Even when I’m packed up and just about ready to leave for my first year of college, Alex is still asking, Did you call Daddy to say goodbye? Daddy isn’t our real father, but he’s been our father since I was six and Alex was three. My brother feels sorry for Daddy because he had to move to a crummy apartment out near the airport when Mother filed for divorce last year. Alex is the kind of brother who tears up right along with you at the end of West Side Story. I remember how Daddy’s eyes looked the day he moved out, all red-rimmed. I still don’t want to think about those eyes.

I meant to call, I did, but then it was the leaving day and I didn’t. Alex and I wound up having one of our fights that morning—who knows about what—and when I was practically in the car and about to leave home for good, he shouted through the side door, “I hope you die! I hope you die in a car crash before you even get there!” Wham. He slammed the door shut. That’s Alex, too.

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Mother said. But when we backed out of the driveway, I could see him looking out from his bedroom window on the second floor.

Nothing’s lonelier than your first night in a strange bed. My roommate, Betsy, brought her hockey stick to college. Just seeing it made me think I’ll never find a friend. When Betsy turns out her light, I stay up to read the last pages of An American Tragedy. By the time I close that book, my original life is over. It’s 1964. By the end of September I feel like I’ve been at Elmira College for Women forever.

“Allison Mackenzie cut off all her hair,” Claire says one morning as I settle into my desk in eight o’clock English.

Claire’s inking a butterfly on the white skin of her inner arm.

“No!” I say. “She did?” I had to miss last night’s show to write a paper for today.

“Okay, she didn’t,” Claire says just to be perverse.

I like the way Claire smells. Like limes. She has long chestnut hair and the sweet round face of a pioneer girl. Who knows what goes on in Claire’s head.

Allison Mackenzie is a character in Peyton Place, a television show Claire and Phoebe and I watch in the dorm lounge. It’s based on a book I read in seventh grade, baby-sitting for the Bergers. I can still picture the book’s black cloth binding and thrilling insides.

Allison’s blond hair goes to her waist, same as in the book.

Phoebe’s clear blue eyes flick past Claire and connect with my brown ones. Recently, a boy I was slow-dancing with at a mixer told me I had sad eyes. I guess I’m the kind of girl boys like that like.

“I was the one who told that actress to cut her hair,” Phoebe says. Phoebe’s eyes are frank and challenging. Her hair is honey-colored, loopy waves tumbling to neat squared-off shoulders. She’s small like me, but with bigger feet.

Phoebe draws hard on a Winston and tips her head back to blast the ceiling with her exhale. Phoebe is nervy, like my best friend from home. That girl is at the University of Wisconsin now. She sends me blue books filled with lavender-inked poetry and wild dating adventures in which she refers to herself as Scarlett.

Claire’s more like my second-best friend from home, the one who made Snow Queen Court and worried about her reputation. She goes to Mount Holyoke and dates a premed senior at Yale. Her stationery has the name of her dormitory at the top and a zillion exclamation points at the end of every other sentence. Those girls already feel as lost to me as Troy. I’m still the girl in the middle, though. I can go from good to bad and back again in a blink.

“I wrote Peyton Place,” I say. “I invented Allison Mackenzie.”

“You did?” says Claire.

“Claire,” says Phoebe. “We’re kidding.”

“I know you are,” Claire says crossly.

Phoebe reaches into her bookbag, fishes out a cigarette and tosses it to me. A big round box of powder rouge and a copy of Miss Lonelyhearts tumble out, too.

The rouge rolls toward my desk. I stop it with my foot, then park the Winston behind my ear. When I bend down to pick up the makeup, I notice that Claire is wearing my Chinese slippers, the ones Mother sent from her trip to visit relatives in California. I try to remember the last time Claire was in my room.

“Cute shoes, Claire,” I say. Her cheeks pink up, but she doesn’t look my way.

I toss the rouge back to Phoebe. “I invented Blush-On,” I say. Talking nonsense with Phoebe is fun, like the clapping game girls played when I was a kid. Hollywood. Clap, clap. Rhy-thm. Clap, clap.

“Cheez Whiz,” Phoebe counters. “Also, by the way, the topless bikini.”

“Bye-Bye Birdie,” I say. “Book and music. Got the idea from Elvis Presley.”

Phoebe exhales smoke through her nose in a snort of a laugh, then has a coughing fit. We’re just learning how to smoke.

Claire is from Philadelphia, somewhere fancy, and has her original mother and father. Phoebe’s from some part of New York City, and her father died when she was eight. Whenever I tell Claire and Phoebe a story with a reference to Daddy, Phoebe interrupts and says, “He’s not your father, Grace. He’s your stepfather.” Well, I don’t want to argue with her but the word feels wrong. My real father isn’t dead. He’s remarried, he lives in Ohio, and his name is Irv. Alex and I haven’t seen him since we were small. It was always summer when he came, always around the Fourth of July, just before Alex’s birthday. One year Irv brought us a puppy, a boxer we named Mugsy, and took Alex and me to a fancy restaurant we’d never been to. We ate South African lobster tails, right out of their bright red shells, dipping the meat into melted butter with special little forks. There were birthday sparklers on baked Alaska. Alex couldn’t stop talking about lobster tails after that. He looked for them on the menu when we went to Chin’s for chow mein, when we stopped along the road at Howard Johnson’s. Those lobster tails must have gotten under Daddy’s skin. After that, Alex got sent to his room when Irv came, and eventually Irv stopped coming. Mugsy chewed up the sofa cushions, and Daddy took him to a farm to live.

