The Disenchantments

  Meg shakes her head no. Turning off the highway she says, “We need a break. We should stay in Eugene and have lunch.”

  We choose an Italian place with tables outside and pool our money for an extra large pizza and sodas. We are surrounded by college students and stores and cafés, and it feels bigger here than the places we’ve been, but it’s still pretty mellow.

  Bev says, “We’ll be here for an hour, right?”

  Alexa looks unsure, but Meg says, “Definitely.”

  “Then I’ll be right back.”

  We watch her cross the street with her purse and camera to a one-hour photo lab.

  When she comes back, she says, “I was going to wait until Portland, but then the opportunity presented itself.”

  “Fate,” I say.

  She smiles at Alexa. “It’s possible.”

  After lunch Meg keeps pausing by shop windows and looking inside. Bev pays for her photographs and we ask to see them but she tells us we’ll look later. Every block we walk on the way back to the bus stretches forever, because we have to wait for Meg as she falls behind us. In front of a gardening shop, she says, “I’m just going to run in here for a second. They might have something I want.”

  “Gardening?” I ask.

  Alexa shakes her head.

  “Meg. We have to go,” she says. “Now.”

  Each time Bev rewinds, the Walkman wheezes and moans, sounds close to death.

  Alexa taps Bev on the shoulder.

  “I’m worried you’re going to break your tape,” she says.

  “It’ll be fine.” Bev puts her headphones back on.

  We pass a sign telling us that Portland is only forty miles away.

  “Meg, do you have a final playlist for us?” I shout back.

  “No.”

  The answer is so unlike her that I glance in the rearview to try to see what she’s doing. She’s leaning forward a little—I can’t see her face.

  Half an hour later, Alexa says, “Look, Meg!” She twists around in her seat, grinning. “We’re in Portland.”

  I catch a glimpse of the welcome sign as we fly past, but the sign is hardly necessary. For the first time since we left San Francisco, we are in a real city. Freeway overpasses stretch above us. Lanes divide; cars pass us on both sides; we are suddenly inundated with choices.

  Also for the first time all trip, Alexa has the directions in her hands but isn’t telling me which way to go half a mile in advance.

  “Lex,” I say, “which way?”

  But when Alexa speaks next she isn’t speaking to me.

  “Where are your pills?” she asks. “Have you been taking your pills?”

  I look in the rearview mirror. Meg is pale, trembling. She shakes her head, no.

  “Fuck,” Alexa says. She sounds so worried that it takes me a moment to realize that this is the first time I’ve ever heard her swear. She unbuckles her seat belt and dives into the back.

  I turn off the freeway, because though I don’t always buy Alexa’s ideas about energy, this is clear: something is wrong.

  Off the freeway is the parking lot for a warehouse. I stop the car as Alexa climbs back over the seat with her black case. I don’t know what to do, so I just watch as she takes out the flashlight and the emergency radio and finds the first-aid kit. Inside the kit, all of the pills are wrapped and neatly labeled Tylenol, Aspirin, and Meg.

  She unwraps the Meg pills and then Bev is next to them, handing Meg her water bottle. Alexa puts a blue pill in Meg’s mouth and Bev takes the water bottle from Meg’s shaking hand after she’s sipped.

  “Fuck,” Alexa says again, but Bev doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t panic; she doesn’t even look worried; she just takes Meg in her arms and holds her tightly. She holds her for so long that her eyes focus on something far away. She looks solemn and content, like she would stay that way forever if Meg needed her to.

  Once Meg stops shaking, she opens her eyes, looks up to face Alexa.

  “I’m sorry, Lex. I just felt so good. I didn’t think I needed them.”

  But Alexa is angry. She gets out of the van and slams the door, paces around the van in circles as she talks on her cell phone.

  We watch her out the window.

  “She’s talking to our parents,” Meg says. “I can tell.”

  “Meg,” I say. “What happened?”

  She shrugs. “I told you I had my moments,” she says.

