The Nix

1

FAYE HEARS THE CRACK of metal and knows work is being done. Metal is moved and dropped, battered and bent; metal collides with metal and sings. She cannot see the ChemStar factory but she can see its glow, the coppery light beyond the backyard oaks. She pretends sometimes it’s not a factory over there but an army. An ancient army — the light from torches, the noise from brutal weapons at forge. This is what it sounds like to her, like war.

She thought maybe tonight — because of what happened, what is on television at this very moment — the works would go quiet. But no; ChemStar, even on this night, roars. She sits in the backyard and listens. She stares into the thick gloom. Her father is over there right now, working the night shift. She hopes he’s not watching the news, hopes he’s keeping his focus and concentration. For the ChemStar factory is a deadly place. She toured it once and was horrified at the masks and gloves and thorough safety demonstration, the emergency fountain for the washing of eyes, the way her breathing seemed interrupted, how her scalp itched. She’s heard stories of men spending months in the hospital after some stupid ChemStar mistake. Whenever she drives past the factory she sees that logo with the interlocking C and S, and the sign: CHEMSTAR — MAKING OUR DREAMS COME TRUE. Not even her uncles will work there. They prefer the steelworks, the nitrogen plant, the fertilizer plant, the corn plant, or they cross the river to Illinois to take shifts making Scotch tape. Not the tape itself but the glue that makes it sticky. In big vats of milky foam, stirred and shipped out in oil drums. How it appears on Scotch tape, no longer liquid but rather perfectly adhesive, is a mystery. How it appears on shelves, packaged so pleasingly, sent to every store in America — that’s another factory’s job, another set of thick, itinerant men. No wonder her uncles never talk about what they make. Such is the way of commerce. Such is the way of this strange little river town. There’s something always eluding her. She can see the pieces but not the whole.

It is April, four months before her first college classes begin, and she sits in her backyard, and inside the house the television howls its news: Martin Luther King has been killed in Memphis. Chicago is a rage tonight — of rioters, looters, arsonists. Pittsburgh, too. And Detroit, Newark. Mayhem in San Francisco. Fires three blocks from the White House.

Faye had watched until she could no longer bear it, then came out here, into the backyard and the wide-open night and the sounds of ChemStar rumbling somewhere distant and loud, the whistles and cranes and crankshafts, the cascade of metal as a train abruptly lurches forward, how commerce keeps buzzing, even tonight. All these men who won’t know a thing about the riots, she wonders why they’re still working. Who needs chemicals this much? A factory is a terrifying, relentless thing.

She hears the patio door open, and footsteps — Faye’s mother, coming with another update.

“It’s anarchy,” she says, exasperated. She’s been glued to Cronkite all night long. “They’re tearing up their own neighborhood.”

The Chicago police have, apparently, sealed off the ghetto. Molotov cocktails are hurled into liquor stores. Snipers on the tops of buildings. Cars smashed on the street. Traffic lights wrenched down and twisted like tree branches. Bricks thrown through windows.

“What good will it do?” her mom says. “All this destruction? With everybody seeing on TV? Do these rioters really think this is going to make anyone sympathetic to their cause?”

Martin Luther King was shot in the neck while standing on his hotel balcony — every reporter and anchor on TV describes this exactly the same way, using the same words. Words that nobody’s ever thought about have popped out of ordinary language and become incantations. Lorraine Motel. Remington rifle. Mulberry Street. (And how could the shot have been fired across something as wonderful-sounding as Mulberry Street?) Police are on the lookout. Massive manhunt. Early thirties, slender build. White male. The man in room five.

“Probably just an excuse for these people to do whatever they want,” her mom says. “Running around with their shirts off looting stores like: Hey, let’s get a new stereo without having to pay for it.”

Faye knows her mom’s interest in the rioters is an incidental thing. Mostly what she’s out here to do is convince Faye not to go to college in Chicago. The riot has simply given her a delicious new angle. She wants Faye to stay home and go to the nice little two-year school the next town over, and she reminds Faye of this every chance she gets, a more or less constant needling attack that began when Faye was accepted, a few months ago, to Chicago Circle.

“Listen,” her mom says, “I’m all for civil rights, but you can’t be some kind of animal destroying innocent people’s private property.”

Chicago Circle is the catchy name for the brand-new university in downtown Chicago: the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. The promotional brochures that came with Faye’s acceptance letter spoke of Circle as the UCLA of the Midwest. It was the world’s first thoroughly modern campus, the brochures said, built in just the last few years, conceptually groundbreaking, a campus unlike any other: created as a single vast system using the most fashionable principles of social design and engineering; buildings constructed from the most indestructible materials; a raised walkway, one story up, to get you from building to building with a bird’s-eye view, a kind of pedestrian expressway in the sky; innovative architecture that included field theory mathematics, which as far as Faye could tell involved overlaying squares on top of each other and rotating each square slightly to achieve a many-angled, multifaceted design that looked, from above, like a honeycomb. This was an advance at least as important as the flying buttress or the geodesic dome, the brochure said, and it was all part of the school’s overriding mission: to build the Campus of the Future.

Faye had applied to the school in secret.

“If these people weren’t so destructive and angry,” her mom says, “I think regular people would be more likely to support them. Why don’t they go out and organize voters? Propose some solutions instead of just smashing everything?”

Faye looks out across the backyard to ChemStar’s distant glow. Her father would be working now, probably ignoring the news of the world. The one time he spoke on the matter of college was when Faye showed him Circle’s acceptance letter and brochure. He was the first person she told. After a brief private celebration in her bedroom, she came to him in the living room, where he was reading the newspaper in his easy chair. She handed him the documents. He looked at her and then at the papers. Read through them silently, slowly accommodating this new information. Faye was ready to burst. She waited for him to praise this extraordinary thing she’d done. But when he finished reading, he simply handed back the papers and said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Faye.” Then he opened the newspaper and gave it a shake to snap out the wrinkles. “And don’t tell anyone,” he said. “They’ll think you’re bragging.”

“It’s chaos in the streets!” her mom says. She’s getting really roiled now. Sometimes lately it’s like she’s a top capable of spinning herself. “I don’t even know what they’re fighting for! These people. What do they want?”

“Probably, for starters, less murder,” Faye says. “That’s just a guess.”

Her mom gives her a long, measured look. “When John Kennedy was shot we didn’t riot.”

Faye laughs. “Yeah, because those things are exactly equivalent.”

“What’s gotten into you tonight?”

“Nothing, Mom. Sorry.”

“I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be.”

“I’m worried about you going to Chicago,” she says, finally coming around to her point. “It’s just — it’s so far away. And so big. And so full of, you know, this urban element.”

By which she means Negroes.

“I don’t want to scare you,” she says, “but think about it. One night you’re coming home from class and they snatch you and take you into a dark alley and rape you and shove a gun in your mouth so hard you can’t even pray to God.”

“Okay!” Faye says, and she stands up. “Thanks, Mom. Great talking to you.”

“Plus, what if you have an episode while you’re away? What are you going to do if I’m not around?”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Faye.”

“Nowhere, Mom. I just need to take a drive. Clear my head.”

Which is a lie. She’s going to Henry’s, of course. Good, gentle Henry. She will go to him tonight, before her mom can scare her even more with tales of violence and rape. She takes the car and drives out of her little neighborhood, a parcel of small bungalows called Vista Hills (but this is Iowa, and that name has always confused her, the Vista Hills sign showing a wide panorama atop mountains that nowhere in this state actually exist). Then out onto the main boulevard, past the Dairy-Sweet Good-Food, the Dollar General, Schwingle’s Pharmacy. She drives past the Quik Mart station, across the street from the Spotless Touchless, past the gray water tower that some of the old folks call the green tower because it was green many years ago, before the sun bleached it, and Faye wonders if she should pity those who live so narrowly inside their memories. Then past the VFW and the restaurant named Restaurant with its sign that never changes: ALL YOU CAN EAT WALLEYE. FRIDAY, SATURDAY, AND WEDNESDAY.

She turns onto the highway and sees in the distance, through a clearing in the trees, what she playfully calls the lighthouse: It’s really a tower at the nitrogen plant where gas is vented and burned, where one can see, at night, a blue flame. So it looks like a lighthouse, sure, but it’s also a joke about geography: Iowa, after all, is landlocked for a billion miles. This is the way to Henry’s. She drives the empty streets, the night like any other night except for what’s on TV. The catastrophe on the news means people won’t notice her — they won’t be on their porches, in open garages, won’t say: There goes Faye. I wonder where she’s heading. Faye is aware of the attention, the neighborly curiosity, the unyielding abstract gaze of the town, the way everything sort of shifted when word got out about Circle. People at church who previously had no outward opinion of Faye whatsoever suddenly began saying things that felt hostile and passive-aggressive: “I suppose you’ll forget about us when you’re off in the big city,” or “I guess you won’t be coming back to our boring little town,” or “I imagine when you’re a big shot you won’t have time for little old me,” and so on. Things that seemed to have an ugly edge to them, like: You think you’re better than us?

The answer being, in fact, Yes.

On her desk back home is a letter from Circle — so official-looking with its logo and heavy paper — informing her of her scholarship. The first girl from her high school to win a college scholarship. The first girl ever. How could she not feel better than everyone else? Being better than everyone else was the whole point!

Faye knows it is wrong to think this, for these thoughts are not humble; they are arrogant and vain and choked with pride, that most hazy of sins. Everyone proud of heart is an abomination, the pastor said one Sunday, and Faye in the pew nearly crying because she did not know how to be good. It seemed so hard to be good, and yet the punishments were so vast. “If you’re a sinner,” the pastor said, “not only will you be punished but your kids will be punished, and their kids will be punished, to the third and fourth generation.”

She hopes the pastor doesn’t find out she visited Henry without permission.

Or that she was so sneaky about it. That she drove without headlights while approaching his family’s farm. That she parked the car at a distance and walked the rest of the way. That she crouched on the gravel road, let her eyes adjust to the dark, watched for the dogs, spied on the house. That there was some sly maneuver to get his attention without stirring his parents: tossing pebbles at his window. Teenagers have their ways.

The town knows about them, of course. The town knows about everyone. And they approve. They wink at Faye and ask her questions about weddings. “Won’t be long now,” they say. It seems obvious they would prefer she marry than go to college.

Henry is kind, quiet, well-mannered. His family’s farm is large and well-run, respectable. A good Lutheran, a hard worker, his body is built like cement. She feels his muscles tense when she touches him, that nervous boy voltage that gathers up and breaks him. She doesn’t love him, or rather she doesn’t know if she loves him, or maybe she loves him but she’s not in love with him. She hates these distinctions, these tiny matters of vocabulary that, unfortunately, matter so much. “Let’s go for a walk,” Henry says. His farm is bordered on one side by the nitrogen plant, on the other by the Mississippi River. They walk in that direction, to the riverbank. He does not seem surprised to see her. He takes her hand.

“Have you been watching the news?” he says.

“Yes.”

His hand is rough and calloused, especially on the palm, above each knuckle, where Henry’s body connects with the various implements important to farm labor: shovel, spade, hoe, broom, the long and finicky stick shift of the John Deere tractor. Even a baseball bat would cause such marks, if it were used as he uses it, to kill the abundant sparrows that nest in the corn crib. It’s too small in there for buckshot, he explained to her once. It could ricochet. You could lose an eye. So you have to go in with a baseball bat and take the birds out of the air. She asked him never to tell that story again.

“Are you still going to Chicago?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says.

The ground grows spongier the closer they are to the river. She can hear the whoosh of each small wave. Behind them the lighthouse burns a bright azure blue, like a splinter of daytime that got stuck here through the night.

“I don’t want you to go,” Henry says.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

When they’re holding hands, he’ll often rub his fingers on the soft skin between her thumb and index finger, or on the even softer skin of her wrist. Faye wonders if he does it because otherwise he can’t feel anything. Not beneath so many layers of thick, dead skin. It’s the friction that tells him his fingers are where he thinks they are, and Faye worries what will happen when he begins reaching for other things, for new things. She’s waiting for it — it’s inescapable — waiting for him to make a move beneath her clothes. Will they hurt, those hard, impenetrable hands of his?

“If you go to Chicago,” Henry says, “I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“I won’t,” he says, and he squeezes her hand hard and stops walking and turns to her, theatrically — seriously and profoundly — like there’s something of great weight he must tell her. Henry always has had a bit of the melodramatic in him. Teenage boys are like that sometimes, the emotions they feel blown so tremendously out of proportion.

“Faye,” he says, “I’ve made a decision.”

“Okay.”

