Chapter Nineteen
Thresholds
In which Sally Oppenheimer is not invited inside
The visit Sally Oppenheimer made to Ellesmere, New York, over spring break was not communicated in advance to Rochelle （something Sally had decided would “ruin the surprise”）， and not well thought out in general, but in her own defense, Sally was aware of no specific reason Rochelle wouldn’t welcome a visit. Yes, there had been that time back in the fall when her roommate had gone home due to a “family problem,” and Sally’s offer to go along （to support or assist with whatever it was） had been declined. And that other time Sally had asked to visit over Christmas? Also declined. But she had put these prior events out of her mind, and besides, why shouldn’t Sally see where her roommate and closest Cornell friend had grown up? And meet Rochelle’s friends and get to know her mom and maybe even treat her to a few frolicsome adventures in the city, the kind any Long Island girl must secretly long for?
Rochelle had left early in the week, directly after her econ midterm, but Sally had a term paper due for her Writing and Sexual Politics class. When she finished it a couple of days later, she walked it over to the office of her women’s studies professor, dropped it through the slot in the door, and went directly to the student center to pick up the next New York–bound bus. Five hours later, still full of fire and intention, she boarded the LIRR at Penn. Destination: Ellesmere.
Sally might have been a lifelong New Yorker, but Long Island remained a land of mystery. She knew F. Scott Fitzgerald characters lived at one end and Oliver Stone characters at the other, but in between the two was truly a foreign country, and as far as Ellesmere itself was concerned, Rochelle had told her very little: a few choice anecdotes about her big public high school （the degenerate football team routinely harassing the girls from the Catholic school across town, and a single college counselor for the entire grade!）。 The Ellesmere skating rink and bowling alley had been mentioned, and Sally had heard about the basements of certain friends, where herbals were smoked （though not by Rochelle）， and the Saturday-night pack gatherings at the almighty Ellesmere Marketfair Mall, to which the girls wore Ralph Lauren polo shirts and Mudd jeans and the boys dressed like Kurt Cobain. It was this exotic Shangri-la of Rochelle’s past that Sally found herself summoning as the train wound eastward, a pastiche of teen movies and magazine stories about bad behavior in the suburbs. But the skies were gray and the afternoon already well underway, and she felt the first stirrings of apprehension, because Rochelle did not have any idea she was coming, and no one would be waiting for her at the Ellesmere station.
There were a few SUVs in the parking lot when the train pulled in, but they picked up their passengers and moved off quickly, leaving a disassociated woman in a trench coat, walking up and down the aisle of cars in a stiff, internally regimented gait. There was a single taxi, which Sally approached.
“Do you know where this is?” she asked the driver, showing him the piece of paper on which she’d written Rochelle’s home address hours earlier in their dorm room.
“Yeah,” said the man, who might have hailed from Long Island central casting: intentional mullet, chains of gold nestled comfortably in abundant chest hair. “Five bucks. Hop in.”
Five bucks sounded pretty good. At home, five bucks wouldn’t have gotten her to the Brooklyn Bridge.
They set off, away from the miniscule downtown and along streets of small houses. Eventually the road began to coil through woodland, passing gated communities with names from an Anglophilic epic: Hunter’s Chase, Squire Estates. Some of the houses glimpsed past the guard booths were huge. Some had gates of their own. Then, on the right, a football field with a billboard of an Indian brandishing a tomahawk and the legend: Redskins on the Warpath! （At Walden this would have instigated a school-wide crisis. Then again, Walden didn’t have a football team.）
“And here we are,” the driver announced, turning into a cul-de-sac called Lorelei Circle. He came to a stop in front of the farthest house.
“Thanks,” Sally said, paying him. She pulled her bag from the trunk and got out.