Leaving
Their sense of order had been annihilated. Restoring it was an impossibility. What had become of their wonderful family on that hot July night? Lou’s refusal to admit any anger toward Janet, his refusal to join them in their disapproval and condemnation, was in some ways even more infuriating and inexplicable to his daughters than was their mother’s original horrific offense. Nearly a month of bitter, largely unspoken discord had passed, during which time their parents were totally united in their complete unwillingness to engage with their daughters in further debate on this painful subject. The obvious solution became clear to Meg, Joanna, and Amy. They would leave.
They informed their parents perfunctorily. Joanna and Amy would move in with Meg. To the exceedingly rational Janet and Lou, it seemed at first like an absurd, teenage scheme, an adolescent storm that would blow over in a matter of days, with time to spare before classes at Warren Prep began, if the girls could finally exhaust their rage with a lot of perfectly healthy and dramatic leave-taking. They had absolutely no idea that as far as the girls were concerned, their family was truly shattered.
Reader’s note: Why don’t you show the actual moment when the three sisters decide that this is their solution? And why don’t you show the confrontation, when they announce their plan to their parents? MG
Author’s note: It didn’t seem necessary to the momentum of the story to depict each moment in time. A narrative can indicate in all sorts of ways events that are about to take place or have already occurred. These are the choices a novelist makes on every page of a novel—what is left out as much as what is depicted. The uninvolved reader understands and accepts this.
Reader’s note: But in the end, is there ever really such a thing as the uninvolved reader? MG
Author’s note: The ideal reader has nothing personal at stake.
Reader’s note: Oh no, not so. The ideal reader should have everything personal at stake. MG
Reader’s note: When the author of this novel was a child, in all of her drawings the people always had their hands in their pockets. Although she would offer various psychological or symbolic explanations, there was a simpler excuse—she couldn’t draw hands. AG
Author’s note: Pointless interruptions in this text are as regrettable as they are unavoidable. Apologies once again to the reader who feels compelled to read these notes.
Reader’s note: So you just couldn’t write those scenes. MG
Author’s note: I have my own reasons for not including those scenes. Those moments are implicit in the narrative. Every moment cannot possibly be described or every novel would be thousands of pages long. Readers accept the implied events of any story.
Reader’s note: She had her own reasons for all those hands in all those pockets, too. AG
The morning Meg drove up to New Haven, the three sisters stood close together in the street beside the Subaru while Mike, the doorman who had known each of them from the day they were born, tied a few more superfluous, loopy knots in the stiff hanks of
clothesline that zigzagged over their bicycles. Finally, having duly thanked the diligent and now perspiration-soaked doorman, Meg got behind the wheel and shut the driver’s door. Rolling down her window and leaning out, Meg said in a low voice, “Guys, aren’t you even a little worried about Janet and Lou? I mean, once they buy a clue? No matter how much they deserve each other, I’m anxious about them. I mean, one minute they’re oblivious and everything is fine, and then the next minute they had some kind of anxiety attack that I didn’t want them to come down the street to see me off, for God’s sake, like I couldn’t find my way without Lou’s special advice about how to get to the Bronx.”
“I think anxiety is very interesting,” said Amy. No one said anything for a moment after that. Meg sat still for a moment in the baked heat, her eyes closed, a hand splayed on her forehead in a gesture that reminded both Amy and Joanna in an unfortunate way, they agreed as soon as Meg fastened her seat belt, started the car, and drove off, of their mother.
“That hand on the head thing really spooked me, you know?” Joanna said.
“Oh, my aching thoughts! My precious mind! My sensitive self! I can’t believe how Janet that was,” Amy concurred, mimicking the gesture cruelly.
Meg had to organize her schedule and get it approved, she had told them, and that wasn’t a lie, though she had many days of what is known at Yale as shopping period to nail down her schedule. Mostly she was eager—anxious, really—to meet with their putative roommate Teddy Bell, the eccentric junior she had known only slightly the previous term in an American Studies seminar. She had phoned him at a number in Maine she was able to obtain from the Silliman Master’s office by dint of deviousness and subterfuge, she was so wild with desperation, and for unknown
and possibly not great reasons, he had agreed at the last minute to ditch his very desirable single room in Silliman and throw in his lot with the Green sisters.