“I have decided”—and here he pauses, makes sure she’s listening with appropriate attentiveness, feels assured that she is and so continues—“if you go to Chicago, I’m joining the army.”

And here she laughs — a little bark she tries to hold back but cannot.

“I’m serious!” he says.

“Henry, please.”

“I’ve decided.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“The army is honorable,” he says. “That’s an honorable thing.”

“But why on earth would you do that?”

“I’ll be lonely if I don’t. It’s the only way I could forget you.”

“Forget me? Henry, it’s college. I’m not dying. I’ll come back.”

“You’ll be so far away.”

“You could visit.”

“And you’ll meet other boys.”

“Other boys. Is that what this is about?”

“If you go to Chicago, I’m joining the army.”

“But I don’t want you to join the army.”

“And I don’t want you to go to Chicago.” He crosses his arms. “My mind is made up.”

“They could send you to Vietnam.”

“Yeah.”

“Henry, you could die.”

“If I did, I guess it’d be your fault.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Stay here and be with me,” he says.

“That is not fair.”

“Stay here where it’s safe.”

She feels the injustice of this, and she’s angry about it, but she also feels, strangely, relief. The riots, the looting, all the horrible things on television tonight, and her mother, and the town: If she stays here with Henry, they need no longer terrorize her. Things would be so much easier if she stayed, so much cleaner.

Why did she come here? She regrets it now. She regrets summoning Henry under the pale blue flame of the lighthouse. She hasn’t told him, but there’s another reason she calls that thing a lighthouse. It’s because a lighthouse is two-faced, and this is how she feels each time she visits. A lighthouse is both an invitation and a warning. A lighthouse says Welcome home. But next to that, right after that, it also says Danger.

2

IT’S A SATURDAY NIGHT late in April 1968—the night of Faye’s senior prom. Henry picks her up at six o’clock with a rose and a corsage. His hands fumble as he pins the flowers to her gown. He pulls on the fabric near her chest as if he were pantomiming, right there before her parents, all the awkward gestures of teenage groping. Yet her mother takes photographs, says Smile. And Faye guesses this corsage business was invented by parents — very protective parents wanting to ensure that their daughters’ suitors were not too familiar with the garments and breasts of women. Clumsiness is probably the best thing here — it signals little danger of bastard children. And Henry is a man inept with flowers. He cannot get the corsage pinned correctly. He grazes the needle across her skin and leaves a thin red line on her breastbone. It reminds her of the horizontal bar in the letter A.

“It’s my scarlet letter!” she says, laughing.

“What?” Henry says.

“My scarlet dash, actually.”

Everything is easier when they dance. She takes to the floor and does the Twist. She does the Madison. She does the Mashed Potato and the Jerk and the Watusi. Faye’s teenage years have been consistently buoyed by new dance crazes that appear every few weeks on the Top 40. The Monkey. The Dog. The Locomotion. Songs and dances that enact a perfect circle — the song tells you everything you need to know about the dance, and the dance gives reason for the song. When Marvin Gaye sang “Hitch Hike,” she knew exactly what to do. When Jackie Lee sang “The Duck,” Faye could do it even before she saw it on TV.

So here she is, staring at the floor, doing the Duck in a blue charmeuse prom dress — lift the left leg, then the right leg, then flap your arms, then repeat. That’s what goes for dancing these days. Every prom and homecoming and Valentine’s Day dance is like this, the deejay playing a song that tells you precisely what to do. The big new thing this year is Archie Bell and the Drells singing “Tighten Up”—shuffle to your left, then shuffle to your right. “Tighten it up now, everything will be outta sight.” Somewhere nearby Henry is dancing too, but Faye doesn’t notice. These are dances meant to be done alone. When you do the Freddie, the Chicken, the Twist, even on a crowded dance floor, you do them by yourself. They aren’t allowed to touch each other and so they dance alone. They perform the dances that fit exactly what their chaperones want of them. They are told how to dance and they respond like proper bureaucrats, is what Faye thinks now as she watches all her classmates. They are happy, satisfied, soon-to-be-graduates, pro-authoritarian, their parents support the war, they have color televisions. When Chubby Checker says, “Take me by my little hand and go like this,” he is telling her generation how to respond to what is happening to them — the war, the draft, the sexual prohibitions — he is telling them to obey.

But then at the end of the night, the deejay announces he has time for one more song—“This one’s very special,” he says — and so Faye and Henry and the other students move slowly back to the dance floor, feet tired from all the shuffling and twisting, and the deejay puts on a new record and Faye hears the needle catch, the scratch before it falls into the groove, the static, and then comes this song.

It doesn’t even sound like music at first; more like some crude primeval screeching, the dense noise of strings all playing dissonant and muddy — a violin maybe, and some freakish guitar repeatedly striking the same chord — the slow, monotonous beat of a bass drum, the insistent reverb, the singer not actually singing but chanting. Faye can’t make out the words, can’t identify a chorus, can find no beat to dance to. A dreadful sexy moaning, that’s what it is. A phrase pops out: “Whiplash girlchild in the dark.” What does that even mean? Around her, the students move with the music, move as sluggishly and languidly as the music itself: They stagger toward each other, touch each other, grab each other by the waist and squeeze their bodies together. It is the slowest dance Faye has ever seen. She looks at Henry, who stands there worried and helpless while around him dancers wiggle like giant worms. How do they know what to do? The song gives no instructions. Faye loves it. She grabs Henry by the back of the neck and pulls him into her. Their bodies slap together. He stands there bewildered as Faye lifts her arms over her head and closes her eyes and turns her face to the ceiling and sways.

The chaperones, meanwhile, are wary. They don’t know what is happening but they are sure it’s wrong. They force the deejay to stop the song and the dancers groan. They walk back to their tables.

“What were you doing out there?” Henry asks.

“Dancing,” Faye says.

“What dance is it? What’s it called?”

“Nothing. It’s not called anything. It’s just, you know, it’s just dancing.”

Afterward, Henry takes her to the park, a quiet neighborhood park near her house, unlit, private, one of the few places in this small town to be alone. She expects this. Henry is a boy who believes in romantic gestures. He pays for candlelit dinners and buys candy in heart-shaped boxes. He shows up at her house smiling like a jack-o’-lantern handing her fat bunches of lilies and irises. He leaves roses in her car. (That the roses shrivel in the heat and die, she never tells him.) Henry doesn’t know the meaning of the flowers, the differences between red roses and white, between a lily and an iris. This is a language he does not speak. He does not know how to love Faye creatively, and so he does what everyone else in high school does: candles and chocolates and flowers. He treats love like a balloon, like it is all a very simple matter of accumulation, just adding more air. And so the flowers keep coming. And the dinners. And the love poems that appear in her locker from time to time, typewritten, unsigned—

I love you with all my love

more than the stars above

“Did you get my poem?” he’ll ask, and she’ll say “Yes, thank you,” and smile and look at the ground and cross her feet and hope he doesn’t ask if she liked it. Because she never likes it. How could she like it when in her free time she’s reading Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg? How ugly Henry seems compared to Allen Ginsberg! How simple and stupid, how quaint and provincial. She knows Henry wants to impress her and woo her, but the more of these poems she reads, the more she feels tranquilized, like her mind is sinking slowly into sand.

When you are away

I have the worst day

Because I can’t hold you

I feel real sad too

She can’t bring herself to criticize him. She’ll only nod and say, “I got the poem. Thank you,” and Henry will make that face — that grinning self-satisfied face, that triumphant face, that big stupid muffin face — which makes her so angry she wants to tell him cruel things:

That it would be a better poem if he wrote it in meter.

Or if he owned a dictionary.

Or if he knew more multisyllabic words.

(And how awful of her to even think that!)

No, he is a nice enough boy, a good enough boy. Good-hearted, bighearted. He is kind. Gentle. Everyone says she should marry him.

“Faye,” he says as they sit on the merry-go-round, “I think we’ve come a long way, you know, in our relationship.” And she nods but does not know exactly what he means. He has certainly given her lots of flowers and poems and dinners and chocolates, but he’s never told her a secret. She feels she knows nothing about him, nothing more than what everyone else knows: Henry, whose family owns the farm by the nitrogen plant, who wants to be a veterinarian, the football team’s mediocre tight end, the baseball team’s backup third baseman, the basketball team’s third-string forward, who on weekends fishes on the Mississippi and plays with his dogs, who sits quiet in class and needs her tutoring for algebra — Faye knows his résumé but not his secrets. He never tells her anything important. He never explains why, for example, when he kisses her he doesn’t act like a boy should, doesn’t try the things boys are supposed to try. She’s heard the stories — famous in high school — of boys who will do anything if you let them. Who will go all the way if you let them. And anywhere! In the backseats of cars or on the baseball field at night, in dirt or grass or mud or whatever cheap and lucky spot they find themselves when they find a girl who doesn’t say no. And the girls who let them, who invite it, who aren’t going steady, their reputations are massacred with that one whispered syllable: slut. The fastest word in the language. It moves through school like a plague. One has to be careful.

So she’s been waiting for Henry to try it — paw at her belt, stick his hands somewhere private — so she can protest and defend her chastity and he can try again next time, try harder and better, and she can protest more until finally, after enough protesting, after enough of saying no, she will have demonstrated that she is virtuous and chaste and good, not easy, not a slut. And then finally she can say yes. She is waiting for this, the whole ritual, but instead Henry only kisses her, smashes his face against hers and stops. It goes like this every time. They sit together at night on the riverbank or in the park and listen to the sound of motorcycles on the highway, the squeaks of the swing set, and Faye picks at the rust on the merry-go-round and waits. And nothing has ever happened, not until tonight, this night after the prom, when Henry is so full of ceremony it seems he’s memorized his lines.

“Faye, I think we’ve come a long way. And you’re very important to me and special. And it would make me feel honored and happy and really happy…” He stutters, stops, he is nervous, and she nods and touches his arm lightly with her fingertips.

“I mean,” he says, “it would make me feel honored and happy and really lucky if you, you know, to school, from now on,” and he pauses, gathers his courage, “if you can, please, wear my jacket. And my ring.”

And he exhales greatly, spent from the effort, relieved. He can’t even look at her now. He stares at his feet and twists his shoelaces tightly around his fingers.

She finds him adorable in this moment, in his embarrassment and fear, in how much power she has over him. She says yes. Of course she says yes. And when they stand up to leave, they kiss. And the kiss feels different this time, feels like it is a greater and more powerful thing, a kiss with meaning. They both must know they’ve crossed a boundary: the class ring is a harbinger, everyone knows that. An engagement ring almost always follows, and these symbols make their coupling official and sanctioned and certified and good. Whatever a girl might do in the backseat of a car, she is protected if she wears the boy’s decorations. These things insulate her. They guard her. She is immune from insult. A girl is not a slut if she has a ring.

And Henry must sense it too, that they now have permission to do as they want, because he pulls Faye closer, kisses her harder, presses his body tightly to hers. She feels something then, some blunt and rigid thing pressing into her belly. It’s him, of course, Henry. He is pushing up through his thin gray slacks. He is shaking a little and kissing her and he is hard as stone. It surprises her, how solid a boy can be. Like a broom handle! It’s all she can think about. She is aware she is still kissing him but she is doing it automatically — all her attention is on these few square inches, that obscene pressure. She thinks she can feel his pulse through it and she starts sweating, grabbing him tighter to tell him it is all okay. He runs his hands over her back and makes little squeaking sounds; he is jittery, jumpy; he is waiting for her. It is her turn to do something. His was an opening gambit, pressing himself so obviously into her. It is a negotiation. Now it is her move.

She decides to be bold, to do what she’d insinuated during that final dance at the prom. With one hand she pulls on the waistband of his slacks, pulls hard enough that there is enough space for her other hand. Henry twitches then, and his body goes tense, and everything about him stops moving for a split second. Then it all happens so fast. She drives her hand down as he leaps back. Her fingers begin to grasp him — she feels him for the smallest moment, and knows that he is warm and solid but also soft and delicately fleshy — and she has just begun to understand this when he jumps back and turns slightly away from her and yells, “What are you doing?”

“I’m, I don’t know—”

“You can’t do that!”

“I’m sorry, Henry, I’m—”

“God, Faye!” And he turns from her then and adjusts his pants, jams his hands in his pockets and walks away. He paces from one side of the swing set to the other. She watches him. It’s hard to believe that his face can go so cold so quickly.

“Henry?” she says. She wants him to look at her, but he doesn’t. “Henry, I’m sorry.”

“Forget it,” he says. He digs his foot into the sand, wiggles his shoe until it’s buried, then does it again, getting his nice black dress loafers all dirty.

She sits again on the merry-go-round. “Come back,” she says.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Faye.”

