exponentially with each further day of our separation. I crafted endless reunion fantasies for their return in the fall.
In the end, when I saw them again for the first time, we just stood around awkwardly, hands jammed in our pockets, trading labored barbs as though our repartee had grown rusty with disuse. Before long, however, we’d slipped comfortably back into familiar grooves. What surprises me is that none of them, after a summer’s reflection and no doubt a fair crop of girls their own age, had grown too self-conscious to continue chatting up an eighth-grader with newly installed braces on her teeth. I had worried that those braces, along with the glasses I could no longer shirk wearing because I couldn’t see the blackboard anymore even when I squinted, would spell my social death, but no, it was my parents who were ruining my life, with their relocation agenda.
* * *
In spite of our new apartment, we maintained technical occupancy of our house, and at first I seized any opportunity, any excuse to finagle a night or a weekend there.
“I need to go out to the house tonight to look for a book,” I’d say, or “Wouldn’t it be fun to go for a hike this weekend?” I’m not saying these pretexts weren’t patently transparent, but at the time I believed they would appear credible.
Once on campus, I’d wait, my heart pounding with anticipation, for dinner, for walking into the dining room and imagining a little ripple, an awareness among my putative pals that I’d reappeared, as if they were dogs suddenly getting wind of something intriguing, and sniffing at the air. But of course you never look. Never acknowledge. Just feel like you are moving through an electrically charged field, its faint crackle and surge playing across your skin. Eat nothing, just sip slowly at your milk, because eating is so degrading, so empty of dignity.
After dinner, I’d meander to the lobby, maintaining the same requisite pretense of nonchalance. We’d warm up with a few moments of fidgety mock hostilities.
“Gee! We thought you were dead,” they’d say, or “Oho! So you condescended to come back and see us!”
“Yeah, well, I’m stuck here for the weekend. Figured I had to kill time somehow,” I’d say in reply.
The preliminaries dispensed with, we’d settle back into the same old routines, the thrusts and parries of our game.
* * *
But I’d reached fickle thirteen; my allegiances began to drift. Every time we stayed in our old home for the night or the weekend, the house seemed that much colder, emptier, more depressing. It took on a ghostly quality, like a house abandoned suddenly in the face of some oncoming cataclysm or lethal plague. One glass stood on the drainboard in the kitchen, rinsed and reused, rinsed and reused. The soap dried and cracked in the dish in the bathroom my sister and I had shared. My father, who stayed there the most, did his living in his bedroom and study, and the rest of the house went unheated. My room—still with its familiar array of animal posters on the wall, my childhood bed and desk, a few outgrown dresses hanging in the closet, the Trixie Belden novels stacked thick along the bookshelf, the Fisher-Price toys piled in the closet—seemed like an artifact preserved, a museum reconstruction of a life that was almost but not quite familiar, a life I could see but never revisit. An almost palpable pall of disuse settled like dust over everything. I think we even draped some of the furniture in sheets, though that may be my imagination.
When we first moved into the apartment, we brought with us the bare minimum of possessions, thinking in a vague way that, at some undetermined point in the future, when some unspecified criteria had been met, we would go home and resume our interrupted lives, like returning relieved from a disastrous vacation. Degree by degree, however, that life receded unrecoverable into our past. Each new possession we moved into our
In the end, when I saw them again for the first time, we just stood around awkwardly, hands jammed in our pockets, trading labored barbs as though our repartee had grown rusty with disuse. Before long, however, we’d slipped comfortably back into familiar grooves. What surprises me is that none of them, after a summer’s reflection and no doubt a fair crop of girls their own age, had grown too self-conscious to continue chatting up an eighth-grader with newly installed braces on her teeth. I had worried that those braces, along with the glasses I could no longer shirk wearing because I couldn’t see the blackboard anymore even when I squinted, would spell my social death, but no, it was my parents who were ruining my life, with their relocation agenda.
* * *
In spite of our new apartment, we maintained technical occupancy of our house, and at first I seized any opportunity, any excuse to finagle a night or a weekend there.
“I need to go out to the house tonight to look for a book,” I’d say, or “Wouldn’t it be fun to go for a hike this weekend?” I’m not saying these pretexts weren’t patently transparent, but at the time I believed they would appear credible.
Once on campus, I’d wait, my heart pounding with anticipation, for dinner, for walking into the dining room and imagining a little ripple, an awareness among my putative pals that I’d reappeared, as if they were dogs suddenly getting wind of something intriguing, and sniffing at the air. But of course you never look. Never acknowledge. Just feel like you are moving through an electrically charged field, its faint crackle and surge playing across your skin. Eat nothing, just sip slowly at your milk, because eating is so degrading, so empty of dignity.
After dinner, I’d meander to the lobby, maintaining the same requisite pretense of nonchalance. We’d warm up with a few moments of fidgety mock hostilities.
“Gee! We thought you were dead,” they’d say, or “Oho! So you condescended to come back and see us!”
“Yeah, well, I’m stuck here for the weekend. Figured I had to kill time somehow,” I’d say in reply.
The preliminaries dispensed with, we’d settle back into the same old routines, the thrusts and parries of our game.
* * *
But I’d reached fickle thirteen; my allegiances began to drift. Every time we stayed in our old home for the night or the weekend, the house seemed that much colder, emptier, more depressing. It took on a ghostly quality, like a house abandoned suddenly in the face of some oncoming cataclysm or lethal plague. One glass stood on the drainboard in the kitchen, rinsed and reused, rinsed and reused. The soap dried and cracked in the dish in the bathroom my sister and I had shared. My father, who stayed there the most, did his living in his bedroom and study, and the rest of the house went unheated. My room—still with its familiar array of animal posters on the wall, my childhood bed and desk, a few outgrown dresses hanging in the closet, the Trixie Belden novels stacked thick along the bookshelf, the Fisher-Price toys piled in the closet—seemed like an artifact preserved, a museum reconstruction of a life that was almost but not quite familiar, a life I could see but never revisit. An almost palpable pall of disuse settled like dust over everything. I think we even draped some of the furniture in sheets, though that may be my imagination.
When we first moved into the apartment, we brought with us the bare minimum of possessions, thinking in a vague way that, at some undetermined point in the future, when some unspecified criteria had been met, we would go home and resume our interrupted lives, like returning relieved from a disastrous vacation. Degree by degree, however, that life receded unrecoverable into our past. Each new possession we moved into our
Similar Books
