Maine. These were all places that Annie had in store. He, in turn, wanted to see the horse farms around Lexington. Calumet. Then, if she could show him a moonshiner . . .
She heard her father say it again. Your friend Jonathan sounds like a fellow who has yet to dig in to face the day that’s sure to come.
She winced and laughed at the same time. Her roommate, Valerie, who had just walked into the room, heard what might have sounded like a snarl and shot Annie a look. Valerie’s looks were always larger than life, more often than not exaggerated wrenchings of her features. Annie gave Valerie a look that backed her off.
Her mother said, “More intelligence than maturity, it sounds like to me. Once he grows up he might be something to call home about. You will call home, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You did say he was a handsome devil, didn’t you?”
“Did I?” She decided to include Valerie, who might be sulking from that last look. The fact was, Valerie was a dear friend who had been Annie’s roommate both in the dorm and in this apartment, and whose family life, if it didn’t include the death of a sister, did include a mother who had overdosed on sleeping pills and was not above threatening to do it again. Valerie’s father was hanging on for compassion’s sake, although Valerie would not have blamed him if he’d left. If he left, Valerie would inherit the whole of her mother. You could divorce a wife, but mothers lived off your blood.
“Valerie,” Annie inquired, “my mother wants to know if Jonathan is ‘a handsome devil.’”
“He’s a step up from that sleazeball you had before. Tell her that.”
Annie told her mother that Valerie said Jonathan was an improvement on his predecessor, nothing more.
It was time to get off the phone.
She said, “I’ve got a lot of work coming up—exams and stuff. Probably best not to call.” After a pause she added, “Hey, that’s great about the three houses. They used to have goats and cows on the Arts Quad, did you know that?” There was another pause, calculated, measured, not her intention. Then she said, “Call if you hear from Dad.” She insisted, “Call then.”
When Valerie asked her what all that had been about, Annie shook her head. Would she believe a herd of goats popping like popcorn over a field? Valerie bugged her eyes. Annie said she was going to class.
All her classes were on the Arts Quad. She had to cross a narrow gorge on a footbridge. Once on the quad, she could position herself in the right opening between the old stone buildings, half-covered with ivy, and let her eyes sail out to the horizon, where the glacially formed lake the university was built above took its first jag toward the west. It jagged east and west on its way north for forty miles. It was, in one spot, said to be six hundred feet deep. She frequently came here and looked at the lake before attending classes. It was a way of clearing the head, straightening the spine. It was also, as far as she could remember, the only tip her sister had given her about how to meet the rigors of the university. “Rigors” had been one of Michelle’s favorite words.
Beautiful, spectacular, sure, but as an act of self-discipline, learn to see through all that. Then you’re ready enter the classroom and not be distracted by the pretty phrases. If the professor has anything to teach you, that’s when you’ll learn.
Annie had been a freshman here when Michelle had begun her junior year abroad in Spain. They had not overlapped by a single day.
She was trying to pay attention to what her teacher was saying about the six causes of the Spanish-American War, a Catholic culture about to be replaced by a mercantile Protestant one, but it was mid-May and a lilac bush was in bloom whose scent was pouring in through an opened window. She closed her notebook and quietly slipped out the back door.
Her sister had died, her father had gone through a disorienting divorce, and Annie had survived with her friends, her health, her intelligence intact. And her beauty. Michelle had not been beautiful. Her defense system was so elaborately wrought that any natural warmth she might have had was smothered, though in unguarded moments she’d let it show. They’d had canaries in the house, and tropical fish, and more than once Annie had surprised her sister sitting before the cage or aquarium with something like wonder in her face. Once—only once that Annie could remember— Michelle had invited her sister to share it. They’d sat together and watched. The canaries would hop from the floor of their cage, where the feeders were, to the top perch in one nervy zigzagging ascent. The guppies or black mollies or angelfish would swim placidly along, then suddenly describe darting arabesques. Michelle’s face in those moments shone with the iridescence of the fish and the canaries’ yellow glow.
Stripped of her defenses, her sister had had her beauty.
Where did her defenses get her, anyway?
Blown away.
Annie was alive on this lovely spring day. Tall, graceful as a dancer, warm-complexioned, tints of auburn in her hair. She wore no makeup. Her eyes were dark, but not bold, not forbidding. They scared nobody away.
Lips moist, teeth white. The face of somebody who laughed.
She had started to cry. She went and sat in the obscuring shade of an Arts Quad oak.
Curiously, she’d never blamed the people who had set the bomb and denied her another chance to get to know her sister. In her art history class she’d learned that the cornices of buildings built three and four hundred years ago were falling all over Europe. Pedestrians were sometimes killed. The Old World was crumbling, and those who frequented its streets ran the risk of falling with it. That was what had happened to her sister. The Old World had fallen on her. The Old World was more dangerous in that way than the New, but this oak could fall too. If it did she would join her sister, and their father would have no one left.
Her thought had taken a turn. Life and death were such fragile, flickering things, such whims of the moment, such accidents, that all the records we kept of them were the biggest joke of all. We recorded history to keep from laughing, out of sheer terrified disbelief, at ourselves. This oak, for instance, made mockery of anybody who sat with her back to it pondering the meaning of life, and of what belonged to whom. My life belongs to me. Then, poof! What life? What you? The oak had been planted when they’d cleared the Arts Quad of its goats and cows. That had been at least one hundred and twenty years ago. It had seen how many generations of students into the grave? Administrators? Trustees? Presidents? And the university owned it? She laughed, inside, on a deeper register. Someone sitting at her side might have heard it as a growl. It would be an honor to be killed by this oak tree, she thought. Just to be worthy of this oak tree’s attention would be an honor. This noble oak. Sprung from a tiny acorn. What a joke.
Its bark hurt her back. She pressed against it, mortifying the flesh, as monks and nuns and other religious fanatics did when they failed to have God’s attention. Her tears had dried and her eyes felt parched with the heat of an unaccustomed anger. She remembered something her sister had told her that suited her mood. They were in Michelle’s bedroom, where Annie had gone to return a sweater she’d not really had permission to wear, and which didn’t fit her in the first place. She was two years younger than her sister but had experienced a gangly spurt of growth and was already taller. Michelle accused Annie of having taken the sweater without her permission, and Annie, defiantly, put it back on and showed Michelle how woefully short it was in the arms. In her memory, it barely came to her forearms. It was tight in the shoulders. Buttoned up, it made it hard to breathe. It was some pale indeterminate color between beige, tan, gray and green, and quite simply, it was like being wrapped up in her sister’s skin. Annie took it off and flung it on the bed. She stood there with her superior stature to see what her sister would do. Michelle took her time hanging the sweater back up in the closet. Then she turned and said, “You know what you are?” Annie didn’t, but she knew not to bite at her sister’s question. “You’re their backup daughter. You know what that means? You’re the daughter they’ve got left over in case something happens to me. The backup daughter,” she repeated in a quieter, more private voice, clearly savoring the phrase.
It