He is an even-keeled boy, mild and modest; he must have frightened himself, reacting the way he did. And now he is trying to make it go away, to erase what happened. Faye sits on the merry-go-round and says, “It’s okay, Henry.”

“No, it’s not,” he says, his back to her, hands pocketed, shoulders hunched up. He is a closed fist, all tense and curled in on himself. “It’s just…You can’t do that.”

“Okay.”

“It’s not right,” he says, and she considers this. Picks off red flakes of rust and listens to his feet crunching the sand as he paces and she stares at his back and finally says: “Why?”

“You shouldn’t want to. It’s not what a girl like you is supposed to want.”

“A girl like me?”

“Never mind.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“Forget it.”

And then Henry is gone. He sits on the merry-go-round and shuts everything off, becomes a silent, cold lump. He crosses his arms and stares out into the night. He is punishing her. And it makes her furious, makes her begin trembling. She can feel a nausea beginning in her gut, an agitation in her chest — her heart beating, the little hairs on her neck standing up. She can feel something coming, a familiar wave of sweat and dizziness. She is lightheaded suddenly, and hot and tingly and a little outside herself, as if she is floating above the merry-go-round, looking down, watching the buzzing of her own body. Can Henry see it? The wrecking ball is on its way — the sobbing and choking, the shakes. This has happened before.

“Take me home,” she whispers through clenched teeth.

Who knows if he understands what is happening, but Henry looks at her then and seems to soften. “Listen, Faye—”

“Take me home now.”

“I’m sorry Faye, I shouldn’t have—”

“Now, Henry.”

So he takes her home, and for the whole terrible ride they don’t speak. Faye squeezes the leather seats and tries to fight off the feeling she is dying. When he stops in front of her house, she feels like a ghost, flying away from him without making a sound.

Faye’s mother knows right away. “You’re having an attack,” she says, and Faye nods, wide-eyed, panicky. Her mother takes her to her room and undresses her and puts her in bed and gives her something to drink, dabs a cold washcloth on her forehead and says “It’s okay, it’s all okay” in her quiet and sweet and hushed motherly voice. Faye holds her knees to her chest and sobs and gulps for air while her mother runs her fingers through her hair and whispers “You’re not dying, you’re not going to die” as she has all through Faye’s childhood. And they stay that way until finally the episode passes. Faye calms down. She begins breathing again.

“Don’t tell Dad,” she says.

Her mother nods. “What if this happens in Chicago, Faye? What will you do?”

Her mother squeezes her hand and leaves to fetch another washcloth. And Faye thinks about Henry then. She thinks, almost gladly: Now we have a secret.

3

FAYE DID NOT ALWAYS SUFFER SO. She was once a normally social, normally functioning kid. Then one day something happened to change all that.

It was the day she learned about the house spirit.

It was 1958, a late-summer barbecue, light fading purpley in the west, mosquitoes and lightning bugs, kids playing tag or watching the bug zapper do its frightening business, men and women outside smoking and drinking and leaning against fence posts or each other, and Faye’s father grilling food for a few neighbors, a few guys from work.

This was all his wife’s idea.

Because Frank Andresen had a reputation: He was a little intimidating, a little standoffish. There was the matter of his accent, sure, that he was a foreigner. But more than that was his manner — melancholy, stoic, inward. The neighbors would see Frank outside gardening and ask how he was doing and he wouldn’t say a word, just simply wave with this expression on his face like he had a broken rib he wasn’t telling them about. Eventually they stopped asking.

His wife insisted: We will invite people over, we will let them get to know you, we will have fun.

So here they were, all these neighbor guys in his backyard, having a conversation about some sports team Frank knew nothing about. He could only listen and stand on the conversation’s periphery, because even after eighteen years in the States there were still some words that eluded him, and many of them were sports-related. He listened and tried to have the correct reactions at the appropriate moments and, thus distracted, he let the hot dogs burn.

He motioned to Faye, who was playing tag with two neighbor boys, and when she came to him he said, “Go inside and fetch some hot dogs.” Then he leaned over her and whispered: “From downstairs.”

By which he meant the bomb shelter.

The immaculately cleaned, brilliantly lit, fully stocked bomb shelter that he spent the previous three summers building. He had constructed it at night — only at night, so the neighbors wouldn’t see. He would leave and come back with a truck full of supplies. One night it was two thousand nails. Another it was eleven bags of concrete. He had this kit that showed him how to do it. He would pour the concrete into plastic molds that Faye loved touching because while the concrete was hardening it was also hot. Only once did Faye’s mother ask him about it, early on, asked him why on earth he was building a bomb shelter in their basement. He stared at her with these horrible hollow eyes and gave her this face like Don’t make me say it out loud. Then he went back to the truck.

Faye said yes, she would fetch the hot dogs, and when her father’s back was turned she ran to the two neighbor boys and, because she was eight years old and desperate to be liked, she said, “You want to see something?” To which the answer was of course yes. And so with the two boys Faye entered the house and took them downstairs. Her father had dug up the basement’s stone floor so that the shelter looked like a submarine surfacing right out of the ground. A rectangular concrete box with steel-reinforced walls that could withstand their own house collapsing on top of it. A small door with a padlock — the combination being Faye’s birth date — that Faye opened and took the four steps down into the structure and flipped on the lights. The effect here was like a single aisle from the grocery store had been magically transported into their basement: the brilliant white fluorescents, the cans of food that lined the walls. The boys gasped.

“What is this?” one of them said.

“Our bomb shelter.”

“Wow.”

Shelves crowded with cardboard boxes and wooden crates and mason jars and cans all turned identically label-out: tomatoes, beans, dehydrated milk. Ten-gallon jugs of water, dozens of them, stacked in a pyramid near the door. Radios, bunk beds, oxygen tanks, batteries, boxes of cornflakes stockpiled in the corner, a television with a cord that disappeared into the wall. A hand crank on the wall labeled AIR INTAKE. The boys looked around astonished. They pointed to a locked wooden cabinet with a frosted glass cover and asked what was in there.

“Guns,” Faye said.

“Do you have the key?”

“No.”

“Too bad.”

Upstairs, the boys were delirious. They could not contain their excitement.

“Dad!” they said, running crazily into the backyard. “Dad! Do you know what they have in the basement? A bomb shelter!”

And Frank looked at Faye so hard that she couldn’t bear to meet his eyes.

“A bomb shelter?” said one of the fathers. “No kidding?”

“Not really,” Frank said. “Just supply closet. Like a wine cellar.”

“No it isn’t,” said one of the boys. “It’s huge! And it’s concrete and full of food and guns.”

“Is that so?”

“Can we build one?” said the other boy.

“You get one of those kits?” said the father. “Or did you do it yourself?”

Frank seemed to consider whether he wanted to engage this question, then softened a bit and stared at the ground.

“Bought the plans,” he said, “then built it myself.”

“How big is it?”

“Thirty by twelve.”

“So that fits, what, how many people?”

“Six.”

“Great! Russians drop the bomb, we’ll know where to go.”

“Funny,” Frank said. His back was turned now. He placed the new hot dogs on the grill, moving them around with long metal tongs.

“I’ll bring the beer,” the father said. “Hear that, kids? We’re all saved.”

“Sorry,” said Frank, “no.”

“We’ll bunk it up for a few weeks. Be like we’re in the service again.”

“No can do.”

“Aw, c’mon. What are you going to do, turn us away?”

“I’m all full.”

“It’ll fit six. You said so yourself. I only count three of you.”

“No telling how long we’ll be down there.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am.”

“You’re pulling my leg. You’d let us in, right? I mean, if there really was a bomb. You’d let us in.”

“Listen to me,” Frank said. He put down the tongs and turned around and put his hands on his hips. “If anyone comes near that door, I will shoot them. You understand? I will shoot them in the head.”

And everyone was quiet. Faye heard nothing but the air hissing out of the sizzling meat.

“Okay, jeez,” the father said. “I was joking, Frank. Settle down.”

And he took his beer and went into the house. And Faye and everyone else followed, leaving Frank out there alone. She watched him that night from a dark upstairs window as he stood over the grill and silently let the meat blacken and burn again.

This would be an enduring memory of her father, an image that captured something important about the man: alone and angry and hunched over with his arms on the table like he was praying to it.

He stayed out there the rest of the evening. Faye was put to bed. Her mom gave her a bath and tucked her in and filled her glass with water. It was always there, that glass, in case she got thirsty in the night. A short, wide tumbler, adult-size with a thick base. She liked to hold it on hot summer evenings, wrap her hands around it and feel its solidity and heaviness. She liked to press it against her cheek and feel its smooth crystalline coldness. And this was what she was doing, holding the glass to her face, when, after a brief and gentle knock, after the door swung slowly and silently open, her father appeared in her bedroom.

“I have something for you,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small glass figurine: an old man, white beard, sitting with his legs around a bowl of porridge, wooden spoon in his hand, wrinkly face full of satisfaction.

“It’s very old,” he said.

He handed it to Faye and she studied it, ran her fingers over it. It was hollow and thin and brittle, the colors yellowed, about the size of a small teacup. The figure looked like a smaller, thinner Santa Claus, though with a very different attitude: Whereas Santa always seemed so animated and cheerful, this thing seemed nasty. It was the ugly smirk on his face, maybe, and the way he held the bowl so guardedly, like a dog tensing over food.

“What is it?” Faye asked, and her father said it was a house spirit, a ghost that usually hid in basements, back in old Norway, in a time more enchanted than this one, it seemed to Faye, a time when everything in the world must have been paranormal: spirits of the air, sea, hills, wilderness, house. You had to look for ghosts everywhere back then. Anything in the world might have been another thing incognito. A leaf, a horse, a stone. You could not take them literally, the things of the world. You always had to find the real truth the first truth concealed.

“Did you have one in your basement?” Faye asked. “On the farm?”

Her father brightened as he thought of it. He always brightened at the thought of the old house. He was a serious man who only seemed to cheer up when describing that place: a wide salmon-red three-story wooden house on the edge of town, a view of the ocean out back, a long pier where he fished on quiet afternoons, a field in the front bounded by spruce trees, a pen for the few goats and sheep they owned, and a horse. A house at the top of the world, he said, in Hammerfest, Norway. Talking about it always seemed to restore him.

“Yes,” he said, “even that house was haunted.”

“Do you wish you still lived there?”

“Yes, sometimes,” he said. “It was haunted, but not in a bad way.”

He explained that house spirits weren’t evil. They were sometimes even kind, would take care of the farm, help with the crops, brush the horse’s hair. They kept to themselves and got angry if you didn’t bring them cream porridge on Thursday nights. With loads of butter. They weren’t friendly ghosts, but they weren’t cruel either. They did what they pleased. They were selfish ghosts.

“And this is what they looked like?” Faye said, turning the figurine around in her palm.

“Most of the time they’re invisible,” Frank said. “You can only see them if they want you to see them. So you don’t see them very much.”

“What’s it really called?” she said.

“A nisse,” he said, and she nodded. She loved the weird names her father gave his ghosts: nisse, nix, gangferd, draug. Faye understood that these were old words, European words. Her father used these words sometimes, sometimes accidentally, when he was excited or angry. He once showed her a book full of these words, incomprehensible. It was a Bible, he said, and on the first page was a family tree. There was her name, he pointed out: Faye. And her parents’ names, and names above them too, names she’d never heard before, strange names with strange marks. The paper was thin and fragile and yellow, the black ink faded to lavender and blue. All of these people, she was told, stayed behind, while Fridtjof Andresen changed his name to Frank and came bravely to America.

“Do you think we have a nisse here?” Faye asked.

“You never know,” her father said. “Sometimes they’ll follow you around your whole life.”

“Are they nice?”

“Now and then. They’re temperamental. You mustn’t ever insult them.”

“I wouldn’t insult them,” she said.

“You could do it accidentally.”

“How?”

“When you take your bath, do you splash water on the floor?”

She considered it and admitted yes, she did do that.

“If you spill any water, you must clean it up quickly. So the water doesn’t seep into the basement and drip on your nisse. That would be a big insult.”

“What would happen?”

“He would get angry.”

“Then what would happen?”

