This year, Rachel and Bob had invited Eudora Easter and Reverend Michael Woodward, Rector of the Episcopal Church in Fieldington, to their Thanksgiving feast. Michael was a small man with a very pale complexion who wore such big glasses that he looked as if he were surprised by everything he saw. Rachel admired him for stubbornly trying hard to believe what he professed. He wasn’t wearing clerical clothes today, having changed to an old brown sweater over a white shirt after the morning service. Eudora wore a flowing blue robe of velvet that came down to the top of her shoes. She and Father Woodward were close friends. Sometimes Rachel caught herself hoping they would marry, like now as they sat beside each other on one side of the table. Sylvia, Elizabeth, and Auda settled on the other, Bob and Rachel opposite each other at the ends.
The conversation around the table that afternoon would have been even more lively if Dean of Academics Gregory van Buren were in attendance, but he had declined in favor of a splurge of theatergoing in New York City. Gregory was brilliant and powerful in his position. Rachel adored him. For years she’d been wishing he would find a woman to share his New York City jaunts, a fellow lover of good food, great wine, theater, and, of course, sex and romance, but Gregory had adhered relentlessly to his monkish lifestyle and had reached an age that, for conventional thinkers, especially the young, romance is difficult to imagine and sex on the verge of disgusting. Some thought he was gay. Gregory explained to Rachel that the reason he refused to correct them was that if he did, it would appear that he didn’t approve of being gay.
After Bob had carved the turkey and before anyone began to eat, he said, his voice rising with enthusiasm, “Just think how implausible it is, how many related events had to occur, to make the universe and this little dot within it that supports life against all odds; and then think about how all the events that had to happen for each of us to be born, and on top of that to be together, here, now.”
“I bet the turkey wishes a couple of events didn’t happen,” Michael said, “but that was a very nice grace.”
“Right. I said it because I figured you needed a break. Auda, would you like to add anything as our guest from Germany?”
“I’d like to thank God,” Auda said.
Eudora got up from her chair, saying something about making sure the pies weren’t cooling too fast, and went into the kitchen. She had converted to atheism when her husband drowned in a swamp during a Reserve Marine Corps training two weeks right after their honeymoon. She preferred no god to one so incompetent as to allow such an obscenely calamitous event.
Auda went on for several minutes, thanking God in better English than many Americans ever achieve, and ended by asking Him “to make us ever mindful of the needs of others” just as Eudora returned.
“Amen to that,” Eudora said in spite of herself after Auda finished, and Sylvia and Elizabeth, thinking of their homeless man, glanced at each other.
“Sylvia, would you like to add anything?” Bob asked.
Sylvia shook her head. She didn’t look at her father. She wondered how much turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing would be left over and how much she and Elizabeth could take to the homeless man without its being discovered.
“Elizabeth?”
Elizabeth smiled brightly at Bob. “I never thought of myself as a coincidence before.”
Silence.
“This is wonderful cranberry sauce,” Michael said, saving the moment. Everyone started eating.
All the rest of the day, even past the time when Elizabeth and Auda went upstairs to the guest room they shared, Sylvia tried to find a moment to be alone with Elizabeth. It never happened. Auda was always there.
In her own room, in bed, with the lights out, Sylvia didn’t even try to sleep. What was the homeless man doing in the parking lot? In the stolen down jacket and his clean clothes, he was almost too well dressed to beg. It couldn’t be that he was waiting for someone. She felt a flicker of jealousy. Who? To do what? To go where?
