylon Line and it was so poetic!”