“I’ll tell you a story,” he said. And this was the story he told her:

At a farm near Hammerfest, many years ago, there was a beautiful little girl named Freya (and Faye smiled at this, at the proximity of the beautiful girl’s name to her own). One Thursday night, Freya’s father told her to take cream porridge to the nisse. And the little girl was planning to obey her father, but on her way to the basement she grew very hungry. Her mother had made a special batch of porridge that night, with brown sugar and cinnamon and raisins and even thin slices of mutton on top. Freya thought it was a pity to waste all that good food on a ghost. So once she was in the basement and hidden from view, she ate it herself. She licked it from the bowl, then drank the drippings. And scarcely had she finished wiping her chin clean when the nisse rushed out and grabbed her and started to dance. She tried to break free but the grip of the nisse was strong. He crushed her into him and sang “From the nisse did you steal! So dance now until you reel!” and she screamed and screamed, but the nisse pressed her face into his wiry beard so nobody heard. He twirled her around and galloped from one end of the basement to the other. He was too fast. She couldn’t keep up. She kept falling and tripping, but the nisse pulled her up again and yanked her arms and tore her clothes, and he did this until finally she lay on the ground, in bloody rags, gasping for breath. In the morning, when they found her, she was pale and sick and nearly dead. She was bedridden for months, and even after she was well enough to walk, her father never asked her to take food to the nisse again.

“I’m sorry I took those boys to the basement,” Faye said after he finished the story.

“Go to sleep,” her father said.

“Someday I want to see your home,” Faye said. “The farm in Hammerfest, with the salmon-red house. I’ll go visit.”

“No,” he said, and when he looked at her he looked tired, maybe sad, like when he was standing outside, over those dying coals, alone. “You’ll never see that house.”

That night she couldn’t sleep. She was kept awake for hours by every squeak — every little crack, every rustle of wind and she thought there was an intruder or an apparition. The lights outside shined through tossing leaves and phantomed hideous forms on her wall: burglars, wolves, the devil. She felt hot and fevered and tried to cool herself down with the bedside glass of water, pressing it to her forehead and chest. She sipped the water and thought about her father’s story, about the house spirit: Sometimes they’ll follow you around your whole life. It was a horrifying thought, this beast downstairs, watching them, speaking gibberish.

She looked at the floor as if she could see through it, down to the basement where the ghost was prowling, greedily waiting. She tipped the glass and poured out the water. She felt a bolt of panic as she watched what she was doing, watched the water puddle, a dark brown blot on the light brown carpet. She imagined the water as it seeped into the floor, dripped down through cracks in the wood, over metal slats and across nails and glue and slunk its way beneath her, picking up dust and dirt as it washed into the basement and coldly fell on whatever angry thing was down there, lurking in the darkness.

At some point in the night — this is the truth — they found Faye in the basement.

In some dead hour of the morning, they heard a scream. They found her downstairs. She was shaking and shivering, her head rattling on the concrete floor. Her parents didn’t know how she got there. She couldn’t talk, couldn’t see, her eyes rolled blindly into her head. At the hospital she eventually calmed down, and the doctors said she had a nervous fever, a nervous disposition, a case of hysteria, which is to say they had no diagnosis at all. Rest in bed, they said. Drink milk. Don’t get too excited.

Faye didn’t remember a thing, but she knew what happened. She knew absolutely what happened. She had insulted the ghost, and the ghost had come for her. The ghost had followed her father all the way from the old country, and now it was haunting her. This was the moment that would forever divide her childhood, which would set her on a path that made everything that came after — the seizures, the disaster of Chicago, her failure at motherhood and marriage — feel inescapable.

Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces. This was hers.

4

THE PINKEST CLASSROOM in Faye’s high school. The most ruffled and doilied. The cleanest, brightest. The most elaborate, with ovens and sewing stations, refrigerators, banks of saucepans and stockpots. By far the most aromatic, that warm chocolately air spilling into the hallway during their two-week unit on cake-making. The home economics classroom — electric, full of light, cleaning products bright and chemical, sharp knives, soup cans, blazing silver-white skillets made of aluminum, modern appliances of the atomic age. Not once has Faye seen a boy here, not even poking his head in for cupcakes or waffles. The boys stay away, their reasons cruel: “I’d never eat something you made!” they tell the girls, making choking sounds and grabbing their necks and wheezing and dying to howls of laughter. But really the boys are nervous about the posters.

Word has reached them about the posters.

Tacked onto the pink walls, posters of women looking lonely and ashamed, advertising products whose existence the boys deny — douches, pads, absorbent powders and carbolic sprays. Faye sits in her cushioned seat, arms crossed, shoulders hunched, reading them in quiet disgust.

Unfortunately, the trickiest deodorant problem a girl has isn’t under her pretty little arms, says a poster for a can of something called Pristeen. The odor problem that men don’t have, says one for Bidette Towelettes. A woman sitting alone in her bedroom, headline above her in bold black letters: There’s something every husband expects from his wife. Or a mother talking to her daughter: Now that you’re married, I can tell you. There’s a womanly offense greater than bad breath or body odor, and the daughter — beautiful, young, face all eager and happy, as if they were talking about movies or memories and not antiseptic germicides — says, It’s so much easier to hear it from you, Mom!

What a terrible thing, this world of married women. Faye imagines that funk from the kitchen sink when the water sits too long, or how the dishrags reek of something like gasoline when they’re crumpled and wet. The secret, envenomed married life — naked, moist, unperfumed — hiding away one’s stink. Women in despair as their husbands hurry madly out the door. Why does she spend evenings alone? She keeps her home immaculate, and looks as pretty as she can, but she neglects that one essential…personal feminine hygiene. That’s an ad for Lysol brand disinfectant, and Faye’s mother has never mentioned any of this. Faye is afraid to look through her mother’s bathroom, afraid of what she’ll find. The pink-and-white bottles and boxes with such awful names, they sound like what the boys study in chemistry class: Zonite, Koromex, Sterizol, Kotex. Words that sound vaguely scientific and smart and modern, but words that don’t really exist. Faye knows. She’s looked them up. There is no dictionary definition for Koromex, nor for any of the others. Words like empty balloons, all those useless Ks and Xs and Zs.

A poster from their Kinney beauty consultant about controlling perspiration. A poster from Cover Girl about hiding blemishes. Another showing girdles and padded bras. No wonder the boys are afraid. The girls are afraid. Deodorizes so thoroughly you know you’re the woman your husband wants you to be. Their home ec teacher is on a crusade, stamping out all manner of bacteria and uncleanliness, making the girls tidy, sweet-smelling, preventing them from becoming, as she says, “dirty cheap people.” She doesn’t call the course “home ec.” She calls it “cotillion.”

Their teacher, Mrs. Olga Schwingle, the wife of the local pharmacist, tries to teach these small-town girls manners and etiquette. She shows them how to be proper ladies, how to take up the habits necessary to join the faraway sophisticated world. To brush their hair each night one hundred times. To brush their teeth fifty times up and down. To chew each bite at least thirty-four times. To stand up straight, don’t lean, don’t hunch, make eye contact, smile when being spoken to. When she says “cotillion” she pronounces it with a French affect: co-ti-YO.

“We must rinse that farm off you!” Mrs. Schwingle says, even to the girls who do not live on farms. “What we need is some elegance.” And she’ll put on a record — chamber music or a waltz — and say, “You girls are so lucky to have me here.”

She teaches them things their mothers know nothing about. What kinds of glasses to serve wine in, or scotch. The difference between a dinner fork and a salad fork. Where all these things belong in a proper place setting. Which direction the blade of the knife should face. How to sit without putting your elbows on the table. How to approach a table, how to leave one. How to gracefully accept a compliment. How to sit when a man pushes the seat in behind you. How to make a good cup of coffee. How to serve it properly. How to set out sugar cubes in adorable little pyramids on fragile-looking painted china the likes of which Faye has never seen in her own home.

Mrs. Schwingle teaches them how to host a dinner party, how to cook for a dinner party, how to make pleasing conversation with dinner guests, how to create the sophisticated dishes she insists the wives on the East Coast are right now making, mostly involving some kind of gelatin, some kind of lettuce trim, some kind of food-within-another-food conceit. Shrimp salad in an avocado ring mold. Pineapple in lime gelatin served with cream cheese. Cabbage suspended in jellied bouillon. Peaches split and filled with blueberries. Canned pear halves covered in shredded yellow cheese. Pineapple boats filled with cocktail sauce. Olive pimento mousse. Chicken salad molded into white warheads. Tuna squares. Lemon salmon towers. Ham-wrapped cantaloupe balls.

These are the new and fabulous dishes that ladies of culture are serving. America has fallen in love with these foods: modern, exciting, unnatural.

Mrs. Schwingle has been to New York City. She has been to Chicago’s Gold Coast. She goes all the way to Dubuque to get her hair done, and when she isn’t buying clothes from the catalogs of East Coast retailers, she shops the boutiques of Des Moines or Joliet or Peoria. When the weather is pleasant she announces “What a wonderful day” and throws open the classroom shutters so dramatically that Faye expects to see cheerful animated birds flying in from outside. She tells them to enjoy the breeze and the scent of lilacs. “They’re in bloom, you know.” They go collect the flowers and place them around the class in small vases. “A lady’s house will always have such touches.”

Today she begins class with her usual exhortation regarding marriage.

“When I was in college becoming a certified professional secretary,” she says, standing powerfully erect, her hands clasped in front of her, “I decided to take classes in biology and chemistry. All my teachers wondered why I would do that. Why go to all that trouble? Why not more typing?”

She laughs and shakes her head like someone patiently tolerating a fool.

“I had a plan,” she says. “I knew since I was a girl that I wanted to marry someone in the medical field. I knew I needed to expand my mind so that I could attract someone in the medical field. If all I could talk about was typing and filing, who in the medical field would be interested in me?”

She looks at the girls solemnly and profoundly like she is delivering some awful adult truth.

“Nobody,” Mrs. Schwingle says. “That’s the answer. Nobody. And when I met Harold, I knew my science electives really paid off.”

She smoothes her dress.

“What I’m trying to say is, set big goals. You do not have to settle for marrying a farmer or plumber. You might not be able to marry someone in the medical field, like me, but someone in the accounting field is not out of the question for any of you young ladies. Or perhaps business, banking, or finance. Figure out the kind of man you want to marry, and arrange your life to make it happen.”

She asks the girls to think about the kind of husband they want. I want a man who can take me on trips to Acapulco, they say. I want a man who can buy me a convertible. I want a man who is a boss, so I never have to worry about impressing the boss when he drops in because I’m married to him! Mrs. Schwingle teaches them to dream in these terms. You can have a life that includes cruises in the Mediterranean, she says, or you can have a life of bass fishing on the Mississippi.

“It’s your choice, girls. But if you want a better life, you’ve got to work for it. Do you think your husband will want to talk about stenography?” The girls gravely shake their heads no.

“Faye, this is especially important for you,” she says. “Chicago will be full of sophisticated men.”

Faye feels the collective gaze of the class land on her, and she sinks into her chair.

They move on to the day’s primary lesson: toilets. As in, where are the germs? (They are everywhere.) And how is it cleaned? (Thoroughly, with bleach and ammonia, on our hands and knees.) In groups of five they practice toilet-scrubbing in the bathroom. Faye waits her turn with the other girls, who stare out the classroom windows at the boys, who are currently in gym class.

Today it’s baseball, the boys fielding grounders at shortstop — the thud of the bat, the ball skipping over the dirt as they charge and scoop it up and snap it to first base with that gratifying thwack. This is pleasing to watch. The boys — who act so aloof and nonchalant in real life, who try to be so cool in class, sitting slumped in their chairs, defiant — they perk up like puppies on the baseball field, their movements exaggerated and eager: Charge. Stop. Catch. Pivot. Throw.

Henry is out there with them. He’s not quite quick enough for shortstop, a bit of a lumberer, but he tries nonetheless. He slaps his fist into his mitt, shouts encouraging things. The boys know the girls watch them during practice. They know, and they like it.

Faye sits on a stool at one of the cooking stations, her elbows on the dark brown metal stovetop. Beneath her is a generation of culinary disasters — burned tomato sauces, burned pancake batters, roasted eggs and puddings, fossils now on the burners, black and carbonized. An old scorching that not even their teacher’s most penetrating potions can remedy. Faye runs her hand across the char, feels the roughness on her fingertips. She watches the boys. Watches the girls watch the boys. Watches, for example, Margaret Schwingle — the teacher’s daughter, with her fair, slightly plump face, expensive wool sweater, nylons, shiny black shoes, blond hair extravagantly curled — and the assembly that clings to Margaret, her disciples, who all wear the same silver clique bands on their fingers, who help arrange Margaret’s hairdo in the morning, fetch her Cokes and candy in the cafeteria, and spread hateful rumors about her enemies. Faye and Margaret don’t talk, not since elementary school. They’re not unfriendly; Faye has simply receded from her view. Faye has always been intimidated by Margaret and usually avoids making eye contact. She knows the Schwingles are wealthy, that their huge house sits on a bluff overlooking the river. Margaret is wearing a boy’s class ring around her neck, another on her right hand. On her left hand, a gold promise ring. (This on a girl who yawns during English-class discussions on symbolism.) Margaret’s quasi-fiancé—her steady since freshman year — is one of those impossible, intolerable boys who’s a star at everything: baseball, football, track and field. He pins his medals to his school jacket, then gives his jacket to Margaret, who walks around school clinking like a wind chime. His name is Jules, and Margaret has stripped him of all his tokens. She’s remarkably proud of him. She’s watching him right now, in fact, while he waits his turn on the baseball diamond. Meanwhile, she makes fun of the other boys, the clumsy ones, the ones who are not Jules. “Oops!” she says when a ball squirts under a glove and into the outfield. “You forgot something!” The few friends around her laugh. “It’s behind you, fella!” She’s speaking loud enough for the rest of the room to hear her but quiet enough that they’re not part of the conversation. This is a typical Margaret pose: extroverted, yet also exclusive.

