She passed a terrible night and then another, then she got out of bed and drove Harriet’s car to Watertown, following Drew’s shiny truck through Adirondack forests, and back through Pulaski, Oswego, and Syracuse (where they relieved a thrift store of a three-piece painted cottage bedroom set), and the following morning she decided she didn’t know enough to be as angry as she was or as sad as she feared she was becoming. She walked across Ithaca, across the campus, across the Thurston Avenue Bridge, and past the scene of her own crime, Balch Hall, to Jameson, where she knew Rochelle was resident advising for the high school students in the summer session, and found a discreet seat on a bench with a good view of the entrance.
At half past eight they emerged together, each wearing a sweater against the morning chill, her brother’s arm distressingly across Rochelle’s shoulders. (She came up only to his shoulder, which made this a logical posture, but still.) They headed into town and Sally, after a moment, followed, trailing them to Café Jennie where she was forced to watch her brother bring two smoothies and a copy of the Times to their table, dividing the paper between them like any couple at ease on a leisurely morning. After this, they parted for separate classes and reconvened, again at Café Jennie, this time for sandwiches and coffees. The afternoon they spent at adjacent tables in the law library: Rochelle engrossed in her work, Lewyn restless, checking on her frequently, always with some accompanying touch. Then they ate dinner and returned to Jameson—in for the night. Together.
Sally walked back to East Seneca through the campus and town. Even after this, and the easy intimacy she’d seen between them all day, she still could not fully process the transformation of these two singular persons into coupledom. She kept running an imagined conversation through her head, over and over, as she ascended the hill to East Seneca, churning her humiliation and anger into a froth and then changing something and doing it again, making it worse.
Oppenheimer! That’s my roommate’s name.
Well then, you must be my sister’s roommate. Sally Oppenheimer?
What do you mean, your sister?
My sister. Sally Oppenheimer.
Wait, are you the twin brother? You go to some … college somewhere. In New Hampshire? (Rochelle would be too polite to say “junior college.” She was a far nicer person than Sally herself.)
Not a twin. A triplet. She never told you she had a brother at Cornell? I’ve been just across the courtyard since the day we moved in.
She never told me. She never told me.
And then, of course, quite naturally, Rochelle had decided to make this hidden brother her boyfriend—her … God! Lover!—because what could be more transgressive, more thrilling, than taking somebody else’s secret and making it your own secret? She’d never suspected how angry Rochelle must have been, for months now, and must still be, or how thoroughly her own subterfuge had obviously festered, ruining everything: their friendship, their continued journey as roommates, Sally’s entire capacity to navigate the university, perhaps to navigate the entire baffling mosh pit of adult life.
Why had she even done it, back at the beginning? What would have been the harm in owning her millstone brother, maybe even inviting him over to the room for a desultory chat and an awkward introduction, allowing him to make his own unimpressive impression on Rochelle? Lewyn, left to his own devices, would certainly have done that, and Sally wouldn’t have spent the better part of a year hoping her roommate wouldn’t find out. She had done this to herself, in other words. There were layers and layers of closeness she had denied herself—herself and Rochelle—all stemming from this original decision. And yet, it wasn’t hard at all to remember why she’d made it: the desperation to be away from her brother, from both her brothers. To be, just, finally, left alone.
Well, she was alone now, in an admittedly stately room in an old Ithaca house with an elderly and ailing woman downstairs, unregistered for the fall semester, untethered by other friends, cast off from the only fellow student she’d even tried to know in college. She spent the better part of a month stewing in her own regret and sharpening her resentment at everyone else.
Then, one morning in the middle of August, she woke up in a magnanimous mood and thought she might be capable of some form of apology, or perhaps of giving Rochelle a chance to make an apology of her own. She wisely chose not to sit with this epiphany but sent her former roommate an email before she could dissuade herself, asking Rochelle if she wanted to meet up for coffee (not at the contaminated Starbucks but at Café DeWitt off Buffalo Street). Rochelle emailed her back right away and arrived just as promptly (and alone) at three, joining her at her table. Sally (who was nervous) was on her third cappuccino. “Hey,” Rochelle said simply, sliding into the chair opposite. She looked tan and rested. She looked … unpleasant as this was to contemplate … loved. “I’m so glad you emailed,” she said without further preamble. “I’ve been thinking about you.”
“You have?” Sally asked with what she hoped was benevolent indifference.
“Well, I was so crazed, running around at the end of spring term, and then you were gone.”
Sally let this linger for a moment, not because she didn’t have a response but because she was not above pressing this apparent bruise.
“Yes, it’s too bad,” she said finally. “You want something to drink?”
“No, I’m good,” said Rochelle, who had likely just walked over from Starbucks. Starbucks was the common setting for Rochelle’s and Lewyn’s afternoons, as Sally now knew. “So, you’re settled? In your … off-campus apartment?”
“Yes, complete with four-poster bed and an immense claw-foot bathtub.”
“Well, that sounds swank.”
“Yes and no,” said Sally. She had a sort of summer internship, she explained, helping a local antiques dealer. This was the dealer’s own house, and full of inventory. “So it’s kind of a full immersion. Like if you were living in the law library,” she noted.
“Sometimes I think I am,” said Rochelle.
“You said you were doing that advising thing this summer?”
“Yeah. I’m living with the youngsters over in Jameson. How can I possibly be only a couple of years older than these idiots? They need to be scheduled and entertained at all times. I mean, Christ, read a book! Have a conversation! We have board games in the common room, even. But they knock on my door constantly: Susie told Alice I like Peter but I don’t like Peter, and even if I do like Peter I never said I like Peter and now Alice told Peter I like him and they’re all laughing at me and I want you to call my mom and tell her she has to come get me and then you need to call up my instructors and tell them I need a medical excuse for my midsession test on the French Revolution…”
“Yow,” said Sally, momentarily distracted from her own drama. She missed talking like this. She had loved talking like this. When would she ever talk like this again, if not with Rochelle Steiner?
“Oh,” said Rochelle, “and I kind of have a boyfriend.”
Sally, punctured, said nothing. She tried to prepare herself for the next thing.
“I know. Hilarious, right? I mean, who has time? But it sort of just happened. I should have mentioned it back in the spring, but … you know, I wasn’t sure where it was going, and I just … I guess I didn’t want to share my inevitable humiliation. But now I’m sorry I didn’t. I’d have liked you to meet him. I mean, of course you can still meet him anytime!”
Sally stared. She could still? Meet him?
“He’s a bit shy. To be honest, he hasn’t made a ton of friends here, but that’s okay. He kind of hung out with his roommate, and his roommate’s friends. They’re all, like, born-again Christians. Well, the roommate’s a Mormon.”
Sally didn’t trust herself to speak. Luckily, she didn’t have to.
“Oh my God,” Rochelle said, “a couple of weeks ago we went to see his roommate in this Mormon thing, this religious pageant thing, way out in the middle of nowhere.”
“Palmyra?” said Sally.