The following week, Walden furloughed the seniors for a couple of days so we could more “holistically” consider a “range of options” “outside the box,” and I caught a ride to Ithaca with a classmate named Jack Neubauer and his dad, a theater director of such prodigious enthusiasms and ranging preoccupations that he barely stopped talking, querying, opining, and wondering aloud for the entire five-hour ride. It was a head-spinning tear through theater and politics and Walden and more theater and still more politics, and after I finally exited the car in front of my sister’s house on East Seneca Street, I just stood there for a moment in the cool afternoon air, breathing the wondrous quiet.
My sister’s house was old, about as old as our house on the Esplanade. This made sense, I supposed, given the work Sally did, work that our mother preferred to speak of as “antiques dealer,” though that (as I suspected Johanna knew perfectly well) was only a part of it, and very much the lesser part. In fact Sally cleaned out houses—filthy, packed, and often septic houses—ostensibly in search of objects of value and obviously for money but also, I had come to understand, for some unfathomable satisfaction she derived from it. Apart from mandated holidays and the first preconscious part of my own life, I had never lived with Sally, but I had always lived in Sally’s room, and that room still retained a lingering imprint of its former occupant. I had no detectable style of my own, either domestic or, if I was honest with myself, sartorial, and I had simply moved into the space, inheriting the shade of blue Sally had chosen in 1997, and a rug she had also apparently chosen at ABC Carpet. If Sally had left behind items of clothing, I might have found myself wearing those, as well.
No one came to the door when I knocked, but it swung inward when I tried it, onto dark wooden floors so brightly polished I thought for a moment they might be wet. I stepped inside, noting first the smell of chicken roasting and then the familiar chords of the All Things Considered introduction. Four o’clock already; that was a long day in the car. A thin black cat came loping in from the living room and immediately began coiling between my legs.
“Hello,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Hello?” Sally called from the kitchen. “Phoebe?”
“Yep. It’s me.”
“Oh, I didn’t hear the door.” She came out, one hand still in an oven mitt, and gave me an awkward hug. “Wow, you’re big.”
“Uh-huh.”
It was usually like this with Sally: ever so slightly brittle, if generally affectionate. In fact, I wasn’t any taller than I’d been the last time we were together, or any broader if it came to that. It was more likely that Sally still had a sense of me as short and soft at around the age of twelve, and hadn’t felt the need to update it.
“You look great,” I said, because Sally really did. She had let her hair grow past the crew cut for the first time I could remember, and it brushed her shoulders, dark as root beer but now run with silvery strands as well. Sally would not be the sort to color her hair.
“How was the drive?”
“Exhausting. But interesting. I came up with a boy in my class, and his dad.”
“Also looking at Cornell?”
I nodded. “But heading to Hamilton tomorrow, and then Dartmouth.”
“And where else are you looking? C’mon back, I was just putting the vegetables in.”
I followed, but didn’t answer. I wasn’t looking anywhere else. Actually, I still wasn’t sure I was even looking at Cornell. All those hours in the car and I’d barely given a thought to the place, or to college in general; I’d just been trying to follow Jack’s father through his various discourses on communism in the American Midwest, and the new crop of playwrights he was nurturing, and the destabilization of the two-party system, and the founding philosophy of his theater. Jack himself, I couldn’t help noticing, plowed through at least half of the book he was reading during the same period. I wished I’d brought a book.
“I’d rather not think about any of it, if you want to know the truth,” I said. I pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table. “Maybe I don’t want to go at all, or not yet. Maybe I should take time off, but even if I did that, they still want you to get your shit together enough to apply, then defer, and I’m, like, if I’m organized enough to apply, why am I not organized enough to actually go?”
“I agree,” Sally said, coming to sit at the table with me. “It’s like this big conveyor belt to get you out the door of your parents’ house, that’s all it is. More people should take time off. If they don’t, they get here and just get overwhelmed. Why not go work for a couple of years? You can work for me.”
I looked at her in shock. “Really?”
“Why not? Not everyone likes the work, it’s only fair to say. And I can be a little bitchy as a boss.”
“I had a bitchy boss last summer. At the day camp. I can handle that.”
This had been an unpleasant woman from Queens who seemed to hate children, but the other counselors, a mix of high school and college students, were friendly and fun to hang out with, and as a group we had reached an early and silent accord: we tolerate the boss, we focus on the kids, we hang together on the weekends. There was one boy I’d loved in particular: a Yale student, African American, crazy smart, and also from Brooklyn. He could quiet the kids with a few wiggles of his fingers. He’d promised to stay in touch, but hadn’t.
The room was bright and warm and immaculate. The dark wooden countertops and gleaming white sink, at least four feet wide, looked as if they got wiped down any time a speck of salt or a drop of water marred their surfaces, and the table, which I remembered from my last visit, was long and wide and each leg looked a little like a thick double helix of solid wood. “I always liked this table,” I said.
“Yes, me too. It belonged to the woman who used to own this house. Actually it was her family’s dining table. She called it ‘brown furniture.’”
“Is that a technical term?”
“Sort of. Technical for ‘completely out of fashion.’ Today, anything not made from the 1940s to the 1970s is out of fashion. But that’s okay. It’ll come back, and meanwhile I have a nice table.” She went back to the stove, opened the oven door, and dribbled olive oil over a pan of carrots and parsnips, then she slid it back into the oven with a thunk, and as she did the room filled with a deep and peppery waft of roasting chicken.
“Oh my God, that smells so good,” I said. We hadn’t stopped for lunch, only bathroom breaks. “Thank God somebody in our family can cook.”
“Can’t you?” said Sally, getting a bottle of beer from the fridge.
“No. I have no domestic skills. I could never do this,” I said, waving at the kitchen. “It’s so pretty here. I mean, I completely understand why you wanted this and not, you know, Brooklyn.”
“Well!” Sally smiled. “Those weren’t the only two options, you know. To be honest I never made this big decision: I. Like. Ithaca. I’m. Going. To Stay. In. Ithaca. I just … kind of got comfortable. So I stayed. And I like my house, and I like my job. I like my cat. And also, I’ve met someone.”