“Did you have a think about the colleges on your list?” Shura asked me.
Of course I hadn’t. I’d spent the summer working at a Children’s Aid Society day camp, and coming home every night so blinded by exhaustion that my only off-time activity had been watching old movies with Lewyn, down in his apartment.
“Well, a bit,” I said. “But I still don’t see myself anywhere in particular.”
“I’d like Phoebe to apply to Cornell,” said my mother, stunned that she needed to point out the obvious. “You know, her father went there, and her older siblings. Also there was a very substantial donation of art, back in the early seventies.”
“Oh?” said Shura, trying to look interested. Her silver rod was gone today. Instead, a little coil wound in and out of three holes in her left lobe. “Have you been thinking about Cornell, Phoebe?”
“I’m … thinking about thinking about it,” I said, improvising. Then I said: “My sister lives in Ithaca. I’m planning to go up and visit.”
“Really,” Johanna said. “When is that happening?”
“We’re working it out,” I bluffed.
We left with another list of fourteen schools to investigate, and another suggestion that I read Colleges That Change Lives.
The following week, Walden furloughed the seniors for a couple of days so we could more “holistically” consider a “range of options” “outside the box,” and I caught a ride to Ithaca with a classmate named Jack Neubauer and his dad, a theater director of such prodigious enthusiasms and ranging preoccupations that he barely stopped talking, querying, opining, and wondering aloud for the entire five-hour ride. It was a head-spinning tear through theater and politics and Walden and more theater and still more politics, and after I finally exited the car in front of my sister’s house on East Seneca Street, I just stood there for a moment in the cool afternoon air, breathing the wondrous quiet.
My sister’s house was old, about as old as our house on the Esplanade. This made sense, I supposed, given the work Sally did, work that our mother preferred to speak of as “antiques dealer,” though that （as I suspected Johanna knew perfectly well） was only a part of it, and very much the lesser part. In fact Sally cleaned out houses—filthy, packed, and often septic houses—ostensibly in search of objects of value and obviously for money but also, I had come to understand, for some unfathomable satisfaction she derived from it. Apart from mandated holidays and the first preconscious part of my own life, I had never lived with Sally, but I had always lived in Sally’s room, and that room still retained a lingering imprint of its former occupant. I had no detectable style of my own, either domestic or, if I was honest with myself, sartorial, and I had simply moved into the space, inheriting the shade of blue Sally had chosen in 1997, and a rug she had also apparently chosen at ABC Carpet. If Sally had left behind items of clothing, I might have found myself wearing those, as well.
No one came to the door when I knocked, but it swung inward when I tried it, onto dark wooden floors so brightly polished I thought for a moment they might be wet. I stepped inside, noting first the smell of chicken roasting and then the familiar chords of the All Things Considered introduction. Four o’clock already; that was a long day in the car. A thin black cat came loping in from the living room and immediately began coiling between my legs.
“Hello,” I said. “Who are you?”
“Hello?” Sally called from the kitchen. “Phoebe?”
“Yep. It’s me.”
“Oh, I didn’t hear the door.” She came out, one hand still in an oven mitt, and gave me an awkward hug. “Wow, you’re big.”
“Uh-huh.”
It was usually like this with Sally: ever so slightly brittle, if generally affectionate. In fact, I wasn’t any taller than I’d been the last time we were together, or any broader if it came to that. It was more likely that Sally still had a sense of me as short and soft at around the age of twelve, and hadn’t felt the need to update it.