Dear Reader
Page 6
Wherever Miss Sweeney was on the Columbia campus, her mocking spirit swirled in Flannery’s mind. Window to the World! Well, now! Why not a porthole to a planet? O, brave pilgrim, are you standing in a doorway to a dream?
“Okay?” The cabdriver looked at her in the rearview mirror. Flannery marveled at his economy of word choice: two syllables that conveyed that she needed to pay—the meter flashed fourteen dollars—and hustle out of his cab. The sun visor was flipped back up so the tethered baby was out of view, but Flannery envisioned a late-night family tableau: the cabdriver sitting with his head in his hands at a grim kitchen table—a bowl of bruised clementines and a stack of medical bills on the speckled gray Formica—and his wife next to him on a folding chair, snuggling their sick baby.
Flannery unzipped her backpack and handed the driver an ATM-fresh twenty. “I don’t need any change. Thanks for letting me keep the bouquet.” She manically jammed her hand in her backpack to do a quick touch of her essential items: Phone! Wuthering Heights! Wallet! The driver told Flannery to have a good day and raised one hand, not quite a wave, but a few inches of kindness that levitated there above the steering wheel. She needed that gesture, because as she stepped out of the cab to the falling snow and iced asphalt and car exhaust, to the throngs of hazardously cool-looking people on the sidewalk, Flannery’s Grand Central Station zeal was entirely replaced by Morningside Heights apprehension.
An oncoming car honked and seemed to just miss brushing her arm as it revved past, so Flannery hopped up on the sidewalk. As she struggled her backpack to a more secure spot on her shoulder, the cellophane bouquet crackled; she pressed it to her chest and lowered her face to breathe in the calming sweetness. Flannery tried to puzzle out why she was now holding a dozen red roses. Yes, she had found them in a cab, but what was the origin of the roses? Had a hopeful romantic felled by ADD left them behind? Had arguing lovers—“You can take back your goddamn roses”; “No, you keep the stupid roses!”—left the bouquet in the cab to spite one another? Well, Flannery knew the roses were a symbol—the muted red muscle of her heart thudding along—and naturally she loved literary symbolism and was eager to deconstruct the meaning of her found bouquet, but the words scrolling along in her brain were accompanied by Miss Sweeney’s laughter: Audacious Alliteration Alert! Flummoxed Flannery Finds Floral Foreshadowing!
Flannery looked up at the statues flanking the Columbia gates: a male statue holding a globe, and a female statue holding an open book over her chest as if shielding her heart. Of course, thought Flannery, the man was going to see the whole world and the woman would stay home and read all about his big adventure! Yippee! She smiled at her own observation and gazed up at the female statue’s hair—carved Marcel waves—and flowing granite robe. As Flannery entered the gates she took a last sideways look at the statue and offered up a reverential nod, as if she were gazing at a primary apostle, as if sucking up to a stone spirit guide could help her find Miss Sweeney.
And then she was just another girl walking on campus, and if Flannery were not wearing her school uniform—which she severely, severely regretted—she could have been mistaken for an actual college student. This would be her daily routine by autumn, and Sacred Heart would recede into kitschy heartache and emo anecdotes, because she would find her people, and life would be gorgeous, interesting, magical: the book thrown open. Flannery thought of Miss Sweeney, not of her current peril, but of an eighteen-year-old Caitlin Sweeney, fresh from the plains. Surely arriving at the Columbia campus from Kansas would be no less exotic than a lunar landing! But, no, Flannery remembered saying as much during one of their college talks, and Miss Sweeney had given her a piqued sigh and a droll lecture on the ubiquity of the suburbs, how Kansas was not so different from Connecticut, and that she’d misspent her youth in the same bland manner as any old girl from Darien or Roxbury: listening to Fleet Foxes and the Arctic Monkeys and drinking Frappuccinos and dodging the Starbucks manager who enforced the inane rule about not smoking within thirty feet of the building. Flannery thought Miss Sweeney’s response was shaded with a bit of Thou Doth Protest Too Much, and in any case, it was better to imagine the campus seen through the thrilled gaze of someone who had only known sunflowers and pick-up trucks, the big sky and Friday night lights.