“A little faster next time, big boy!” she says when poor John Novotny — overweight, thickish ankles, a bumbling hippopotamus among the faster boys — doesn’t reach a ground ball to his right. “Really. Why is he even out there?” she says. Or when it’s Pauly Mellick’s turn — little Pauly Mellick, all of maybe five feet tall and a hundred pounds — she says, “Noodles! Go, Noodles!” because of how his arms look. She preys on the fat, the skinny, the short. She preys on the weak. She’s a carnivore, Faye thinks. A fangy wolf pup.

Then it’s Henry’s turn. All the girls are waiting, watching, Margaret is watching, they all see him: Henry smacking his glove with his fist and getting into an approximation of an infielder’s crouch. Faye suddenly feels very protective of him. She senses that the class wants to be entertained, wants to hear more of Margaret’s intoxicating cruelty, like they’re rooting for Henry to fail. Faye can do nothing but watch and hope. And when she looks at Margaret again, she finds Margaret is looking right back at her, and Faye’s stomach does a loop, she blushes, her eyes grow wide, she feels somehow that she’s already lost at whatever kind of showdown this is, and Margaret’s cold scrutiny makes the hierarchy very clear: Margaret can say whatever she wants right now, and Faye cannot stop her.

So they’re all watching Henry as the coach hits the ball. It bounces across the dirt field and Henry bounds to his left to retrieve it and Faye is angry. Not at Margaret but at Henry. Angry at his imminent public failure, that he put her in this position, in this stupid rivalry with Margaret Schwingle. Angry that she feels responsible for him, accountable for his weaknesses as if they were her own. He seems to be waddling like a toddler, and Faye hates him right now. She’s attended enough weddings to know that essential line from the liturgy: And the two shall become one. Everyone seems to think this is really romantic, but Faye has always been appalled by the thought. And this moment, right now, this is why. It’s like taking all your fallibility and doubling down.

But this is Henry’s moment. He’s running to fetch a baseball.

And wouldn’t you know it, he does so flawlessly. Snares the ball, plants his feet, and throws directly and precisely and quickly to first base. Perfect. The archetype of ground-ball fielding technique. And the coach claps and the boys clap and Margaret says nothing at all.

Soon it’s their turn in the toilets, and Faye sits on the tile floor feeling miserable. Though the moment passed without incident, Faye was ready for an encounter with Margaret, and her body still registers that tenseness. She’s one big exposed nerve right now, her insides still squawking. She had been so ready for a fight that it seems as if she actually had the fight. And it does not help that Margaret is here with her, in the bathroom, is sitting in the neighboring toilet stall. Faye can feel her presence almost like an oven.

The toilet in front of her is spotless and white and shiny and smells like bleach — the work of home ec girls in here moments before. The teacher paces behind them explaining the perils of an unclean toilet: scabies, salmonella, gonorrhea, various resident microorganisms.

“There is no such thing as a too-clean toilet,” she says. She hands them new scrubbing brushes. They crouch on the floor — some of them sit — and they wash the bowl, jostling the water, foaming the water. They scour and cleanse and rinse.

“Remember the handle,” Mrs. Schwingle says. “The handle might be the dirtiest of all.”

The teacher shows them how much bleach to use, how to contort their arms to most effectively clean under the lip of the bowl. She tells the girls how to keep their inevitable future children healthy, how to stop colds from spreading by keeping a clean bathroom, how to prevent toilet germs from infecting the rest of the house.

“Germs,” she says, “can be propelled into the air when the toilet is flushed. So when you flush, close the cover and step away.”

Faye is scrubbing when, from the next stall over, Margaret speaks. “He looked cute out there,” she says.

And Faye doesn’t know who she’s talking to, finds it unlikely that Margaret would be talking to her, so she keeps scrubbing.

“Hello?” Margaret says, and she knocks lightly on the wall. “Anybody home?”

“What? Yes?” Faye says.

“Hello?”

“Are you talking to me?”

“Um, yeah?” Then Margaret’s face appears beneath the john wall — she’s leaning over, she’s almost upside down, her huge blond curls hang comically off the top of her head.

“I was telling you,” she says, “that he looked cute out there.”

“Who?”

“Henry. Duh.”

“Oh, right, sorry.”

“I saw you watching him. You must have thought he looked cute.”

“Of course,” Faye says. “Yes. That’s what I was thinking.”

Margaret looks at Faye’s necklace, on which she’s wearing Henry’s ring. His big opal-stoned class ring. She says, “Are you going to put that ring on your left hand?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you two were really serious, you’d wear it on your left hand. Or he could get another ring. And then you’d have one for your neck and one for your left hand. That’s what Jules did.”

“Yes, right.”

“Jules and I are very serious.”

Faye nods.

“We’ll be married soon. He has a lot of prospects.”

Faye keeps nodding.

“A lot.”

Their teacher notices the chattering and walks over, hands on hips, saying, “Margaret, why aren’t you cleaning?” and Margaret gives Faye this look — conspiratorial, like We’re in this together, that sort of look — and disappears behind the wall.

“I’m cleaning it mentally, Mom,” Margaret says. “I’m visualizing it. I’ll remember it better that way.”

“Perhaps if you were as focused as Faye here, you’d be going to the big city too.”

“Sorry, Mom.”

“Your husband,” Mrs. Schwingle says, louder now, talking to the whole group, “will expect a certain level of household cleanliness,” and Faye thinks about the posters on the classroom walls, husbands with their big demands, husbands in hats and coats storming out the door when their wives can’t meet basic womanly requirements, husbands in advertisements on television or in magazines — for coffee, how he’ll expect you to make a fine pot for his boss; or for cigarettes, how he’ll want you to be hip and sophisticated; for the Maidenform bra, how he’ll expect you to have a womanly figure — and it seems to Faye that this husband creature is the most particular and demanding species in human history. Where does he come from? How do the boys on the baseball field — goofballs, clowns, clumsy as chickens, unsure of themselves, idiots at love — ever become that?

The girls are excused. They return to the classroom to summon the next wave. They sit back at their desks and look, in boredom, outside. The boys are still at it — some are dirtier now, having found reasons to dive or slide. And Jules is up, that gladiator of a boy with a sugar-cookie face. Margaret says, “Go honey! Go baby!” though he can’t hear her. Margaret’s exaltation is for the girls in the class, so they’ll watch. And the grounder comes in at Jules and he moves for it, moves so fluidly and easily, his feet so fast and sure, not slipping in the dirt like the other boys, as though he moves on some other, more tactile earth. And he plants himself in front of the ball, arriving in the correct spot with so much time to spare, relaxed and effortless. The baseball bounces toward his glove and — maybe it hits a rock or a pebble, maybe it strikes an odd indentation in the dirt, who knows — the ball suddenly shoots upward, unexpectedly and crazily, bounces up fast and strikes Jules square in the throat.

He drops to the ground, kicking.

And the girls in the home economics classroom find this hilarious. They giggle, they laugh, and Margaret turns to them and yells, “Shut up!” She looks so hurt at this moment. So ashamed. She looks like the women in the posters, their husbands abandoning them: frightened, damaged, rejected. That feeling of being unfairly and cruelly judged. Margaret looks like that, and Faye wishes she could take Margaret’s vulnerability and embarrassment and bottle it, like deodorant. Like cans of germicidal spray. She’d give it to wives everywhere. She’d shoot it at grooms on wedding days. She’d throw bombs of it, like napalm, off the roof and onto the baseball diamond.

Then the boys, too, could know how it feels.

5

FAYE SITS ALONE, outside, after school, a book in her lap, her back pressed against the school’s warm, gritty wall, listening through the wall to musicians idly playing: a trumpet runs up a scale to its highest, loudest peak; a xylophone is plinked on its smallest bars; a trombone makes that splatty-fart noise only a trombone is capable of. The students of the school orchestra seem to be on a break right now, fooling around between numbers, and so Faye waits and reads. The book is a thin collection of poems by Allen Ginsberg, and she’s reading the one about sunflowers again, for maybe the hundredth time, each time becoming more convinced that the poem is about her. Well, not really. She knows the poem is really about Ginsberg sitting in the Berkeley hills, staring out at the water, feeling depressed. But the more she reads it, the more she sees herself in it. When Ginsberg writes about the “gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery,” he might as well be describing the ChemStar plant. The “oily water on the river” could easily be the Mississippi. And the sunflower field he describes could just as well be this Iowa cornfield in front of her, separated from the school by a rickety barbed-wire fence, the field recently tilled and planted, a rippled blanket of black, wet, slippery earth. By the time school resumes in the fall the field will be busy with big-shouldered plants, spine-straight, corn-armored, and ready, finally, to be hacked down, to crumple weakly where they’re chopped at the knees. Faye sits and waits for the orchestra to begin playing again and thinks about this — harvest — and how it always makes her sad, how the cornfields in November look like battlegrounds, the chopped-down plants blanched and bonelike, cornstalks like femurs half buried and poking sharply out of the ground. After that, the chilly approach of another Iowa winter — the late-autumn snow dusting, the first November frost, the desolate January tundra this place becomes. Faye imagines what a Chicago winter would be like, and she imagines it would be better, and warmer, heated by all that traffic and movement and concrete and electricity, by all those hot human bodies.

Through the wall she hears someone squawking on a reed, and she smiles at that noise, the memory of that noise. She had been a musician once — one of the woodwinds, one of those who crowed her reeds. It’s one of the things she gave up after the panic attacks began.

That’s what the doctors called them—panic attacks—which didn’t seem accurate to Faye. It didn’t feel like she was panicking; it felt more like she was being forcibly and methodically deactivated all over. Like a wall of televisions being turned off one by one — how the images on each TV shrank to pinholes before disappearing altogether. It felt like that, the narrowing of her vision when an attack began, how she could only really take in and focus on one small thing, a dot in the wider field, usually her shoes.

At first it seemed to happen only when she displeased her father, when she did something — like taking those boys to the bomb shelter — that angered him. But then later the attacks struck in moments when she might displease him, when she had the opportunity to fail in front of him, even if she had not yet failed.

Example: the concert.

She had joined the school orchestra after listening to a compelling recording of Peter and the Wolf. She had wanted to play the violin, maybe the cello, but the school had openings only in the woodwinds. They gave her an oboe — dull black, the color rubbed off in places, the keys once silver but now a flat brown, one long, deep scratch running down its entire length. Learning the oboe was a calamity of honks and squawks, missed notes, her pinkie fingers sliding off the keys because they couldn’t yet move independently of the rest of her hand. Yet she liked it. She liked that the oboe gave the tuning note at the beginning of rehearsal. She liked the constancy of that, the hard solid A she delivered that anchored the whole group. She liked the severe posture needed to play it, sitting up straight, holding it in front of her, elbows at right angles. She even enjoyed the rehearsals. The camaraderie. Everyone working toward a common goal. The general feeling of high artistry. The magnificent sound they could make together.

For their first concert, each musician would have a very small solo. She practiced hers for months, until the notes were inside her, until she could play her solo perfectly without even looking at the music. The night of the performance, she was all dressed up and she looked into the audience and saw her mother, who waved, and her father, who was reading the program. And there was something about his concentration, something about the humorless way he studied the program, the way he scrutinized it, that just terrified Faye.

A thought popped into her head: What if I screw up?

It was something she had never before considered. And suddenly whatever magic she summoned when she practiced could not be summoned now. She could not clear her mind, could not let go as she had let go in rehearsal. Her palms moistened and her fingers grew cold. By intermission she had a headache, a stomachache, dark patches of sweat under her arms. She felt the urgent need to pee, but once in the bathroom she found that she couldn’t. Then during the concert’s second half, she began to feel dizzy, her chest was tight. When the conductor pointed his baton to cue her solo, Faye couldn’t play. The air stopped in her throat. What she squeezed out was a small cry, a short and helpless wheeze. Now all the faces turned. Everyone was looking. She heard music coming from elsewhere, but it sounded far away, like being underwater. The light in the auditorium seemed to dim. She stared at her shoes. She tumbled out of her chair. She blacked out.