Joanna and Amy were more than a little concerned about what sort of flake would agree to set up housekeeping with Meg and her two high-school-age sisters in an apartment on High Street on the strength of one phone call from someone he knew from across a seminar table. But even if he was completely gross or perverted, or merely crazy, Meg pointed out, though he had seemed none of those things in class, she promised, they needed him—they desperately needed his three-hundred-dollar share of the rent—and it was tremendously fortunate that he had been willing to do it, never mind why.
Meg had originally planned to share the apartment with two other juniors—Jennifer Goldsmith and Jennifer House, both known by Meg before Yale, as one had been in her class at Warren and the other had been on her Putney Student Travel trip to France that summer after graduation. But both of them had balked at the news that Joanna and Amy would be moving in. Within hours of Meg’s call to each Jennifer to let them know of her family crisis and to check that it would be okay for her sisters to stay for at least a couple of months into the semester, Jennifer and Jennifer had bailed out on Meg and the perfect three-bedroom High Street apartment in the legendarily seedy Oxbridge Arms that they had all loved so much in June, leaving her entirely responsible for the rent. (Meg had, after all, been the one who had agreed to stay an extra day in New Haven to take care of signing the lease after finals, and Lou, who had driven up to New Haven to help her move her things down to the city for the summer, had been co-signer.)
But one of the Jennifers had at least thought of Teddy Bell, whom she knew from some singing group, so that was something. Teddy Bell was really okay, Meg kept saying, apparently attempting to reassure herself as much as her sisters. Meg was pretty sure
he was from Maine or New Hampshire, or maybe it was a farm in Vermont—he had said things in class that made her think so, when they were reading Hawthorne. She remembered, too, that he could be funny. Beyond that, she couldn’t really say what he was like.
“Leave it to Meg to be so spacey about someone who’s going to be living with us,” Joanna said to Amy at the nearest Starbucks on Broadway, where they tended to roost for hours at a time as part of their total parental avoidance strategy in those final desultory days, and where they had gone for iced lattes that afternoon, after Meg drove off. Joanna’s job that summer was at a different branch of Starbucks, a dozen blocks farther south. She was highly critical of the inconsistently prepared iced lattes at this location.
“This Teddy Bell who is maybe, what, an amusing boy from Vermont, so, what, he’s going to be our great maple syrup connection? Is that all we know about him? If he had been in a class with me,” Amy said, dumping yet another packet of pale brown sugar into the dregs of watery coffee and ice cubes in her plastic cup, “for one thing, I would be able to describe him to my sisters. I mean, Meg can’t even tell us what he looks like very clearly. Do you think she really doesn’t remember, or do you think she knows and won’t tell us what a weirdo he is?” Amy stirred her sugary sludge vigorously with her straw and then slurped it down.
“Maybe he’s weird but in a good way,” Joanna began, “like, you know, like us, the way we’re weird. Maybe—”
“And I would know where he had gone to elementary school,” Amy continued her relentless catalog. “And camp, and where his family spends their summers, and what his father does, and his astrological sign, and if he had a dog, and I would know who his friends are, what kind of music he likes, what books changed his life, what TV shows he watches. I would know a zillion things about him. I mean, what if he’s some freak? What if this is the revenge of the Jennifers? What if he’s a complete techno-geek with a homemade Star Trek uniform, or he’s a Buffy freak, or he has terrible
personal hygiene, or some completely bizarre personality disorder or deformity Meg never even noticed? He could be a total Diane Arbus person! And then everyone will think we’re so nice for pretending we don’t notice! How could she know nothing about this guy? Don’t you think that’s pretty shady?”
“I think we should just count on his being sketchy or maybe some kind of freak,” Joanna said. “If he wasn’t, why would he want to live with us?”