“You look great,” I said, because Sally really did. She had let her hair grow past the crew cut for the first time I could remember, and it brushed her shoulders, dark as root beer but now run with silvery strands as well. Sally would not be the sort to color her hair.
“How was the drive?”
“Exhausting. But interesting. I came up with a boy in my class, and his dad.”
“Also looking at Cornell?”
I nodded. “But heading to Hamilton tomorrow, and then Dartmouth.”
“And where else are you looking? C’mon back, I was just putting the vegetables in.”
I followed, but didn’t answer. I wasn’t looking anywhere else. Actually, I still wasn’t sure I was even looking at Cornell. All those hours in the car and I’d barely given a thought to the place, or to college in general; I’d just been trying to follow Jack’s father through his various discourses on communism in the American Midwest, and the new crop of playwrights he was nurturing, and the destabilization of the two-party system, and the founding philosophy of his theater. Jack himself, I couldn’t help noticing, plowed through at least half of the book he was reading during the same period. I wished I’d brought a book.
“I’d rather not think about any of it, if you want to know the truth,” I said. I pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table. “Maybe I don’t want to go at all, or not yet. Maybe I should take time off, but even if I did that, they still want you to get your shit together enough to apply, then defer, and I’m, like, if I’m organized enough to apply, why am I not organized enough to actually go?”
“I agree,” Sally said, coming to sit at the table with me. “It’s like this big conveyor belt to get you out the door of your parents’ house, that’s all it is. More people should take time off. If they don’t, they get here and just get overwhelmed. Why not go work for a couple of years? You can work for me.”
I looked at her in shock. “Really?”
“Why not? Not everyone likes the work, it’s only fair to say. And I can be a little bitchy as a boss.”
“I had a bitchy boss last summer. At the day camp. I can handle that.”
This had been an unpleasant woman from Queens who seemed to hate children, but the other counselors, a mix of high school and college students, were friendly and fun to hang out with, and as a group we had reached an early and silent accord: we tolerate the boss, we focus on the kids, we hang together on the weekends. There was one boy I’d loved in particular: a Yale student, African American, crazy smart, and also from Brooklyn. He could quiet the kids with a few wiggles of his fingers. He’d promised to stay in touch, but hadn’t.
The room was bright and warm and immaculate. The dark wooden countertops and gleaming white sink, at least four feet wide, looked as if they got wiped down any time a speck of salt or a drop of water marred their surfaces, and the table, which I remembered from my last visit, was long and wide and each leg looked a little like a thick double helix of solid wood. “I always liked this table,” I said.
“Yes, me too. It belonged to the woman who used to own this house. Actually it was her family’s dining table. She called it ‘brown furniture.’”
“Is that a technical term?”
“Sort of. Technical for ‘completely out of fashion.’ Today, anything not made from the 1940s to the 1970s is out of fashion. But that’s okay. It’ll come back, and meanwhile I have a nice table.” She went back to the stove, opened the oven door, and dribbled olive oil over a pan of carrots and parsnips, then she slid it back into the oven with a thunk, and as she did the room filled with a deep and peppery waft of roasting chicken.
“Oh my God, that smells so good,” I said. We hadn’t stopped for lunch, only bathroom breaks. “Thank God somebody in our family can cook.”