“Big tall piece, maybe eight feet!”
It wasn’t in the first room, or the second （which was weirdly occupied by a line of back-to-back cupboards）， or the third （piles of hooked rugs and old blue coverlets）， but it was impossible to miss in the fourth. Stately in the corner between the room’s two windows, it had been given an actual cleared space in which to reside. It was a lovely object, tall and triangular with a steel-blue surface and a hand-carved knob. She couldn’t imagine how Harriet had gotten this up here to begin with. Or how they would begin to get it down.
“Those are nice rooms up there,” Harriet had said when she descended a few minutes later. “There’s a bathroom, too.”
“I saw,” said Sally.
“If you wanted to make some space you could move into one. Nicer than that dorm, probably.”
Sally thought of Rochelle Steiner, her randomly assigned roommate. Months before, the two of them had spoken about rooming together again, perhaps in one of the Collegetown dormitories for upperclassmen, but then had come Sally’s aborted visit to Ellesmere over the spring break and somehow an unacknowledged cloud had begun to obscure their time together. Rochelle, while never anything but cheerful and solicitous, was in the room less and less, and had less and less to say, let alone inquire about, on evenings she was present. When asked about her state of mind （and Sally had asked, though not without trepidation）， Rochelle had only said that she was worried about her Bill of Rights seminar grade, and how it could impact her choice of upper-level classes for sophomore year. The class was demanding, and she had to study with a few of her classmates on an almost nightly basis if she was going to get an A, which she needed to get into the Functions and Limits of Law seminar next fall, which was completely necessary because that professor would be overseeing selection for the junior year program at the London School of Economics. Rochelle had her heart set on the LSE program. She had never been out of the United States.
Sometimes, when Rochelle went to bed before her, Sally had watched her roommate sleep. She had a peculiar position she always found her way to, no matter what position she started in: hands together and wedged between her knees, as if she needed to fold and lock herself in place to stay asleep until morning. There she breathed, her eyes jittering beneath their lids as Sally looked and thought.
Then it was over. Rochelle announced that she’d be mentoring or advising or something during the summer high school program, and when the subject of continuing as roommates was raised （by Sally, obviously）， Rochelle had asked her advice about going to a single in one of the Collegetown dorms or maybe in one of the cooperative houses, where a woman she knew from Hillel apparently lived. “I don’t know,” she’d said to Sally, who was struggling to keep control over her face. “I don’t know if I’m the ‘cooperative’ type. I’m not that great at reaching consensus, I don’t think.”
“You and I reached consensus,” said Sally feebly.
“Well, that wasn’t hard. It was a pleasure living with you, Sally.”
That—the finality of that—had been a very terrible blow.
“What have you decided?” Rochelle asked then.
Sally, of course, had not decided anything. Sally had thought the two of them would be continuing their quiet tunnel through the university. Now, not having taken the precaution of making any other friends, she was suddenly alone and without prospects.
By then, Sally had been going to visit Harriet Greene for months, working her way through the furniture, piece by piece. There was so much of everything that Sally couldn’t help beginning to understand what was indifferent, good, and better than good, which wasn’t always a matter of value, though value was important to Harriet. To extract a fine object from a barn full of rusting cars or a basement of criminal dampness was to do good in the world. Harriet believed that. Sally came to believe it, too.
“Can I come with you?” she’d asked that very first day over the orange donuts, and she asked it every time Harriet disappeared to Elmira or Watertown on a picking trip. Somebody just north of Albany wanted her to look at a table he said was Shaker. （Yeah right, Harriet told Sally, but you had to go, for the slightest chance of something Shaker.） The brother-in-law of a woman she’d bought a cupboard from back in ’92 had a set of chairs he thought might be old, though two （he admitted） were in pieces. She wanted to go back to a farm near Alfred where an old man had once turned her away, threatening to call the cops on her for trespassing, but not before she’d managed to spot a tantalizing green paint surface in the parlor behind him. Maybe the guy was dead by now, or incapacitated. Maybe he’d be more open to the notion of trading an unadmired sideboard for cash, or maybe he’d have a kid or a caregiver who would. Maybe a lot of things. But Harriet had a large and silent employee named Drew who drove for her and did the loading, and there wasn’t really room in the front of the pickup. And besides, “You got your schoolwork,” Harriet said, always with obvious mirth, still so entertained that a college girl, a city girl, would want to spend her days hauling all over the state’s various backs of beyond, just for a few old boards of furniture.