A girl brushed past close enough for Flannery to smell her almond-scented leave-in conditioner and then turned and gave her a quick, polite “Sorry!” She wore a pomegranate red leather coat that made Flannery think of Miss Sweeney’s purse, a quick punch to Flannery’s heart. The girl took a second glance back at Flannery’s bouquet and offered up the briefest nod of recognition to convey: Good for you! And FYI: I, too, am a girl who is given flowers. Flannery was delighted to be thought rose-worthy, to pass for a girl with a boyfriend who would shyly present her with a dozen roses—along with a bit of arched eyebrow to acknowledge that floral expressions of love were goofy and stereotypical, but that he loved her anyway and so … here you go! Miss Sweeney would probably vomit at the imagined scenario of insipid romance. Oh, Miss Sweeney! Flannery thought about the solemn eyes of the police officer when she’d given him Miss Sweeney’s purse, of how he’d put his hand out slowly, as if reluctant to take it, and Flannery’s own hands trembled from the cold, and even on the Columbia campus the scenario from the bathroom at Sacred Heart popped up in Flannery’s thoughts like a Whack-a-Mole carnival game she could never win: Is your sorrow here? No, it’s here! Now look: It’s your humiliation! Over here: It’s your injured indignation! Ha! Can’t quite win, can you? Time’s up!
But happiness trumped her standard self-pity. Though sure, she certainly felt deep concern that bordered on dread for Miss Sweeney, off on her addled adventure to locate her old, dead, boyfriend, Flannery’s adrenaline raced just from the delight of being on campus—I’m here, I’m here! I’m here! And the world was bursting with possibility, all those dream-laden bumper stickers were factually correct! Flannery wanted to COEXIST and COMMIT RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS and BE THE CHANGE SHE WANTED TO SEE. She imagined future friends among the students passing by: the aggressively freckled girl with the red curly hair and lotus flowers tattooed on the backs of her hands, two boys in athletic wear joyfully discussing last night’s episode of Game of Thrones, the girl in a gray-and-green hijab looking down at her phone and then raising her face and giving Flannery a polite smile before she went back to texting. It was thrilling, but perhaps not unusual, because everyone on campus looked pretty friendly; no one moved with the predatorial grace of the Sacred Heart girls, eyes scanning the distance for any perceived weakness. And she would soon be away from Sacred Heart! The girls who had ignored her or tormented her would fall away; they would be nothing but haunting marionettes that she could easily snip away with the beauty of her NYC life. Because Flannery was choosing to believe what Miss Sweeney had told her. When she was at Columbia, she would find her people.
Miss Sweeney’s cursive words scrolled along in Flannery’s brain: Oh, Flannery … haunting marionettes? Do not string me along with your putrid puppetry prose!
Still, Flannery tried to hold on to her empowered feeling because, looking around the quad, the handsome square of buildings that created the walled campus, she started to feel a little discouraged, as well as being coatless and cold. If Miss Sweeney were on campus, where might she be? She stepped out of the throng of people walking along the main sidewalk bisecting the campus and cut across the dead lawn. Flannery slowly spun around—there was Butler Library, and Carman Hall, where she would live in the autumn, and the statue of Alma Mater—but wasn’t so preoccupied with finding Miss Sweeney not to notice a dark-haired boy on a bench by himself, reading. In his skinny jeans, ratty black leather jacket and stocking cap he was every inch the stereotype of the self-involved hipster; he was even reading his newspaper with a disaffected scowl. He sat very straight, not even a centimeter of slouch, so of course Flannery’s mind churned out the line from Wuthering Heights: “He is … rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with
his negligence, because he has an”—cue the unstifled giggles of AP English Lit!—“erect and handsome figure.” She felt a blast of contextual joy that came from the intersection of books and life: It was the best thing ever! But of course not everyone felt that way. All the Sacred Heart mothers were in book clubs, and liked to discuss narrative arcs while enjoying coffee and dessert, but this hadn’t filtered down to their daughters.
