Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  She was applying to six colleges, five of them private and expensive. As recently as October, college catalogues had been objects of romance, variously flavored promises of escape from a family she’d outgrown and a school whose social possibilities she’d exhausted. But then she’d discovered Crossroads, which had lessened her impatience to leave New Prospect, and now, as she opened the folder of applications, she found that the kiss had foreshortened the future more drastically. Anything beyond the coming day seemed irrelevant.

  Tell us about a person you admire or have learned something important from.

  She removed the tooth-dented cap of a Bic pen and started writing in a spiral notebook. Her handwriting, its upright pudginess, struck her as childish this morning. She scratched it out and tried to make it leaner and more slanting, more forward, more like the woman she’d felt herself to be the night before, in the parking lot behind the Grove.

  The person I most admire is

  My family lived in Southern Indiana until I was eight. My father was the pastor of two small rural parishes. It was farm country but there were woods and creeks to explore with my brother Clem. Unlike most brothers, Clem never got angry if I followed him. Clem wasn’t afraid of anything. He taught me to stand still if a bee was bothering me. He liked all kinds of critters. He called animals “critters” and was curious about all of them. One day he scooped up a big spider and let it crawl on him and then asked if he could put it on my arm. I learned that spiders don’t bite if you don’t threaten them. There was a log over a deep creek that Clem ran across like it was nothing. He showed me how to cross the creek by sitting on the log and scooching along. I think most brothers would have been happy to leave their little sister behind, but not Clem. He had a baseball glove he

  A weariness had overcome her. Her words seemed childish, too. She’d imagined that colleges would be charmed if she wrote about her brother, and that it would be easy to explain why she admired Clem, but she wasn’t feeling it this morning. For one thing, Clem had come home at Thanksgiving and told her, in strict confidence, that he had a girlfriend in Champaign, his first ever. She ought to have been purely happy for him, but in truth she’d felt a little bit left behind. Until then, despite being younger, she’d considered herself the more worldly and socially advanced one.

  Clem’s friends in high school had mostly been slide-rule types, guys with dandruff-coated glasses, defiant body odor. She’d felt sorry that he couldn’t do any better than this, but he claimed to have no envy of her social position and only a “sociological” interest in her people. Coming home late on a Saturday night, she invariably saw light under his bedroom door. If she knocked, he set aside the book he was reading or the science problem he was cracking and listened, as only he in her family could, to her little tales of life in Camelot. He pronounced clear-eyed judgments on her friends, which she brushed aside in the moment (“Nobody’s perfect”) but privately recognized the justice of. He was particularly harsh about certain guys of her acquaintance, such as Kent Carducci, who wouldn’t stop asking her out on dates and who, according to Clem, tormented Clem’s friend Lester in the locker room. Still only a tenth grader, she’d walked up to Kent one day at lunch hour and spelled out, in front of his jock buddies, why she would never go out with him: “Because you’re a bully and a jerk.” Though Kent apparently continued to snap wet towels at Lester’s butt, Becky was keenly attuned to the hierarchy and detected a subtle new shunning of Kent by the highest tier. She was tempted to report this accomplishment to Clem, but she knew it was the hierarchy itself, more than any given member of it, that he disdained. And yet, as if he recognized it as the field of her own sort of excellence, he never pushed her to drop out of it. How grateful she was for that! It was one of a hundred ways she knew he loved her. Sometimes it happened that she dozed off on his bed and awoke to find herself tenderly covered with a quilt, Clem asleep on the rug by the bed. She might have worried that there was something weird about their friendship, that she felt close to him in an almost married way that maybe wasn’t healthy, that she wasn’t as physically repelled by his beanstalk body, his scarred and pimpled face, as a sister ought to have been, if she hadn’t been so sure that everything Clem did was good and right.