Sylvia was well aware of her confusion. She pitied the homeless man, was afraid of him, wanted to help him, was curious about him, attracted to him, and disgusted by him, all at once. Her various versions of him paraded in her head: the one who was her and Elizabeth’s project. Keeping him alive was something to get done, like finishing a term paper. He was also the one she had smelled before she dropped the dollars into his hat; and the one up to his knees in the river, facing away, his skin so white; and the one who turned around, whom she would have the right to join only if she took off her clothes too. Or the version crawling out of his lean-to into the dark and swiveling his head to find her while she held her breath. Here we are, she imagined calling to him. Over here. What would have happened next? If Elizabeth had not been with her, maybe she would have called out to him. Oh yes, he could hurt her and Elizabeth—yes, they were maybe falling into his trap. And yes, every once in a while, she felt a pulse of attraction to him. Just knowing that was in itself fascinating. What amazed her so was how alive she was. She didn’t even want to be unconfused.
“Sylvia?”
For an instant, Sylvia was in the shed again, Elizabeth on the other side of the door. Unscrewing the hinges.
But this door was already open. “I can’t sleep,” Elizabeth whispered. She tiptoed into the room and sat down on the side of Sylvia’s bed. Her ungainly form was a silhouette against the paltry light. “What was he doing in the parking lot?”
“I don’t know,” Sylvia said.
“Maybe getting ready to steal something from the store?”
“Why? We’re bringing him food.”
“Cash maybe. Who knows?”
“It’s the middle of the day. He could never.”
“I know.”
“So you think he’s crazy?”
“I don’t know. But he does live in a lean-to. You and I wouldn’t.”
“Well, why does he have to?”
“Okay,” Sylvia said. “So maybe he is crazy. So what? Let’s bring him Thanksgiving dinner.”
“You know that’s insane.”
“Why? We had ours. Why shouldn’t he?”
Elizabeth didn’t answer.
“Come on! Is Thanksgiving for everybody, or isn’t it?” That was what to say to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth put up her hands, palms out. “Okay, okay, okay, we’ll do it. We might as well. We’re in deep shit anyway. I’m much more afraid of getting kicked out than I am of him. And your mom has made it clear we can’t undo what we’re going to get kicked out for, if someone figures out we are the ones who stole the stuff.”
“Good!”
“But that’s not the only reason, is it? We just like to take chances. And it’s not even just that. We’re sticking our middle fingers up, flipping the bird.”
“I suppose we are. But to what?”
“I don’t know. The universe your dad was talking about?”
Sylvia giggled. “Whatever.”
“Besides you’re in love with the guy, right?” It was Elizabeth’s turn to giggle.
“Very funny,” Sylvia said. “If you don’t make it as president, you can try being a comedian.” Then, switching the subject as fast as she could: “How are we going to bring dinner to him without Auda knowing?”
“We’ll figure that out in the morning.”
“Okay. Think you can sleep now?”
“Probably not.” Elizabeth stood up and moved to the door. “See you in the morning.”
SYLVIA WOKE up around ten o’clock to a silent house. Cold, damp November air came in through the open window, smelling like dead gardens. She got out of bed, reluctantly, and closed the window. Outside, the campus was shrouded in mist. By the time she was dressed it had begun to rain.
Elizabeth was waiting for her in the kitchen. She told Sylvia her mother had gone to her office to catch up on work, and her dad was driving around visiting stores where Best Sports stuff was sold. “Pretending to be a customer,” Elizabeth added, shaking her head. “We need to get going before they get back and Auda wakes up.” She crossed to the refrigerator and took out the big container holding the remains of the turkey.
Just then, Auda appeared, sleepily rubbing her eyes. “I’m starving. What’s for breakfast?”
“Granola, yogurt, and fruit,” Sylvia said, forcing herself to sound glad to see her.
“Goody,” Auda said. “At home it would be cheese and meat. Yuck. Everything we eat in Germany is brown. But why’s the turkey out?”
“There’s a homeless man we’re going to bring some to,” Elizabeth said in her most casual tone.
“Oh?” Auda didn’t look sleepy anymore. “Can I come?”
“It’s raining hard out,” Elizabeth said. “So if you want to stay inside, it’s cool.”
“I don’t mind a little rain. I’ve got a great raincoat. Besides, we’ll be in the car.” Auda turned to Sylvia. “Your parents coming?”