The doctors said nothing was wrong.

“Nothing medically,” they quickly added. They made her breathe into a brown paper bag and diagnosed her with a “chronic nervous condition.” Her father looked at her, mortified and stricken. “Why did you do that?” he said. “The whole town was watching!” Which ignited her nerves all over again, his disappointment about her panic attack combined with her anxiety about not having another one in front of him.

Then she began having panic attacks even in situations that had nothing to do with her father, in moments that seemed otherwise innocent and even-keeled and calm. She would be having a normal conversation and suddenly this toxic thought would, for no reason, appear: What if I screw up?

And whatever blithe thing Faye had been saying the moment before was suddenly elevated to catastrophic proportions: Was she being stupid, insensitive, dim-witted, boring? The conversation became a horrible test she could easily fail. She felt a sense of doom combined with those bodily fight-or-flight mechanisms — headaches, chills, blushing, sweating, hyperventilating, hairs standing on end — which made everything worse because the only thing more painful than a panic attack was someone else seeing it.

Moments when she failed in front of other people, or moments when she felt the potential to fail in front of people — these could trigger an attack. Not every time, but sometimes. Frequent enough that she had adopted a certain self-protective behavior: She became a person who never screwed up.

A person who never failed at anything.

It was easy: The more afraid Faye felt on the inside, the more perfect she was on the outside. She blunted any possible criticism by being beyond reproach. She remained in people’s good graces by being exactly who they wanted her to be. She aced every test. She won every academic award the school offered. When the teacher assigned a chapter from a book, Faye went ahead and read the whole book. Then read every book written by that author that was available at the town library. There was not a subject in which she did not excel. She was a model student, a model citizen, went to church, volunteered. Everyone said she had a good head on her shoulders. She was easily likable, a great listener, never demanding or critical. She was always smiling and nodding, always agreeable. It was difficult to dislike her, for there was nothing to dislike — she was accommodating, docile, self-effacing, compliant, easy to get along with. Her outward personality had no hard edges to bump into. Everyone agreed that she was really nice. To her teachers, Faye was the achiever, the quiet genius in the back of the room. They gushed about her at conferences, noting especially her discipline and drive.

It was, Faye knew, all an elaborate mental game. She knew that way down deep she was a phony, just your average normal girl. If it seemed like she had abilities that no one else did, it was only because she worked harder, she thought, and all it would take for the rest of the world to see the real Faye, the true Faye, was one failure. So she never failed. And the distance between the real Faye and the fake Faye, in her mind, kept widening, like a ship leaving the dock and slowly losing sight of home.

This was not without cost.

The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky. There’s a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything. Faye, for example, gave up the oboe. It goes without saying that she never played sports. Theater was an obvious no. She declined almost all invitations to parties, socials, mixers, afternoons at the river, nights drinking around a bonfire in somebody’s backyard. She has to admit that now, as a result, she really has no close personal friends at all.

Applying to Circle was the first risky thing she’d done in living memory. And then dancing the way she danced at the prom. And going after Henry the way she did at the playground. Risky. And now she felt punished for it. How the town resented her, and how Henry had shamed her — such was the price for asserting herself.

What had changed? What had inspired this new boldness? It was a line from this very poem, actually, the Ginsberg sunflower poem, a line that seemed written exactly for her, a quick jolt that seemed to slap her awake. It summed up exactly how she felt about her life even before she knew she felt it:

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower?

When had she forgotten that she was capable of bold things? When had she forgotten that bold things bubbled constantly inside her? She flips to the back of the book and studies the author photo once again. There he is, this dashing young man, fresh-faced, his short hair lightly tousled, clean-shaven, wearing a baggy white shirt, tucked in, and round tortoiseshell glasses that look like Faye’s glasses. He’s standing on a rooftop somewhere in New York — behind him, the antennas of the city, and beyond those, the hazy shapes of skyscrapers.

When Faye discovered that Ginsberg would be a visiting professor at Circle this coming year, she applied to the school immediately.

She leans back against the brick wall. What would it be like to be in his presence, this man of such abundance? She worries about what she’d do in his class: freak out, probably. Have a panic attack right there on the spot. She would be like the desolate narrator of the sunflower poem: Unholy battered old thing.

But the orchestra is coming back now.

The musicians are assembling, and Faye can hear them warming up. She listens to the cacophony. She feels it through her spine where she leans against the wall. And as she turns to press her cheek against the warm brick, she sees movement at the far end of the building: Someone has just rounded the corner. A girl. Light blue cotton sweater, intricately styled blond hair. It is, Faye sees, Margaret Schwingle. She’s reaching into her purse, pulling out a cigarette, lighting it, blowing out that first drag with a delicate little phoo. She has not yet seen Faye, but she will, it’s only a matter of time, and Faye does not want to be caught doing what she’s doing. Slowly, so as not to disturb the bushes around her, Faye reaches into her bag and replaces the Ginsberg collection with the first book she feels: The Rise of the American Nation, their history textbook. On the cover is a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson surrounded by a monochrome of bright teal. She does this so that when Margaret finally notices her, which she quickly does, and walks over to her and says “What are you doing?” Faye can respond “Homework.”

“Oh,” says Margaret, and this makes sense to her, since everyone knows Faye to be a studious, hardworking, brainy, scholarship-getting girl. And thus Faye does not have to explain her deeper motives, that she’s here reading questionable poetry and pretending to be an oboist.

“What homework?” says Margaret.

“History.”

“Jeez, Faye. Boring.”

“Yeah, it really is,” Faye says, though she does not find history boring at all.

“It’s all so boring,” Margaret says. “School is so boring.”

“It’s terrible,” Faye says, but she worries that she sounds insincere. Because of course she loves school. Or maybe more accurately she loves that she’s good at school.

“I cannot wait to be finished,” says Margaret. “I want to be done.”

“Yeah,” Faye says. “It won’t be long.” And this fact, the quickly coming end of the semester, has lately been filling her with dread. Because she loves the clarity that school brings: the single-minded purpose, the obvious expectations, how everyone knows you’re a good person if you study hard and score well on exams. The rest of your life, however, is not judged in this manner.

“Do you read here a lot?” Margaret asks. “Behind the building?”

“Sometimes.”

Margaret stares out at the black cornfield before them and seems to consider this. She puffs lightly on her cigarette. Faye follows her lead, stares blankly ahead and tries to act aloof.

“You know,” says Margaret, “I always knew I was a special kid. I always knew I had certain talents. That everyone liked me.”

Faye nods, to agree, maybe, or to show she’s listening, interested.

“And I knew I’d grow up to be a special woman. I always knew that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was a special child and I’d grow up to be a special person.”

“You are,” Faye says.

“Thanks. I’d be a special woman who would marry a special man and we’d have these great children. You know? I always thought that was going to be true. This was my destiny. Life was going to be comfortable. It was going to be great.”

“It will be,” Faye says. “All those things.”

“Yeah. I guess,” Margaret says. She smothers her cigarette in the soil. “But I don’t know what I want to do. With my life.”

“Me neither,” says Faye.

“Really? You?”

“Yeah. I have no idea.”

“I thought you were going to college.”

“Maybe. Probably not. My mom doesn’t want me to. Neither does Henry.”

“Oh,” says Margaret. “Oh, I see.”

“Maybe I’ll put it off a year or two. Wait for things to calm down.”

“That might be smart.”

“I might stay here a while longer.”

“I don’t know what I want,” says Margaret. “I guess I want Jules?”

“Of course.”

“Jules is great, I guess. I mean, he’s really really great.”

“He’s so great.”

“He is, isn’t he?”

“Yes!”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay, thanks.” And she stands, brushes off the dirt, and looks at Faye. “Hey, look, I’m sorry for being weird.”

“It’s fine,” Faye says.

“Please don’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t.”

“I don’t think other people would understand.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

And Margaret nods and begins to leave when suddenly she stops, turns back to Faye. “Would you like to come over this weekend?”

“Come over where?”

“My house, dummy. Come have dinner with us.”

“Your house?”

“Saturday night. It’s my father’s birthday. We’re having a surprise party for him. I want you to come!”

“Me?”

“Yeah. If you’re going to stay in town after graduation, don’t you think we should be friends?”

“Oh, okay, sure,” says Faye. “Sure. That’d be swell.”

“Great!” says Margaret. “Don’t tell anyone. It’s a surprise.” She smiles and struts away, rounds the corner, and disappears.

Faye leans back against the wall again and realizes the orchestra is going full tilt. She hadn’t noticed. A big torso of sound, a big crescendo. She is overcome by Margaret’s invitation. What a victory. What a shock. She listens to the orchestra and feels vast. She finds that music muffled through a wall makes her more aware of the physicality of it, that when she can’t hear the music exactly she can still sense it, the vibrations, like waves. That buzz. The wall she presses her face to makes it a different kind of experience. No longer music but a crossing over of the senses. She is aware of the friction needed for music, the striking and stroking of string, wood, leather. Near the end of the piece, especially. When, louder, she can feel the bigger notes. Not abstract, but a quaking, like a touch. And the feeling moves down her throat, a great pulse of noise now, a banging inside. It hums her.

Beyond everything else, she loves this: how swiftly things can strike her — music, people, life — how quickly they can surprise her, all of a sudden, like a punch.

6

SOMETIMES SPRING SEEMS to happen all at once. Trees bloom, the first green shoots curl out of rain-muddy cornfields, things are renewing, beginning, and for certain members of the graduating class, this is a time of hope and optimism: Commencement approaches, and the girls — those with steady boyfriends, those who daydream about weddings and gardens and toddlers — begin talking about soul mates, how they can feel it, destiny, the ineluctable hand of fate, how they just know. Soft adoring eyes and a quiver in their pulse — Faye feels sorry for them, then sometimes sorry for herself. She seems to lack some essential romance in her life. To Faye it all seems so arbitrary, love. All happenstance. As easily one thing as another, as easily one man as another.

Take Henry.

Why, of all men, Henry?

The two of them sit on the riverbank one night throwing stones into the water, picking at the sand, nervously attempting wit and conversation, and this is what she’s thinking: Why am I here with him?

Simple. Because Peggy Watson started a dumb rumor last autumn.

Peggy had come galloping to Faye after home ec all smiles and high drama. “I know a secret,” she said, then teased Faye the rest of the day, slipping her a note in trigonometry: I know something you don’t know.

“It’s a good one,” she said at lunch. “Grade-A juicy. Something to write home about.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s better if you wait,” she said. “Till after school. You’ll want to be sitting down.”

Peggy Watson, vague friend since the third grade, house down the street, same bus ride home, the closest thing Faye has to a “best friend.” When they were children they played this game where they used all the crayons in the box and whole pads of paper to write “I Love You” in different colors, scripts, and designs. It was Peggy’s idea. She couldn’t stop. It never got old for her. Peggy’s favorite was a picture of a heart with I Love You written in a circle around it. “A circle, so no beginning and no end,” she said. “Get it? It keeps going? Forever!”

After school that day Peggy was ecstatic, exhilarated with big rumors and alarming news: “There’s a boy who likes you!”

“No there’s not,” Faye said.

“There is. Most definitely. I have it on good authority.”

“Who told you?”

“Lips are sealed,” Peggy said. “I swore up and down.”

“Who’s the boy?”

“He’s a boy in our class.”

“Which one?”

“Guess!”

“I am not guessing.”

“Do it! Guess!”

“Tell me.”

But Faye didn’t really want to know. She didn’t want the hassle. She was single, kept to herself, perfectly happy with that tableau. Why couldn’t people just leave her alone?

“Okay,” Peggy said. “Fine. No guessing. No games. I’ll blurt it all out. Hope you’re ready.”

“I am,” Faye said, and she waited, and Peggy waited, savoring it, staring at Faye, full of mischief, and Faye suffered through the big theatrical pause until she could no longer bear it. “Damn it, Peggy!”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “It’s Henry! Henry Anderson! He likes you!”

Henry. Faye didn’t know what she was expecting, but she was not expecting that. Henry? She’d never even considered him before. He was barely a presence in her thoughts.

“Henry,” Faye said.

“Yes,” Peggy said. “Henry. It’s destiny. You two are destined. You wouldn’t even have to change your last name!”

“I would too! Andresen, Anderson, they’re different.”

