morning, wrote until seven, and ran five miles before he went to work at Widener Library. But he was the first to surrender and go to law school. He’s a tax attorney in Tampa now. Abby was next. Her aunt convinced her to take a realtor’s exam, just on a lark. Later she tried to tell me she was still using her imagination when she walked through the houses and invented a new life for her clients. I saw her last month outside an enormous house with white columns in Brookline. She was leaning into the driver’s window of a black SUV in the driveway and nodding profusely. Nia met a Milton scholar with excellent posture and a trust fund, who handed her novel back after reading fifteen pages, saying first-person female narratives grated on him. She chucked it in the dumpster, married him, and moved to Houston when he got a job at Rice.
I didn’t get it. I didn’t get any of them then. One by one they gave up, moved out, and got replaced by engineers from MIT. A guy with a ponytail and a Spanish accent came into Salvatore’s looking for Barthes’s Sur Racine. We spoke in French. He said he hated English. His French was better than mine—his father was from Algiers. He made me a Catalan fish stew in his room in Central Square. When he kissed me he smelled like Europe. His fellowship ended, and he went home to Barcelona. I went to an MFA program in Pennsylvania, and we wrote each other love letters until I started dating the funny guy in workshop who wrote gloomy two-page stories set in New Hampshire mill towns. After we broke up, I moved to Albuquerque for a while, then ended up in Bend, Oregon, with Caleb and his boyfriend, Phil. A letter from Paco found me there, and we resumed our correspondence. Enclosed in his fifth letter to me was a one-way ticket to Barcelona.
I poke around in the Ancient Greek section. That’s the next language I want to learn. Around the corner, in Italian, the only other customer sits cross-legged on the floor with a small boy, reading him Cuore. Her voice is low and beautiful. I started speaking a little Italian in Barcelona with my friend Giulia. I come to the long wall of French literature, divided by publishers: rows of red-on-ivory Gallimards, blue-on-white Éditions de Minuit, dime-store-like Livres de Poche, and then the extravagant Pléiades, set apart in their own glass case, leather bound with gold print and thin gold stripes: Balzac and Montaigne and Valéry, their spines glistening like jewels.
I shelved copies of all these books, cut open the boxes, stacked them on the metal storage racks in back, and brought them out a few at a time, usually arguing with Maria all the while, about À la recherche, which I adored and she said was as boring as Middlemarch. She had to give herself eighteen hand jobs, she told me, to get through Middlemarch the summer she was seventeen. That book made my nethersphere sore, she said.
I see a copy of Sur Racine, which we didn’t have the day Paco came looking for it. I had to special order it for him. I touch the bit of glue at the top of the spine. I don’t ever cry about Paco. Those two years with him rest lightly on me. We went from French to a sort of hybrid of the Catalan and Castilian that he taught me, and I wonder if that’s part of the reason I don’t miss him, that everything we ever said to each other was in languages I’m starting to forget. Maybe the thrill of the relationship was the languages, that everything was heightened for me because of it, more of a challenge, as I tried to maintain his belief in my facility with languages, my ability to absorb, mimic, morph. It was a trick no one expected of an American, the combination of a good ear, a good memory, and an understanding of the rules of grammar, so that I appeared more of a prodigy than I was. Every conversation was a chance to excel, to frolic, to amuse myself and to surprise him. And yet now I can’t remember what we said to each other. Conversations in foreign languages don’t linger in my head like they do in English. They don’t last. They remind me of the invisible-ink pen my mother sent me for Christmas when I was fifteen and she had gone, an irony that escaped her but not me.
I slip out before Gabriel recognizes me or one of his employees comes out from behind the reference desk to assault me with help.
I didn’t mean to move back to Massachusetts. I just had no other plan. I don’t like being reminded of those days on Chauncy, writing stories in my dormer window on the third floor, drinking Turkish coffee at Algiers, dancing at the Plough and Stars. Life was light and cheap, and if it wasn’t cheap I used a credit card. My loans got sold and sold again, and I paid the minimums and didn’t think about the ballooning balance. My mother had moved back to Phoenix by then, and she paid for my flights to see her twice a year. The rest of the time we talked on the phone, talked for hours sometimes. We’d pee and paint our nails and make food and brush our teeth. I always knew where she was in her little house by the noises in the background, the scrape of a hanger or the chime of a glass being put in the dishwasher. I’d tell her about people at the bookstore, and she’d tell me about people at her office in the state house in Phoenix—she was working for the governor then. I’d get her to retell some of her stories from Santiago de Cuba, where she grew up with her American-born, expat parents. Her father was a doctor, and her mother sang show tunes at a nightclub. Every now and then she’d ask if I had done my laundry or changed my sheets and I’d tell her to stop being maternal, it wasn’t in her nature, and we’d laugh because it was true and I had forgiven her for that. I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line.
Up on the street the heat pools just above the hoods of the parked cars, making the brick buildings squiggly. The sidewalks are packed now, packed with out-of-towners creeping along with their crêpes and iced lattes, their children sucking down milkshakes and Mountain Dews. I walk in the street to avoid them and cross over to Dunster and back up to Iris.
I go up the stairs, past the presidents, directly to the bathroom even though I’m already wearing my uniform. It’s empty. I catch myself in the mirror over the sink. It’s tilted away from the wall for people in wheelchairs so that I’m at a slightly unfamiliar angle to myself. I look beat up, like someone who has gotten ill and aged a decade in a few months. I look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating. It’s like when you go into a dressing room with a three-paneled mirror and you line them up just right to see the long narrowing hallway of yourselves diminishing into infinity. It feels like that, like I’m sad for an infinite number of my selves.
I splash my face and pat it down with paper towels from the dispenser in case someone comes in, but as soon as I get it dry my face crumples up again. I put my hair back into the tight bun and leave the bathroom.
I’m late by the time I enter the dining room. The Twisted Sister is back in action.
Dana glares at me. ‘Deck. Candles.’
The deck, past the bar and through the French doors, is humid and smells of roses and lilies and the peppery nasturtiums the chefs use to garnish the plates. All the flowerpots are dripping dirty water and the floorboards around the edges are soaked. It smells like my mother’s garden on a rainy summer morning. Helene, the pastry chef, must have just watered. This rooftop oasis is her creation.
Mary Hand is in the far corner with a tray of tea lights, a water pitcher, and a trash can, knifing out the old wax from the night before.
‘The three and fourpence,’ Mary Hand says. She has her own vernacular. She’s been waiting tables at Iris longer than anyone else.
I sit down beside her. I pick up the rag on the tray and wipe out the insides of the glass holders she has voided, pour a few drops of water in each, and drop in a fresh tea light.
It’s hard to know how old Mary Hand is. She’s older than I am but by three years or twenty? She has straight brown hair without