“Actually, we’ll be walking,” Elizabeth said.
“My parents are both working,” Sylvia said. “They won’t come.”
“On a holiday weekend?”
“Yeah, Americans work even harder than Germans,” Elizabeth said.
Auda shrugged.
Elizabeth glanced at Sylvia as if to say, Your turn.
“I feel like I’m giving a quiz,” Auda said. “Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”
“He lives in the woods,” Sylvia said. “In a lean-to.”
“A lean-to? What’s that?”
“It’s like a shack he made out of pine boughs,” Elizabeth said. “It’s pretty cool.”
“Why doesn’t he live in a shelter? Aren’t there any shelters?”
“In Fieldington? Are you kidding? Nobody around here needs a shelter. They were all born on third base,” Elizabeth said. “Besides, maybe he wants to live in the woods.”
“Third base?”
“Never mind. Let’s get going before it starts to rain even harder,” Sylvia said.
“Okay, but how do you know where he lives?”
“He told us,” Sylvia said.
“You talk to him?”
“Sometimes,” Elizabeth lied.
“That’s nice. What’s his name?”
“It’s not like that,” Elizabeth said. “We didn’t get introduced.”
Sylvia cut three slices of white meat from the carcass of the turkey and two dark from a drumstick, and put them into a plastic container while Elizabeth spooned stuffing and cranberry sauce in another. “Does your mother know we are doing this?” Auda asked.
“No, but she won’t mind,” Sylvia said.
“Just the same, let’s not tell her. Okay?” Elizabeth said.
Auda nodded. “My parents wouldn’t want me to be hanging out with a homeless guy either.”
“And if she notices there’s less, we ate it for lunch,” Elizabeth said.
THE ROOF WAS leaking. Christopher reached up to tighten the weave of pine boughs, and a cold stream ran down his hand, across his wrist and into his sleeve. He started to yell a swear word but stopped himself. He didn’t want to hear his own voice swallowed in the drum of the rain and the burble of the swollen river. He was disappeared enough already.
So he just moved from under the drip and went on thinking about the lady in the brown coat. That was another reason he didn’t swear when the cold water ran down his arm: she’d said, God bless you, and it was the world that was crazy, not him, and now he was watching her walk away again across the parking lot into the store on her little black shoes, with their short, square heals. They kept her steady as she walked.
After a while, he couldn’t sit there anymore. The drip was getting bigger, a steady wet percussion. He crawled out of the lean-to into the rain. His axe was embedded in a tree stump near the door. Like Excalibur in its stone in the stories Uncle Ray used to read to him. He pulled it out and carried it to a tree whose lower branches he chopped off, and then he trimmed the smaller shoots off and he brought them back to the lean-to and put them on top of where the leak was, and then he did this again and again, weaving the new boughs into the whole roof—and not just the leaking part, because, even though he was getting wet and cold because he wasn’t wearing the down jacket because down loses its ability to keep you warm when it gets wet, working like this, treading back and forth over the sodden dead leaves of last summer to fix his lean-to, soothed him, and he explained to himself, because explaining things to himself was calming too, that the reason the pine boughs leaked after a while was that the needles died.
He crawled back into the lean-to, took all his wet clothes off, and got into his sleeping bag. When he was warm, he’d put on dry clothes and maybe even the down jacket. One step at a time. Think about each one while you do it and about nothing else. That’s how you stay alive.
He was still in his sleeping bag, half an hour later, when the rain started to come down harder and then even harder, and then a wind came up, blowing through the woods. He told himself it was just pure luck that he had re-sheathed his lean-to just in time, and then he heard footsteps. He scrambled out of his bag. His axe was outside in the stump. Where an enemy could reach it first. How did he get so careless? An instant later, he was in his lean-to again, the leap from one place to another so explosive he would be better off to be still in Iraq with his friends; and then he figured out whose footsteps they probably were and he made another explosive leap, to the same upwelling of the sudden happiness he’d felt when he remembered he hadn’t heard them laughing at him and realized they were friends. And not just one, but two!
