Cambridge (28 page)

“You did not eat,” George said.

He was the only one who cared about me.

“At the café beside La Belle Hélène they have very good sweets of the spoon,” he told me. “I will get you a beautiful fig. It’s the best one.”

“Oh, she doesn’t like them,” my mother said.

I didn’t like figs and I didn’t like sweets of the spoon, which were candied fruits served dripping with honey, but I wanted one anyhow, because George was being nice.

“Apricot,” he said. “Orange. Whatever you like.”

“If you think the fig is the best one, then I would like to have that,” I said.

My mother raised her eyebrows. My jab had hit. I was pleased.

And now it was time to go. She checked in the bag: sunglasses, wine bottle, scarves, owl, all set. We headed back toward the terrible gate.

I’d wanted to walk with George, but he’d teamed up with my father so they could discuss whether to go to Nemea or Tiryns the next day. George was for Nemea. “Tiryns is just a shadow of Mycenae,” he said. “At Nemea is the nice piece of the temple for Zeus.”

I was in my usual position behind everyone. “Any lions?” I called to them.

My father granted me an appreciative snort. “Were there ever any lions?” he asked George.

First I was happy that he thought my question worth repeating, then I was mad because he thought it hadn’t really been asked until
he
had asked it.

“Jackals, probably,” said George.

My insides were beginning to feel very bad. Something in there was opening and closing like a fist, squeezing out blood with each movement. My back hurt. The pad seemed to be used up. It was leaking at the sides, making tickly dribbles down my thighs that chafed my skin against my blue jeans. Soon, blood was going to reach my ankles and emerge into public. Then what?

I had to get another pad. I hustled up to my mother, who was close to the gate, holding my sister’s hand.

“Do you have another pad thing in there?” I asked her.

“Oh,” she said. It was down at the bottom. She lifted my sweater a little and popped the pad under it. “Go behind the wall over there,” she told me. “I’ll wait.”

I wanted her to wait. I was surprised she’d offered to. “You don’t have to wait,” I said.

She didn’t bother to respond. She waved her fingers at the wall and then at me. My father and George were approaching. She waved her fingers at them too.

“Go on,” she said. “We’ll be along soon.”

My sister said, “I’m going with Daddy.”

My mother handed her off to my father, and I trudged over to my wall and went behind it.

I pulled down my blue jeans and squatted. It was wonderful to feel the air on my dank bottom parts. When I got my pad
unhooked from the little prongs of the belt, I had a good look at it. It was a combination of hard and gooey, black and stiff around the edges and bright with fresh pink blooms in the center. My upper legs were streaked with thin rivulets that itched. I decided to pee. I looked down to see if I had peed blood, but the earth was so parched that my pee had gone straight into it like a needle. I stayed squatting for a minute to let things dry out before strapping myself onto a new pad.

When I stood up I felt better. The clean pad was soft and nice. Peeing had helped too; my sensations were so mixed up I hadn’t even known I needed to pee.

The old pad lay at my feet. It looked like a thick red worm. I poked it with my sneaker. All that blood had come from inside me: strange. Could I just leave it there? I decided I could. It was going to dry up and fall apart soon, probably, I hoped.

I liked leaving my blood on the ground. Mycenae was the right place for it.

Home

We were home, after many more things.

A white horse in a field in Thessaly on the day of the earthquake, when the ground rippled like water. The wicker baskets that hauled us to the top of Meteora to eat bread and feta with musty-smelling monks. The bees frantic in the bowl of honey at Sunday brunch in Kifissia with the professors from Tübingen who had first disapproved and then helped when I fainted on the Acropolis. They were a couple; I hadn’t known that was possible. My parents went to Istanbul for ten days and Frederika came from Sweden to babysit once more. My mother thought Freddy and George? But he was too busy to come over that week, so they never met. Besides, Frederika had a nice Swedish boyfriend, Anders, who was a civil engineer. My mother said that wouldn’t last. “You’re too romantic to be married to an engineer,” she told Frederika.

The years of wandering were over. We were home and we were staying home.

“Frederika will come back to live with us again, won’t she?” I asked my mother.

“You’re both so grown up now, we don’t need her,” my mother said. “But she’s always welcome. She might. I don’t think she’s planning to, though.”