  I nod.

  “I panic,” she says to Bev. “It comes suddenly sometimes. I’ve been on meds since freshman year. Not major ones, just something to help with the anxiety. But I stopped taking them a couple weeks ago. I thought maybe I didn’t need it. Like I was starting over and I would be okay now.”

  We are the only people in this parking lot, next to a huge and empty building, under the overpasses. Above us, the sky is blue and vast.

  “No matter what issues you do or don’t have,” Bev says quietly, “it’s a lot of pressure.”

  It’s the first time she’s spoken since Meg started acting strangely. Her carving tools are cast aside. She runs her finger across a half-finished figure. The person has short hair, so it’s either herself or me—I’m not close enough to tell.

  “It’s hard.”

  “What’s hard?” I ask.

  Bev shakes her head, as if the answer is too big to put into words.

  Finally she says, “Growing up.”

  And there is nothing any of us can say to that. It feels too true for a response. So we just sit in the bus as Alexa orbits us, gesturing wildly, mouthing words we can’t hear, held safe by the single year that separates her from us.

  We drive down a tree-lined road, past a mansion made of brick-colored stones until we reach Meg’s dorm. In front of the building, parents are helping their kids move in. Meg opens the back door and peers up at her new home.

  “It looks nice,” I say.

  Meg nods. “It’s like a college from a movie.”

  “I’m taking a walk,” Alexa tells Meg.

  “I’m sorry,” Meg says.

  Alexa shakes her head.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” she says. “I just need to be by myself for a while. Your room is on the third floor.”

  “I know.”

  “Number three sixteen.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll meet you guys up there in an hour.”

  Bev, Meg, and I grab boxes of Meg’s things and climb the flights of stairs. The top of the third flight opens to a common space with a couple of couches and a table. Bulletin boards with brightly colored fliers announcing clubs and movie nights hang in the spaces between doors along the hallway.

  And before we even get to Meg’s room—as the college kids and their parents step aside as we pass them in the hall, and I see everyone’s welcoming faces, and the notes written on whiteboards on room doors, and the free condoms in a wall-mounted box, and signs announcing open-mic nights and movie screenings—I realize that I was wrong. College is something new. It isn’t like high school at all.

  A guy walks out of the bathroom in flip-flops with a towel tied around his waist.

  “Hey,” he says to us. “I’m Kevin, your R.A.”

  “Hi, Kevin,” Meg says. “I’m Meg.”

  “Meg in three sixteen,” he says. “I’ll swing by later, when I’m dressed in more than a towel.”

  He laughs and we laugh and he continues down the hallway, and moments later we find Room 316. Two notes from Kevin hang on the door. One says Welcome, Meg!; the other, Welcome, Julia! We walk in: white walls, two single beds, two bedside tables, two desks, and two closets. All of it clean and empty.

  We set everything down. Meg crosses to the window. I wait for her to turn around, not sure what to expect. She could love it here, or she could tell us to take her home. I leave the boxes taped shut just in case. No one says anything.

  Then she turns around. She looks tired, but she still looks like Meg.

  “What are you kids
waiting for?” she asks. “Let’s get to it.”

  So we do. I run down to the bus for another load of her stuff, and Bev and Meg start ripping tape off boxes, weighing the benefits of each side of the room. By the time I get back, they have taken over the right side. Bev is lining up Meg’s shoes on the floor of the right-hand closet; Meg is stacking a few books on her desk. I open the box I just carried up: one bowl, one mug, one fork, one knife, one spoon. A box of crackers, a water filter, a box of Earl Grey, a bar of chocolate, cereal bars. In the next box is a toothbrush and a hairbrush, a razor, lotion, tampons, Tylenol, her Xanax prescription.

  “Where do you want these things?” I ask.

  “I think I get a locker in the bathroom,” she says. “Let’s go look.”

  Meg and I leave the room, go out into the hallway, which is still filled with friendly strangers, and find the bathroom on her wing.