He put on his dry clothes as fast as he could and even combed his hair with his fingers to make himself presentable, then he went out into the storm and there they were, three of them this time. Three! By the food cache. They didn’t see him yet.
The tall, thin one was taking off her backpack and putting it on the ground. She took off her raincoat and covered the backpack with it. “But you’ll get all wet,” he yelled above the noise of the storm. “You’ll freeze! Can’t you see it’s raining out?”
The wind was blowing the rain sideways now. They stared at him though the torrent of it. Like wet kittens someone had tried to drown. “Get in,” he commanded, a sergeant again, taking care of his troops. He pointed to the opening of the lean-to. “Where it is dry.” He stepped forward, picked up the raincoat and the backpack, and pointed to the lean-to again with his other hand. “Out of the wind,” he yelled. “Otherwise you”—pointing at the tall thin one, her shirt and jeans soaked through, clinging to her like another skin—“will get hypothermia. Hypothermia,” he repeated, and he stepped around them so he was behind them, and spreading his arms he shepherded them in.
There was just enough room in there for the four of them to sit in a circle. The other two girls, the big blonde one and the small one with red hair, were still in their raincoats. He put their backpack in the middle of the circle and reached behind himself into his own backpack and pulled out the down jacket and handed it to the tall, thin one where she was sitting across the circle, shivering hard in her wet clothes. She stared at the down jacket, like someone deciding whether or not to reject a gift. Then she reached for it and put it on over her wet shirt.
In that cramped space, the sides of the other two girls, the tall, thin one on his right, the big blonde one on his left, touched his shoulders and hips. He leaned forward to make a space, sure they didn’t want their bodies to touch the likes of him, just as, very near, there was the huge cracking sound of a tree trunk breaking. The girls’ bodies stiffened. They looked up, as if they could see through the roof. There was the roar of the tree falling down through the branches of other trees and the final dying crash, and then even in the wind it seemed very quiet and he realized the rain had stopped. “Don’t worry, no tree is going to fall on us,” he said. It was total bullshit. There were two huge trees even nearer that were just as likely to fall on the lean-to and squash them all like bugs, but he wanted them to feel safe.
The backpack they had brought sat in the center of the circle. The big blonde girl and the tall, thin one looked at each other. “Now?” the big blonde one asked. The tall, thin one, still shivering, nodded, and opened the backpack and pulled out two square plastic containers, placing them before him in the center of the circle. The other two girls watched, their eyes going back and forth between him and the tall, thin one. She popped the covers off. He smelled the turkey, the cranberry sauce, the stuffing even before he saw them.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” she said.
“For me?”
“Yes, for you,” the tall, thin one said. “And by the way, my name is Sylvia. And this is Elizabeth,” pointing at the big blonde one, “and that’s Auda.”
“Sylvia,” he repeated. “Sylvia.” A flush came on her face. He turned to Elizabeth and said her name, and then to Auda and said hers too.
“Aren’t you going to tell us yours?” Sylvia said.
“Christopher,” he said, turning his face to her. “Christopher Triplett, Sergeant, US Marine Corps.”
They were silent.
“I’m not in the best of shape,” he said, not sure whether he was warning them, or just stating the fact. “Maybe you can see?”
Auda frowned.
“I don’t see anything wrong,” Sylvia said.
“Iraq? Or Afghanistan?” Elizabeth asked.
“How did you know?”
“I didn’t. I guessed.”
“Iraq. Four times,” he said.
“Four!” Elizabeth said.
He shrugged.
“Well anyway, we’re glad you don’t have to go there anymore,”
Sylvia said. She looked straight at him.
I might as well be there, he almost said. Instead: “You’re still shivering. You’ll never get warm with your wet shirt on. Take it off and put the down jacket back on.” The sergeant again, taking care of his troops. “I’ll go outside while you do.” He crawled out of the lean-to.
