An Uncommon Education (15 page)

Lilly turned around and put her hands on my shoulders but I couldn’t stop. I was sent home that morning, but snuck back for my afternoon classes. I thought no one would have noticed me and my hysteria in the wake of discovering Anton, but Anna Kim, beautiful now as well as popular, and still vying with me for top ranking in the school, saw everything. From that day onward she would let out a little cry every time I passed near her. “Oh! I don’t know if I can stop!” Her friends laughed, the boys turning her jeers into sexual jokes, the girls punching them playfully on the arms. I went back to taking a shortcut through the auditorium, careful never to look up, though in my mind’s eye I frequently pictured a body swinging overhead: sometimes it was Anton’s, sometimes it was my mother’s, and sometimes it was mine. I hated to admit it, but the days when I imagined myself there were the worst. Whatever happened, I knew, furiously, that I wanted to live. Those days I went to the girls’ room, splashed cold water on my face, and made myself run after school until I had to stop to breathe.

Junior year passed by in a whirl of even more intensive work and dogged training, and by the fall of senior year I had my early application to Wellesley prepared. When Mr. Rutledge began a dissection unit with the advanced biology class, beginning with the frog, he inspired many protests and refusals among my classmates. By then, I had adopted an impressively stoic exterior and made the first cut on the frog, almost expecting a gasp of air to emerge when I did. Instead, the creature’s insides seemed too simple, the forms within too straightforward to be the alchemical heart, liver, stomach, and brain. I made notes on my sheet, holding my disappointment in, eager for the end of the semester, when we’d dissect a pig, a day I felt sure I’d been waiting eight years for.

It became easier and easier to bury my misery under my drive. And along the way, it became logical to believe that the more I saw those around me fall, the more I needed to lift myself up as compensation. Maybe it was because of that day all those years ago when I witnessed my father’s heart attack and sidestepped the pain with a resolution. Maybe it was because my mother and Teddy persisted in slipping in and out of safety as I stood by. Or maybe it was just because I knew that I could never let any memory go and would have to learn to shut certain things out to keep my own balance in check. For all these reasons, and probably countless more I could not name, I nurtured the perfect juvenile solution to the pain of losing. I would win, all the time, at everything.

It was that simple.

Part II

Eleven

I
had continued to volunteer at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital throughout high school so that I could claim with some credibility that my plans to be a cardiologist were well researched. On a cool winter morning early during my junior year, a woman walked into Central Transport, identified herself as Dr. Sally Orchuk, explained that she’d like to take on a shadow in surgery, and then, later, on our way up to the top of the building in an elevator, told me she had gone to Wellesley (class of 1973), had heard from the hospital’s volunteer office that I was interested in the college, and that I was a good student.

“Take off the bracelet,” she told me on our first meeting. I had only recently taken to wearing the cuff my mother had given me, briefly trying on the idea that the work I would do would make her proud. I looked down at it, a question on my face. “A surgeon should never wear jewelry,” she grinned challengingly. “Plus,” she straightened up to her full six feet, “it’s bad luck.” I unlatched it and dropped it in my pocket.

That summer I was allowed to watch her surgeries; the next fall, in the middle of our dissection unit (mice and cats), my long-awaited acceptance letter to Wellesley and a hefty financial aid package were firmly in hand. My father claimed it was fate, that Rose Kennedy was smiling down on me, rewarding me for all those childhood visits to her home. For a moment I missed the girlhood I’d had there, before I’d known suffering to be anything other than the sad constant my mother wore regularly, easy to look beyond. I tried to argue that Rose was neither a deity nor a monitoring presence at 83 Beals, but my father dismissed my comments the way he would swat at a fly. “You have no idea what she’s doing,” he declared, as though I were unthinkably wrong.

T
hree weeks before orientation at Wellesley a tournament was held for the incoming students who wanted the one first-year spot available on the tennis team. I was surprised to see more than two dozen girls at the tournament, held at Longwood Cricket Club, an establishment only ten minutes from my home. We were all trying hard to seem uninterested in one another. But it didn’t take me long to learn that there were three girls from New York, one from Indiana, and one from Japan. Her parents had flown in with her for the weekend to compete for the spot.

