I knew college was the way out of my home, which I mainly remember as rooms my father strayed in and out of, with the occasional quiet woman sitting at the breakfast table uncomfortably, waiting for the coffee to brew, made sheepish by my sweeping presence as I imperiously picked up and put things down around her. I had been sent to live with my father because, unlike my two older sisters, it was thought that I showed academic promise, and he was the health-and-safety coordinator for a boarding school where I could go for free. At the time I was indifferent to this leg up. At first I was upset that I couldn’t stay back in Texas with my sisters and their boyfriends and the desultory life of cars and dates and marijuana and minimum-wage jobs. Later I resented that I couldn’t board with the other girls at the school, and thus was never able to permeate the boundaries of their exclusive world.
Yes, I had academic aptitude, but I never knew my efforts as stress （that didn’t come until graduate school）。 I was excited to do well, and to be petted like a pretty cat who moves with assurance, and I was passionate—so passionate about the books I read and the way they made me feel. I loved that the complexities of my emotions were understood by authors writing hundreds of years ago, I loved looking at their texts and trying to understand what they were aiming to do, to pull my own meaning from them, to point out what others didn’t see or notice—the repetition of blue imagery, the recapitulation of motifs of separation. I was good at that. I love and have always loved typing—my fingers traveling and pressing like a musician’s, first against the big, resistant keys of the typewriter, then the light, bulky plastic of the word processor, and eventually the smooth, soft clicks of a laptop.
In college I met real mentors who taught me to write and pushed me into academia. I wanted to go there—I didn’t want to be in the world, around all those people who didn’t read books, who didn’t think they were important. I worked hard, I think. I remember falling asleep in the library, waking up once to a teacher （who was probably fifty but at the time seemed ancient, eighty years old at least） stroking my hair with psychotic restraint. But I also felt that I was, as they say, on a track—I was a figurine in an animatronic Christmas display, being whipped around from one end of the window to another. I can see my half-blind pursuit of an academic career only as a blessing. It was merely due to my lack of imagination that I scurried on to my master’s and PhD.
Five minutes after I submitted my letters, Edwina sent an email thanking me and asking if she could take me out for coffee the next day. And there it was, that rightness, that ability to not only make the correct and courteous gesture but to do it quickly. This was one of the many qualities that set Edwina apart and would ensure her success. I saw how speed wore on my students—sending some into a brittle and constant state of worry, some into torpor, others into paralysis. If something was not dealt with in a few days, it felt to them like a completely forsaken cause. They viewed lives, roles, opinions, stations as things that got taken from them if they didn’t act fast enough. Where was the time for thinking? For consideration? For not thinking? For failure? When I was in college the way to waste time was movies and friends and alcohol and drugs and sex and music. Activities that for the most part we agree now are essentially enriching. They waste time on their little boxes. And they don’t want to, they hate themselves for it. But the boxes are there and they are their schoolwork and their social life and their entertainment and their sin and their virtue all in one. God help them.
My gut was thudding with excitement when I made my way down to the backyard—a tumbler of rye in one hand and the pack of cigarettes in the other. I had not smoked in twenty years, after I quit for a bad hacking cough. They had been my master for so long—my friends, my saviors, my trusty companions, my escapes, my rebellion, my illicit yet effective method of weight control—that when I was finally able to excise them from my life, I was too scared to ever go back.
The man’s comment in the park upset me. It was always that—a man could always make me feel worse than anything any woman could ever say to me. He could always make me despise myself, make me feel fundamentally self-conscious about my idiotic femininity and my pathetic peevishness, make me understand I was no match for the real power he possessed. In Texas, in Connecticut, in France, in New York, in Missouri, in Mexico City, in my kitchen, bathroom, living room, basement, bedroom, I could click mentally from slide to slide each time a man, with a well-aimed put-down, has made me feel essentially worthless. That bottomed-out feeling, combined with the intense longing stirred awake by Vladimir, the taxing encounters with John, the meeting with Cynthia that had both excited and depressed me, had weakened my defenses. Cigarettes are best when they are accompanied by intense moods—happiness, anger, defeat. No cigarette is better than the one that follows a torrential cry. I had a friend who used to call them “emotion suppressors” but it’s more like they complement emotions, like a good wine complements a meal.
I lit one using a lighter （lighting by a match, unless it’s an easy-strike match, ruins the first drag）。 While I wanted to enjoy it more than I did—the smoke felt abrasive and thick in my throat—the transgression against my better judgment was beautiful. My head lightened immediately and sensation was sparkling through my body when I heard footsteps on the driveway coming toward me. Thinking it was John, I kept my gaze fixed forward, as though I hadn’t noticed.
“So now you come to his house?”
My daughter’s voice rang out of the darkness—I turned to see her at the back gate, illuminated by the motion sensor light that hung over the garage.
“Sid?” I called to her but she didn’t hear me. She was fumbling with the gate, pushing at the latch, which had to be turned and then lifted to be released. I rose to walk over and open it for her, when, in her rage, she kicked the door down entirely.
“Don’t you walk toward me, skank,” she yelled at me. “You come to his house? He lives here with his fucking wife who is my fucking mother, you little skank.”
It is always—funny is not the right word, but maybe interesting—how the exceedingly drunk are truly the most repetitive people in the world. I remember John getting blotto one night in the city （he vomited in the cab and I paid the cabdriver the last fifty dollars we had in apology） saying, while he was in this compromised state, “I Goddamn love you. Do you know that? I Goddamn love you” on repeat. It was uncharacteristic, and I remember feeling pleased for a bit, then tired, then disgusted.
It took me a moment, however, to realize that because I was in near-complete darkness, and Sidney was so very drunk, she didn’t recognize who I was. She dropped her attaché and shrugged off her European hiker’s backpack like a townie barfly readying himself for a brawl. I said her name again, but before I could tell her that I was her mother, and not her father’s paramour, she stumbled toward me and grabbed me by the shoulders with her strong grip. She smelled like a distillery, and her eyes were steely and distant and red-rimmed—waking consciousness buried deep within her. “I’m going to fuck you up, skank.” She lost her balance slightly and hugged me into a kind of boxer’s clinch. She was taller than me, and far sturdier, and she staggered against me, pushing me so that I stumbled backward.