The first thing he saw was his axe. Embedded in the tree stump. Beckoning. We’re glad you don’t have to go there anymore. Because you won’t be killing any more of us. Looking straight at him. She’d come back to punish him.
He stands up and goes over there and puts his hand on the handle of the axe. He doesn’t let himself see what he’s going to do.
Below his eyes, the rings marking the age of the stump when it had been killed are as clear as lines for rivers on a map. Then darkness came.
INSIDE THE LEAN-TO, Sylvia unzipped the down jacket.
“Don’t!” Elizabeth said.
Sylvia took the jacket off and hung it over a pine branch on the side of the lean-to.
“This is fucking crazy!” Auda said. “He’s trying to get us naked. We need to get out of here.”
“If he wanted to hurt us, he already would have,” Sylvia said. She took off her shirt and put it down beside her.
“Jesus, leave your bra on at least!” Elizabeth said. She moved to the door to stand guard until Sylvia put the jacket on.
Sylvia shrugged. She put the down jacket on over her bra. “I already feel warmer,” she said. “You can leave if you want.”
“Oh sure!” Elizabeth said. “And leave you behind.”
“I’d go. I’m not crazy. But I don’t remember the way,” Auda said.
“Relax, everybody,” Sylvia said. “It’s going to be fine.”
CHRISTOPHER WATCHED AN ant crawl across the stump. Crossing the rings, one by one. For hours and hours and hours, it felt like, until the ant reached the axe blade, a wall before it. It stopped, crawled to its left, stopped again, and crawled to its right. Christopher urged it to keep on crawling around the axe to continue its journey, but the ant stopped again and reversed itself. Christopher put his hand on the handle of the axe to pull it out of the stump and the ant’s way, but something told him not to. The ant was on its own. Christopher turned away from the stump toward the lean-to, realizing, at last, he was hungry. “You ready?” he called.
“Yup,” Sylvia called back.
He crawled back in past Elizabeth. Elizabeth returned to where she’d been sitting. “I’m not going to eat this alone,” he said, a sergeant again, in full command of his troops—and of himself.
“We brought it for you,” Sylvia said.
He shook his head. “We’re eating together.”
The girls looked at each other. Elizabeth nodded her head. She turned to him. “As long as you go first.”
“All right,” he said.
“Oh crap, we forgot the fork!” Elizabeth said.
“It’s probably my fault,” Auda said. “I should have thought of it.”
“Who cares?” Christopher picked up a slice of turkey, pulled a piece of it off, dipped it in the cranberry sauce, placed it on the lid of the container as if it were a plate, put the rest of the slice back into the container, then picked up some stuffing and put that on top of the slice of turkey. He smiled and said, “Don’t worry, I washed my hands last month,” and put the turkey and stuffing in his mouth. He handed the lid to Sylvia, who tore off a tiny bit off turkey and put it on the lid, then did the same with an even smaller chunk of stuffing before picking both up and putting them in her mouth.
The other two girls followed, but they took big chunks and didn’t bother to use the lid as a plate—to get this over with fast and get out of there, he understood. Because why shouldn’t they be frightened of him? Even though he told jokes about washing his hands once a month. They went round and round, each in turn, until the food was gone. “That was the best Thanksgiving I’ve had in a while,” he said.
Elizabeth said, “We’re glad we came.” She looked at Sylvia and pointed to her wristwatch.
Sylvia nodded. Her wet shirt was still hanging beside her on the side of the lean-to. Elizabeth stared at it. Sylvia turned to him across the circle. “Close your eyes.”
Exaggerating, he closed his eyes, bent his head down, and put both hands over his eyes. His second try to let them know he could be funny when he wanted to be. Sylvia took off the down jacket and her damp shirt off its pine branch hanger, put it on, and shivered again, while Elizabeth put the containers into the backpack. “I’m finished now,” Sylvia said. “You can open your eyes.”
