“Well, that’s impressive,” said our mother.
Lewyn, perhaps in response, tried to tell Salo about his art history survey class, which met early in the mornings.
“They always seem to,” our father said.
The holidays labored under Johanna’s frantic embroidery of family traditions. There was Hanukkah, with the small and bent silver menorah that had—according to family legend, anyway—come over from Germany, and eight days of gifts to be selected, purchased, wrapped, and presented, every one of which Sally was forced to appear delighted about, and lie about needing, and which would then have to be transported all the way back to college before she might deposit them in the lounge down the corridor. There was the defiant New-York-Jews-on-Christmas-Day walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to lunch in Chinatown. There was even, horribly, a performance of The Nutcracker, surrounded by hordes of dressed-up children. In the evenings she sometimes ended up in the basement with Lewyn, watching tapes on the still functional VCR from opposite ends of the old couch: Hitchcock, Disney from long ago, Japanese anime that Lewyn liked and Sally couldn’t quite follow. Oddly enough these were not unpleasant evenings, though even alone together they never spoke of Cornell, or their classes, or roommates, or anything else related to the shared experience they were supposedly having.
Every morning while she was home, Sally set her alarm for five and went to her bedroom window, which overlooked Montague Terrace and the back gate, and waited there, watching for the lifting latch and the dark shape of her father as he slipped inside. She’d been doing it for years, and not once had he ever looked up to see her, or know that he’d been seen.
Chapter Thirteen
Light Meat vs. Dark
In which Harrison Oppenheimer’s taste for chicken is forever compromised
When Harrison got back to New Hampshire after the holiday he learned that three of the cows were down with mastitis. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to feel about this. The cows hadn’t been part of his chore rotation yet, so he didn’t know much about caring for them, nor had he formed anything resembling a human-bovine connection. He went right out to the barn with the others, though, to get caught up.
Three cows comprised a quarter of the school herd, and the sick ones were being kept apart from the others. The milk itself, in a brown plastic milking bucket, looked weird, with what appeared to be flakes and clots in it.
“What is that?” asked Carlos, pointing to the nearest cow’s extended udder.
Tony, who’d grown up on a dairy farm in southern New Hampshire, said, in his succinct way: “Pus.”
Carlos looked like Harrison felt.
The cow did seem to be very unhappy, but perhaps that was just anthropomorphism. （Harrison had found numerous opportunities to use the word “anthropomorphism” since coming to Roarke.） “Is she in pain?” he asked Tony.
Tony said: “Ayuh.”
The milk would have to be dumped until the infection was cleared. The three cows had already begun antibiotics, which Tony and Justin （one of the Justins, the one from Lake Forest） were giving as infusions. Harrison watched Justin maneuver a plastic tube over the first cow’s udder and squeeze the fluid up, then remove the tube, pinch off the teat, and palpate the medicine up into the gland.
Not for the first time, he marveled at how he’d managed to get here. Eighteen years of being coddled, overscheduled, and overseen, paid attention to in all of the worst ways （and in none of the ways that mattered）， housed and clothed and fed and amused in a manner commensurate with his family’s endemic wealth, had somehow brought him to this Spartan community of men: rising early to menial, often arduous, chores, consuming food they’d personally raised or helped to prepare, and entertaining themselves with little more than the combined content of their minds. As far as Harrison was concerned, every single one of his fellow students was of an intellectual caliber that had never once crossed the threshold of the Walden School （either in a student or a faculty member）。