“Frances,” Alaina said. “Hold on.” We’d reached the bottom of the steps. “If I offended you when I asked about your OCD, I want to apologize.”
I stared at her. “Excuse me?”
“I have a cousin who has it, and it doesn’t have to be this debilitating thing,” Alaina said. “My cousin’s on medication, and she’s doing real well.”
“I’m not obsessive-compulsive,” I said. “And it’s none of your business.”
“Frances, it’s okay. I’m not—”
“It’s okay?” I said. I could hear my voice growing louder.
“Frances, relax,” Karen said.
“You’re telling me it’s okay when you’re the one who has no grip on reality?” I said to Alaina. “It’s obvious that you live in this imaginary world where you believe—you believe—” I paused. Our faces were only a few feet apart, and in the dusk I saw a tiny dot of my spit land on Alaina’s jaw. She didn’t rub it away; she seemed paralyzed, staring at me with curiosity and confusion. “You believe that people are watching you go through your life,” I said. “That if you use a big vocabulary word, someone will be impressed, or if you make a joke, someone will laugh, or that you’re scoring points by buying glitter for underprivileged children. But no one cares. Do you understand that? No one gives a shit what you do. And everyone can see how desperate and pathetic you are, so you might as well just stop pretending that you—”
“Whoa there, Frances,” Karen said. “Let’s all take a deep breath.”
“Next time she’ll probably kidnap Derek for good,” I said. “Then you can tell me to take a deep breath.”
I had always respected Karen, but in this moment she seemed dismissive of me because I was young; she seemed fundamentally oblivious. I turned to leave, and Alaina said, “We just want to help you, Frances.”
I whirled around. Though this was when I lunged toward Alaina, though I placed my hands on either side of her throat, though I pressed them inward and felt the delicate bones of her neck beneath her warm and grotesque skin, I really didn’t mean to hurt her; it’s not that I was trying to strangle her. Her eyes widened and she was blinking a lot, her eyelids flapping as she brought her own hands up to my wrists to pry my hands away. But that gave me something to resist. I squeezed more tightly, and she made a retching noise.
“Let go of her, Frances,” Karen said, and she was tugging on my shoulders. “Let go right now or I’m calling the police.”
It actually wasn’t the threat so much as the interruption—an outside voice, a third party—that made me drop my grip. I can’t say that I ever cared what Alaina thought of me, though I did regret later that Karen had witnessed it. In her eyes, I was probably a person she once knew who turned out to be crazy.
Outside the shelter, Alaina coughed and panted in a way that struck me even then as theatrical. Before I hurried away, I said to her, “You disgust me.”
* * *
—
I never went back to the shelter, and I never spoke to any of them again. I received four messages at work from Linda, the shelter’s director, all of which I deleted without listening to them.
Around Christmas, I received a donation request from New Day. That I was still on their mailing list was probably, given the circumstances under which I’d stopped volunteering, an oversight. New Day was affiliated with two other shelters on Capitol Hill, and the request came with a calendar that said, on the front, VOLUNTEERS ARE SHINING STARS! For each month, the picture was of kids and adults playing at the various shelters, and Alaina was featured for the month of March. Had she been posing with Derek, the calendar would have felt karmically punitive; in fact, she was doing a puzzle with a boy I’d never seen.
I wondered if any of the children noticed my absence or asked where I’d gone, or if I was just another in a long line of adults who slipped without explanation from their lives. For a while, I contemplated what I’d do if I saw one of them on the street. Because of the shelter rules, it would have to be a subtle gesture, less than a wave, something a mother wouldn’t detect—a raise of the eyebrows, a flare of the nostrils, a wiggling pinkie finger. But I moved away from Washington without running into any of them.
It was a Sunday morning about three months after I’d last been to the shelter when I saw Karen. A couple emerged from the bagel place near my apartment holding hands, the guy carrying a brown bag, and I watched them for a moment before I realized the woman was tall, cheerful Karen, the self-declared spinster. Was this a new development? They were talking, and then he turned and kissed her; he was slightly shorter than she was. Before she could notice me, I crossed the street.