I wanted her back so I could reconstruct life as it had been. It was just barely possible—I felt that. There was enough of the old me, the one who knew nothing about bleeding and eternity, to have one last round of childhood. If Frederika came back, we could try on makeup and laugh about how silly we looked. She could tell me what to do and I could not do it and she would love me anyhow, and the world would be safe for a little while longer.

But she wasn’t coming back. She was going to stay in Sweden and marry Anders and have two daughters and then divorce him. My mother was always right.

We came home in August. After the dry glitter of Greece, Cambridge felt thicker and stickier than I remembered it. When I pressed my finger into the tar of our street, it left a hole. My attic bedroom smelled of heavy, unused air. The backyard was a tangle, the closets were stuffed with clothes that didn’t fit us, the cupboards were full of boxes of spaghetti turning to dust and cans of tomato soup that my mother said looked “dubious.” The inside of the unplugged refrigerator made me think of an empty swimming pool, sad without its contents and with a whiff of chlorine. It was a haunted house, and our old selves were the ghosts.

Pinch was another ghost. The Bigelows had taken her for the year, as they’d done when we went to England. But this time, she died. My mother didn’t tell me until we were on the second leg of our journey home, the twelve-hour flight from Rome to Boston.

“She was an old cat,” my mother said. “She was more than ten.”

“When did she die?” I asked. I couldn’t believe my mother hadn’t told me. “Did she die last week or something?”

“Oh, no,” said my mother. “Sometime in the spring, April, I think.”

“Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“I felt the news could wait,” she said. “There wasn’t any point in upsetting you.”

“But all this time I thought she was alive. I thought when we got home, she’d be there.”

“That’s kind of nice, isn’t it?” said my mother. “She lived another four months, for you.”

•   •   •

I didn’t know what to do with my days. I made bicycle pilgrimages to the important places: the candy store across the street from the Bigelows’ (who were on the beach in Wellfleet with the other psychoanalysts), where Roger and I had bought bull’s-eye caramels and Squirrel Nut bars with our pennies; the gloom of Gray Gardens East, where I’d enjoyed feeling sorry for myself; even the boggy riverside fields of my detestable school, where soon enough I’d be back in the classroom, bored to death. At each place I was surprised by how small, how faded, how insignificant it was.

I couldn’t locate the problem—I couldn’t tell if the problem was “real” or just something the matter with me. Maybe while I was away Cambridge had gotten worn out and dirty and unappealing. A worse thought was that it had always been like this, but I hadn’t known it. Or maybe it was both. Maybe I’d changed and Cambridge had also changed.

In Harvard Square bits of scrap paper were scooting around the empty streets and everything was asleep, waiting for September. Veritas mugs and spiral notebooks lazed on the shelves of the Harvard Coop. The Out of Town News was deserted. There weren’t any French graduate students looking for
Le Monde
or homesick midwestern kids buying the
Chicago Tribune
, just a few locals grabbing packs of Chesterfields and Lucky Strikes. I walked my bike into the Yard: nobody and nothing. The enormous colonial trees rustled their dusty hot leaves above me.

I stood beside my bicycle, looking at Memorial Church, where in the spring a platform would be built to hold the faculty and the Latin orator and the sheriff of Middlesex County and everyone else needed to enact commencement. My mother and I always sat in the audience and tried to find my father, in his black robe, among the rest of the professors in their black robes.
The choir sang a hymn, “Domine Salvum Fac,” that made me shiver every year.

I wondered if I would shiver this coming spring. I didn’t think so. What had thrilled me was the idea of how many years—hundreds!—this scene had taken place in this spot, and of how old the rituals and costumes were. I had felt that I was part of a big, old thing.

But I wasn’t really part of it. And it wasn’t very old. It was a nice ceremony on a pretty June morning in a small town in America, and I was a bystander.

If I shut my eyes I could see the dark, turbulent Aegean, sacred to Poseidon, thrashing at the headlands of Sounion. I could see the almost-smiling girls of the Acropolis. Those things were old. I wasn’t part of them either.

I got back on my bike and went home. I was home now.

But it was no good pretending. I had become a stateless person.

