“He wasn’t my boyfriend when I was in the class,” Sadie said, but Hannah was already walking out the door.
Sadie hadn’t worked on a game of her own since she’d been with Dov, though she did occasionally help him with his. It was easier, in some ways, to work with and for Dov than it was to do her own work. Her work seemed basic and uninteresting compared to the kind of work Dov was doing. Her work was basic and uninteresting. She had just turned twenty. Everyone’s work is basic and uninteresting at twenty. But being around Dov made her feel impatient with her twenty-year-old brain and the quality of its ideas.
She had been with Dov ten months when she ran into Sam in the train station. She saw him long before he saw her. There he was: his coat too big over his boyish frame, his gait lurching but determined, his eyes focused ahead—she was quite sure he would never look back and notice her, and she was glad of it. He was unchanged, pure. He had not done the things she had done. Compared to him, she felt aged and withered, and she thought, if they spoke, he would be able to sense her decay. But for whatever reason, he turned back. And when he called her name, she kept walking.
But then, he called out one more time, “SADIE MIRANDA GREEN, YOU HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY!”
Sam could be ignored, but the childish shared reference could not be. It was an invitation to play.
She turned.
* * *
—
Before returning to Israel for the winter break, Dov had warned Sadie that he wouldn’t be in contact much. “Family things,” he said. “You know how it is.” Sadie said she was cool, though even as she said it, she wasn’t sure if she was cool. She knew she had no choice but to be cool. And cool girls definitely didn’t ask their lovers if they were planning to see their supposedly estranged wives over winter break. If she wasn’t cool, Dov might end the relationship, and Sadie couldn’t bear that. She had come to depend on Dov. She realized, in retrospect, that the one and a half years she’d spent at MIT before she met Dov had been incredibly lonely. She hadn’t made any real friends. And to go from having no friends to having Dov as your friend was an intense experience. He was like a bright, warm light over everything in her life. She felt lit up, turned on. There was no one better to talk to about games. There was no one better to run ideas by. Yes, she loved him, but she also liked him. She liked herself when she was with him.
Recently, she had suspected he was losing interest in her. So, she had attempted to make herself more interesting. She had tried to dress better, and she’d gotten a haircut and she bought lacy underwear. She had read a book about wine, so she could be knowledgeable at dinner, the way she imagined an older lover would be. He once said, in passing, that it was amazing how little American Jews knew about Israel, and she read a book about the founding of Israel, so she’d be conversant. But it didn’t seem to matter.
She sometimes felt as if he was trying to find fault with her. If Sadie spent the day reading a novel, he’d say, “When I was your age, I was constantly programming.” Or if Sadie was too slow to complete a task Dov had assigned to her, he would say, “You’re brilliant, but you’re lazy.” In addition to working on Dov’s games, Sadie had a full course load. If Sadie mentioned this to Dov, he would say, “Never ever ever complain.” Or he’d say, “This is why I don’t work with students.” If she told him about a game she admired that he didn’t think much of, he would tell her the reasons the game was terrible. And that didn’t just go for games—it was movies, books, and art, too. It got to the point where she would never outright say her opinion of anything. She trained herself to begin conversations, “What did you think, Dov?”
And so she’d be cool, because that’s what mistresses were. Mistress, Sadie thought. Sadie laughed a bit to herself, thinking this was what it was like to play someone else’s game: to have the illusion of choice, without actual choice.
“Why does the brilliant one laugh so very ruefully?” Dov asked.
“No reason. Call me when you get back,” she said.
Sadie was moody and quiet the entire time she was in California for the holidays. She felt flu-ish, permanently jet-lagged, worn out. She spent most of the holidays sleeping in her childhood bed, under faded rose-print sheets, reading the dog-eared paperbacks of her youth. “What’s wrong with you?” Alice asked. “Everyone’s worried.” Alice was in her first year of medical school at UCLA.
“I’m fine,” Sadie said. “I think I might have caught something on the plane.”
“Well, don’t get me sick. I can’t afford it.” Alice refused to lose even one more day of her life to malady.
Sadie didn’t feel like she could tell anyone in her family about Dov, even Alice or perhaps, especially Alice. Alice, like their grandmother, had a strong distaste for life’s inevitable gray areas.
Alice studied Sadie. She put her hand on her forehead and then she looked into Sadie’s eyes. “You don’t feel hot, but I don’t think you are fine,” Alice said.
Sadie changed the subject. “You’ll never guess who I ran into in Harvard Square.”
In the end, Alice had been the one who told Sam about Sadie’s community service project. Alice always claimed that jealousy hadn’t been a motivator, and Sadie came to believe that it hadn’t been. But it was no secret that Alice had never liked the idea of Sadie doing community service at the hospital, and Alice had been disgusted when Sadie received the community service award from the temple.
About three months before Sadie’s Bat Mitzvah, Alice had run into Sam at the hospital. Alice had been there for a routine follow-up blood test—she had been in remission for about a year; Sam had been there for yet another surgery revision on his foot. They did not know each other well, and what Alice did know of Sam, she did not particularly like. She found Sadie’s relationship with Sam to be strange. Part of this was Sadie’s fault. When Alice expressed interest in meeting her new friend, Sadie had claimed that Sam wasn’t really her friend. She had emphasized the volunteerism aspects of the relationship and had described Sam as “pretty pathetic.” There was a part of Sadie that hadn’t wanted Alice to know Sam, to offer her opinions about him as candidly as Alice offered opinions of Sadie’s other friends and classmates. Alice was clever, but she had the kind of cleverness that verged on the unkind, and this had only gotten worse in the years since she had been diagnosed with leukemia. Sadie didn’t want Sam viewed through her sister’s acute and often unforgiving lens.
And so, when Alice saw Sam at the hospital, Alice’s first instinct was to ignore him.
“You’re Sadie’s sister, right?” Sam said. “I’m Sam.”
“I know who you are,” Alice said.
One of Sam’s many doctors, a pediatric orthopedist, spotted the two kids together and mistook Alice for Sadie, who was always at the hospital. “Hi, Sam! Hi, Sadie!”
“Dr. Tybalt,” Sam said, “this isn’t Sadie; it’s her sister, Alice.”
“Of course!” the doctor said. “You two do look alike.”
“Yes,” Alice said. “But I’m two years older, and my hair is straighter. But the easiest way to tell my sister from me is that I don’t have a timesheet with me.”