He opened his eyes and raised his head. She handed the down jacket back to him and reached for her raincoat to put it on. He nodded toward the jacket. “Thanks for this. And thanks for the dinner.”
“We’re glad you liked it,” Elizabeth said. “We would have brought you gravy too, but you don’t have a stove to heat it with.” Then, flushing: “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s all right,” he said, softly. “I understand.”
THEY CRAWLED OUT of the lean-to into the smell of woods after a rain. Right away, Auda started to run. Sylvia put her hand on Elizabeth’s elbow, holding her back. “He’s watching,” she said. “Don’t you dare insult him.”
Auda was waiting for them at the edge of the athletic fields. “How did you know he doesn’t have a stove?” she asked Elizabeth. “He has a down jacket and some other stuff.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I just guessed,” Elizabeth said.
“Yeah, but he has a firepit with a grill over it. Didn’t you see?”
“He does? No, I didn’t notice.”
“Oh well,” Sylvia said, careful to avoid Elizabeth’s eyes. “He didn’t seem to mind not having gravy. The cranberry sauce was enough.”
UPON THEIR RETURN, they found Bob Perrine raking leaves off the front lawn of the Head’s House. “Where have you guys been?”
“Just walking around, showing Auda stuff,” Elizabeth said. She wore her raincoat over the backpack. Sylvia had let her carry it because it was light now.
“In all that rain?”
“We left before it started,” Sylvia said.
“Then why are you carrying your raincoats?”
Sylvia could tell by her father’s tone that he wasn’t suspicious. He was just mystified. She realized that if he were less trusting she would not feel the rush of sadness that descended on her while she gazed at his innocent face. She was drifting away from him, traveling to some place she needed to reach, where, because he was still mystified, she could not tolerate his company. She was halfway there, on a path she couldn’t see, and she’d stopped to turn around and wave good bye.
All she had to do to keep him with her was tell him everything. Maybe the school wouldn’t kick her and Elizabeth out for being kind. Maybe it was worth it to take that chance. She drew in a big breath and held it, on the thin edge of telling.
But they’d just brought Christopher his Thanksgiving dinner. Now they were going to tell where he lived? Those woods belonged to somebody. They’d tear down his lean-to and make him leave.
She let out her breath and said, “We took the raincoats just in case,” supplying the only answer that came to mind, and waited for him to wonder aloud why they didn’t wait till after the rain. But he nodded his head, satisfied, and resumed his raking.
THAT NIGHT, IN Sylvia’s room, after Bob and Rachel had gone to bed, Auda said, “I started to figure it out when he thanked you for the down jacket. Because why would he thank you when he had lent it to you?”
“He was thanking her for giving it back,” Elizabeth said.
“Like he thought you’d just walk away and leave him without it? Come on! And then you said he didn’t have a stove when there’s only one reason that you could possibly know. Why are you denying it? You think I would tell?”
“No. If we did it, you wouldn’t tell,” Sylvia said. “But we didn’t.”
“I hate this! I just hate it! You do think I would tell. Otherwise, why would you lie to me? You invite me to go with you. Like you want someone to know. You want to share, not just be alone in it. Then when it gets obvious to that someone, you pretend you don’t know what she’s talking about. That’s crazy. You know what this means? It means you want to get caught, that’s what it means. You want to get caught because it feels crazy to have to sneak around and pretend some burglar stole the stuff, when you did and everybody should be proud of you. The guy’s homeless, he lives in a shack made out of dead trees in the woods because he has post-traumatic whatever from fighting in the stupidest war that ever was, and you bring him clothes and food and you’re supposed to be ashamed?”
“Shh,” Sylvia said. “My mother and father will hear.”
“They should hear. Let’s all three of us go in there and wake them and tell them. I’ll say it was my idea. I’ll tell them it was me who stole the stuff, not you.” Auda shook her head. “What do I care if your mother kicks me out of Miss O’s. I’m only staying the first semester anyway. My school in Germany would think I’m a hero. I’d probably get some kind of dumb prize named after some duke or other that somebody cooked up to salve his conscience. I live in Germany, remember. We’re still living down the Holocaust.” She paused. “And you need to stop going out there. He told us right to our faces he’s not in the best of shape. He was trying to warn us he’s crazy.”