  “Let me check if anyone’s in here.”

  She disappears through the door. I hear her calling hello, and then the door opens again and I follow her inside.

  There is a row of lockers, a row of shower stalls, a row of toilet stalls, a row of sinks and mirrors. We hunt for an unclaimed locker and find one.

  “I’m not looking forward to showering in flip-flops,” Meg says. “But I’m all about hot boys roaming the halls in towels.”

  I place her shampoo in her locker, her hairbrush beside it.

  “So you’re doing okay?” I ask.

  “I’m getting there.”

  “It seems pretty great here.”

  She shuts the locker, studies my face.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Are you regretting it?”

  “Not starting college?”

  She nods.

  “Maybe,” I say. Then, “Yes.”

  “The year will go by so fast. And there are other things to do.”

  “Yeah, I know. I looked through Alexa’s book. I’m trying to decide between delivering mail and arranging flowers.”

  “Flowers are pretty, and you can listen to music all day if you deliver mail.”

  She leans against the wall of lockers.

  “I guess I can’t blame her for wanting this,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says. “But wanting this was never the problem. The problem was her not telling you.”

  She’s right, I know. And our trip is coming to an end now. There’s tonight and tomorrow and then Alexa and Bev and I will drive home in one long day, and Bev still hasn’t explained why she kept college a secret.

  We don’t go straight back to Meg’s room. Instead, we explore her floor: the spacious, communal kitchen with two ovens and stoves, the lounge with more couches and a TV, the laundry room with several washers and dryers and tables for folding and lower tables at which to sit and study. Meg swears to me that she is going to bake cookies every night and become addicted to reality shows and always have clean underwear.

  When we get back to Meg’s room, Alexa is waiting outside the shut door.

  “Your campus is incredible! I found this little hidden place on a hill with a couple of benches. And I went into that huge building, the really old one. It’s beautiful in there.”

  As Alexa talks, I just sort of watch her in wonder. When she left us she was all wound up and angry, she took the walk she said she needed in order to be in a good mood, and now she’s back, smiling, gushing about how great everything is.

  And then the door opens.

  Bev.

  “What have you been doing in there?” Meg asks.

  Bev’s eyes are nervous and excited.

  She says, “It’s okay if you don’t like it. You can change it all.”

  “I’m sure I’ll love it. Let me see!”

  She steps to the side, lets us in.

  One half of the white room is no longer bare. Meg’s bed is made with her yellow comforter and green pillows. A silkscreened poster from The Disenchantments’ first show is pinned above her desk. A thin wire hangs horizontally over the longer wall, and from the wire dangle several photographs.

  We cross the room to look at them. The first is a picture of me.

  “Where did this dog come from?” Meg asks.

  “She was on the street in front of Bev’s house on the morning we left,” I say. “Her name’s Daisy.”

  I look from the first photograph to the others. They look at once familiar and unfamiliar. Each photograph is of us, taken in the places we visited, but they look different. The colors are more saturated; in every one of them we look happy; every setting is clean and peaceful. Meg at the apple farm, biting into a green apple with rows of trees behind her. Meg’s photo of Alexa at Glass Beach, with the ocean in the background and no sign of junk. Bev leaning against me, asleep in the back row of the bus. The back of me in the driver’s seat, with my eyes reflected in the rearview mirror and trees and flowers out the window.

  A phrase from school comes to me: “True to life and yet more beautiful,” which is what Aristotle said that theater should be.

  For the first time it makes sense to me why Bev would have wanted the dog in the photograph to capture the moment: in an ideal world, on an ideal trip, we would have a dog. We would sneak her into our motel rooms and feed her our leftovers and in return, Daisy would curl at our feet in the bus and save us from the cruelties of real life. She would bring us together when we were consumed by personal disappointments with her performance of some simple and irresistible trick, and we would pat her head and she would gaze up at us with an expression of complete devotion and loyalty.