  Even after he went off to college, he’d remained the star she navigated by. There were some fairly debauched, parentally unsupervised parties she found it necessary to attend because no sophomores and almost no juniors had been invited. In principle, Clem hated this kind of exclusivity even more than her parents did, but where her father gave her gentle lectures about remembering those less fortunate than her, and her mother worried aloud that she’d gotten pretty full of herself, Clem understood how important to her it was to be at the center of things. “Just be careful,” he said. “Don’t forget you’re better than the rest of that crowd put together.” She was protected at the parties, to an extent, by having been the leading vote-getter in the all-school cheerleader election, thus automatically a co-captain of the squad, despite being only a junior; if she raised her voice to wail that she hated the music, then, voilà, some unseen hand would lift up the needle and put on a Santana album. But the pressure to fuck up was still intense. She might not have been able to wave away the burning doobies she was offered if Clem hadn’t warned her that marijuana’s long-term effects on the brain were not well studied. At the infamous New Year’s party at the Bradfields’, where there was barfing in the back-yard snow and a disgusting truth-or-dare thing happening in the basement, she might have gone upstairs with Trip Bradfield, who was twenty and relentless, if she hadn’t been seeing him through Clem’s eyes.

  The Bradfield party had been her last of that sort. Her aunt Shirley had passed away a few weeks later, and Becky had quit the cheerleading squad and applied herself more seriously to schoolwork. It was Shirley who’d taught her that staying home and reading a good book, letting people wonder where you were, could get you farther than chasing after every party. No longer exempted from family work rules by her cheerleading duties, she took an afterschool job at the florist shop on Pirsig Avenue. She’d been secure in her popularity for long enough to know she wasn’t in danger of being forgotten. Quite the opposite. By quitting the squad, she’d cast a diminishing light on all the girls who remained. Shirley had given her an ankle-length navy-blue merino coat, and when she walked in it on Pirsig after school, accompanied only by Jeannie Cross, her best friend and her loyal lieutenant since seventh grade, she could sense how the two of them looked to the cars full of peers driving by. Shirley’s word for it had been mystique.

  She forced herself to take up her pen again. Her plans for the day were predicated on finishing an essay before lunchtime.

  One warm hot humid summer afternoon Clem and I were out exploring near a farmhouse which had a large, vicious dog on a chain. Even Clem was a little afraid of that dog. Well, sSomehow the dog wasn’t on its chain that day, and it jumped over a fence and started chasing me. It bit my ankle and I fell down. I could have been very seriously injured if Clem hadn’t dove onto the dog and started fighting with it. By the time the farmwife came to the rescue, Clem was the one who was seriously injured. The dog bit his face and both of his arms, and he had to have thirty forty fifty forty stitches. He was lucky the dog didn’t cripple his arm or bite through an artery. To this day, whenever I see the scars on his arms and his cheek, I remember how he

  Always does the right thing without caring what other people think of him

  Sticks up for kids who get picked on not afraid of bullies (just like dog)

  He helped me realize there are more important things in life than being the

  Why did her writing have to make her sound like such a nitwit? She ripped the offending page out of the notebook. From the kitchen came the smell of a preheating oven, the morning slipping away. She felt unfairly stymied by the badness of what was on the page, as if she weren’t, herself, the person who’d put it there.

  And now came her mother, carrying a pitcher o
f water into the living room. “Oh,” she said. “You’re up.”

  “Yes,” Becky said.

  “I didn’t hear you get up. Have you had breakfast?”

  Her mother was already in her exercise clothes, a formless sweatshirt, saggy synthetic knit pedal pushers. It was a look that encapsulated, Becky felt, the difference between her mother and her aunt, who’d been as trim as her mother was bulky and couldn’t possibly have owned such a sweatshirt. As her mother kneeled down to water the Christmas tree, Becky averted her eyes from the impending exposure of lumbar flesh. Another, more tragic difference between her mother and Shirley was that her mother was alive. Shirley had stayed trim by smoking two packs of Chesterfields a day.

  Her mother asked her if she had any fun plans.

  “Working on my applications,” Becky said. “Christmas shopping.”

  “Well, just make sure you’re home by six, so you have time to get ready for the Haefles’ party. We’ll leave as soon as your father gets home.”

  “I’m going to a party?”

  Her mother stood up with the pitcher. “Dwight invited everyone to bring their families. Perry’s staying home with Judson, and I don’t know what time Clem is getting here.”

  “Sorry—what is this party?”

  “An open house for clergy. Clem came with us last year.”

  “Did I say I would do this?”