It was the first week in August, the beginning of the end of a summer that had been exceptionally warm and humid. The air was so thick and wet it was difficult to breathe, and by afternoon any breeze quieted players and spectators alike, the light winds not relieving us so much as bringing to our attention what little we had in our lungs. Almost everyone stayed to watch the final matches, though there were only four of us competing by then. I took the court for the last time against the girl from Japan, Jun Oko.

She was tall, taller than my five feet eight inches, and I guessed that she must be exceptionally tall for her native Tokyo. She wore a visor low over her eyes even though it was late in the day and I was playing shade-side, and I could see nothing of her expression except her mouth, firm and wide, set in a tight frown. It was the first set and my serve, and though I was ready to begin, I stalled for a moment to let the breeze cool my skin. Across the court, I thought I saw Jun stiffen, registering my hesitation. I didn’t wait any longer; if she hadn’t made note of my stall, my father would have. He had taken to watching my matches as closely as most men would watch for the outcome of a bet.

I followed through with my serve and Jun sent it directly back to me. A movement so swift and uncalculated it was nearly insulting. In that instant we both knew she could send me running, but she didn’t bother. I slammed the ball in the opposite direction, at least ten feet from her and one inch from the outside line. This, too, she reacted to strangely. She lunged for it, but hadn’t been nearly close enough to be in position. She was a better player than that. The thought crossed my mind that she had conceded the point intentionally, by way of apologizing for her initial condescension. I don’t know why I thought this; I couldn’t see her face to study her expression. I didn’t know her. But there was something in her manner, the extreme care with which she stood waiting between sets, that made me think that a false effort was more likely than an accidentally bad play.

I renewed my focus on Jun’s dark head, the visor still blocking much of her face. It was irking me, the way she concealed her expressions, like she was too good to fully acknowledge me, or maybe she was hiding something. She hit my next serve with a return so forceful I had no chance of hitting it, though I went for it. This was a bad trait of mine as a player; when rattled I tended to spring to action, like startled prey.

I knew my father would be hoping more than usual that I would win. Nothing thrilled him more than a win when I was clearly outclassed. His most recent heroic crushes had been on legendary tennis underdogs: Nate Winkles in ’85 at the U.S. Open, Anna Treblenka at Wimbledon in ’90. He loved to recount these matches with relish, and would do so for as long as I’d let him. I managed to return Jun’s next hit when I heard the first vague rumble of thunder. I ignored it, but missed the ball after that.

The leaves on the chestnut trees lining the court began to whisper, and another rumble sounded, louder than the first. I didn’t care about rain, but the match would be suspended if there was lightning. I renewed my efforts, still wanting that rally, wanting even more to make her run, to make that visor slip off her head. She picked up on my renewed focus and upped her game. I wondered if she felt the match as acutely as I did, if she, too, was conscious that this was our first showing as Wellesley students. The assistant coach was watching from somewhere in the stands but had been so quiet all afternoon that we had almost forgotten about her.

A heavy, soaking rain came immediately behind the next break of thunder. The people in the stands stood in nearly one motion, some pulling the backs of their T-shirts over their heads, all running to get out of the weather. I stared at them from the court, the rain driving at an angle into my face and down the collar of my shirt. Jun was watching me. I picked up a ball and put it into play, though her racket was at her side. She was surprised, but returned it.

The ref ran out to the middle of the court: “Game over. Rematch,” he hollered, then ran off again.

My father was still in the stands, holding the schedule over his head. The ref was talking to the coordinator, who had managed to produce an umbrella at the sidelines. There were two more people still watching, an Asian man and woman sitting together. Jun’s parents, I guessed, sitting there as if they had been the only viewers all along, as if the rain had washed out everything incidental, everything but our parents in the stands. Seeing Jun’s parents as a unit like that made them seem stronger than my father, made him seem like an old man, lingering, lost in the stands.

