That May evening my mother walked down the aisle to the podium like a queen, like a bride, focused single-mindedly on the task still ahead of her. She did not even look at the reserved purple section. She did not come to me as she does in my dreams, sensing danger or darkness, and rescue me from it, whisking me to her side, hugging me tightly. She walked straight to the front and sat in the front row and waited. The introductory speaker was late. The introduction that night would make my mother cringe: all superlatives and the facts wrong.
I could only see her from the back. She looked so animated, gulping water, flushed, chatting with her host, flanked by Florence and Bethany, her college friends, now teachers at this college. I knew that I worried about her too much. I heard her stormy, wild laugh. So many times I had seen her this way, her hands flying about her like birds as she talked. I turned away.
They teetered down the aisles at the last moment, taking seats, one next to me, one in front of me. They looked fragile, breakable, but that was not the case. They are in their own ways more capable, stronger than most of us. They teach the Victorian novel or Chaucer or the Romantic poets. They wave to their bearded friends and clutch their programs and smile in anticipation. I love these women with their eccentric hairdos: the wispy blonde bangs and ponytail, the red hair swept up with tendrils at the ears, curls cascading down the neck. I love these women with their frilly bodices or little-girl pinafores or long plaid skirts or cocktail dresses from the fifties. I love these women with their box-shaped pocketbooks, their complicated shoes, their high sexual laughs, their quirky brilliance.
They had made my mother feel less fearful. She seemed happier when she was with them, not as alone in the world. Years after she left college she would still visit with them, sit in their houses, drink with them, and relish their intricate, intelligent stories. As a famous person, my mother had met many such women living in college towns all across the country, throwing parties for Byron’s birthday, dancing in spring at bacchanalias, reading Emily Dickinson by a fire. They were obsessive, unpredictable, exacting. When I got to college I recognized them immediately.
I loved them for the way they made my mother feel. All these years they had made her feel safe. What they told her was this: “Take refuge.” “Step into your talent.” “Apologize to no one.” “Life is perplexing. Your imagination is your gift.” “Do what you must.” They were islands of comfort. She had swum out to them and rested on their wonderful shores.
The associate professor of English, carrying an armful of books, smiles. I pass her on the library steps. “Take refuge,” she says.
“Come now, Christine,” she says softly, offering her hand. “You’re going to be all right. I promise.”
My mother stands up and allows herself to be helped out of the ditch by the woman who is so kind. She has a long, gray braid down her back. “I promise,” she says again, speaking softly to her grown daughter. They turn from the ditch. It is Grandma Alice. She hugs my mother. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
Marta, walking through the library, no interest in books, recognized me against the high, pine window where I still sat gazing at the many faces of my mother. She looked from the photos to me but made no connection as far as I could tell. I collected the books and put them in a pile as if I might protect my mother from Marta in this way. Though it seemed to me that Marta lived a dangerous life, something my mother had once recommended, I was doubtful that this was what she had had in mind.
I did not expect Marta to recognize me. She had barely seen me the previous night in Jennifer’s room, I thought. She had barely known that I was there at all. And though she had at one point actually described my face, lingered over my features, it had not seemed to me an accurate portrait.
“Forget a face like that?” Marta laughed, tipping my head up and putting her thumb and forefinger on my chin. “No chance.” I caught a glimmer of what might have been the old Marta, the Marta before Natalie, the one who laughed and wanted, without hesitation, faces like mine.
“Have you seen Jennifer?” she asked, as if we had known each other a long time, as if the face she could not forget exhausted her, bored her.
“I don’t know who Jennifer is.”
She looked at me as if she wondered what it would be like to be able to say that.
“You haven’t met her yet?”
“No.”
Marta had lost track of the days. How many had passed, she wondered, since I had arrived holding that little note?
“Well, won’t that be something?” she smiled. She looked like a mischievous child: the grin, the sneakers, the mass of dark curls, the papers she held in her hand, crumpled, tear-stained.
She put her hand on my shoulder. Her touch was like no other, firm but gentle, hard but yielding, and it brought me immediately back to the night before. She was drawing me at a tremendous speed into intimacy. There was no time to waste.
“I’ve got a dog,” she said. She was still a child to me.
“Oh?” I said.
“She’s really only a puppy. I live in Gushing. She’s in my room. Do you want to see her?”
“Sure,” I said.
I put the books back on the shelf. On another day I would be able to find them easily, I said to myself.
“Come on,” she said.
I knew what Marta wanted. It was easy to see. We left the library. I turned to look at the librarian and watched her grow small as we walked toward Marta ‘s dormitory.
“This is it,” she said as we stood in front of a large house made completely, it seemed, of gingerbread.
“This is it?” I said.
She nodded. “This way,” she smiled. And I followed her up the winding stairs to the tiny room where the dead girl lived.
Each night was the same. She wore the same clothes, the black pants she had gotten in Mykonos and the cotton T-shirt of Natalie’s. Every night she rubbed her cheek against her shoulder, closed her eyes, and sniffed the shirt as if fabric, like the heart, could hold a person long after they were gone, in its weave.
Two eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of Natalie were propped on the bureau and illuminated by candles. Every night we toasted those photos of her and listened to the records of Billie Holiday. Wherever we were, if we sat in her room or if we went to classes or to the dining hall, Billie Holiday seemed to follow us. She sang as I studied those pictures of Natalie. The straight blonde hair, the long, elegant nose, the lips — too thin, I thought, cruel, somehow.
“She was a complete mystery to me, Vanessa,” Marta said.
I nodded, engrossed in the photographs. Natalie seemed terrified to me, alone in that frame against a black background, lost. She carefully held the poses of a self-conscious child, though the poses, a hand on a hip, a cigarette poised between beautiful fingers, were meant to convey the opposite impression: sophistication, worldliness, maturity — Natalie in her leather pants, Natalie clutching an Italian Vogue. What did she see, as she looked into the glassy eye of the camera, that frightened her so?