“Still,” Peggy said, “he’s pretty cute.”

Faye went home and locked herself in her room. Seriously considered, for the first time, having a boyfriend. Sat on her bed. Didn’t sleep much. Cried a little. Decided by the next morning that, strangely, she actually cared for Henry a great deal. Had convinced herself that she’d always liked his looks. His sturdy linebacker physique. His quiet manner. Maybe she’d liked him all this time. At school he seemed different now — more pink, alive, handsome. What she didn’t know was that Peggy had done the same thing to him. Harassed him all day with hints about a certain girl who liked him. Revealed later that it was Faye. He came to school that day and saw Faye and couldn’t understand why he’d never noticed how beautiful she was. How elegant and simple. What fierce eyes hid behind those big round glasses.

They began dating shortly thereafter.

Love is like this, Faye thinks now. We love people because they love us. It’s narcissistic. It’s best to be perfectly clear about this and not let abstractions like fate and destiny muddle the issue. Peggy, after all, could have picked any boy in the school.

This is what’s racing through her mind tonight on the riverbank, where Henry has brought her so he can, she believes, apologize. He’s been timid ever since that night at the playground. The incident after the prom. They talk about it, but obliquely. They don’t say anything specific. “I’m sorry about…you know,” he says, and she feels bad for him, the way he slumps over when addressing the subject. He’s been irritatingly contrite and penitent. Carrying her book bag home, walking a step behind her, head down, buying more flowers and candy. Sometimes, in fits of self-pity, he’ll say things like “God I’m so stupid!” Or he’ll ask her to go to the movies and before she can accept he’ll say something like “If you still want be my girl, that is.”

It’s all arbitrary. Had Faye attended a different school. Had her parents moved away. Had Peggy been sick that day. Had she chosen a different boy. And on and on. A thousand permutations, a million possibilities, and almost all of them kept Faye from sitting here in the sand with Henry.

He is a cauldron of nerves tonight, clenching and unclenching his hands, picking at the dirt, throwing rocks into the water. She sips a Coca-Cola out of the bottle and waits. He had planned it this far, getting Faye alone, here, on the riverbank. Now he doesn’t know what to do. He wobbles back and forth in the sand, swats at something in front of his face, sits there hard and tense like a nervous horse. It irritates her, his torment. She drinks her Coke.

The river smells of fish tonight — a damp and funky stench like spoiled milk and ammonia — and Faye thinks about this one time she was out with her father on his boat. He was showing her how to fish. This was important to him. He had grown up a fisherman. When he was a kid, that was his job. But she had no taste for it. She couldn’t even hook the worm without crying — how it coiled around her finger and brown goo came spurting out as she pierced the skin.

Henry reminds her of that worm right now: ready to pop.

They stare at the river, and the blue flame of the nitrogen plant, the moon, the light breaking on the water and scattering. A bottle bobs ten yards out. A bug whizzes by her face. Waves come ashore in their rhythmic way, and the longer they sit here in silence the more it seems to Faye like the river is breathing—how it contracts and expands, rushes in and rushes out, water caressing rocks as it pulls away.

Finally Henry turns to her and speaks. “Hey, listen, I want to ask you something.”

“Okay.”

“But…I don’t know if I can,” he says. “If I can ask you this.”

“Why not?” she says. And she looks at him, sees him and realizes she hasn’t done that — actually looked at him — in how long? All night? She’s been avoiding his eyes, embarrassed for him, hating him a little, and now she finds him grim and scowling.

“I want to…,” he says, but stops. He never finishes the sentence. Instead, he leans quickly into Faye and kisses her.

Kisses her hard.

Like he did that night at the playground, and it surprises her — the sudden taste of him, his warmth pressing into her, the oily smell of his hands now clutching her face. It’s shocking, his forcefulness, pushing his mouth to hers, driving his tongue past her lips. He’s kissing like it’s combat. She falls back into the sand and he pushes himself onto her, over her, still seizing her face, kissing wildly. He isn’t rough, exactly. But commanding. Her first impulse is to shrink away. He squeezes her, crushes his body into hers. Their front teeth knock together but he keeps going. She’s never felt Henry so strongly and savagely male. She can’t move under his weight, and now she feels other of her body’s demands — her skin is cold, her belly full of cola, she needs to burp. Needs to wiggle out and run.

And just at that moment he stops, draws back a few inches, and looks at her. Henry, she sees now, is in agony. His face is screwed up in knots. He’s staring at her with big pleading desperate eyes. He’s waiting for her to protest. Waiting for her to say No. And she’s about to, but she catches herself. And this will be the moment, later on in the night, after everything’s over, after Henry has driven her home, as she stays awake till dawn thinking about it, the thing that will confuse her most is this precise moment: when she had the chance to flee, but she did not.

She does not say No. She does not say anything at all. She simply meets Henry’s gaze. Maybe — though she’s not entirely sure of it — maybe she even nods: Yes.

And so Henry goes back at it, vigor renewed. Kissing her, tonguing her ear, biting her neck. He drives his hand down, between them, and she hears the undoings of various mechanisms — belt and buckle, zipper.

“Close your eyes,” he says.

“Henry.”

“Please. Close your eyes. Pretend you’re asleep.”

She looks at him again, his face inches away, eyes closed. He’s consumed by something, some unutterable need. “Please,” he says, and he takes her hand and guides it down. Faye pulls against him, weakly resisting until he says “Please” again and tugs harder and she lets her hand go limp, lets him do what he wants. He draws himself out of his slacks and guides her hand the rest of the way, between the folds of his pants, under his briefs. When she touches him, he leaps.

“Keep your eyes closed,” he says.

And she does. She feels him move against her, feels him slide across her fingers. It’s an abstract feeling, removed from the world of actual things. He’s pressing his face to her neck and pumping his hips and, she realizes, he’s crying, soft little whimpers, warm tears puddling where he’s bearing into her.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

And Faye feels like she should be mortified but mostly she feels pity. She feels bad for Henry, his despair and his guilt, the crude needs wrecking him, the hopeless way he’s gone about it tonight. And so she pulls him closer and grips him tighter and suddenly, with a great shudder and a splash of warmth, it’s all over.

Henry collapses, groans, falls into her, and cries.

“I’m sorry,” he keeps saying.

His body is curled up against her, and in her hand, he’s quickly shrinking away. “I’m so sorry,” he says. She tells him it’s okay. Strokes his hair slowly, holds him as the sobs ripple through his body.

This cannot be what people mean when they talk about fate and romance and destiny. No, these things are ornaments, Faye decides, decorations hiding this one bleak fact: that Henry’s master tonight was not love but rather catharsis, plain old animal release.

He whimpers into her chest. Her hand is sticky and cold. True love, she thinks. And she almost laughs.

7

THERE ARE TWO CONDITIONS, Margaret says, for dinner at the Schwingles. First, pick up a package at the pharmacy. And second, tell no one.

“What’s in the package?” Faye says.

“Sweets,” Margaret says. “Chocolates and stuff. Bonbons. My dad doesn’t want me to have that kind of food. He says I need to watch my figure.”

“You don’t need to watch your figure.”

“That’s what I said! Don’t you think that’s unfair?”

“That is so unfair.”

“Thank you,” she says. She smoothes her skirt, a gesture that seems inherited from her mother. “So when you pick it up, can you pretend it’s yours?”

“Sure. Of course.”

“Thank you. I already paid for it. I placed the order in your name, so I wouldn’t get yelled at.”

“I understand,” Faye says.

“The dinner is going to be a surprise for my dad. So when you see him at the pharmacy, tell him you’re going on a date that night. With Henry. To throw him off the track.”

“Okay, I will.”

“Better yet, tell everyone you’re going on a date that night.”

“Everyone?”

“Yeah. Don’t tell anyone you’re coming over.”

“All right.”

“If people know you’re coming over, my dad could find out and he’d suspect something. I know you wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.”

“Of course not.”

“If you tell anyone it will definitely get back to my dad. He’s very well-connected. You haven’t told anyone yet, have you?”

“No.”

“Okay, good. Good. Just remember. Pick up the package at the pharmacy. And say you’re going on a date with Henry.”

The party would be unforgettable. Margaret has promised balloons, streamers, her mother’s famous salmon aspic, a cake with three different layers, homemade vanilla ice cream, maybe afterward they would even take the convertible out for a nighttime joyride along the river. Faye feels so special to be singled out for the occasion.

“Thank you for inviting me,” she tells Margaret, to which Margaret gently touches her shoulder and says, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

On the evening of the party, Faye is in her bedroom trying to decide between two versions of the same dress, a smart little summer dress — one green, one yellow. Both were purchased for special occasions that Faye can no longer remember. Probably church-related. She looks into the mirror and holds one up in front of her, then the other.

On her bed, spread out over the blankets and pillows, is paperwork from Chicago Circle. Documents and forms that will, once delivered, officially hold her seat in the freshman class of 1968. She’ll need to put them in the mail within the next week to meet the deadline. She’s already filled them out, in ink, in her neatest handwriting. Each night she’s been spreading out the materials like this, the brochures and pamphlets, hoping something will speak to her, hoping to see something that will finally convince her to go or stay.

Each time she feels near a decision, some worry compels her in the opposite direction. She’ll read another Ginsberg poem and think, I’m going to Chicago. She’ll look at the brochures and read about the space-age campus and imagine being in a place where the students are roundly smart and serious and wouldn’t look at her all funny when she aces another algebra test, and she’ll think, I’m definitely going to Chicago. But then she’ll imagine how everyone in town would react if she went, or, worse, if she came back, which is just about the most mortifying thing in the world, if she can’t cut it at Circle and has to come back, then the whole town would be gossiping about her and rolling their collective eyes. She pictures this and thinks, I’m staying in Iowa.

And so it goes, this awful pendulum.

But she can make one decision, at least: the yellow dress. Yellow feels like the more celebratory color, she thinks, the more birthday-appropriate.

Downstairs she finds her mother watching the news. A story about student protesters, again. Another night, another university overrun. Students pack themselves into hallways and won’t leave. They invade the office of the president and provost. They sleep there, right where people work.

She watches it on television, Faye’s mother, gaping at the weird happenings in the world. On the couch she sits and stares, each night, at Walter Cronkite. The events lately have seemed otherworldly — sit-ins, riots, assassinations.

“The vast majority of college students are not militant,” explains the reporter. He interviews a girl with pretty hair and a soft wool sweater who tells him how much all the other students disagree with the extremists. “We just want to go to class and get good grades and support our boys overseas,” she says, smiling.

Cut to a shot, wide angle, of a hallway filled with students: bearded, long-haired, unkempt, shouting slogans, playing music.

“Good lord,” says Faye’s mother. “Look at them. They’re like hoboes.”

“I’m going out,” Faye says.

“They probably started as nice boys,” says her mother. “They probably took up with the wrong crowd.”

“I have a date tonight.”

Her mother looks at her finally. “Well. You look very nice.”

“I’ll be back by ten.”

She passes through the kitchen, where her father is twisting off the top of the percolator. He’s brewing coffee and fixing a sandwich in preparation for his ChemStar shift tonight.

“Bye, Dad,” she says, and he gives her a quick wave. He’s wearing his uniform, his gray jumpsuit with the ChemStar logo on the front, the interlocking C and S on the chest. She used to joke with him that if he removed the C he’d look like Superman. But they haven’t joked like that in a long time.

She’s opening the outside door when he stops her. “Faye,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“The guys at the factory are asking about you.”

Faye pauses in the doorway, one foot in the house and one foot out. She looks back at her dad. “They are? Why?”

“They’re wondering about your scholarship,” he says as the percolator’s top clatters off. “They’re asking when you’re leaving for college.”

“Oh.”

“I thought we agreed not to tell anyone.”

They stand there in silence for a moment, her father scooping spoonfuls of coffee grounds, Faye gripping the doorknob.

“It’s not something you have to be ashamed of,” she says. “Me getting into college, and getting a scholarship. That’s not — what did you call it? Bragging?”

He stops fussing with the percolator then, and looks at her and smiles his tight smile. Puts his hands in his pockets.

“Faye,” he says.

“That’s just — I don’t know what that is. Doing a good job. It’s not bragging.”

“Doing a good job. Right. Does everybody get this scholarship?”

“No, of course not.”

“So you’re special then. You’re singled out.”

“I had to work hard, get good grades.”

“You had to be better than everyone else.”

“Yes, I did.”

“That’s pride, Faye. Nobody is better than anyone else. Nobody is special.”

“It’s not pride, it’s…reality. I got the best grades, I scored the highest marks. Me. It’s an objective fact.”

“Do you remember the story I told you about the house spirit? The nisse?”

