Elena by Thomas H. Cook

correct procedures for application. I showed it to my sister immediately.
    She was sitting in the little shed in the back yard, her feet drawn up under her, a book in her lap.
    â€œI got a letter from Columbia College,” I said excitedly as I stepped up to the door.
    Elena glanced up from her book. She was thirteen years old but already looked more like a woman than a child. She was wearing a burgundy skirt and white pullover sweater, and I remember thinking that in only a little time she would no longer be the object of purely innocent attention.
    â€œLet me see the letter,” she said.
    I handed it to her and leaned against the door while she read it.
    â€œI guess you’ll be going soon, then,” she said matter-of-factly as she handed me back the letter.
    â€œI guess so,” I said, playing down my elation.
    Elena smiled slightly. “You want to leave very much, don’t you?”
    â€œMaybe,” I said. I stepped into the shed and sat down beside her. “It’s probably a good idea to go away to college. You want to leave Standhope?”
    â€œI don’t know, William,” Elena said. She closed the book and wrapped both her hands around it. “I don’t know about me, about leaving Standhope. But I know about you. You’ll go as soon as you can.” She scanned my face as if, in some premature way, she was guessing at my destiny.
    â€œI wish you could come with me,” I said, though not truthfully. I was ready to strike out on my own now, tired of everything that reminded me of the last few years, even my sister.
    Elena glanced down at the book. Her hair was longer than it would ever be again, the strands falling almost to her breasts. “In books things are always moving, people and time,” she said, “but really, things are stuck sometimes, completely stuck.”
    I shrugged. “You can get stuck anywhere, even at Columbia College.” I draped my arm over her shoulder and began to draw her close. But she pulled away, almost sharply, and walked back into the house. She never told me the cause of that sudden brittleness, and so I didn’t understand until she wrote about it in New England Maid: “My brother had taken the first steps out of a life that had so long engulfed us both in its timelessness and tedium. He was leaving all that was flat and pale, moving into a multitude of colors, into a city where the sky lit up at night and the earth trembled beneath your feet as if on the edge of a new creation. So good-by to the elm and the willow, the stream and the pond, the peace that is like death. Good-by to a desert outpost on the New Haven line, to blowing dust and crackling leaves, to monotones and monochromes and me.”
    I think Elena must have hated me at that instant when she jerked herself from my embrace. I hope it was the only time she did.
    In the late spring of 1924, I was accepted by Columbia College and told to present myself on Morningside Heights in September. I expected things to go smoothly from then on. I would drift through the summer in Standhope, then head for New York in the fall. But in June, my mother experienced an emotional crisis from which she never fully recovered. She had always been jittery, living as if she were standing on a high ledge, staring down at the traffic below, sometimes leaning toward it, but always drawing herself back in time. Elena described her in New England Maid: “She was a tall, thin woman, high-waisted and erect, her hair pulled tightly behind her head and bound in a bun. She favored long print dresses, hemlines to the ankle, and never in her life wore a petticoat of either silk or crêpe de Chine. She had the body of a farm woman, tawny about the face and arms, thick necked and heavy footed, graceless but not plodding. For there was a contradictory quickness in her, one which spoke to other energies held deep within. Her eyes flashed within the oval of her slack and weary