“Reading too much makes you a freak,” Maeve McKenzie had once whispered to Flannery in the Sacred Heart library. Flannery had been kneeling down, looking at the spines of books on the bottom shelf, and Maeve’s words had literally put her off balance: She’d had to grip the dusty metal shelving for support. Flannery recognized Maeve’s revolting faux-stupidity, but she also pitied herself: I am just kneeling here trying to decide between Bleak House and Dubliners. I’m not hurting anyone. In the movie version of Flannery’s life, Maeve McKenzie would have to be a dyslexic girl living in a subsidized apartment and bullied by her alcoholic stepfather. But in vexing real life, Maeve had already been accepted to Brown, her grandmother’s name on a dorm.
Uggh! Flannery tried to shake off all her bad memories with a bold gesture: She walked over and sat right down on the opposite end of the concrete bench, only five feet away from the boy. Well, Flannery needed to read too, and so she’d have a little company. They sat peaceably together, but cold concrete radiated up from her legs to her spine, and Flannery wished she’d worn thicker tights with her school skirt, and of course, if she were wishing, she’d wish for an entirely different outfit, and to be an entirely different person altogether, etc.
An icy breeze made Flannery draw her flowers to her chest, and the boy winced at the crush and rattle of the roses, the crackling cellophane cone. He gave Flannery a glancing frown and returned to his paper.
She apologized, but immediately felt annoyed by her own mousey behavior. The bouquet was not an air horn, and anyway, who was he to be so delicate, so very perturbed by the sound of cellophane in a public square? But his jerky behavior gave Flannery courage: “Um, excuse me. But I was wondering if there was some sort of, like—I don’t know—like, an alumni club around here?”
When he looked up, Flannery saw that he had smiling brown eyes. Unbidden, Miss Sweeney snarked about in Flannery’s brain: Do his “smiling” eyes have a dimple smack in the middle of his irises? That is just precious! That is just Precious Moments!
“I am not aware of any alumni club.” He went back to his newspaper. He put the emphasis on not; the first definitive consonant was a harsh starburst that made her feel a little swoony, and while the o was straightforward, the t was the lightest touch of tongue to upper palate, a mere suggestion before it evanesced into its own sexiness: Oh, baby. He had a British accent!
Miss Sweeney’s voice was so close, a red pen on the bench between Flannery and the boy, her voice tight with choked-back laughter. The letter t is evanescing into its own sexiness? Alrighty. Well, the letter F is for Flannery and you, my dear letter girl, are the bomb. The F bomb! Just take it down a notch, lest you evanesce into your own freakiness.
Flannery cleared her throat. “Okay, thanks.”
He raised one hand from his newspaper and dismissed Flannery with a half-wave. “’S alright.”
Well then. She was apparently a very taxing person to talk with. The boy couldn’t have been more bored. Flannery unzipped her backpack and checked her cell phone: no missed calls, no texts. Did no one care about her fake cramps? Did no one miss her? It was best to be pined for when you went missing. And the handsome boy sitting on the bench with her—reading his paper and ignoring her—had just given Flannery a big old dose of Manhattan reality. She was just herself, and she would be herself in the fall, too. She wouldn’t morph into a desirable or mysterious girl. It was as if the boy himself had just stage-whispered: Newsflash! Your future does not sparkle with possibility.
Flannery watched a trio of girls race past, laughing a lot—possibly high?—with scarves looped around their necks in that carefree fashion impossible to replicate. Two wore high ponytails shined and straightened into glossy whips, minimal makeup, and dark, lint-free pea coats. But the most beautiful one was waifed out: A pixie cut and Cleopatra eyeliner, skinny legs in skinny jeans, and silver spaceman boots. She was as towering and precisely beautiful as any girl in a magazine.
But, wait! Oh, crap, the pixie-cut girl WAS a model: Flannery remembered her from a mascara commercial. Maybe going to college in Manhattan, land of college student/fashion models, was the worst idea ever; maybe she should have been Miss Sweeney in reverse, and gone off to college in the Midwest. But when the college rep from Notre Dame had visited Sacred Heart, Miss Sweeney had steered Flannery clear of the session, telling her that, with the world being so vast and gorgeous, why spend four years at a Disneyland for Catholics? Flannery must have looked startled by her teacher’s smackdown of the venerable college, because Miss Sweeney had laughed and said: “I say this both as a Catholic and as a fan of Disneyland.” She’d also advised against Grinnell—“People want to get out of Iowa!”—though it was an excellent school, sure. But Flannery was reluctant to let these options go: The Midwestern schools seemed like they would be so much less intimidating. Miss Sweeney admitted (with pleasure) that though she had been the homecoming queen in high school, it wasn’t, beauty-wise, a major accomplishment because Midwesterners were generally pretty regular-looking: Even the beauties, even the beauty queens, were quite often short and looked like they would eventually morph into moms who drove minivans and gorged on snack cakes. “So, Flannery, aside from the fact that you are a beautiful girl in the first place, you would also have that exotic East Coast thing going for you and drive all the boys crazy and get yourself in over your head with all variety of romantic drama. Just go to Columbia! Why not start your adult life in the City of Dreams?”
