before, and at thirty-six, she’s aged beyond her mother’s vaunted professional expertise.
And yet that party was days ago, and what is she doing right now?
She’s heading home to Palm Springs, where she could get some familial, or maternal, or psychological help figuring out how to reclaim her life. She couldn’t bear if that life was now closed to her, if she never regained her strength, her tenacity.
She’s thinking about all of this as she wheels her small bag from her ground-floor room, down the sidewalk, and into the lobby of the motel in San Luis Obispo, where she spent last night. Her sleep was restless and she needs coffee, and there on the laminated table sit urns of French Roast, Decaf, Hot Water, tiny tubs of dried creamers and sweetener packets, baskets of tea bags and hot cocoa packets, a tray of lopsided Danish, a stack of napkins several inches high. The purported breakfast free with a night’s stay.
She’s alone, the kid at the front desk busy putting keycards for the rooms into their slots, and then the glass doors spring open, and a clutch of elderly women bustles in, sporting backpacks and fanny packs, sensible walking shoes and sticks. Eight of them, barefaced and wrinkled and happy, talking and laughing, pouring their coffees, dunking their tea bags, splitting Danish, debating whether the day’s expedition should be to the Santa Lucia Range, or the La Panza Mountains, or the Montaña de Oro State Park. Maybe it’s their age and their brusque warmth that reminds Camille of her heroines.
She nods and smiles and says, “Morning,” to the old happy women, and the old happy women nod and smile and say, “Morning,” to her.
She takes it as an encouraging sign, her default into researcher mode, wanting to ask them how they’ve all come together, what bonds they share, where they hail from, who the leader is, who the followers, what this trip signifies, but she doesn’t. She’d sound crazy to them, and so she refills her large Styrofoam cup, secures the lid, and pushes out through the lobby doors, into the already-warm air at seven twenty in the morning.
She unlocks her car, new when it was her college graduation present, slips the cup into its holder, the bag into the back, herself into the driver’s seat. She is about to start the second and final leg of her drive. In less than five hours she’ll be on Agapanthus Lane.
When she left Seattle at the crack of dawn yesterday, she promised herself she would use the nearly twenty highway hours wisely. Instead, she wasted the first fifteen listening to music, to talk radio, to a popular true-crime podcast she found detestable and clicked off after ten minutes. And whenever the thoughts started churning, she shooed them away. But it’s time to decide various things:
Whether or not she should end things with Val because she is no longer the person she was when they met.
Whether or not she should attempt to turn her doctoral dissertation into some kind of tell-all book, despite her abhorrence of the idea.
Whether or not she will go where the Peace Corps sends her, if they want her.
Whether she will pretend to Dr. Jin that she’s back to normal, and ask him to find out when an assistant professorship in their department might come up, or in any university’s soc. anthro department, and to make those calls to the journals, to learn if there is a rare opening, or might be one in the near future, and she could say, “In the meantime, let me be your research assistant, starting fall semester,” a better proposition than trading distant fieldwork for research of local trends in disease, overpopulation, land use, and urban dialects. She’s not interested in those areas, so why use up the little energy she has to pursue an opportunity she doesn’t want—when winning would mean a chilly office, appropriate business attire, and, likely, immediately quitting. No matter that she’s stalled now; she doesn’t want any marks against her growing reputation. If she still had her natural energy, she knows what she would do: develop a new research proposal, submit it to her university and every anthropological organization that funds exploration, and when she had the money, she’d head off once more, seeking the exotic, with a clear and stated purpose. But figuring all of that out seems impossible, mind-boggling, and utterly exhausting.
And, finally, whether she will reveal to her family the depression she has been suffering from, severe enough that she has relegated her expensive and wide-ranging education and years of diligent, imaginative, and difficult work to a back burner, to the closet, that she is spending eight hours a day tending to those on the way out, when once she was only interested in figuring out how those most uniquely alive lived.
The interstate is quiet this early, and when she sees no police cars ahead or behind, or tucked into the verges and waiting to pounce, she sets her cruise control to eighty, then checks her watch. Last night, Phoebe left a voicemail commanding Camille to call her today. “While we’re both driving to the place we seem incapable of not calling home, we can talk about things we won’t be able to talk about there, or at least not easily, or at least not without Mom sitting down next to us, caressing our hair—wait, I forgot, Mom always knows everything. Shit, I hope that’s not really true—” The message had ended with Phoebe’s laugh.
Does she want to call her pluperfect older sister, founder of her own law firm, who rents a charming apartment, though she could, on a whim, purchase an embassy-sized house in the most expensive Los Angeles neighborhoods, who, despite trouble finding a husband, knows she absolutely wants one of those and the eventual children, who has never experienced a moment of depression or doubt or indecision, who wouldn’t understand what it feels like to be dragged under the waves of one’s life? Camille’s kept everything from her family, including Phoebe, when they trade their infrequent telephonic confidences.
She stares down the long, straight highway. If she calls Phoebe at eleven, she has three and a half hours left to gather herself together, to sound like the Camille her sister thinks she knows, the Camille they all think they know.
BEST OF SEVEN?” HARRY calls out to Levitt.
Levitt, already wiping sweat from his forehead with his terry-clothed wrists, says, “Why do you insist on subverting protocol? It’s best of five, Harry. Best of five at the US Open. Best of five at Wimbledon. And there’s no way you and I can go seven in this heat. Best of three, like we do every Saturday. Is this your attempt to psych me out, gain the upper hand?”
“Of course I know the protocol. I’m being a caring friend, offering you a shot at taking me down, because I’m feeling extraordinarily energetic today.”
“Yeah, yeah, Harry. Just serve.”
Harry bounces the yellow ball, six, seven, eight, nine times, to unbalance Levitt, who is bent over at the waist, at the ready, those thick tree trunks of his in a wide, imposing stance.
Harry feels the sun on his face, hears the solid thump of the ball on the warm court, the happy yips of small dogs freed from their leashes. Then, like a thunderbolt to the brain, he’s thinking about King David and Queen Esther, the way they yipped happily, flicking their tails, circling around their new masters as Harry and Roma and Phoebe and Camille headed away from the great rambling house in Connecticut that was no longer their home. It belonged now to the buyers, that replacement family who was waving, the husband and wife the same ages as Harry and Roma, the little boys nearly the same ages as Phoebe and Camille, the family who took title and said yes, they would be delighted to take the Tabor family’s dachshunds as well, agreeing it wouldn’t be right to uproot the dogs from their puppyhood home, and impossible to travel thousands of miles with them, when the dogs couldn’t tolerate speed, would be carsick within minutes.
Levitt calls out from across the court, “You going to serve in this century?” Harry hears him, but he can’t respond, struck by these memories of King David and Queen Esther, dogs he gave to his girls when all four were young, by his ability to hand them over so easily to a family he knew nothing about, except that their financials were in order and they hadn’t required a mortgage. He doesn’t even recall their last name, despite seeing it on nearly every page of the purchase and sale agreement.
Why