Do-Over
Clay never seriously considered the possibility that Donald Trump would win the election, and around nine P.M. central time, when it seems likely he will, Clay texts his daughter, Abby, who is fourteen and at her mother’s house. He writes, I hope you are not too disappointed. Progress sometimes happens in fits and starts. I love you, Abs. Abby texts back, He’s gross, followed by the poop emoji.
That night, Clay dreams of Sylvia McLellan. He dreams with some regularity of boarding school—the classic dream that he’s unprepared for an exam, plus a more idiosyncratic one that involves a girl named Jenny Pacanowski waiting in her dorm room to have sex with him, while, agitatingly, he’s delayed by the task of putting away equipment for the entire lacrosse team—but he’s never before dreamed about Sylvia. And the dream Clay has of Sylvia isn’t sexual; in fact, within a minute or two of waking, he can’t remember what it was about except that it leaves him uneasy. Yet he’s not surprised when, four months later, he receives an email from her. They haven’t had contact since their graduation in 1991.
Hope you’ve been well, she writes. Super-random after all this time, but I’m coming to Chicago for work in April and I was thinking it would be fun to have dinner if you’re around.
After a few volleys, they have settled on a day, a time, and a restaurant near the downtown hotel where she’ll stay. She lives in Denver, she tells him, she’s an architect, her husband is also an architect but not at her firm, and they’re the parents of twin boys who are nine and a girl who’s five.
You didn’t go into politics, either? Clay types, then he adds the phrase the dirty business of between into and politics to convey that he’s kidding, then he deletes the entire question. Her trip to Chicago is three weeks away.
* * *
—
In the spring of 1990, when they were juniors, Clay, Sylvia, and three of their classmates all ran for senior prefect, which was the fancy term used at Bishop Academy for student body president. Their school was in western Massachusetts, and there were a total of seventy-six people in their grade. After Clay and Sylvia tied for first place, a runoff occurred. The exact results were never disclosed, but apparently they were close, so close that the dean of students met with Clay and Sylvia and proposed the following: Because Clay had been their grade prefect for the past three years, and because no girl had ever served as senior prefect—a fact mostly explained by Bishop having switched from all-boys to coed only a decade earlier—Clay would assume the role of senior prefect, but unprecedentedly, another role would be created for Sylvia, that of assistant prefect. Clay would show her the ropes with regard to running Monday and Friday assemblies and serving on the honor council, and in turn, Sylvia would help raise money for senior class activities, especially since, for the first time in Bishop’s history, there was a movement afoot to hold a prom.
Clay can still remember sitting in Dean Boede’s office, the warm New England afternoon outside the big window, his impending lacrosse practice; he can remember how qualmlessly he accepted this offer and how Sylvia did, too. That night, before everyone was released from Sit-Down Dinner, the headmaster announced the arrangement to the student body, and there was much applause.
Clay had been in a few classes with Syl
via over the years without ever talking to her much, and he thought of her as smart—she had at some point won a prize for an essay written in Latin—as well as quiet and almost definitely a virgin. He’d been surprised when she’d run for prefect. She was tall and thin and had long, straight blond hair, so that she looked hot from behind, but from the front you could see her jutting, rectangular jaw and aquiline nose; besides that, she just didn’t carry herself like a hot girl. A week after being elected assistant senior prefect, she also was elected captain of the girls’ crew team.