“Yes.”

“And the little girl who ate the nisse’s meal?”

“I remember.”

“She wasn’t punished because she stole his food, Faye. She was punished because she thought she deserved it.”

“You don’t think I deserve to go to college?”

He chuckles and looks at the ceiling and shakes his head. “You know, most fathers have it easy. They teach their daughters to value hard work and a day’s wage. Chase off the wrong boys and buy an encyclopedia set. But you? You complain if a book is a poor translation.”

“What’s your point?”

“Everyone already thinks you’re a big shot. You don’t have to go to Chicago to prove it.”

“That’s not why I want to go.”

“Trust me, Faye. It’s a bad idea, leaving home. You should stay where you belong.”

“You did it. You left Norway and moved here.”

“So I know what I’m talking about.”

“Do you think it was a mistake? Do you wish you’d stayed back there?”

“You don’t understand anything.”

“I earned this.”

“What do you suppose is going to happen, Faye? Do you really believe that because you work hard the world is going to be kind to you? You think the world owes you something? Because the world isn’t going to give you a damn thing.” He turns around to attend to his coffee. “It doesn’t matter how many straight-A report cards you have, or where you go to college. The world is cruel.”

Faye is still angry about this as she drives to the pharmacy. Angry at her father’s cynicism. Angry that what always earned her the most praise — being a good student — is now the thing that makes her a target. She feels double-crossed by this, betrayed by some implicit promise made to her long ago.

And she thinks maybe it’s providence that she’ll be seeing Mrs. Schwingle tonight. Because if there’s anyone in this entire town who would not accuse Faye of being pretentious, it is Mrs. Schwingle, who brags about her world travels and worships whatever new thing the elegant ladies of the East Coast are doing. Certainly Mrs. Schwingle, of all people, could sympathize.

Faye arrives at the pharmacy and walks up to the counter, where she finds Harold Schwingle standing with a clipboard counting aspirin jars.

“Hi, Dr. Schwingle,” she says.

He considers her sternly and coldly for what seems like an oddly long moment. He is tall and wide, his hair cut high and tight with military precision.

“I’m here to pick up my package,” Faye says.

“Yes, I suppose you are.” He leaves and remains somewhere in the back room for what seems like far too long. Over the tinny speakers a brass band plays a waltz. The automated air freshener releases a small poosh and a few seconds later there’s the cloying, perfumey odor of synthesized lilacs. There is nobody else in the pharmacy. The overhead lights flicker and buzz. On the counter, buttons for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign stare woodenly back at her.

When Dr. Schwingle returns he’s carrying a dark brown paper bag, stapled shut. He drops it — and not particularly gently — on his side of the counter, too far away for Faye to comfortably reach it.

“Is this for you?” he says.

“Yes, sir.”

“Will you swear to that, Faye? You’re not buying this for someone else, are you?”

“Oh, no sir, it’s for me.”

“You can tell me if it’s for someone else. Be honest.”

“Cross my heart, Dr. Schwingle. This is mine.”

And he breathes in a dramatic way that reads as exasperation, maybe disappointment.

“You’re a good girl, Faye. What happened?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Faye,” he says, “I know what this is. And I think you should reconsider.”

“Reconsider?”

“Yes. I’m going to sell this to you because it’s my duty. But it’s also my duty, my moral duty, to tell you I think it’s a mistake.”

“That’s very nice of you but—”

“A big mistake.”

She was not prepared for the intensity of this conversation. “I’m sorry,” she says, though she doesn’t know what she’s apologizing for.

“I always thought you were so responsible,” he says. “Does Henry know?”

“Of course,” she says. “I have a date with him tonight.”

“Do you?”

“Yes,” she says, as instructed. “We’re going out tonight.”

“Has he proposed to you?”

“What?”

“If he were a gentleman he would have proposed to you by now.”

And Faye feels defensive under his criticism. What comes out sounds hollow. “All in good time?”

“You really need to think about what you’re doing, Faye.”

“Okay. Thanks very much,” she says, and she leans over the counter and closes her fist around the brown paper bag with a loud, poignant crunch. She doesn’t know what’s happening here, but she wants it to be over. “Goodbye.”

She drives quickly to the Schwingle house, a grand thing that sits on a rocky bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, a rare point of elevation in the otherwise gentle rolling flatness of the prairie. Faye drives up through the trees to the house, which she finds unexpectedly dark. The lights are off and everything is silent. Faye panics. Did she get the date wrong? Were they meeting somewhere else first? She’s considering driving back home and calling Margaret when the front door opens and out she walks, Margaret Schwingle, in sweatpants and a baggy T-shirt, hair disheveled in a way Faye has never seen before, scooped to one side like she’s been sleeping on it.

“Do you have the package?” she asks.

“Yes.” Faye gives her the crinkly brown bag.

“Thanks.”

“Margaret? Is everything okay?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “We can’t have dinner tonight.”

“Okay.”

“You have to go home now.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

Margaret is staring at her feet, not looking at Faye. “I’m really sorry. For everything.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Listen,” she says, and now she looks at Faye for the first time. She stands up straight and points her chin out, trying to look tough. “Nobody saw you come here tonight.”

“I know.”

“Remember that. You can’t prove you were here.”

Then Margaret nods to Faye and spins on her heel and leaves, locking the door behind her.

8

IN 1968, in Faye’s small Iowa river town, the girls of the graduating class knew — though they never spoke of it — dozens of ways to get rid of unplanned, unwanted, unborn children. Some of these methods were almost always unsuccessful; some were nothing more than old wives’ tales; some required advanced medical training; some were too horrible to think about.

The most attractive were of course those that could be done innocently, without any special chemical or apparatus. Long-distance bicycling. Jumping from a great height. Alternating hot and cold baths. Placing a candle on the abdomen and letting it burn all the way down. Standing on one’s head. Falling down stairs. Punching oneself repeatedly in the belly.

When these failed — and they almost always did fail — the girls moved on to new techniques, remedies that wouldn’t arouse suspicion. Simple, over-the-counter things. Douching with Coca-Cola, for example. Or Lysol. Or iodide. Ingesting incredibly high quantities of vitamin C. Or iron tablets. Filling the uterus with saline solution, or a mixture of water and Kirkman Borax Soap. Eating uterine stimulants like julep. Or croton oil. Calomel. Senna. Rhubarb. Magnesium sulfate. Herbs that initiated or increased menstrual flow, such as parsley. Or chamomile. Ginger.

Quinine was also effective, according to many grandmothers.

And brewer’s yeast. Mugwort. Castor oil. Lye.

Then there were those other methods, those things that none but the most desperate would ever consider. Bicycle pump. Vacuum cleaner. Knitting needle. Umbrella rib. Goose quill. Cathartic tube. Turpentine. Kerosene. Bleach.

None but the most desperate, the most alone and unconnected, those who had no friends with medical access who might procure certain behind-the-counter items. Methergine. Synthetic estrogens. Pituitary extract. Abortifacient ergot preparations. Strychnine. Suppositories known in some quarters as Black Beauties. Glycerin applied via catheter. Ergotrate, which makes the uterus stiffen and contract. Certain medicines used by cow breeders to regulate animal cycles — difficult to acquire, polysyllabic: dinoprostone, misoprostol, gemeprost, methotrexate.

What was in that paper bag? Almost certainly not small chocolate bonbon things, Faye decides as she drives home, rounds the corner into Vista Hills, regrets that she did not open the bag. Why didn’t she open it?

Because it was stapled, she thinks.

Because you’re a coward, another part of her thinks.

She has an abstract feeling of panic and distress right now. How strangely Margaret had acted tonight. Dr. Schwingle too. A feeling like there’s something she’s missing, some essential fact whose revelation she dreads. The air is misty, the sky not raining so much as lightly spitting, a humidity like when the girls boil things in home ec. Once, one of the girls forgot her pot and left it there to burn all day and the water boiled out and the pot got scorched and red-hot and its plastic handle melted and then outright burned. It set off all the alarms.

Tonight has that same quality to it. Like there’s something very close and dangerous and alarming that Faye has not yet noticed.

She’s sure of this when she arrives home. Only one light is on in the house — the kitchen light. There’s something wrong with that one lonely light. From outside it looks almost green, like the color of cabbage once you cut way down deep into it.

Her parents are there, in the kitchen, waiting for her. Her mother cannot look at her. Her father says, “What have you done?”

“What do you mean?”

He says they got a phone call from Harold Schwingle, who said Faye had been in the store tonight to pick up a package. What kind of package? Well, let me tell you, said Dr. Schwingle, I’ve been in this business long enough to know that any girl buying the things Faye bought tonight is only trying to do one thing.

“What?” Faye asks.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” says her mother.

“Tell you what?”

“That you’re knocked up,” says her father.

“What?”

“I cannot believe you let that idiot farmer boy shame you like this,” he says. “And shame us, Faye.”

“But he didn’t! There’s been a mistake.”

The phone had been ringing all night. Calls from the Petersons. And the Watsons. And the Carltons. And the Wisors. And the Krolls. All of them saying, You should know, Frank, what I heard about your daughter.

How on earth did everyone know this? How does the whole town already know?

“But it’s not true,” Faye says.

And she wants to explain to them about the birthday party that never happened, and about Margaret’s strange behavior tonight. She wants to explain what she immediately understands is the truth: that Margaret is pregnant and needs certain drugs without her father knowing, so she used Faye to get them. She wants to say all this but she can’t, first because her father is now in a blind rage about how she’s ruined her reputation and how she can’t show her face here ever again and how god will punish her for what she wants to do to her own child—yelling more words at her right now than he’s spoken to her in the last year — and also because she feels an attack coming on. Coming on strong now because she’s having trouble breathing and she’s sweating and her field of vision is beginning to narrow. Soon it will be like looking at the world through a pinhole. And she’s fighting off the feeling that this is the Big One, the really big seizure that finally kills her; she’s fighting the sense that these are the last breaths she will ever take.

“Help me,” she tries to say, but it comes out a whisper, inaudible above her father, who’s now telling her how many years he’s worked to gain a good reputation in this town and how she’s ruined it all in one night, how he’s never going to forgive her for what she’s done to him.

For how much she’s hurt him.

And she thinks: Hang on.

She thinks: Hurt him?

Because even though she’s not pregnant, if she were pregnant, wouldn’t she be the one needing comfort? Wouldn’t she be the one the neighbors were talking about? How is this about him? And she feels suddenly defiant, suddenly uninterested in defending herself anymore. And when her father reaches the end of his lecture and says “What do you have to say for yourself?” she stands up as vertically and nobly as she can manage and says: “I’m leaving.”

Her mother looks at her now for the first time.

“I’m going to Chicago,” Faye says.

Her father stares hard at her for a moment. He seems like a twisted version of himself, the expression on his face like when he was building that bomb shelter in the basement, that same determination, that same dread.

She remembers once he had come up from the basement, his clothes powdered gray from whatever construction was happening down there that night, and Faye had just taken a bath and she was so happy to see him that she broke free from the mass of towels her mother used to dry her and she bolted out the door, happy, bright, bounding like a rubber ball. She was wiry, sinewy, she had just bathed, she was nude, she was eight. Her dad stood in this very kitchen and she burst in and did a cartwheel, that’s how happy she was. A cartwheel, oh lord, imagine it now, at the cartwheel’s middle, spread open like some giant tropical plant. What a thing for her father to see. He frowned and said “I think this is inappropriate. Why don’t you put on some clothes,” and she ran to her room not quite knowing what she’d done wrong. Inappropriate for whom, she wondered as she stood naked looking at the neighborhood through her big picture window upstairs. She didn’t know why her father had sent her here, why she was inappropriate, and she looked out her window and perhaps thought about her body for the first time. Or maybe she thought for the first time of her body as a thing separate from her. And who cares if she imagined a boy walking by and spotting her? Who cares if this image would continue to interest her for reasons that would never be entirely clear? From that moment, there was no other purpose to Faye’s big picture window than to imagine what she looked like through it.

That was many years ago. Faye and her father never talked about this. Time heals many things because it sets us on trajectories that make the past seem impossible.

And now Faye is back in the kitchen, and she’s waiting for her father to say something, and it’s like the space that opened between them that day has reached its apogee. They are two bodies orbiting each other, connected by the thinnest tether. They will either drift back together now or fling themselves forever apart.

“Did you hear me?” Faye asks. “I said I’m going to Chicago.”

And now Frank Andresen finally speaks, and when he does there is just nothing in his voice, no emotion, no feeling. He’s dislodged himself from the moment.

“Damn right you are,” he says, and he turns away from her. “Leave and never come back.”