When Professor Thorne comes into the classroom in her strict wool suit and ironclad page boy, Phoebe mashes out her cigarette on her chair’s underside. There’s a commotion of sparks as the dying butt hits the floor, and my stomach goes hollow. Our assignment was to describe how a true thing happened. I didn’t know what to write about so I wrote about something else.

“Let’s get started,” says Professor Thorne.

Claire’s hand is in the air. “I’ll go,” she says, opening her notebook.

Claire’s story is going to be about Bob, from high school. Bob Bob Bob Bob Bob. Bob’s penis, Claire told us, is curved like a comma. Phoebe informed her that a penis can’t curve. Phoebe and I agree there’s something demented about the Claire-Bob thing—such as, does Bob even exist—but why hurt Claire’s feelings? Phoebe has plenty of dates and is always expecting some boy to call. Me, I haven’t had a boyfriend since Ricky Taylor in sixth grade when, boy-wise, I peaked. Don’t bother asking me if Ricky Taylor’s penis curves.

Professor Thorn calls on Nadia, and I breathe again.

Nadia begins. “I didn’t know it at the time, but that Sunday would turn out to be the one Sunday I would never forget...”

If I look at Phoebe I’ll burst out laughing, so I look out the window, at Mark Twain’s actual writing room, which sits in the middle of our campus, at two longhaired girls hurrying past it through the drizzle. I look at the wet trees, at the leaves beginning to drop. One leaf, then another, then another after that.

I picked Elmira College for Women after seeing a picture of a leafy campus in a book on my guidance counselor’s desk, then combining it in my mind with an illustration of a mail-order dress I saw while reading the cartoons in a magazine in my dermatologist’s waiting room. I pictured myself doing a lot of reading at a place like that, probably under a tree. A girl’s school seemed dignified, vaguely British. A college that a girl in a book might go to. A girl without the nerve to apply to a college anyone had actually heard of. Secretly? I have big plans for myself. Just don’t ask me what they are.

Mother got cousin Larry to drive us there, because Ohio to New York was too far to drive alone, she said. I sat in the back seat and stared out the window. I concentrated on the yellow line down the middle of the highway, on keeping my edges crisp so my insides wouldn’t leak out all over the back seat. Mother kept turning to tell me something new about a man she was dating. Percy this, Percy that. He lived in California, and wanted her to come out there for a visit.

“But do you approve of me going, Grace?” Mother asked. Her hair was still red, still in a bubble cut with cheek curls, the way Daddy used to do it. Daddy is a hairdresser and an orphan.

“Who’s Percy?” Larry asked.

“You should just go,” I said. I didn’t approve or disapprove. Do you approve of the ocean? Do you disapprove of the sun?

While Mother and Larry chatted, I listened for “Pretty Woman” to come on the radio. Certain songs crawl directly into your heart. When Mother and Daddy came to visit me at sleepaway camp when I was eleven, I couldn’t wait to sing “Old Shep” for them, about a dog that died. “Old Shep” is still the saddest song I’ve ever heard.

It was raining hard when Larry pulled up in front of a frightening-looking Gothic dormitory. Mother rummaged through her purse for lipstick. “It looks charming!” she said.

Orientation, freshman beanie, the meal pass system. When the welcoming assembly was almost over, Mother whispered, “Do you want me to go now, Gracie?” Some of the parents had already gone, and the rest were sitting on the edges of their seats like dinner guests who couldn’t figure out how to leave. Mother sat beside me in her white coat and big sunglasses, a balled-up tissue in one hand. She looked like a bereaved movie star. When she took off the glasses, she looked like herself, only sorrier.

I didn’t want her to go, or else I wanted to go with her.

“You might as well,” I said.

That Nadia girl finishes up the story of her favorite uncle’s heart attack. “...and looking at my uncle’s pale face, I felt my own heart begin to break like the shattering notes of a single silver flute.” Claire’s arm is already in the air.

“Miss Silverman,” Professor Thorne says instead.

Phoebe shrugs off her rain slicker—she’s in her nightgown, a white flannel Lanz with little red flowers.

Sitting there, back erect and bare legs crossed Indianstyle— her muddy clogs are under her desk—she looks like a compact, cranky genie. She reads a story about the day a Pope came to Queens, New York, and passed by the Silvermans’ apartment building on his way to Yankee Stadium. The band played “Hello, Dolly!” and even Rabbi Solomon’s wife, watching from a balcony, fainted from excitement. Police officers were warned not to pray while on duty. You can tell Phoebe’s story is true.

I think about my story, about the day my brother ran away from home. You can tell it’s not.