  “No. I’m telling you now that you will.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I have other plans. I’m going to the Crossroads concert.”

  She kept her eyes averted, but she could imagine her mother’s expression.

  “Your father won’t be happy about that. But if that’s your choice, we’ll be home from the Haefles’ by eight thirty.”

  “The concert starts at seven thirty.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being fashionably late. Missing one hour, to maintain some semblance of peace at the holidays, doesn’t seem like much to ask.”

  Becky inclined her head mulishly. She had her reasons, but she wasn’t going to explain them.

  “How’s it going with your essay?” her mother asked.

  “Fine.”

  “I can help you with it, if you want to show me what you’ve written. Do you want to do that?”

  This in a more honeyed tone, intended as a peace offering, but Becky took it as a reminder that her mother was better than her at writing, she herself better at nothing her mother valued. “I’m thinking,” she said, by way of striking back, “that I might write about Aunt Shirley.”

  Her mother stiffened. “I thought you were writing about Clem.”

  “It’s a personal essay. I can write whatever I want.”

  “True enough.”

  Her mother left the room. The light in the windows had brightened a little, and Becky was pleased to find her goodwill still intact. It wasn’t as if her mother was a bad person. She just didn’t understand how much nicer Becky’s own plans were than going to the Haefles’ party.

  After the dog attack in Indiana, when the bite on Clem’s face was iodined and stitched and his arms were in bandages, her father had come home from a church meeting and yelled at him. How did you let this happen? What on earth were you doing at that farm? I gave you responsibility for your sister! She could have been killed! It happens all the time—a child no smaller than Becky gets killed by a dog! What were you thinking? All this to a ten-year-old boy who’d been mauled while protecting her. And then came the edict: Clem was henceforth forbidden to take Becky beyond the lines of their property, except on the county road to and from their school. When Becky thought about her and Clem’s unusual friendship, her mind went back to the word forbidden. Things that were forbidden were often precisely what the heart most wanted. Things became more attractive because they were forbidden by some cruel or uncomprehending authority. As a teenager, when she saw the light under Clem’s door, late on a Saturday night, it was like the beckoning glow of a forbidden thing. She and Clem were united against the authority that wanted to separate them.

  Following the edict, her father had undertaken to replace Clem as the person she went on walks with. For Clem, outdoors, everything was an adventure—vines to be swung from, old wells to be sounded with pebbles, terrible centipedes to be discovered under rocks, seed pods to be sniffed and broken open, horses to be lured with an apple. For her father, nature was just a glorious but unspecific thing that God had made. He talked to Becky about Jesus, which made her uncomfortable, and about the hard lives of local farmers, which was more interesting but maybe not so wise of him. The stories she could tell on the playground—the Boylans had a son in an insane asylum, Mrs. Boylan could only take nourishment through a straw, Carl Jackson’s mother was actually his grandmother—had given her an early taste of popularity. Shocking true facts about grownups were at a premium in grade school.

  After the family moved to Chicago, her father had continued the “tradition” of taking her on walks on Sunday afternoons, usually a simple loop around Scofield Park. Declining his invitation was seldom worth the guilt trip her mother would have laid on her. Becky already felt guilty enough for caring little about the church and even less about oppressed people, and she did appreciate that her father treated her like a grownup, respected her like that, and kept telling her things he maybe shouldn’t have. She heard a lot about his dreams of a larger life of Christian service, his frustrations at being an associate minister in an affluent and mostly white suburb, and she took what she heard straight to Clem. (“He’s frustrated,” Clem said, “that he has a wife and four kids.” Or, more wickedly: “Mom likes you being the one Dad goes for walks with, because she knows he can’t run off with you.”) In return, despite being prodded, she told her father nothing about her own dreams and frustrations.

  She uncapped her pen again with her teeth. The first batch of sugar cookies was baking.

  On January 16, it will be one year since my Aunt Shirley passed away.

  This was better already. It had gravity and created immediate sympathy for the bereaved college applicant.

