“That’s kind of you to offer, Sally. But no.”
The next morning, a storm over the Finger Lakes dumped a locally modest foot of snow over the Cornell campus. Sally walked Rochelle through that to the bus station and watched her board the eight o’clock to New York. Then, unsure of what to do with herself, she trudged back to Carol’s Café for breakfast. The room wasn’t crowded. She took the table she and Rochelle often chose, under a poster advertising Cornell’s study abroad program in Florence, and bought coffee and a strawberry yogurt. A girl at a nearby table was texting on her flip phone and weeping at the same time. She kept pushing her dark hair back behind her ears, but let the tears fall, undisturbed. Sally didn’t know her. She didn’t know anyone else in the café, either. Five months into her life as a college student and she felt as if she hadn’t met a soul.
The cafeteria overall was emptying, as everyone stomped off to first-period class. Sally had a class of her own—the introductory earth sciences course she was taking for a distribution requirement—but something kept her from getting to her feet and out the door. The next time she looked, the weeping woman had also gone—off, presumably, to text and cry in a less public place—and Sally was the only one left. She continued to sit, looking down at her cold coffee and what was left of her strawberry yogurt, and wondering what it was about this gray Ithaca morning that made it feel so different from any other gray Ithaca morning. But of course this was obvious, even to her. The day was different, and not in a good way, because the diminutive Ms. Rochelle Steiner was on a Peter Pan bus, bound for Port Authority and the mysteries of Ellesmere, Long Island, return unknown.
Gone, in other words. Not here, with her, in other words.
And then, long past time, something began to really break through, something that had been working away at her for months, and Sally Oppenheimer caught an accurate glimpse of her own situation, its dimensions and far-reaching implications. Oh, and her situation was precarious, indeed.
One thing she and her brothers actually did have in common was that none of them had ever formed an attachment to another person that might, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered romantic. Lewyn, of course, was a basket case in general when it came to other people, though he had moped after that famously beautiful girl a class behind them in high school. Harrison had lost his virginity to a Walden classmate he considered deeply inferior in every way （it had been the girl’s idea, he’d made sure to tell them; she had even provided the condom!）， but naturally he’d never considered this any form of a relationship. Sally herself had felt only twice that hand-in-the-guts disturbance, that sickening catapult into the unknown, first with the counselor during her first and only Pinecliffe summer, and once in that folk art museum where she’d been stalking our father. In both cases the experience had been almost instantly replaced by an equally powerful wave of horror and loathing. So not much baggage, no! And now, in addition to that, there was a brand-new fucking problem, and it was too close for her to ignore, and it was vast, and it consumed worlds.
It went without saying that Sally wasn’t going to do anything about her predicament. Her goal was to get out from under these very unwelcome feelings, and if that couldn’t be accomplished, to learn how to coexist with them, as if they were some form of chronic condition. Management, in other words. Management, through so many of the things she had already taught herself: discipline, order, containment. If anyone could do it, in other words, Sally Oppenheimer could! Anyway, she didn’t have a choice.
Sally got up and left the café, heading for Olin Library where she intended to do penance by finding a topic for her women’s studies seminar on the Marys, Wollstonecraft and Shelley. She was trudging toward the center of campus, hood up, head down, watching her own feet make their turgid progress through the snow and muck, and there was remarkably little merriment to be overheard among her fellow students, all of them sloshing along through the same wintry mix. As East Avenue curved left past the bridge, a fresh new blast of wind pushed back the edge of her hood, and Sally, squinting into it, found herself with a straight-on view of the Johnson Museum of Art: a right-angled concrete bunker with a Lego-like appendage over the entrance.