“Do not mix work with pray,” Phoebe reads in her matter-of-fact voice. She’s a girl whose voice seems to say, Why feel sad? Why feel scared? Look around. The worst has already happened.

By the time I get called on, I’ve passed through my usual queasy terror and arrived at some still-underconstruction new self. I stand. I pretend to read from my notebook. “You put your right foot in,” I say in Phoebe’s voice. “You put your right foot out.”

I hear some nervous titters, then Claire’s startled giggle, but it’s Phoebe’s big bark of a laugh I long for. “You put your right foot in. Then you shake it all about.” I refuse to even look at Professor Thorne, at the pity I imagine in her eyes. Underneath I feel the way I always feel, terrified, and it’s my job to pretend otherwise.

Then I hear Phoebe laugh, and I feel pretty okay. Not like me exactly, but giddy and light-headed, the way I felt the time cousin Rachel dared me to shoplift Go Go Go Pink lipstick from Woolworth’s. “You do the Hokey-Pokey and you turn yourself around. That’s what it’s all about. Hey.”

Mother writes every other day. She types her letters—she happens to be an excellent typist— on stationery from Exclusively Girls. That’s the employment agency downtown where she’s worked since Daddy moved out. Mother gets a big kick out of dressing up and going to an office every day, as long as it doesn’t interfere with her new social life. When she went to California on the trip the slippers came from, this Percy person spotted Mother in a restaurant and practically fell in love with her on the spot. Now he comes all the way from Los Angeles, just to take her to tennis matches and the opera. Our family goes to the movies, then to Mawby’s for hamburgers. Mother is always talking about the symphony orchestra and the art museum, but school took us there. I didn’t know Cleveland had tennis matches. Mother says Percy used to date Dinah Shore. He’s not a movie producer but he’s got all kinds of ideas about how Mother could improve herself. Have her nose fixed is one way.

From the Desk of Georgia Hanford
Exclusively Girls
Employment Agency for Business Girls
Cleveland, Ohio

October 4, 1964

Dear Grace,

I’m writing to you on your 18th birthday, a day filled with many different emotions for me. You are entering into the adult world, a world filled with responsibilities and demands, etc. I can only remind you to reach out for all the goodness of life so that you never look back and regret that your youth was wasted on the young.

P.S. Percy flew in from Los Angeles again. He is that rare combination of charm, intelligence, glamour, humor, etc. We went to see Traviata (my black chiffon), then Chinese food after (he ate with chopsticks!). Next weekend is Al Abramowitz (Abramowitz Plumbing Supplies) and ice-skating and deli with Herb Cohen.

He wants me to come to Los Angeles, for opening night of the opera (formal, of course). I said I’d have to think it over carefully. Tell me, Grace. Do you think it’s proper? I told him I couldn’t do anything to damage the respect of my children.

I’m sorry about your laundry troubles! Will Claire replace the blouse?

All my love!
Mother

Alex sends a birthday card that really makes me laugh, and there’s a dopey flowery one from Daddy. “To my Darling Daughter.” At the bottom, he’s written, Please write! and P.S. I’d come and visit but I don’t have the you-know-what. A few words are misspelled, and I feel ashamed to see them. I shove the card into the bottom of my footlocker, along with the other cards Daddy has sent.

From the Desk of Georgia Hanford
Exclusively Girls
Employment Agency for Business Girls
Cleveland, Ohio

October 10

Hi Sweetie!

Just a quickie before I dash out to the dentist. Grace, I do hope you’ll reconsider the suitcase I sent you. It’s luxurious and elegant and you will be thrilled to have it when you get married. Things at home are relatively quiet. Alex and I had a run-in Sunday night after you and I spoke. He is very definitely troubled and wants discipline so badly. He keeps telling me I have no control over him and I really feel this upsets him. He asks, “What are you going to do about it?” I don’t have the answer. I can only hope for wisdom and patience.

Love,

Mother

P.S. How was the Spanish Club tea? Did you or did you not wear the hat?

College is one new experience after another. I have so much to tell when I call home on Sunday evenings, I can barely get it all in. The last week in October, Claire and Phoebe and I go to the airport with some other Elmira girls. We watch Bobby Kennedy stand on a car and tell the crowd why he’ll make a great senator. We watch his hair flop onto his forehead. We watch him push it off. We scream and cheer, and a photographer for Life magazine takes our picture. Riding back on the bus, I imagine Daddy idly turning the pages of the magazine one slow afternoon, his feet up on a swivel chair, cigarette between his fingers, waiting for someone to dry, the way I’ve seen him hundreds of times in the beauty salon. I imagine his surprise when my face jumps out at him from the magazine. You wouldn’t know it, but I’m wearing a fall. It’s a fake length of sleek brown hair that makes my own wispy curls look thick and smooth. Everyone says it looks completely natural. Phoebe talked me into getting it. She taught me how to make my lips pale and my eyes more intriguing, too.

When our American Studies professor announces that the actual senator from New York will be coming to our campus next week, I think about going to hear his speech, too.

“You wouldn’t vote for a Republican even if you could vote,” Phoebe says when I mention it. “Would you?”