Flannery knew she was not a beautiful girl, though not a homely one either, and so her problem was not even fixable with a magazine makeover. She just was the way she was. But Miss Sweeney had said the words “you are a beautiful girl” without any sugared inflection, as if Flannery’s beauty was an inarguable fact, but also no big deal: Yep, beautiful. Fine. Whatever. And so sometimes at home, when she looked into the bathroom mirror—her face freshly powdered, her lips glossed—Flannery would tilt her head to the side, a sweep of brown-black hair framing her face, the sides of her mouth sucked in to carve her cheekbones, and think: She’s … right? Mostly, though, Flannery examined herself harshly, and despaired: Was it just dry scalp flaking along her part or full-on dandruff so hideously visible in her dark hair? The antibiotic that she took every morning—a festive capsule of neon pink and white granules—had slowed her acne, but pinpricks of infection still swelled the pores on her nose. So. Very. Gross.
But no matter where she fell on the beauty gradient, Flannery was heartened to see that the boy on the bench kept reading; he didn’t glance up at the Manhattan beauties, no slack-jawed gawking for Mr. Coolio, not even a furtive once-over as the three girls receded from his field of vision. Flannery looked around the campus—the passing break must be over, the quad was quieter, and Miss Sweeney would be easily visible now if she were strolling along, hoping to meet up with her deceased boyfriend. Flannery was cold; she was also stumped, and so it was time to open the book and see if she would find direction for the day.
“Okay,” she said aloud, agreeing with herself, and then took a quick look at the boy, but he read on, impervious to her weirdness. Flannery reached her hand into her backpack for Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights. But she didn’t feel the soft cover of the paperback, so she put her roses on the bench, and with both hands she pawed through her things, her heart racing. No, it had to be here, she just wasn’t finding it, she was panicking for nothing—Kleenex, pencil bag, candy wrappers, a tube of lip stain, a compact, an unwrapped piece of gum—she knew she’d had Wuthering Heights when she’d gotten out of the cab … she’d had it, she had to have it.
Flannery slapped at the bench behind her. “I can’t find my book!”
The boy nodded. “I see.”
Flannery searched in her backpack again, She scanned the ground; she lifted her roses off the bench and put them back. “I can’t find it anywhere.”
The boy tuned back to his paper, so it looked as if he were reading a news story aloud: “This very morning I heard a large, scrabbling-about sound in trash cans in front of my apartment. Soon enough, a raccoon roughly the size of a well-loved house cat emerged with a cantaloupe rind. So. Victory for one wild thing in the city.”
“What?” What was he talking about? One wild thing? There was a joke embedded in his story, probably a mean one, and directed at her, of course. Did raccoons prowl around Manhattan? Flannery thought not; she thought NYC wildlife consisted of rats and pigeons and clichéd cockroaches scurrying from the kitchen light. But oh, dear God, where was the book?
Flannery zipped up her backpack, picked up her roses, and began backtracking her steps, her eyes trained on the ground. She took one long last look back at the boy at the bench, who was now looking back at her, the tamped-down thrill of that, as she scolded herself for being so careless with Miss Sweeney’s book—stupid, stupid, stupid—and for her cowardice. Yes, she’d enjoyed a brief renegade moment when she’d crossed the highway and taken the train to Manhattan to look for Miss Sweeney, but she’d had Wuthering Heights at her disposal since then and had been too afraid to open it, afraid that whatever enchantment had occurred in the Sacred Heart bathroom had vanished, and equally afraid that it was real, that Miss Sweeney’s words would remain, that Miss Sweeney was in fact delusional and roaming the streets of Manhattan.