  She was alone in the world, having lost her one true love in World War II. I had the privilege of knowing her later in life and learning the importance of culture and elegance, belief in oneself, and bravery in the face of solitude and sickness from her. Whatever my mother may think, she didn’t buy my affection. I truly loved her. Every summer, starting when I was ten, I got to go and spend a week in her small but elegantly tastefully furnished apartment in New York City Manhattan.

  It was true that Shirley had bought her a lot of stuff over the years. Also true that none of Becky’s brothers ever got anything. True that the new clothes she brought home from New York had to be cleaned before she even wore them, to get the stink of Chesterfields out of them, and that on her first visit, in 1964, she cried every night on her aunt’s sofa bed (Shirley called it a “convertible,” as if it were a car) out of homesickness for Clem and the eye-burning oppression of the smoke in the airless apartment, and that, ironically, it was her mother who insisted that she accept Shirley’s invitation again the next summer, as an act of charity. (Only later, after Becky had come to look forward to her New York trips, did her mother start using words like vain and unrealistic about her sister.)

  Even early on, though, Becky had been dazzled by her aunt. On Shirley’s first and last visit to the Indiana farmhouse, she’d taken Becky by her seven-year-old shoulders, looked her seriously in the eye, and informed her that she was destined to be a great beauty. That was something. Unlike her mother, who was only ever a pastor’s wife, Shirley had had a career as a Broadway actress, never as a big star, apparently, but an actual career, and Becky had marveled at how imperiously she sliced through the masses of humanity at the World’s Fair, in 1964, and how, when a waiter or a salesperson referred to Becky as her daughter, she merely winked at Becky, who until then had followed Clem’s example and abhorred dishonesty. The difference between dishonesty and make-believe, Shirley said, was art
istic imagination. Though it was obvious that Becky didn’t have this kind of imagination—in New York, she preferred the mummies at the Met to the European painters, the dinosaurs across the park to the mummies, and Macy’s to the dinosaurs—Shirley told her that this was just as well, because the world of art and theater was entirely controlled by cruel men, many of them literally, pardon her French, cocksuckers, and it was better for a woman to be the patron, the appreciator, than patronized and unappreciated. By which, though Shirley never quite spelled it out, Becky understood that she would be better off rich than talented.

  How much money her aunt had and where it might have come from was long unknown to her. Shirley’s apartment was small, but she had charge cards for all the department stores. Her furniture looked inexpensive, but her shoes and jewelry weren’t. She took Becky out for a fancy dinner only once per visit, but she also never cooked a meal. Instead, she and Becky paged through a ring binder wonderfully populated with takeout menus, and anything else Becky needed (milk and cookies in the early years; later Fresca and tampons) was summoned for delivery by a phone call and paid for in cash at the burglar-proof front door. Shirley conveyed, through the way she shuddered at the recollection, her enduring horror at the Indiana farmhouse where she’d foretold her niece’s destiny; the convulsive Maytag in the mud room, with its age-fissured rubber rollers, seemed to have made a particularly traumatic impression. Her own linens arrived clean in brown-paper packages tied up with white string.

  Along with the shopping, what Becky most enjoyed about her summer visits was not having to pretend she didn’t care about status and didn’t want a future life in which she had it. Shirley methodically interrogated her about the professions of her friends’ fathers and the size of their houses, and thereby made Becky aware that New Prospect Township wasn’t a Midwestern utopia where everyone was equal, as she might have supposed, but a place where money counted socially and only good looks or athletic prowess could make up for the lack of it. In tenth grade, using funds that Shirley had provided for the purpose, and over her mother’s sour disapproval, Becky had signed up for New Prospect’s monthly formal dancing school, Messieurs et Mesdemoiselles, which her friends all rolled their eyes at but nevertheless attended. Still Clem’s emissary, but also inspired by her aunt’s insight that snobs were insecure and the true aristocracy gracious, she didn’t avoid the greasier and clumsier dancers the way her friends did (although she did notice, and enjoy what it said about her status, that a clumsy boy became even clumsier when she astonished him by picking him as a partner). Inclusiveness, as she practiced it at M&M, was not only gracious but no less valuable than exclusivity was in building popularity—witness the results of the cheerleader election the following year. To be both feared and liked was its own kind of feat, and it struck, in her mind, a happy balance between the two very different people whose example mattered to her.