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  She wanted to die, and she wanted to live in Paris.

  Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

  Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim . . .

  It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess.

  It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications.

  It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you.

  Nora Ephron, Wellesley commencement, 1996

  August

  For one whole year, we worried about Kate. We worried to her face and worried behind her back, credited her with being tough, while judging her for being pathetic. Some days we thought she was suicidal; others she seemed homicidal, or as if she had the potential, anyway, not that any of us would blame her. We didn’t know how to help. Her sister, Angela, thought she needed therapy, antidepressants, and time to heal. She prescribed hard work and weekend hobbies, like kayaking or photography. Vicki thought she needed to quit wallowing; why not enjoy life as a single woman, celebrate her independence, go out and get laid? The guy who lived below her thought she should turn her music down and leave the apartment from time to time instead of stomping around over his head all day long. The lady at the liquor store suspected she drank too much. I didn’t know what to think. We all agreed she needed to get her ass off the couch and get a life. She needed to stop wearing sweatpants and put on a little mascara, for Christ’s sake. And would it kill her to go on a date? We were tired of the whole thing. Sure, life had thrown a huge piece of shit in her face, but . . .

  Actually, there was no but. Life had thrown an enormous piece of shit in Kate’s face.

  Whenever the topic of Kate came up, faces got twitchy; eyes got shifty. Our friends would glance at each other and look at me with a mixture of blame and embarrassment, making it clear what they all thought but couldn’t say, at least not around me. I could imagine them whispering, after I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room:

  She must feel like it’s her fault.

  It was her fault.

  Well, she certainly is partly to blame.

  Apart from him, it was all her fault.

  I know! I mean, if only she had . . .

  I wonder if she feels responsible?

  Yes, bitches. I feel responsible.

  To me Kate was something like a figure skater, skilled and balanced one second and then, bam, she’s splayed out all over the ice the next. Music still playing, and she can’t even get up to finish the damn routine.

  But before her fall, it was a different story. Skilled and balanced. I remember Kate sitting cross-legged on her bed in our dorm room, laptop open, wearing glasses and retainers, reading an assignment she’d written out loud to us:

  Day 1. Sundown. I enter a community living structure after the tribe’s evening repast. I am in the midst of seven female natives, and while I believe them to be a peaceful people, I approach them cautiously, watching from a safe distance. I see them communicating with each other, using language and gestures, drinking an amber-colored beverage out of red, plastic cups, and listening to music that causes them to jerk their heads in unison. I come closer to observe their rituals and seat myself on a contraption that hosts a variety of food particles in its fibers. When I insert my hand under the cushion, I discover a handful of blackened popcorn kernels, a pair of unwashed male undergarments, and two small copper medallions. The women in the tribe see the items in my hand and begin shrieking, gesticulating, and backing away from me. I fear I have insulted these gentle humanoids by unearthing their relics from the sofa, but they are forgiving. One offers me a large vessel, into which I respectfully lower the clothing and kernels. When I start to put in the copper medallions, the female makes a gift of them to me. I will bring them home to share with my people.

  Kate looked up, ready for our critique.

  “I don’t get it,” Vicki said. She was sitting up in her bed with a Town & Country magazine open across her lap.

  “What?” Kate asked.

  “If they’re pennies,” Vicki asked, “why can’t you just say pennies?”

  “I like it,” I said.

  “Thank you, Chloe,” Kate answered. She was hunched over, reading through her fictional field notes again.

  “I didn’t say I don’t like it,” Vicki said. “I just don’t get the point.”

  “Can you tell I’m from another planet?” Kate asked.

  “Totally,” I assured her.

  “It’s inconsistent, if you want me to be honest,” Vicki answered. “How would an alien know what popcorn is?”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Kate said, holding down the delete button. “It’s so stupid.”

  “You’re a freshman,” Vicki told her. “You’re supposed to be stupid.”

  “She didn’t say she was stupid,” I corrected. “She didn’t mean to say that you’re stupid, Kate.”

  “It’s no good; I’m starting over again,” Kate said, closing her laptop and getting ready to go. “I’ll work in the Student Center, so I don’t keep you up.”

  “We’ll hear you anyway when you come in at two o’clock,” Vicki said.

  “She’ll tiptoe,” I suggested.

  We had only been roommates for two months, and we had already fallen into our roles. Kate was the bookiest of us. She spent more time in the library and less time in the shower than anyone I’d ever met. Not that she smelled bad or anything. She just couldn’t be bothered. She was a scholar in the making, bingeing on nineteenth-century novels whenever she had spare time, the more passion, suspense, and drama, the better.

  “You know you’re wearing pajamas,” Vicki called after her, as Kate walked out of the room.

  Vicki was smart and driven in a different way. She was exceedingly practical, registered for classes only if she found them real-world applicable and down-the-road lucrative. “When would I ever use that?” she asked when I suggested we all take a history class on serfdom in the Middle Ages. She signed up for stats instead. I had to check a map when I first met her to wrap my head around where she came from: a flyover state that she had no intention of returning to. One time I walked into our dorm room to find Vicki looking through Kate’s dresser drawers. Without thinking, I apologized to her.