Their senior year played out as Dean Boede had proposed: Sylvia stood on the auditorium stage with Clay during assemblies, she attended honor council meetings, they did indeed hold an all-school prom. The theme was “April in Paris,” and the centerpiece was a thirty-foot-high papier-mâché Eiffel Tower, with which Clay personally never had physical contact. By the end of the year, his impression of Sylvia remained favorable. Then again, how much thought did Clay actually give her? He was a reasonably conscientious student, an even more conscientious athlete, and a decent boyfriend to a girl named Meredith Tyler, who was dark-haired and looked hot from both the back and the front; meanwhile, and this was why he’d rate himself merely decent as a boyfriend, he occasionally had sex with Jenny Pacanowski, who also was hot from the back and the front, whom he’d lost his virginity to his sophomore year, who took Ritalin, who’d told him that in first grade she’d repeatedly gotten in trouble for humping the corner of a desk, and who had a boyfriend who’d already graduated from Bishop. Every two or three weeks, Jenny materialized in his dorm room in the middle of the night. There was a rule Clay’s mother had about dessert, which was that she couldn’t seek it out but if it landed in front of her, she could indulge; not that it would have made his mother proud, but Clay had the same rule about Jenny.
When he, along with Meredith, Jenny, Sylvia, and seventy-two other classmates, graduated on a Sunday morning in early June, Clay was handed his diploma not by the headmaster, as everyone else was, but by his father, who was a trustee of the school and also a graduate. In the fall, Clay started at Yale and Sylvia started at Williams, which made it slightly surprising that during college they never crossed paths, not even on the second-to-last weekend of each October at Head of the Charles.
* * *
—
Over email, Clay gave Sylvia a choice of three restaurants—a tapas place, a pan-Asian place, and a pricey American bistro—and she picked the bistro; like the others, it’s located a walkable distance between her hotel and the headquarters of the national bank where he is one of four executive vice presidents. When he checks in with the hostess, he can see Sylvia waiting in a booth facing the entrance, a martini glass in front of her. She stands to greet him; she’s wearing a fitted black cocktail dress, sheer stockings, and notably high heels, possibly dominatrix-ish in style; the shoes are unexpected, but good for her. When they embrace, the heels make her as tall as he is, which is six-one.
As they sit, he says, “What a nice surprise.”
She seems slightly sheepish as she says, “I hope it didn’t seem too out of the blue,” and he says, “Not at all.”
In fact, he feels a genuine warmth toward her; he really did respect her intelligence, her steadiness and sense of responsibility. There was a controversial situation the winter of their senior year involving a group of popular juniors caught drinking together, where some were expelled and some merely put on probation, and because of Clay and Sylvia’s roles on the honor council, a lot of ill will was directed toward them. Sylvia’s acceptance of the ill will, the way she acknowledged other people’s displeasure and didn’t make excuses for herself, taught him a lot. Sitting across the table from her, it occurs to him that in her present life as an architect, she’s probably very good at what she does, very reliable and professional. It’s also striking how well she’s aged. It is, of course, far more unusual to be tall and slim and blond in the world than it was at Bishop, far more unusual at forty-three than at seventeen. She still has that rectangular, almost horsey jaw, still isn’t beautiful, and, especially in her sheepishness, gives off an air of girls’ crew captain in uncharacteristically sexy shoes, but she’s solidly attractive.
After ordering a beer, he says, “You’re in town to meet with a client?”
“A prospective client. But the meeting finished a while ago, which means you’re saving me right now from, like, bad room service.”
“So why have you skipped all the Bishop reunions?” he says. “Don’t tell me it’s because you can resist the pull of nostalgia.”
“I actually went to the twenty-fifth, but you weren’t there.”
“That’s the only one I bailed on.” Their twenty-fifth was last May, less than a year ago. He says, “My divorce was being finalized and—” He breaks off. “I’m sure you can imagine. I didn’t feel too celebratory.”
“Well, I hadn’t avoided them on purpose,” she says. “I’d meant to go before, but something always came up. At our fifth reunion, my mom was having surgery, at our tenth, Nelson and I—my husband—I think we were in Europe, and I don’t remember the rest. But there was always a reason. I’m sorry about your divorce, by the way. I know that’s tough.”
He sighs. “Hopefully, the worst is behind us. It was fairly amicable, as these things go.”
