A Sense of the Infinite

Pauline’s house was small and warm and wood-paneled. I recognized a few of Mom’s paintings on the walls. There was a Christmas tree in the corner and a big, drooling dog dozing on the couch. Pauline’s husband, Lev, was in the kitchen chopping parsley.

“Leslie told me you’re vegetarian,” Pauline said. “I hope falafel’s okay. Can I get you something to drink? Water, tea, juice?”

“Just water, please.”

She disappeared into the kitchen, and I sat on the couch with the dog. There was a box of records on the floor. I fingered their narrow spines. Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Ani DiFranco. Pauline’s couch was big and comfortable, with a thick blanket folded up on one end. I wondered whether Mom would have a house like this if she hadn’t had me. If Mom would have a life like this.

“So, tell me about your visit to Northern,” said Pauline, coming back with two glasses of water and a little bowl of snack mix on a tray. “Did Ava take you to Half Moon Mountain?”

I sipped my water and did my best to chat with her. Pauline still had a long braid that went down to her waist, a braid I loved to play with when I was little. When she used to visit us, we would play Climbing Trees and Building Forts and, if it was winter, Dragging the Injured Hiker on a Sled. Things were more fun when Pauline was around. When it was Pauline’s turn to be the Injured Hiker, Mom would get a wild look in her eye and we would pull the sled as fast as we could, giggling like crazy until somebody fell down or the sled tipped over.

“Do you know what you want to study?” Pauline was saying.

“Maybe forestry,” I said.

It felt like only 1 percent of me was actually talking to Pauline, and the other 99 percent was doing anything it could to acquire sleep. The pattern on the blanket was swimming before my eyes. “Take it easy for a day or two,” the nurse had said. “No sledding.” I wanted to be back in Ava’s room, curled up in her bed. It was stupid to come here, stupid stupid stupid.

Pauline was waiting for me to say something.

“Can I use your bathroom?” I said.

“Sure.”

Pauline showed me the way. I locked myself in and washed my face, trying to wake myself up with the cold water. I remembered the time in tenth grade when I’d found Noe and this girl Dulcie Simmonds from choir in the downstairs girls’ bathroom, the tiled room echoing with Dulcie’s sobs. I joined them at the sink.

“What’s wrong?” I’d said.

Noe had her arm around Dulcie’s back.

“Dulcie’s pregnant,” Noe informed me.

“What?!”

Dulcie’s face in the mirror was splotchy and pink. The paper towel dispenser was all the way dispensed. After school that day, I went with them to the drugstore and then to Dulcie’s house and sat on her enormous frilly bed while Noe herded her into the bathroom, listening to their voices through the half-open bathroom door. Laughter, too. As if this were a game, another girlish adventure. And maybe it was.

“Pee on it,” Noe was saying. “Aim, girl.” They’d exploded into giggles.

“I can’t aim when you’re—”

Giggles, giggles. I’d looked around Dulcie’s room. She had very few books, just a closet and a wardrobe and a desk covered with framed family photographs and ballerina figurines, all sorts of shoes lined up against her bedroom wall: red satin high heels, knee-high boots in black leather, blue plastic sandals, black pumps with feathery stuff on the toes. They looked like the props in a magician’s bag, the hoops and wands and handkerchiefs necessary to a life based on illusion. Mom and I had one pair of shoes each, three if you counted hiking boots and sandals for summer.

Jubilant shrieks. “Oh, thank God!”

And Noe, drily, “Congratulations. Your oven has been certified bunless.”

I smiled, imagining Noe saying that to me: Congratulations. Your oven has been certified bunless. And smiled again, remembering how Noe had informed me, later, that Dulcie Simmonds had never even had all-the-way sex, could not possibly have been pregnant, and was making the whole thing up for drama: Unless there is something really weird going on with Mark DiNadio’s tongue, in which case all bets are off.

I sat on the edge of the tub for a few minutes to rest. The smell of the di

When I came out of the bathroom, Pauline poked her head out of the kitchen. “Di

I followed them into the dining room and we all sat down to eat. We chatted about the Wilda McClure house and the theater lecture Ava had taken me to, and I managed to eat most of my falafel and tabbouleh, but by the time Lev went into the kitchen for the blueberry pie, I was spent.

“Pauline?” I said. “I need to lie down.”

Scraping of chairs, worried murmurs, the blueberry pie hustled back into the kitchen. I thought I would die of embarrassment.

“I thought you looked a little sick,” said Pauline.

We went out to the living room and I lay down on the couch beside the drooling dog. Pauline draped the patterned blanket over my shoulders. I wanted to sleep for ten thousand years. I hadn’t realized how worried I’d been until the appointment was over. Now that the burden had been removed, I felt its full weight for the first time.

I must have looked awful.

“Do you want to call your mom?” Pauline said.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

She reached for the phone. I grabbed her hand to stop her.

“Please don’t call her,” I said.

Sharp silence. Something changed in the air. I took my hand off Pauline’s, but it was too late. She sank to a crouch beside me and patted the dog’s head.

“A

64

I KEPT THE STORY SIMPLE. HOMECOMING dance, boy, accident. I tried to make it sound as adult and reasonable as possible.

“I didn’t want to miss campus visits, so I decided to get it done while I was up here.”

Pauline wasn’t buying it.

“Why didn’t you tell Leslie?” she said, flat out, when I had finished my summary.

I skirted my eyes away from Pauline’s and started to ramble. Mom and I had been fighting, Mom didn’t like my friends, Mom would freak out if she discovered that I’d spent homecoming drinking Jack Daniel’s and Gatorade with a boy I hardly knew, let alone the sex part.

“I’d already sort of denied that I’d been with a boy,” I said. “And then this happened and I didn’t want—I couldn’t stand—for her to look at me like that.”

“Look at you like what?” Pauline said.

“Like a disappointment,” I said. “Like a skank.”

“Is that how you see yourself?”

“No.”

“Then why would Leslie?”

I mumbled something about Operation Condom Drop. The truth is, skank wasn’t the thing I was worried about. It was something else. It was the cold glove that clenched at my stomach when I tried to finish my sandwiches. The way I sometimes saw myself in the mirror and wondered if Mom saw him when she looked at me. The way that revulsion would sometimes overcome me when I was in the shower or getting dressed for school, the tightness that lived in the corner of my heart, as if something there could hardly stand to be alive.

“I don’t want to give her any more reasons to hate me,” I said.

Pauline’s gray-blue eyes gazed deeply into mine. “Why would she hate you?”

“Why do you think?”

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. The dog snored. Pauline drew in a short breath. “Leslie once told me she would rather crawl barefoot through snow than see you suffering. She loves you more than anyone else in the world. It’s a spit in her face to say she wouldn’t want to be with you for every minute that you were going through this. A spit in the face.”