  And who was I? Among other things, my role in our clique was keeper of the peace. I held us together. For four years I bridged the gap, and it wasn’t easy. I was the one who made sure we were always assigned to the same dorm, with rooms on the same hall. I was the one who made plans (Friday-night cocktails and weekend getaways) and posed us in pictures, dressed up or dressed down, with me almost always in the middle. I cleared up misunderstandings and found common ground: in our sophomore year, Kate and Vicki got into a fight about gun control (Vicki’s libertarian principles clashing with Kate’s progressive sensibilities), and I spent an anxiety-filled week negotiating a truce, apologizing to one on behalf of the other, failing a sociology test in the process.

  After we graduated from Wellesley, we decided to move to New York as individuals—still as a trio in spirit, but not as roommates. I figured it was for the best, knowing that our friendships would be far less complicated without the petty problems that stem from too much togetherness. I was relieved to move forward into something simple and more adult.

  And then Kate had her disastrous triple toe loop ass-on-ice wipeout and suddenly I found myself reent
angled, back in the middle of a big mess.

  The spring before Kate graduated from college, she and Angela were summoned. Kate was in New York interviewing for a job, so the sisters took the train together to the house they grew up in, speculating about the reason for the visit. Angela feared it was cancer, while Kate guessed divorce.

  “Ha,” was all Angela had to say about that, and Kate knew she was right, of course, because they didn’t have the kind of parents who did regular, predictable, middle-class-American things like split up.

  “One of them published a book?” Kate guessed.

  “They wouldn’t ask us to come out just for that.”

  “What if it’s a book about our family?”

  “We’re not that interesting,” Angela reminded her.

  “A book about their sex life.”

  “Please, Kate, I just ate.”

  Amtrak delivered them to the little station in New Jersey, and as they stepped onto the platform and into the sunshine, they saw their mother waving to them, jumping up and down as if Kate and Angela were disembarking from the QE2. She was wearing cuffed jeans that Angela suspected belonged to their father, and over them, inexplicably, a handmade, tiered skirt that went to her knees. Her hair was covered with a scarf, knotted at the back, and of course, she had clogs on. Kate also had this habit of throwing an outfit together, but in her case she usually managed to pull it off, even if it wasn’t on purpose. She had shown up at Angela’s apartment a few days earlier wearing a denim miniskirt, tall rain boots, and a Chilean poncho that Angela remembered well because her mother had used it regularly as a tablecloth in the dining room. Or maybe it was a tablecloth, and Kate had cut a hole in it to turn it into a poncho. Either way (and impossibly enough), she had looked cute.

  Their mother was now calling to them across the parking lot, “Tervetuloa! Velkomin!”

  “Can’t she ever just speak English?” Angela mumbled. She saw their father sitting in the parked car, clipping his fingernails out the window. “God, who does that?”

  “Does what?” Kate asked.

  Angela put her bag over her shoulder and checked her phone. “Is it possible,” she asked, “that I was swapped with some other baby at the hospital?”

  “No,” Kate said, looking wounded. “Don’t say that.”

  Older, wiser, Angela felt less of a bond with these spectacled, nerdy academics, and she judged their behavior more as a result. Now that her sister was almost a college graduate, Angela was waiting to see which parts of their parents’ demeanor and attitudes Kate would be forced to inherit, given her genes and career choice, and which parts she could freely reject.

  They walked down the ramp toward the car together, and Angela pinched Kate on the arm for no particular reason.

  “Darling daughters,” their mother pronounced and hugged them both. “Zu Hause we go. Who’s hungry?”

  The sisters climbed into the backseat of the old, mustard-yellow Volvo station wagon. They looked at each other while strapping on their seat belts. Kate stuck her tongue out, and Angela elbowed her, glancing around the parking lot, making sure they hadn’t been seen by anyone they knew. Their father put his nail clippers in the glove compartment and started the car.

  At the house they convened in the cluttered kitchen over a meal that their mother called “Kaltes Abendbrot” or sometimes “Smörgåsbord,” depending on the selection, which in either case referred to black bread and things to put on black bread. Sprigs of dill were tucked between tiny shrimp and sliced eggs, not-quite-cooked to hard-boiled, and there was a chunky paté that made Angela wonder, Chunks of what? Kate took off her jacket and pushed up her sleeves, saying, “Mmmm, what a spread!” while Angela felt her usual disappointment, wondering what would be wrong with a nice chicken Caesar salad for once.

  Angela had longed for normal as a child. She wanted what she saw at other homes, like Mop & Glo floors, Honey Smacks, and People magazine. Instead, they lived in a jungle of spider plant vines that draped all over the furniture, artifacts that jumbled up every surface, masks, pots, baskets, and fetishes.