I feel a little bad for the man, that’s all. It’s the kind of bad I used to feel for a barrette I hadn’t worn in a while.

“What if no one goes?” I say.

“You’re too sensitive, Grace.”

Phoebe Silverman isn’t too sensitive. The other evening she camped outside the bathroom stall and explained to me exactly where the Tampax was supposed to go. It was a long explanation.

Later that night I told her the secret of drawing. I spend most of my time in Phoebe’s room. Her real roommate practically lives in the library, then sneaks out to spend the night with her boyfriend. Sometimes I fall asleep in that missing girl’s bed.

“When I was in the sixth grade, my mother went to Florida to visit my grandmother,” I began. In my mind I could see Mother in their bedroom, see that single alarming suitcase of hers open on the unmade bed. Her late-night fight with Daddy still hung sourly in the morning air.

“Your grandmother who sends you coconut patties,” said Phoebe. We’ve memorized the details of each other’s lives, as if they’re the combination to a lock.

The taxi beeped out front, and Daddy swung the suitcase off the bed. Alex had been dragging a balloon stick back and forth along the ribs of the radiator in their bedroom, and now he was stumbling around like a drunk, trying to balance the stick in the palm of one hand. “He looked like one of those plate twirlers on the Ed Sullivan Show,” I told Phoebe. Daddy grabbed Alex by the arm and pushed him up against a wall. Mother went nuts, as usual. I spared Phoebe that part.

“God, I love those plate twirlers,” she said.

I watched from the window as Daddy lifted Mother’s suitcase into the trunk of the cab, and Mother disappeared into the back seat. Daddy shut the door after her, then leaned into the open window, his hands on the roof of the taxi, one foot propped behind the other. He said whatever he said, not that it helped. Then she was gone.

“One night that week, I was hanging out in my room, drawing,” I told Phoebe. When I was a kid, I loved drawing horses. I could draw horses all day. I loved stories about pioneers, too, and when I drew I imagined a pioneer girl on a horse, galloping around a corral.

“Describe your room,” Phoebe said. “Was there a canopy involved?”

She knew it was pink, but I said so again.

“My father came in.” Shit. I waited for Phoebe to say, your stepfather.

“Your father who looks like a cross between Perry Como and Dean Martin,” she said instead. Her voice was goofy-tired.

“...and he stretched out next to me on my bed.”

I couldn’t see Phoebe in the almost-dark of the room, but I could sense her rearrange herself into a microscopically more attentive position. “What do you mean?” she said.

“I mean, he was lying there.” I meant for her to concentrate on the story I was telling. “Then he took the sketch pad out of my hands. The pencil, too. He said, ’Watch. I want to show you something.’ ”

“Uh-huh.”

Daddy has beautiful hands. According to Mother, his hands were the first thing she noticed. As I told Phoebe the story, I pictured his hands, the clusters of black hair on each knuckle. “His hand moved up and down over the paper very delicately,” I said. “The pencil barely grazed the paper. What he was drawing was circles. Sort of swirling circles that overlapped each other.”

It was when he paused, then moved his hand away, that I saw an actual horse’s flank, then galloping legs. I pushed at his hand to make him keep going. “Finally, he was done. He showed it to me. It was a perfect horse. He said, ’It’s all circles. That’s the secret of drawing.’ ” I still don’t know where he learned such a good secret. In the orphanage where he grew up?

Phoebe was quiet, and I thought she didn’t appreciate how truly incredible it was. Thinking it made me feel lost. Then I realized she was asleep.

Alone in the dark, I checked inside my mind for the dot. The dot’s just that—a dot. It stands for Daddy and the way he used to touch me. Touch. Stop. Wait. I’d push at Daddy’s hand to make him keep going: More. The last morning before Mother came home, he was in my bed. He was on top of me, sudden as a safe. I felt the surprise of air squeezed out between ribs, squashed heart thrashing. In the next instant, the weight was gone. The dot stands for the words he spoke next. “Oh, Gracie, this isn’t good.” Those awful words must have traveled an enormous distance because along the way they’d gathered the power to shatter the pleasure world into a sorry mess of shameful pieces. I was on one of those pieces, like that silent movie actress who floats away on a chunk of ice.

It was even lonelier when Mother came home. Everyone pretended I was the same Grace, when I was something else entirely. By now I’m used to the two Graces, one fitting just behind the other like a photograph slightly out of focus. And there’s the dot. It reminds me there was a different Grace once. I look for that dot the way I used to look inside my jewelry box for the Snow White watch my real father gave me, or the way I looked for the plastic red feather pin from United Appeal I pinned to a bush when I was six. Mother and Daddy were away on their honeymoon, and Alex and I were staying with Uncle Sol and Aunt Ruth. I walked a different route to school each day and pinned the feather to the bush in case I couldn’t find my way back. Just before I check inside my mind for the dot I feel the same dizzy uncertainty I felt when I looked for the watch and the feather. Will the dot still be there? And yes, it’s there, it’s always there.