“Have you been in Chicago all this time?”
“I did a stint in New York before HBS. But I’ve been here for fifteen years, so, hey, only fifteen more until I’m a real midwesterner.”
“You grew up in Connecticut, didn’t you?” she says. “There’s so much I can’t remember in my daily life, like where I left my keys and what night my kids’ Cub Scouts meetings are, but I’m afraid my memories of Bishop are weirdly intact.”
“That’s impressive,” he says. “I’m from Darien.” He doesn’t know where she grew up, which she seems to recognize, because she taps her chest and says, “Burlington, Vermont.”
“And how long have you guys been in Denver?”
“Eight years. My in-laws are there, so that’s a double-edged sword.” As the waitress delivers his beer, Sylvia holds up her glass, which is still a third full and contains two green olives on a toothpick, and says to the waitress, “Another gin martini?” Then she tilts her glass toward him and says, “Cheers.” As they clink, she asks, “Which of our classmates are you in touch with?”
“Warrington Russell’s been trying to persuade a bunch of us to meet at his lodge up in Alaska some summer, have a week of fly-fishing, but we’ll see. Coordinating the calendars of five men in their forties is like herding cats. What about you?”
“Laurie Dixon was in Denver a couple years ago, and we had lunch, but I’ve been pretty lame overall. That’s why it was good to catch up with everyone at the reunion.” She takes a sip and says, “A lot of your family went to Bishop, right? So you must naturally run into people.”
Is there some subtext to this comment? He isn’t sure. He says, “Yeah, both my older brothers. And my dad, too, and my uncle.” There’s a pause, and he says, “How’d you end up at Bishop? Were you from a family where boarding school was the default?”
“My parents were both professors, and neither of them had gone away to school, but some of their students had. I was attending a not great public middle school, and when the teachers floated the idea of my skipping a grade, I applied to Bishop instead. Did you hear that Dean Boede died?”
It’s still early, and it might be a little easier if Clay himself had consumed more alcohol, but this feels like the right moment. He clears his throat. “I want to say—I’m not sure if this is why you got in touch—obviously, if it is, I respect it—but after Trump was elected, in the past few months, I’ve been thinking about our time at Bishop, and I want to apologize.” The expression on her face is a little weird, as if maybe she’s amused, but he perseveres. “I guess we’ll never know the results of t
hat runoff, but I’d be willing to bet I lost and you won. And even if it was a different time, even if I wasn’t the one who came up with the plan, what happened was completely sexist. I just want to say I recognize that now and I’m sorry.”
She’s watching him intently, still with that amused-seeming expression, and she says, “Is that why you think I suggested having dinner? To extract an apology?”
He hesitates, then says, “I’m not faulting you if you did. I get it.”
“Hmm.” She looks to the side for a few seconds, at other diners, and she seems to consider his comments, then she makes eye contact again. “I’ll tell you something about that stuff at Bishop,” she says. “In the first round, before the runoff, I voted for you. Frankly, I probably thought I’d make a better senior prefect, but I also thought back then that it was conceited or indecorous or something to vote for myself. Did you vote for yourself?”
“Yes.” He adds, “It was a competition.”
“No, I know. You should have voted for yourself. I should have, too. But it’s just funny because if I had, we wouldn’t have tied and I bet Dean Boede wouldn’t have come up with his boneheaded plan. He was your football coach, right? And he clearly favored you. At the same time, I learned an important lesson from all that, which was to be my own advocate and if I came off as immodest, so be it. And you have to figure that out at some point. Or at least if you’re a woman, you do, or not a white man. Architecture is totally an old boys’ field—the vast majority of partners at firms are men, and a lot of times if a woman is a partner, it’s a woman without kids.”
“Well, if that’s the case,” Clay says, “you’re welcome.” He can tell immediately that she didn’t like the joke—she raises her eyebrows and purses her lips in a sort of fake-pleased way—and he strongly wishes he hadn’t made it.