My mother was purging the house. Everything chipped, broken, lidless, outgrown, or disliked had to go. Out, out, onto the curb for the trashmen.

“What about the Goodwill?” my father asked. “Someone could use this stuff.”

“I haven’t got time to go there,” my mother said.

“I’ll do it,” said my father. “We’ll do it.” He turned to me and nodded my agreement for me.

I didn’t care. I had nothing else to do. I felt chipped, lidless, and broken. Maybe I would go stand at the curb on Monday morning and wait for the maw of the garbage truck to eat me up.

Every afternoon for most of a week my father and I gathered the boxes and old shopping bags full of the detritus of the past
and shoved them into the Chevrolet. Then we went all the way across town, past the building where Alexander Graham Bell had received the first telephone call, and the NECCO factory, breathing out clouds of sugar and chocolate, beyond the railroad tracks to the half-empty stretch between Central Square and MIT.

A few guys were always lounging against the Goodwill building, smoking, when we pulled up. They didn’t look at us as we made our several trips from the car to the back of the store, where a squinty lady ruled over stacks of stuff. She pointed: “Kitchen left, clothes right,” she said. She said that every day, refusing to remember us from the day before.

“Those people don’t like us,” I said on the way home.

“Why should they?” said my father. “The way they see it, we’ve got everything and they’ve got nothing, or not much.”

“Is that true?” I asked him.

“It’s not untrue,” he said.

“But we’re giving them our extra stuff, so they can have some things they need.”

“Charity underscores disparity,” said my father.

“You were the one who wanted to give them things,” I objected. “Mummy wanted to throw it all out. If you don’t believe in charity—”

“I didn’t say I don’t believe in it,” my father interrupted. “I said it shows up the difference between the ones who have and the ones who don’t have. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.”

“And it doesn’t matter if they don’t like us?”

“You don’t help people because you want them to like you,” my father said. “You do it because they need help, and because you can help. They don’t have to like you for it. In fact, they will probably dislike you. That isn’t important.”

“Daddy,” I said. “Are you a communist?”

My father made an Ingrid-y noise,
pffff
, blowing air out in a rush. “Hardly,” he said. “I wouldn’t be on the economics faculty if I were. Though,” he muttered, “there have been a few.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“Gone. Purged.” He waved his hand at the rearview mirror.

“Mummy says you’re a communist.”

“It’s a family joke,” he said.

One more thing I wasn’t in on. “I don’t get it,” I said.

“It’s not that funny,” he said.

Labor Day weekend. The Bigelows were coming for dinner.

“I thought they were on the Cape,” I said to my mother.

“They decided to leave early, so as not to get stuck in the Monday-night traffic. And to see us.” She had a roast of beef in the oven and heaps of tomatoes and corn on the counter. The corn-water pot was boiling away. “Shuck these,” she said, jerking her elbow at the corn.

I liked shucking corn, because it was a permitted mess. I sat on the floor and spread the business section of
The New York Times
in front of me. The silk felt wet, though it wasn’t. Some ears peeled easily, and some I had to struggle with, but there was always one moment when the whole casing gave way and the bright, fresh kernels appeared, with their sweet vegetable smell. Something about corn was sad. Like the huge tomatoes, many so ripe they were splitting at the top, corn signaled the end of summer.

The doorbell rang before I’d finished shucking.

“Perfect timing,” said my mother. “We don’t want the corn to sit around and get old.”

The Bigelows hadn’t changed at all.

“How wonderful to see you again,” said A.A. “The travelers return.”

“We brought beach-plum jelly,” Ingrid said, “because we wanted to bring oysters but we were afraid they would die in the car.”

“Mama, you thought that. I told you just put them in a bucket of seawater,” Roger said.

“I’m glad you didn’t,” my mother said. “We want to start right in with the corn, unless”—she looked worried—“you’ve had it up to here with corn.”

“Never enough corn,” said A.A.

“You grew up,” Ingrid said to me. She scowled.

I could see that Roger wanted to hug me. He looked from side to side, he blinked, he looked at the floor. Then he walked over to me in a robotic shuffle and put his arms around me like pincers, his hands sticking straight out behind my back so as not to overdo the contact.