Phoebe orders a pizza from Bruno’s one weekend night when nothing much is going on, when no one has a blind date or a mixer or a paper to write. While we wait for the food, she reads us a quiz in Glamour that promises to match us with our ideal mate. “’Would you be happier on a ski slope or in a museum?’” she reads.

Claire is sitting on the roommate’s bed, brushing her thick hair, flipping up the ends with long, mesmerizing strokes.

“ ‘Would you rather spend the evening having dinner by candlelight or at a baseball game?’ ”

“Are we supposed to be writing this down?” Claire says, frowning.

“Would you rather slit your wrists or be a member of the Mitch Miller Singers?” Phoebe says. She snatches her hairbrush from Claire’s hand.

We love magazines that promise to tell our futures, specifically who our soul mate is and where we’ll meet him and what outfit we should be wearing when we do. Everyone says I’ll meet mine in the library, and then they describe some shy bookish boy who worships me from afar. Some sensitive boy. I’m not saying my ideal mate shouldn’t read books—just not all the time. I’d like to meet a boy who’s really cute and funny and loves to dance and isn’t counting on me to make all the conversation. If he were an existentialist or an atheist as well as a fraternity boy, that’s fine with me. The thing is, I’ve read Gone With the Wind about a million times and I’ve never met a girl who wants to be Melanie.

I’ve got my art history book on my lap, and I’m highlighting the chapter on Etruscan art when reception buzzes to say the food’s here. We three dig for change. We’re always digging for change, for cigarettes and candy bars and long-distance phone calls whose charges can’t be reversed. We complain about never having enough change, but we never talk about money. Grandpa left a few thousand dollars for my education when he died. That was a lot of money when I was two years old, but it only pays for about a year at Elmira now. Then what? When I said I was applying, Mother invited Uncle Sol over one night just before dinner to talk to me. He sat in the Early American writing desk chair that no one ever sat in. I sat on the sofa, my hands folded on my lap. I had never been alone in a room with my uncle before.

“Elmira is an expensive college,” Uncle Sol told me. Mother worships her older brother. He looks like Yul Brynner, the King. He looks like he’d be the kind of father you’d be afraid of at first, then slowly learn to love, the way Anna learned to love the King of Siam. I was still learning.

I tried to think of the right thing to say but nothing came to mind. My cousin Rachel went to a state school, just like her brothers.

“Your mother doesn’t have a lot of money, does she?”

“No,” I said. Daddy didn’t make much money as a hairdresser. When Alex was bar mitzvahed, Mother had to use Alex’s gift money to pay for the party. Alex made her sign an IOU, but she still hadn’t paid it back.

“It’s pretty selfish, wouldn’t you say, to apply to a private school that your mother can barely afford?”

I could hear Mother in the kitchen, rummaging in the silverware drawer. My cheeks blazed with shame. I wasn’t great, but I was better than Rachel.

Uncle Sol stood and looked down at me. His hands were on his hips, just like the King. “Enough said?”

That was it. I was definitely going.

Phoebe goes to get the pizza while Claire creams her hands with something she’s picked up from the missing roommate’s vanity. I notice for the first time that Claire is wearing my charm bracelet, the one Daddy bought me for Sweet Sixteen.

“Even though you don’t talk about sex I think you like it,” Claire says out of the blue. Funny, it feels like a compliment.

“Oh, Claire,” I say.

When Phoebe returns with the food, we open the big box, and the steamy smell of tomato sauce and cardboard washes over us. We tear into the food, the way we always do. You can say one thing for us. We’re never not famished.

“Remember: This is a race,” Phoebe says.

As soon as November arrives, the air turns raw, and the idea of home begins to re-form in our imaginations. Thanksgiving is just ahead, past the presidential election we’ve been talking about in American Studies, past midterm exams, past the last of the fall mixers with the boys who populate the schools around us.

Mother mentions Percy, the man from California, in every letter. I know that Percy smokes a pipe and wears tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, and Mother makes a point of telling me he’s “well-read.” Mother’s vivacious and nice, but she’s impressionable.

Phoebe and Claire get a big kick out of her social life, and I’ve taken to reading some of her letters out loud. “I am sure I love Percy,” Mother wrote in the last one, “but I keep reminding myself that I loved Al, too, at one time, and Herb.” I look up—they’re hanging on every word. “Percy is like no one in the world I have ever known,” I continue. “I trust him so completely with all our lives. He weaves words into the most beautiful patterns. He talks from his heart and soul.” Claire claps her hand over her mouth. Phoebe snorts admiringly. When I read Mother’s letters out loud, I know who I am. I’m the girl with the dating mother.

Claire and I wind up going to the senator’s speech together. He’s old and elegant and kind of boring and his hair doesn’t flop. I can barely keep my eyes open, and Claire keeps pinching me to stay awake. When the speech is over, we don’t hang around with the pale, serious girls to shake his hand. What’s the point?

“Well, it’s his own fault,” Claire says apropos of nothing.

I don’t know why this makes me laugh. “He has no one to blame but himself,” I say.

