apartment signaled the shifting of worlds, until the balance had tipped unalterably.
Charlottesville was seductive in its charms. We could run up to the store for a quart of milk. I could walk to my best friend’s house after school. Going to a movie? It’s as easy as pie—just get your mother to drop you off into your little cluster of girlfriends all waiting there in line with ticket money and giggling gossip.
Then there were my sister’s friends, a pack of flamboyant, brainy students from Charlottesville High School, who milled about one another in a constant ebb and flow of emotional drama. They fascinated me, with their complex theoretical ontologies and conversations that rambled broad and deep. The narrowly focused talk of the boarding-school boys started looking vapid and dull by comparison; it was only ever about sex and how much beer they would drink at their next vacation, and sex and the cars they would buy in college, and sex and the apartments they would inhabit then, and sex and the girls they would sleep with. And sex.
My sister’s friends never talked about sex, except in wry, sophisticated double entendres. They chattered in French and argued vehemently about people I’d never heard of, with names like Voltaire and Nietzsche.
They were also entirely unlike my school friends, those levelheaded girls whose intelligence never seemed to unsettle them from the calm procession of school and music lessons and two hours of studying after dinner. Those girls were my daytime friends, straightforward like the bright, defining light of day.
My sister’s friends, however—into whose company I managed, somehow, gradually to insinuate myself, though I would always, nevertheless, think of them as “my sister’s friends”—were night people. I can hardly remember a time that we were together when the sun was out. We’d drive around Charlottesville, all piled into the beat-up four-door owned by the one boy in the group who had both a license and a car. Then we’d spill out onto the night-shadowed grounds of the University of Virginia, or run around abandoned downtown streets. I remember running through the darkness and the occasional flash of light, breathless with excitement and the cold air raw in my throat. The rest of the city slept around us, oblivious, I thought, but we were alive to the nuanced nighttime subtleties of light and dark. I had stumbled across that startling power of being, simply, young, with all of life’s possibilities still undecided and waiting.
I suppose we must have had curfews, but in my memory we stayed up half the night. My sister and I often slept over at our friend Madeleine’s house; her parents apparently made no issue of our comings and goings. Her parents were, in fact, invisible as far as I can remember, their presence made known only through the endless supply of snack foods stocked in their vast kitchen, snacks I spent a great deal of time thinking about not eating.
During the day my sister’s friends seemed more ordinary and even a bit odd, but at night they intrigued me as mysterious, troubled, brilliant, talking their rarified philosophies and carrying on in angst-saturated crises. My sister in particular had angst, buckets of angst, and she and one or another of her friends would come to some life-altering moment of confrontation standing under the cold light of a city streetlamp on an empty street with their voices echoing against darkened buildings.
Hunched on the hood of a car in the pale blue puff of my down jacket, I could never even begin to understand what the crises were about, but I could see that clearly they were very Deep and Meaningful and Important. Secretly, I kept worrying that I was always going to be just too ordinary for anything but my ordinary and second-best angst, and would live forever vicariously on the edges of things, in uneasy company with a bag of Cheez Doodles.
19
Having so long coveted it, now I couldn’t imagine what I’d
Charlottesville was seductive in its charms. We could run up to the store for a quart of milk. I could walk to my best friend’s house after school. Going to a movie? It’s as easy as pie—just get your mother to drop you off into your little cluster of girlfriends all waiting there in line with ticket money and giggling gossip.
Then there were my sister’s friends, a pack of flamboyant, brainy students from Charlottesville High School, who milled about one another in a constant ebb and flow of emotional drama. They fascinated me, with their complex theoretical ontologies and conversations that rambled broad and deep. The narrowly focused talk of the boarding-school boys started looking vapid and dull by comparison; it was only ever about sex and how much beer they would drink at their next vacation, and sex and the cars they would buy in college, and sex and the apartments they would inhabit then, and sex and the girls they would sleep with. And sex.
My sister’s friends never talked about sex, except in wry, sophisticated double entendres. They chattered in French and argued vehemently about people I’d never heard of, with names like Voltaire and Nietzsche.
They were also entirely unlike my school friends, those levelheaded girls whose intelligence never seemed to unsettle them from the calm procession of school and music lessons and two hours of studying after dinner. Those girls were my daytime friends, straightforward like the bright, defining light of day.
My sister’s friends, however—into whose company I managed, somehow, gradually to insinuate myself, though I would always, nevertheless, think of them as “my sister’s friends”—were night people. I can hardly remember a time that we were together when the sun was out. We’d drive around Charlottesville, all piled into the beat-up four-door owned by the one boy in the group who had both a license and a car. Then we’d spill out onto the night-shadowed grounds of the University of Virginia, or run around abandoned downtown streets. I remember running through the darkness and the occasional flash of light, breathless with excitement and the cold air raw in my throat. The rest of the city slept around us, oblivious, I thought, but we were alive to the nuanced nighttime subtleties of light and dark. I had stumbled across that startling power of being, simply, young, with all of life’s possibilities still undecided and waiting.
I suppose we must have had curfews, but in my memory we stayed up half the night. My sister and I often slept over at our friend Madeleine’s house; her parents apparently made no issue of our comings and goings. Her parents were, in fact, invisible as far as I can remember, their presence made known only through the endless supply of snack foods stocked in their vast kitchen, snacks I spent a great deal of time thinking about not eating.
During the day my sister’s friends seemed more ordinary and even a bit odd, but at night they intrigued me as mysterious, troubled, brilliant, talking their rarified philosophies and carrying on in angst-saturated crises. My sister in particular had angst, buckets of angst, and she and one or another of her friends would come to some life-altering moment of confrontation standing under the cold light of a city streetlamp on an empty street with their voices echoing against darkened buildings.
Hunched on the hood of a car in the pale blue puff of my down jacket, I could never even begin to understand what the crises were about, but I could see that clearly they were very Deep and Meaningful and Important. Secretly, I kept worrying that I was always going to be just too ordinary for anything but my ordinary and second-best angst, and would live forever vicariously on the edges of things, in uneasy company with a bag of Cheez Doodles.
19
Having so long coveted it, now I couldn’t imagine what I’d
Similar Books
