Extraordinary by David Gilmour Page B

the
money
come from? Not from me. And certainly not from her father,” Sally said.
    â€œHow she got there, that was vintage Chloe. Other people could have done it, but few with the same panache. She called it her SP. Her Secret Project. When I inquired, she clammed up, got very mysterious. Until, that is, she sensed I was getting pissed off—I don’t especially care for protracted intrigue—and confessed. Get this. She wrote a letter to the fifteen richest people in Canada and asked them to sponsor her degree. ‘I’m Chloe Sanders,’ her letter declared, ‘and I’d like to do a master’s degree at UC Berkeley in California. The tuition is forty thousand dollars a year. In exchange for your support, I will write you one letter a month with the details of my life on the West Coast.’
    â€œIt was an absurd proposition, but I loathe dream squashers, so I kept my mouth shut. Fourteen millionaires returned their regrets, but one guy, the retired owner of a string of multinational copper mines, nibbled. Could he see her letter of acceptance? She mailed it to him. A week later, she got the following telegram: ‘Pack your bags, Chloe Sanders, you’re going to Berkeley.’”
    â€œIn exchange for what?”
    â€œThat’s exactly what I said. But it turned out, in exchange for nothing. In fact, the guy wrote the cheques on his
wife’s
account.” I went on: “I’ve often wondered about that gesture, her writing strangers and asking for money with the assurance of an adored child. Where did she get the outrageous confidence? And it occurs to me, and not without a certain envy, that the answer lies in the question. She
was
an adored child. And that’s you, Sally. That’s you.”
    We both sat silently for a while. Then Sally said, “I’m not making excuses for Chloe, for her cutting me out of whole sections of her life, but she had to do a lot of things that most young girls don’t, things that they usually have done
for
them. She had to learn to shop for groceries, to buy brown bread and not white bread, to buy healthy morning cereal, not the sugary junk her friends ate; how to detect a fresh cantaloupe; how to separate the whites from the darks downstairs in the laundry room; how to make scrambled eggs (no milk at a low heat). How to drive a car in the winter (turn
into
the skid). She had to learn not to forget her lunch, because she had a mother who couldn’t pop by the school and drop it off. All that must have been a hardship.”
    â€œPerhaps,” I agreed, “but it made her exceptionally
able.
”
    â€œAlmost frighteningly able. But go on, please.”
    â€œIt must have been a lonely time, those first few months in an American city. Setting up a little apartment, eating dinner alone. Trying to make friends without seeming too hungry for friends. She started to phone me again. Chloe only phones me when she’s bleak. But that’s fine. She joined a ‘Newcomers to Berkeley’ society; she even went to church a few times. She went to Alcoholics Anonymous, not because she had a drinking problem but because there were people there. Because they all went out for coffee after the meeting and everyone was welcome.
    â€œAnd then, one rainy November night, a young woman stepped out of the rain, folded up her umbrella and joined the circle of chairs. It was Miranda Treece, her old nemesis from Montreal. And she
did
have a drinking problem. She had done very little with her life in the intervening years except live on her family’s money and fuck a whole bunch of guys. She’d washed up in Berkeley on the heels of a failed romance and didn’t have the steam to leave town. I don’t know the details or even the timing, but one day Chloe found a small parcel in her mailbox. She opened it up. It was a T-shirt. And with it was a short handwritten note:
I wore this for three days. If you like