We walk over to the dining hall to get in line for supper, and we keep saying stuff like this back and forth and over and over, just nonsense, so many times and with so much feeling we forget what we mean, but each time we say them we laugh harder and somehow they feel truer. The thing is, Phoebe is clever and brave, but Claire has this sly sense of humor that sneaks up on you if you let it. I feel protective of Claire. I’m never sure she’s even playing the same game.

The bulletin board outside the dining hall is already papered over with requests for rides, with ads for airline and bus tickets. At the table, as we pass the platters of food around, the names of friends from home are resurfacing in the hum. Tonight, for example, Claire announces receiving a few Bob sightings from one of her hometown friends. Bob at the high school track field. Bob at a bar in a distant suburb. Bob’s car parked in front of Quality Cleaners.

“Are you going to see Bob when you’re home?” Phoebe asks her.

“Oh. Well, I guess so,” Claire says, as if the idea is only just occurring to her. She draws out the word guess. She adds, “He called last night around three in the morning— drunk. He wanted to drive here, from Philadelphia. I had to make him swear not to get into a car.”

It’s impossible to know if this is true. Claire has a single room, for one thing. No one knows how she got it.

Phoebe’s made a zillion plans with various boys for over Thanksgiving vacation. It’s weeks away and she’s already booked.

I’m not booked. I have a letter from Mother saying Percy will be “joining us.” This letter I read to myself, even though it’s filled with details about Mother’s trip to Los Angeles, with little drawings of the outfits she wore to each event. She reminds me to make airline reservations and asks me to please remember to send Percy “a nice note.” A note about what? I turn the words “joining us” over and over in my mind, and each time I do they feel more pretentious.

Still, we’re all excited, including me. We can’t wait for our triumphant return. We want to show off our new superior college selves. We’re practically giddy with anticipation. The dumbest things make us laugh. “This is only going to end in tears,” Phoebe takes to saying in a fake-parent voice, and this causes us to laugh even harder, until our cheeks are wet, until we have to clutch our stomachs and beg each other to please stop.

If Phoebe or Claire or I feel uneasy at the thought of leaving each other for those other places, no one mentions it. We act as if we’re not secretly jealous to be reminded of each other’s former best and closest friends, the former best and favorite pizza parlors and shopping centers and movie theaters and record stores, the former lives whose landmarks we thrilled to turn away from two brief months ago—but a lifetime is what it feels like now. We talk the way we always do. We plan what we’ll do in the weeks and months after Thanksgiving, after Christmas, after freshman year, after graduation: drive to New York, fly to Florida, travel around Europe, lose our virginity, get an apartment together, fall in love, be bridesmaids in each other’s weddings. We talk the way we always talk, in code, in sly asides, in puzzles and jokes, as if saying plainly what’s in our hearts could cause us to burst into flames.

One morning, a note is slipped under the door of my room, saying there’s a Special Delivery letter for me in the campus post office. I hurry over before breakfast. The small building is empty of students, but there’s an attractive dark-haired woman in a suit, a silk scarf knotted at her neck. She’s busy cutting open several small cartons clustered on the floor around her.

I peer into my mailbox and find a single envelope. It’s business-sized, thin as a rejection. Due to the purple date and time stamp and the long row of stamps, though, to the words Special Delivery and Air Mail underlined three times beneath my name and the name of my dormitory, all those typed in big black capital letters, the flimsy envelope feels swollen with self importance. It’s from Percy Perry.

My dearest Grace:

I am so looking forward to meeting you as well. I’m very, very impressed with you and your scholastic achievement. It’s wonderful to know that in addition to being so sweet and pretty, with such winning charm, that you’re also blessed with brains! What a catch you’ll make for some lucky boy! Don’t ever sell yourself short, my dear Grace. And if you’re ever feeling low and depressed, or things don’t work out just right—either in school or socially—drop me a line or call, and I’ll try to cheer you up. Remember, you have a sincere and devoted friend in me, to whom you can turn for emotional, spiritual, and mental nourishment at any time. You’re always in our hearts, and in mine with particular emphasis and warmth, because I’ve never had a daughter before!

All my love,

Percy

I put it right back into its flimsy envelope, swollen myself with some wrong combination of embarrassment and pleasure. So these are the words he weaves around Mother.

The woman is speaking to me. I look up, as if I’ve been caught reading someone else’s mail. I see that she’s torn open the cartons and is unlocking one long swinging wall of mailboxes.

“Are you free for an hour or so?” she says. She offers me a warm, inviting smile. I smile back. I see now that the cartons are filled with books, all the same book, one with a soft red cover and bold black type

I slip Percy’s letter into my Spanish book.

It takes us under an hour to put one book into each mailbox, and though my back feels achy when we finish, I am twenty dollars richer. I don’t ask why each girl is getting a book written by Barry Goldwater, the Republican candidate for President, and I don’t particularly wonder. I feel virtuous for having done a job and earned twenty dollars. I feel absolved of something I can’t name.

By the time I return to the dorm late that afternoon, everyone who’s picked up mail has one of the books, even if they haven’t read it. Phoebe has read it. I’ve never seen her so mad. Her outrage has infected the dorm and is beginning to spread over the campus. She’s turned into a small general marshaling troops. “Propaganda,” Phoebe calls it. “Political scaremongering.” By dinner she’s organized a candlelight march to protest what she calls “the school’s passive tolerance for the distribution of propaganda.”

