When I come up for air, wrote Rochelle, backtracking immediately.
She must not have come up for air at all, judging by the fact that they never did manage to meet up, for coffee or anything else, or at least not the way Rochelle might have intended. Sally would finish her academic work in that bed on the third floor and spend the days and summer weeks that followed with Harriet on East Seneca Street and on the back roads of New York State, being drawn deeper and deeper into the world of old houses and the mainly old people who lived in them. Houses stuffed with sadness: filled up room by room with sadness, each enclosure silenced in sadness behind a closed door until the house itself was jammed and filthy. Some of the houses smelled terrible. Some had owners who barely opened the door, or spoke through a crack, or slipped out and closed the door behind them like Rochelle’s mother had done, reeking of shame and fear. Sally wanted to push them out of the way and charge in with bins and tape and rubber gloves and ammonia, but she held herself back. She was there to learn.
They knocked on doors and brightly introduced themselves to suspicious veterans and addled retirees. They weren’t always let inside, but if they were, Harriet seemed capable of spinning a connection out of the air, talking crops with the farmers and nursing with the infirm. She could claim kin with anyone, Sally thought, watching her talk and talk with the sullen and the shy, filling up the silences with chatter. Loathing of the Democrats in Albany was a common and unifying theme, and the tyranny of downstate New Yorkers also popular. House after house Harriet filled with warm conversation as Sally, doing her best not to mess things up, smiled and nodded and tried not to give herself (and her New York City–ness, and her Democrat-ness, and very often her Jewishness) away. She followed Harriet into stifling kitchens to make what seemed like hours of insubstantial small talk, all for permission to see Aunt Lee’s old family painting that supposedly came over from England long ago, or a late husband’s desk he’d sworn was worth a fortune.
More often than not, they came away with nothing, or with a face-saving purchase of some valueless Eastlake armchair or Victorian coatrack. Sometimes, though, the very kitchen table beneath their coffee cups would depart with them, or a miraculously intact hooked rug depicting George Washington and his cherry tree would be taken from the floor and gingerly rolled up. A cracked bucket that held matches or knitting needles would turn out to have the words “Ancient Fire Society” painted over a building in flames, and the knitter would be stunned that Harriet wanted to give her fifty dollars for it. Once, they’d had to spend a good hour listening to a couple enumerate the many items another picker had hauled away, only a few months earlier. Once, they’d been subjected to a terrible story about the addict son who’d stolen every single thing of value from his parents (except, it turned out, the 1850 first edition of The Scarlet Letter Harriet found in the drawer of a reproduction vanity, which she’d only opened to be polite).
“But is it fair to them?” Sally asked more than once, as they drove away with some such spurned treasure in the back of the car, wrapped in a towel.
“It wouldn’t be, if I lied,” said Harriet. “If I said, ‘Oh, that’s a worthless thing.’ Or ‘Don’t bother showing that to a book dealer or looking it up on the computer.’ A book in the back of a drawer is a book in the back of the drawer until somebody wants to buy it. I’m not stopping anyone from doing anything with their property, you know.”
“I know,” said Sally. “So if after all that, she’d said, ‘You know, I think I’ll drive down to New York and show this chair to Sotheby’s. I mean, if you want it maybe they will, too?’”
“Then I say, Go with God!” Harriet sighed. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles. At least I got to see the inside of the house and I won’t have to come back.”
They were out west near Chautauqua on graduation weekend, and when Sally returned to Ithaca the summer-session students were moving into the dorms and roaming in packs. They looked shockingly young to Sally, who felt so displaced by them that she made a conscious decision to avoid the campus. The only time she went back was to meet with her women’s studies professor. Sally had done well in all of her courses, but her work on the Marys had earned her not only an A but a mug of horrible herb tea in an office in Goldwin Smith Hall and a probing conversation with MJ Loftig (interpreter of Virginia Woolf) about whether she intended to continue in the program. Sally had no answer to this. Of late, she’d been making every effort to merely open the course catalog for 2001–2002 and actually look at the classes, but the many many words describing the many many courses swam before her eyes, and none of it spoke to her. Not one of the majors or concentrations or disciplines or career paths or study-abroad opportunities spoke to her. Cornell itself was not speaking to her, obviously; the thought of a lecture hall or a seminar room seemed to imbue her with a coiling cloud of alarm. I just don’t know, she told MJ Loftig, thanking her for the terrible tea. I just don’t know.
Then, as she made her way back to East Seneca, she looked through the window of the Starbucks on College Avenue and saw something that upended her afternoon and changed the direction of her life.
Well now, thought Sally.
Her stomach felt as if it were falling to the pavement. She didn’t stop. She never even broke her stride, but her brain began to pound out each step as she walked on. Oh, with each expelled breath. Oh, with each slap of foot on cement. The street tilted up the hill. She hadn’t seen this coming. Not this. Not this. It defied all logic and all fairness, and by the time she got home—to her new home—she felt terminally lost.
Flat on her back on the four-poster, looking up through where the canopy had once been but wasn’t anymore, she tried to make sense of the sight of Rochelle, her roommate, her friend, hunched over a textbook with a fat highlighting pen in her left hand and the hand of Lewyn Oppenheimer in her right. That hand, which Sally had been made to hold so often, instantly recognizable, even had it not been attached to the oddly altered body of her brother. A leaner body, longer limbed, longer haired, somehow more at ease with itself than Sally had ever known it to be, but still … Lewyn.
Could they just be friends, acquaintances from somewhere, studying conveniently together, holding companionable hands at Starbucks? No they could not. Because Rochelle had kept it a secret. Because Lewyn hadn’t given her the courtesy of a heads-up, which even he must have understood was bedrock decency befitting a stranger, let alone a sister.