for the house she was selling did the same. People, against their sensible best judgment, were so easily won. A boiler could be about to go, water damage all over the house, and goats on a sunny day could make them forget it. What does that tell you?
“What?” Annie replied. “That people like goats?”
“No, sweetie. That people are still children. Appeal to the child in a buyer, and you’ve got him. But it can’t be just anything. We’re not talking an old rope swing hanging from an oak tree. People have calluses on top of calluses just trying to stay alive in this world. It’s got to be something mysterious, powerful, but something as fresh as spring.”
Annie said, “Was there a boiler about to go, and was there water damage all over a house?”
“Please! The pasture of popping goats was a bonus. The houses were all first-rate. They’ll pass inspection like that.”
Her mother snapped her fingers. Her mother was a great finger snapper. Annie could hear it over the phone, and she could hear it in her mind’s ear. Time to get going—snap! I want that bed made up like this—snap! Let’s cut the shit, it’s over—snap! The popping goats and the snapping fingers, and she realized that in the midst of the tall-tale telling she hadn’t stopped thinking about her father.
She said, “I know you divorced him, but you have to stay friends. Friends look after friends—”
Her mother cut her off. “Annie, that’s enough about your father! I divorced him because I didn’t intend to stagnate with him. I’ve told you this a hundred times. It had nothing to do with love. The kind of love your father believes in doesn’t exist—it never did. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stand by and watch him walk off the edge of the earth, if that’s what you’re saying. To be honest, he’d never find a way to get there. . . .”
“Where? The edge of the earth?”
“Anywhere beyond his beaten track!” There was some impatience in her mother’s voice now, and some heat, which Annie knew not to take personally. Unless she were taking her father’s side. “I wasn’t going to stay with him just because he lost a daughter. I lost a daughter. I wasn’t going to stay there and match his loss against mine. There’s a law of survival, you know. And if you don’t, there’s nothing they can teach you in that university worth a damn. I wasn’t going to let Ben pull me down, Annie— although ‘pull’ puts it too strongly. Not Ben—”
She stopped her mother there. “Give it a rest, Mom. Okay? Dad’s doing what he has to do.”
As usual, her mother handled her daughter’s occasional flare-ups of temper by marking off a cool distance on the phone. Then she said, “Oh, really? And what might that be?”
“He’s seeing me through school.”
He’s doing his court-ordered duty, nothing more or less, her mother might have replied. And Annie might have responded, You demanded it of him as a way of making clear how badly, how catastrophically, he had failed with Michelle.
Her mother asked her about her boyfriend, Jonathan, instead, and if Annie were being honest she would have admitted that Jonathan was beginning to bore her. It was either Cambridge or the Cape, and when the heat was bad, it was the family estate on Mount Desert Island in Maine. These were all places that Annie had in store. He, in turn, wanted to see the horse farms around Lexington. Calumet. Then, if she could show him a moonshiner . . .
She heard her father say it again. Your friend Jonathan sounds like a fellow who has yet to dig in to face the day that’s sure to come.
She winced and laughed at the same time. Her roommate, Valerie, who had just walked into the room, heard what might have sounded like a snarl and shot Annie a look. Valerie’s looks were always larger than life, more often than not exaggerated wrenchings of her features. Annie gave Valerie a look that backed her off.
Her mother said, “More intelligence than maturity, it sounds like to me. Once he grows up he might be something to call home about. You will call home, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You did say he was a handsome devil, didn’t you?”
“Did I?” She decided to include Valerie, who might be sulking from that last look. The fact was, Valerie was a dear friend who had been Annie’s roommate both in the dorm and in this apartment, and whose family life, if it didn’t include the death of a sister, did include a mother who had overdosed on sleeping pills and was not above threatening to do it again. Valerie’s father was hanging on for compassion’s sake, although Valerie would not have blamed him if he’d left. If he left, Valerie would inherit the whole of her mother. You could divorce a wife, but mothers lived off your blood.
“Valerie,” Annie inquired, “my mother wants to know if Jonathan is ‘a handsome devil.’”
“He’s a step up from that sleazeball you had before. Tell her that.”
Annie told her mother that Valerie said Jonathan was an improvement on his predecessor, nothing more.
It was time to get off the phone.
She said, “I’ve got a lot of work coming up—exams and stuff. Probably best not to call.” After a pause she added, “Hey, that’s great about the three houses. They used to have goats and cows on the Arts Quad, did you know that?” There was another pause, calculated, measured, not her intention. Then she said, “Call if you hear from Dad.” She insisted, “Call then.”
When Valerie asked her what all that had been about, Annie shook her head. Would she believe a herd of goats popping like popcorn over a field? Valerie bugged her eyes. Annie said she was going to class.
All her classes were on the Arts Quad. She had to cross a narrow gorge on a footbridge. Once on the quad, she could position herself in the right opening between the old stone buildings, half-covered with ivy, and let her eyes sail out to the horizon, where the glacially formed lake the university was built above took its first jag toward the west. It jagged east and west on its way north for forty miles. It was, in one spot, said to be six hundred feet deep. She frequently came here and looked at the lake before attending classes. It was a way of clearing the head, straightening the spine. It was also, as far as she could remember, the only tip her sister had given her about how to meet the rigors of the university. “Rigors” had been one of Michelle’s favorite words.
Beautiful, spectacular, sure, but as an act of self-discipline, learn to see through all that. Then you’re ready enter the classroom and not be distracted by the pretty phrases. If the professor has anything to teach you, that’s when you’ll learn.
Annie had been a freshman here when Michelle had begun her junior year abroad in Spain. They had not overlapped by a single day.
She was trying to pay attention to what her teacher was saying about the six causes of the Spanish-American War, a Catholic culture about to be replaced by a mercantile Protestant one, but it was mid-May and a lilac bush was in bloom whose scent was pouring in through an opened window. She closed her notebook and quietly slipped out the back door.
Her sister had died, her father had gone through a disorienting divorce, and Annie had survived with her friends, her health, her intelligence intact. And her beauty. Michelle had not been beautiful. Her defense system was so elaborately wrought that any natural warmth she might have had was smothered, though in unguarded moments she’d let it show. They’d had