I don’t say a word about my role in distributing the books. I’m not entirely sure what, if anything, I’ve done to contribute to this injustice, which I admit I understand only vaguely. It takes me by surprise, my ignorance of the world. It startles me every time.

That evening, I make myself invisible. I join the long line of candlelit girls, some wearing their class blazer, in the procession that crosses campus, weaves around the pond, and makes its way to the president’s house. We girls are muted and polite, careful not to tread through the flower beds as we gather in front with our flickering candles and nicely lettered signs, and though our mostly well-behaved discontent is punctuated by a few rude shouts, we return to our dorms in an orderly fashion well before curfew.

It’s not until the next morning that we realize Claire is gone.

In Thorne’s class, someone mentions a car coming for her last night—right after supper, someone else says.

Was it Bob? No one can say for sure. That Phoebe! So busy getting everyone riled up about the books, we didn’t notice Claire was gone.

After class, though, Phoebe and I go together to the assistant dean’s office. Claire’s mother came for her, the woman in the administration office tells us kindly. Claire has transferred to a school in Pennsylvania, it seems. We’re dumbfounded, but it’s possible. Parents have that kind of supernatural power. And after all, it’s Claire.

But the notecard that turns up in my mailbox a few days later isn’t from a college in Pennsylvania. It’s from a psychiatric hospital in Maryland.

Dear Grace and Phoebe,

I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye! Pls. save me some pizza and, if you get a chance, forward my good leather gloves (in an orange box, possibly under my bed) to this address. I love you! Claire

Phoebe and I forget about classes. We get the phone number of the hospital from Information and call it the second we get back to the dorm. We call person-to-person for Claire. And when the operator returns to say that Claire is unavailable, we scrounge up a pile of change and dial the number direct. Tell her to call this number, we say in an urgent voice to whoever has answered the phone. Tell her to reverse the charges. We spend the rest of the day in Phoebe’s room, in case Claire does call. I’m not mad at Phoebe anymore. She’s as upset about Claire as I am. We keep the door half open, listening for the phone down the hall. While we wait, we tell Claire stories. Claire on her hands and knees in Early Childhood Development hunting for her lost false eyelash. Claire mimicking the way the salesman at the Gorton Coy department store mispronounces chic. Claire’s dirty feet. We debate the existence of Bob and wonder if Claire has been taken away to have an abortion or whatever is worse.

I haven’t told Phoebe my news. Mother and Percy are going to be married. At Christmas. We’re moving to California right after the first of the year. Alex is excited, Mother said during Sunday’s call, because he’s going to have his own car. And Percy definitely thinks I should apply to a college in California for sophomore year. Mother says Percy has a friend who’s going to arrange a private tour of a movie studio for us when I fly out for the first time, on spring break. I guess we’ve been saved, and at the very last minute.

Claire doesn’t call. But even when the sky has darkened, Phoebe and I are still listening for the ring. Phoebe has crawled under her covers in her nightgown. I’ve tucked the roommate’s quilt over my wrinkled skirt. When it’s clear we’ve missed the second dinner seating, we’re still listening. We owe Claire that much, don’t we? We sing “Cathy’s Clown,” trying to get the harmony right between the two beds. Phoebe tells the story of color war at Camp Winihawk, and I recite the three things I know by heart: An Emily Dickinson poem called “I Died for Beauty,” the Gettysburg Address, and the Crest toothpaste slogan. At eight-thirty, it could be three in the morning. Phoebe and I are quiet, not even smoking, and the room is dark except for the little lights around one of the vanity mirrors. I lie on my back and twirl the flippy ends of my fake hair. I watch as shadows form and reform on the ceiling whenever a girl passes the room on her way to the kitchenette. The shadows begin to resemble waves, and the room, we two girls tucked inside it, feels safely adrift on currents of silence and talk.

At the sound of a rap on the door we startle. It’s my roommate, Betsy. She pushes the door open wider but keeps her body planted on the exact other side of the threshold. What a disappointment I am as a roommate. “Your father is here to see you,” Betsy says sternly.

For a moment, I picture my real father, the one who’s been scissored out of all the old photographs. In one of them, his disembodied right hand—there’s a chunky ring on one finger—rests on a nightclub table crowded with filled ashtrays and lipsticked glasses. Uncle Sol and Aunt Ruth are at the table, and Mother, with Rita Hayworth hair and a cigarette holder. Mother’s eyes wear a dreamy expression, as if she’s already picturing something better.

Phoebe snaps on a light. “I’ll come with you, Grace,” she says. She’s out of bed, pulling on clothes.

“Don’t be silly,” I say, scrunching my eyes against the sudden light. What’s the emergency? I get to my feet. I smooth my skirt and check the mirror to make sure my fake hair’s on right.

I follow Betsy down the hall, and when she peels off in the direction of our room, I continue down a flight of stairs to reception.