  And books. Books everywhere. Piled up high on chairs and on the back of the toilet, in languages that Angela didn’t recognize and didn’t want to, and on topics ranging from the study of Old Norse and the Viking Age (their mother’s field) to family constructs and gender roles among the Yanomami (their father’s area). And worst of all, the house had a pan-cultural cuisine odor that was permanently adhered to the brown sculptured shag carpet and the cottage cheese ceiling. In the ninth grade—the last time Angela ever had a friend over—her mother served them hamburgers without buns or ketchup, saying “Guten Appetit, ladies! Enjoy your frikadeller!”

  “What’s that?” her friend had asked.

  “Balls,” her mom said. That story had made the rounds at school. The shame, the shame, Angela recalled. Childhood with Professors Pearson and Watts had been perfectly stable and even loving, but acutely, serially embarrassing.

  The four of them together (otherwise known, their parents had taught them, as a clan, or kinship unit, or conjugal family) stood around the butcher-block island to eat, as they had every school night. “Like pigs at the trough,” their mother used to say happily.

  “Standing promotes digestion,” their father reminded them. So did the tiny glasses of digestif they always drank after dinner. Lots of words for that, too: Obstler or akvavit. Kirschwasser or Schnapps. “Corrupting a minor” was what Angela’s friend’s mother had called it when she notified the police on the evening of the dinner-balls.

  Their father leaned against the sink, chewing thoughtfully on a radish, looking out the window. He was scruffy but youthful-looking, a man whose job was his passion.

  “Your father is in the middle of writing an important chapter at the moment,” their mother loudly whispered, “so we can’t penetrate his thoughts today. He just needs to be.”

  “I’m here,” he said, “but I’m distracted.”

  “The girls understand perfectly.”

  “Not really,” Angela said, using her fingernail to scrape something crusty off the tine of her fork. “Kate’s distracted today, too. She barely even talked to me on the train.”

  Kate, hearing her name, looked up suddenly and said, “What did I do?”

  “That’s my girl,” her father said.

  “Brainwork. Good for you, Kate,” their mother added and winked at her.

  “It’s not good, actually,” Angela answered. “It’s textbook antisocial behavior.”

  “That depends on the textbook,” Kate stated.

  “Aha!” her dad agreed. “Go on.”

  “According to the new DSM,” she said, “someone afflicted with an antisocial personality disorder would have to display a pervasive pattern of ignoring or even stomping on the rights of others. Plus I would have impulsivity issues, which I don’t, not to mention tendencies toward aggression and deception. Being quiet on one train trip wouldn’t come close to justifying that diagnosis.”

  “Well argued,” her father said.

  “What are you talking about?” Angela asked. “I wasn’t saying you’re clinically sick in the head. I just meant you were rude.”

  “Now, now,” their mother said, pulling a tiny fishbone out of her mouth. “Kate was probably deeply engaged in a conversation with herself; it can be hard to pull out of.”

  “Sorry, Angela,” Kate said. “I didn’t mean to ignore you.”

  “When is the inquisition at NYU?” their father asked.

  “The day after tomorrow,” Kate told him. “I’ve been preparing for weeks.”

  “So you’ve read most of Professor Greene’s papers?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “And you’re not put off by the dryness of teeth and bones? The lifelessness isn’t off-putting?”

  “Isn’t that from the Bible?” Kate asked. “The valley of dry bones?”

  “Ezekiel,” their mother said. “Marvelous folklore.”

  “Why do
you want to work in a graveyard anyway?” Angela asked. “I don’t get it.”

  “ ‘Graveyard’? That’s a little morbid,” Kate said.

  “I rather like it,” her mother remarked. “I think it gives the job a gothic, eerie feel. It’s certainly more thrilling than ‘lab.’ Or ‘department.’ ” She lowered her voice as deep as it would go. “Graveyard.”

  “Graveyard,” their father repeated solemnly. “ ‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Angela.’ ”

  “Grave,” their mother said in a strange accent. “Did you know it’s the same word in Basque?”

  “I’m sorry I started this,” Angela mumbled.

  “If we worked with bones in my lab,” their mother added, “I would adopt that moniker immediately.”

  “A graveyard,” their father said again. “To me, a graveyard always brings to mind the words of T. S. Eliot,” and he began to recite, “ ‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?’ ”

  Their mother clapped. “I wonder if Kate will make ancient femurs sprout into brilliant insights into our past? Will she gather bouquets of blooming tibias?”

  “Can we focus, please?” Angela asked.

  Kate was smiling. “I’ll be insanely happy if I get this job; you can call it whatever you want,” she said.

  “When you walk in to meet Dr. Greene,” her mother said, “stand up tall, give a firm handshake, and proceed to be yourself.”

  “Who else would she be?” Angela asked.

  “How existential,” her father said. “Is any of us really anyone?”

  “Dr. Greene would like to be someone,” her mother said.

  “He is someone,” Kate stated. “Have you read his lab blog? GangGreene?”

  “That’s a wonderful word pairing: ‘lab blog.’ And what did you learn from the gangrenous lab blog?” she asked.

  “That the work they’re doing with fossils from the Laetoli site is groundbreaking,” Kate said.