I can’t tell you why my father or I stayed where we were, but I realized after watching them a moment longer that Jun and her mother were waiting for her father’s direction. Her mother didn’t look at her father, but sat beside him patiently, her practiced stillness reminding me at once of my mother’s. Jun stood like someone reluctant to abandon a post. Finally, Jun’s father raised his hand lightly and Jun walked off the court without another glance at me. It occurred to me that within the distance between her parents and her there was an invisible, unbreakable line.

My father was suddenly standing before me. “
Ketzi
, it’s cold, we’re wet.” His words were choppy, as if they, too, might get soaked if we didn’t hurry. We made it inside the clubhouse, where he bustled about, putting his things down and getting me something to dry off with: a towel appeared, amazingly white and dry. “Oko Industries,” he whispered, blotting my hair and staring at the Okos, who had appeared on the other side of the room as I tried to blot my face. He leaned in, “Probably the richest man in Tokyo, and he leaves his daughter to stand in the rain just because he thinks she’s got an easy win.” He shook his head.

Jun’s father turned around. He looked my father, then me, in the eye. Jun and her mother stood side by side behind him. We regarded each other for another long moment until Mr. Oko finally bowed in our direction, the gesture at once formal, slight, and notable for its elegance. My father and I returned the bow awkwardly. Mr. Oko turned to leave, his small family following close behind. I saw him open an umbrella for the three of them under the awning before they made their way out of sight. I didn’t see Jun again until a year and a half later, after we had been at school together for nearly as long.

Twelve

T
hree weeks after the matches at Longwood—orientation weekend at Wellesley—the rain had still not let up. In four years, most of us would graduate in another downpour, and I suspect that many of us held both storms as a point of pride, acts of nature that seemed to punctuate our collective power, though it was not in vogue to refer to the heavens, to refer to anything but our own abilities, as commanding events into existence.

As we drove under the banner that marked our welcome and the entrance to the college, I produced a map from the depths of a thick packet and directed my father to the Stone-Davis dorm, an older structure near the outskirts of campus with views of the lake from its southern windows. We could see nothing but the brake lights of the car in front of us as we made our way onto the campus. The incoming line of cars snaked along the main road, our backseats and trunks full of the things we thought we might need to establish our existences away from home, as though we expected to forge individual armors made of our belongings.

By the time we arrived at the front entrance to the dorm, my parents and I had been in the damp, hot car for nearly an hour. I opened my door as the others ahead of me had, trying to hurry even though myself, my parents, and my things were quickly drenched, making the trip up the front stairs even more laborious and awkward than it would otherwise have been. After we’d managed to get everything into the main hall of the building, my father elected to return to the car and park it as my mother and I began to drag the first load of my belongings up the staircase, down three hallways, and into a room that measured, optimistically, at ten feet by seven. I knew it had taken extra effort for her to come with me that day, that she’d been planning to for weeks. I thought that keeping her busy might demonstrate a kindness I wasn’t sure how else to show.

My roommate, Amy Wade, was already there, or so I guessed that the petite, blond girl standing in the middle of the room and looking at me with a mixture of open condescension and interest must be she. I smiled, as did my mother; we must have looked identical in our efforts to appear pleased to meet her. Amy smiled back, richly amused, before barking at her father, who was about to unload her books into the top shelf of the two-shelved bookcase we were meant to share.

“Dad, Jesus, she’s going to think I’m taking over in here. She should have the top shelf; can’t you see how tall she is? Christ.” She looked back at me, grinning wide. “I took the bottom bunk, hope that’s okay. And I hung the Matisse”—she gestured toward a large print of flowers and fish—“he goes well there.” She looked at me to see if I would challenge her. I stared at the print, which took up most of the only wall big enough for it. “Amy Wade,” she finally said, looking up at me as she squatted by a box, not bothering to hold out her hand, either because we were both girls or because she knew she needed no formal introduction. “From Wisconsin.” Her look implied that she knew I had never been to Wisconsin.