Daddy is standing beside the resident advisor’s desk. The same thick black hair, glistening now with rain. The same bruised eyes and stormy mouth.

“Daddy.” My mouth is stale. I feel kind of dazed.

“Hi, sweetheart.” He opens his arms. I walk up to them but not into them. I kiss his rough cheek like I’m dispensing a chilly favor.

“You didn’t tell me you were coming,” I say in my Snow Queen voice. Or did he? I think guiltily of all the cards I’ve stuffed into my footlocker.

“Well, I missed you.”

“Oh.” My real voice sounds tiny.

“Show me around, why don’t you? Let me take you to dinner.”

“Men aren’t allowed in the rooms,” I say. I’m panicky at the thought of Phoebe seeing him. I don’t know why. “Wait here,” I tell him. “I’ll go get my coat.”

Just like that, we walk out into the damp night. I feel like a lump of snarling deadweight, like I’ve been collected by one of those blind dates you can’t help but despise for not recognizing from the very first second that there’s no future in it, that the whole evening will be a seething, tiresome charade. Daddy opens the passenger door of the car for me, and I slide in, modestly hurrying my knees back together, tugging my A-line skirt down to cover them.

It smells like car in there, like leather and smoke. It smells like driving downtown to a Technicolor movie, like the long trip to Washington, D.C., to see the cherry blossoms. It smells like child time, like the endless present tense of family.

Daddy walks around to the driver’s side and gets in, and as he puts the key in the ignition, and the motor turns over, I’m a Brownie on her way to father-daughter potluck. I push in the cigarette lighter and flick on the radio, and a deeper ribbon of memory is released—the cozy sound of a baseball game coming over the car radio, cigar smoke, an unnamed ocean of feeling so blissful and radiant it makes my heart hurt. Joy. The lighter pops out. The ribbon is gone. I fish a Newport from my purse.

“You smoke,” Daddy says. Like I went bad after all.

“Everyone smokes.” I turn away and huff my steamy breath onto the side window, then watch my ghostly mouth melt away. It startles me to see my own reflection flash briefly back at me in the window glass, my sulky eyes and glamorous hair.

We drive to the Tom Sawyer Diner, a place I’m pretty sure no one goes. It’s the cheapest nice-enough restaurant I can think of.

I slide into one side of a booth by the window. Daddy hangs his wet jacket on the coat rack, then slips in opposite, removing the pack of Kents from his shirt pocket, the heavy silver lighter from his pants pocket.

He lays these things on the table like he’s just been arrested. I shrug off my coat, start paging through songs on the miniature table jukebox.

The waitress brings menus. “A Coke for my daughter,” Daddy tells her in his deep, flirtatious voice, as if he’s answering a question he alone can read on her pretty young face, and all for my benefit.

I don’t even look at him. I hunt for loose quarters in the lint and tobacco at the bottom of my purse. I feed quarters into the jukebox, punch in numbers for songs.

“Your hair’s gotten long,” Daddy says.

“It’s a fall,” I say as if anyone with a brain could see that.

“I hear your mother put the house up for sale.” Daddy lights up a Kent, takes a drag, holds it like a pencil, eyes narrowing against the smoke.

“Yeah.”

We order whatever we order, and the food comes, and we busy ourselves over it for a while. I wait like a frozen girl for each song to come on, and when it does, I hurl myself inside like it’s a lifeboat. Daddy says he has a second job, driving a cab nights. He says, “I’ll be able to send you spending money, sweetheart.” It practically makes me cry, it’s so pathetic.

I can hear Alex say, “That’ll be the day.” He says it just like John Wayne, in The Searchers. “That’ll be the day.” Alex and I love that movie. We can’t see it enough times.

Daddy says he still goes to the orphanage once a month to cut the little girls’ hair for free.

“Uh-huh,” I say. I immediately picture the pale yellow brick of that place, even though I went with Daddy one time only. I waited for him in the car. Orphans terrified and fascinated me. Afterward, in my room at home, I thought about the unfortunate sad-eyed girl probably my same age who I imagined lived there, the girl whose bangs Daddy trimmed because, he said, he knew what it was like to grow up in a place like that. She was the girl I imagined when I drew the horse.

“Thank you for dinner,” I say politely when the waitress has dropped the check on the table and Daddy is fishing out his wallet. He smiles, looks sort of surprised and pleased. Doesn’t even know a lie when he hears one.

It’s quiet on the way back. I don’t bother with the radio, just stare out the window. We’re driving, and everything is what it is. What it is is the opposite of The Wizard of Oz. That movie switches from black and white to color as soon as Dorothy gets to Oz. My life started out in color, then it switched to black and white. When we pull up outside the dorm, I feel like I could sleep for a week.

I’m not big on goodbyes. I don’t like saying good night if I can help it. I lean over and kiss Daddy’s cheek anyway. “Drive carefully, Daddy,” I say as I get out. But the words come out ragged. I wonder if I’ll never see him again.

I don’t go in right away. I stand there after the car’s pulled away. I shift from foot to foot, blinking back tears and hugging myself against the cold. I watch until I can’t see that car anymore, until all that’s left is a howl the size of a dot.