  It makes sense, now, why Bev decided against photographing the girl in the Bianchi Market, or Melvin, or the man at the River Bar and Grill. Why Meg would ask to borrow the camera when she saw how pretty Alexa looked standing by the ocean. Why one of the sisters would find a rare moment of Bev and me, together in the way we’re supposed to be, and take our picture.

  We have photographed the trip we were supposed to have. The one where all any of us felt was happy, and the world was only beautiful, and all of the colors were the brightest versions of themselves.

  “They’re kind of like your sculptures,” I say.

  “Yes,” Alexa says. “All these perfect little worlds.”

  “Bev,” Meg says. “Thank you.” She doesn’t go on and on about how amazing her room looks, but there’s enough gratitude in the way she says it to put Bev at ease.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Now all I need is my duffel,” Meg says, “and we can head to the hotel.”

  “Your aren’t staying here tonight?” I ask her.

  “Fuck no.” She play-punches my shoulder. “I’m gonna stay with you guys until you pry me from the fender as you drive away.”

  We park in the lot of the Kennedy School, where they’ll be playing their last show tomorrow night, and make our way out to the sidewalk to round the building. I hadn’t realized that this place used to be an actual school, but here it is, taking up an entire city block, yellow and white with columns and a lot of windows.

  Meg walks ahead of the rest of us, her bass case over her shoulder, plucking flowers from the vines that line the street. Pink flowers with shiny green leaves.

  “The flowers match your hair,” I say. But she’s talking to Bev and doesn’t hear me. She leaves a trail of decapitated blossoms behind her. I watch the sidewalk as I walk, careful not to crush them.

  We enter through the heavy front doors to an open room with polished wood floors and all of these choices of where to go next: straight through to a restaurant in back, down the hall on the right or the hall on the left, or through the door that says PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE. It’s like we’re little kids and starting school all over again, but this time around we’re not afraid to ask for directions when we need them, so Alexa walks into the office, comes back out with a map to our room and to the theater, where we can drop off the instruments for the show.

  She leads us down the hallway to the right. We pass a room labeled DETENTION.
Its door is ajar, revealing the tiniest bar I’ve ever seen, with dark green walls and red velvet bar stools. Soon we reach the theater. I drop my part of Alexa’s drum kit off on the stage, and go back out to wander the halls while they talk to a man about logistics for tomorrow night. I find a colorful bathing pool, a couple of restaurants, a cavernous bar that used to be the school’s boiler room.

  But what really interests me are the halls themselves, because they are covered with paintings and photographs, and all of the images are of little kids. A lot of them are painted in a folk art style, with school-themed borders and smiling children in the center. Others are pure Americana: perfect houses and farm buildings and girls in skirts and boys with book bags. Scattered among the paintings are black-and-white photographs of the real teachers and kids who went to school here. In one, girls stand in the front of the school, dressed in long skirts and black tights, each one of them holding a wooden birdhouse. Another is a class photo. Kids sit at their desks in a crowded classroom, looking up at the camera. Some of them hold books open in their hands; others just smile. A boy in the front row wears round glasses and a striped shirt, suspenders, and a stiff, serious smile.

  A plaque under the photo explains that the photograph was taken in 1915, two years after the school opened. I look at the kids’ faces. They’ve all died by now; I can understand that. They were born decades before my grandparents. But even though I can comprehend the fact that they’ve all died, it’s hard for me to imagine that they lived their lives. They must have gotten through school and done some good things and other things they might have regretted. This tiny, pale girl with barrettes and pursed lips, this round-faced boy who forgot to look at the camera, this curly-haired blond girl, peeking out from the back row and grinning—somehow, they all figured out how to grow up.

  My phone buzzes.

  “All right,” Jasper says. “I know you’re gonna say that Seattle isn’t exactly next door, but it’s only three hours away, and I got it all worked out for you.”

  “He’s there?”

  “Yeah, and he wants to meet you. My brother said he cracked up when he told him the story. He can see you anytime tomorrow.”