“I thought about telling this afternoon when my father asked us where we’d been,” Sylvia said.
“And?”
“I decided not to. Because what would happen to him?”
“Somebody would take care of him.”
“Bullshit,” Elizabeth said. “Why do you think he’s living in the woods? And guess what? Where he’s living is on school property.”
“What!” Sylvia said. “School property! It can’t be. That lean-to is miles away from here.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “I did the research. I thought I should find out. I told Mabel Walters—that’s our business manager, Auda—that I wanted to find out how much land the school owned that it could sell to raise money for financial aid, and she got all excited and told me to bring it up in Morning Meeting and keep on talking about it until something happens. She showed me the deed and the map. She said, ‘I’ve been saying for years we are a school, not a real estate company. Why are we hanging on to all this land?’”
“But suppose they do sell it?” Auda said.
“Are you kidding? It will take the board of trustees about seven hundred more years and two thousand nervous breakdowns to even be able to think about selling. You’ve read the brochure: Surrounded by beauty, blah blah blah. I told Mabel I’d bring it up at an opportune time. Meantime, the school owns miles and miles beyond the actual campus. We tell Sylvia’s mom there’s a guy living on school property—how’s she supposed to know he’s not crazy, maybe even has a gun? And how does she know other homeless people won’t decide it’s a good place to live and there will be a great big encampment? Can you imagine? Going to the bathroom all over the place? She’ll have to bring policemen in to kick them off. Either get rid of Christopher or pretend she doesn’t know he’s there. That’s her choice. Sylvia doesn’t want to do that to her mom.”
“I can speak for myself,” Sylvia said. “But Elizabeth’s right. You want to get Christopher out of his lean-to and us kicked out of our school, go right ahead.”
Before Auda could answer, they heard footsteps approaching down the hall. Seconds later, the door opened. Sylvia’s mom, barefoot in pajamas, said, “I can’t sleep either. How about some pancakes?” The girls didn’t answer. They had expected her to urge them to go to bed. “Pancakes in the middle of the night,” she urged. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Auda was the first to recover. “What a great idea!”
“Yeah, I’m starving,” Elizabeth said.
“Wonderful! See you downstairs.”
THERE WAS A gas fireplace in the huge kitchen, which was almost never lighted. But that night, Sylvia’s mom struck the inaugural fire, after first searching through almost all the cabinets before she found the remote to light it with—as if having a fire in the hearth, even a fake one, was critical to this one occasion. Indeed, it did give off a warm yellow glow. Auda kept the conversation going—mostly about the mix of ingredients and what they would be cooking in the middle of the night if this were happening in Germany. Sylvia was grateful for this. They turned on the oven and put the cooked pancakes in it to keep them warm until there was a huge stack of them, and the kitchen smelled of sweetness and maple syrup, which they warmed in the microwave. When the pancakes were all done, they carried a platter of them to a big leather sofa which faced the fire and they sat there, snuggled close together, and started to eat.
Sylvia should have been shivering with happiness and pride in her family at such an intimate, cozy moment. But she felt again the distance she’d felt when her dad had asked, “Why the raincoats?” There was a removal—as if she were remembering what was happening while it still was. She ate her pancakes robotically, feeling a weird nostalgia and amazement. She was now a guest, like Elizabeth, and maybe even Auda. She pushed the thought away.
But then she heard her dad’s steps on the stairs and he appeared, rubbing his eyes in his old rumpled pajamas and those raggedy slippers she’d put in his stocking ten million years ago, and said, “I smell pancakes,” and precisely because he’d completed and perfected what was happening, the feeling that she had separated from her family returned with even more intensity. She couldn’t wait until she could get away and be alone in her own bed.