by Meg Wolitzer
Alby often carried his box turtle with him, holding it as tenderly as if it were a newborn lamb. The turtle had wandered unobserved into the Pinto yard one day a few months earlier and had sat for a long time in the scrub grass in the sun, giving the appearance of a rock, or an antiquarian law book, dusty, brown, gold, green. But Alby had recognized it for what it was and said, “That’s my turtle,” claiming it immediately and naming it Slowy. “Because they are slow,” he explained to his family.
Alby had easily determined that the turtle was male. “The boy turtles have red eyes,” he said, because he had read it in a children’s science book, having learned to read at age two and a half. Alby would lay the two-pound box turtle down on the couch and then he would lay his own thirty-eight pounds on top of his older brother, who fastened him in place. Alby asked Greer to play video games with him; he was an expert, with advanced hand-eye coordination. He often wanted her to look at books with him—they were both obsessed with books—and Greer found that soon they were making their way through entire series together, taking turns reading aloud. He liked the Encyclopedia Brown series best, books that she had once loved.
“Why did the Meany parents name their son Bugs?” Alby asked, concerned.
“That is an excellent question.”
“Or, maybe it was the author, Donald J. Sobol. Bugs Meany already has a bad last name. Now he has a bad first name too. It doesn’t seem fair.”
“You even feel sympathy for the bully,” she said. Alby burrowed in hard against her.
How resourceful people are, Greer thought now as she lay in bed with Cory in his dorm, recalling this moment. Cory’s little brother had burrowed into her, ensuring that even when they were apart, she would remember him and love him. And still she kept burrowing into Cory, and also, distantly and metaphorically, into the spectral figure of Faith Frank, who had swept down upon Greer’s newly adult life and made her want something. We burrow and burrow, attempting a hidden path. We are canny in our burrowing, Greer thought, though we never want to admit it. Across the dorm room, Steers kept the light on all night.
* * *
• • •
There was a moment in the middle of college, imperceptible at the time as an actual moment, when talk started to shift from classes, majors, parties, and symbolism in literature to jobs. Once it happened, jobs won out, and classes and majors and novels and academic debates took on a sweet, quaint whiff of the past. Jobs made you sit up straighter and scheme, trying to think of any connections you had ever made and could now use. Everyone was thinking and worrying a little about the long run, that abstract road that supposedly might lead to happiness, before it led to death.
The science majors, if they weren’t applying to medical school, were thinking about working in a lab, while some of the liberal arts majors were planning careers in early-childhood education or sales. Or else, like a few people they knew who had already graduated, they imagined themselves working in publishing, answering phones in sprightly voices, saying, “Magda Stromberg’s office, this is Becca!” dozens of times a day, when really they wanted to be Magda Stromberg, not Becca. A number of them would be taking jobs in fields that possessed a certain impressive weight simply as words: Marketing. Business. Finance.
None of them wanted to be like the occasional Ryland graduate who stayed around and haunted the campus. There was one who had graduated three years earlier, and he worked as a barista at the Main Bean downtown, and made a show of leaving whatever book he was currently reading splayed open, title facing up, beside him next to the pumps of syrup and the pitchers of steamed milk, and he’d try to catch the eye of one of the current students buying coffee. The student would take his cup and add packet after packet of raw sugar, gearing up for a paper he had to write that night, while the barista no longer had to gear up for anything except another day behind the counter. It was bewildering the way a place that had held you tightly for four years simply released you at the end, no longer responsible.
Greer had started to imagine becoming a writer; she saw herself writing essays and articles and eventually maybe books with strongly feminist themes, though probably that was the kind of work she would do late at night at first. She would have to start earning a salary to support her writing. She couldn’t have a life like her parents. But if she had a real job, and didn’t have to fall into poverty, then she could try to write when she could, and maybe she would have some luck.
Though Zee was definitely more of the nonprofit type than Greer was, now Greer could see working for a while in communications for someplace that was good. She also imagined that she might write to Faith Frank and tell her about it: “As I try to figure out what to do with my life, I have a job writing the in-house newsletter at Planet Concerns. Again, this is probably because of the conversation we had in the ladies’ room. I’m trying to make meaning, as you suggested.”
Soon Greer was saying to Cory, unasked, “A nonprofit. That could work at first, while I write at night, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” he said easily, but he didn’t really know what he was talking about; neither of them did.
“Chloe Shanahan’s friend works for an organization that brings art to people with disabilities. Her brother is blind,” Greer added, then felt she had to put in, “Not that she wouldn’t have worked there anyway.”
“But probably she wouldn’t,” Cory said.
“True.”
It seemed that you came to what you ended up doing, and who you ended up being, through any number of ways. Being a writer had a dreamy impossibility about it, but she liked to imagine it anyway. She became increasingly able to see herself writing on the side while working someplace decent and honorable. “It won’t be marketing,” she told Cory. “It won’t be fashion. It won’t be,” she added gratuitously, “library clown.”
Cory had become friends with two people he’d met in a class on economic development at Princeton, and after talking fiercely around the seminar table about poverty, and later continuing the conversation outside of class, the three of them talked about developing a microfinance app after college. Both Lionel and Will came from wealthy families that were considering investing in their sons’ app. The three of them were now buzzed with the idea of it, swarmed with plans.
“I think this is actually going to happen,” Cory said to Greer. “It’s exciting, though it has to be handled right. There are people out there throwing around these terms, microfinance, microloans, but essentially ripping other people off. When it works it can make a huge difference to small-business owners. But the interest can be incredibly high. So we’re going to do it in a way that’s low-interest. We’re not going to rip anyone off. Also, women apply for these kinds of loans a lot,” he added, and though this remark was a self-conscious nod to feminism, a nod to her, she didn’t mind.
Greer imagined Cory in shirtsleeves in a little office somewhere in Brooklyn, his phone blowing up with the sound effects of a cash register dinging as loans went through. But mostly, in this image, she saw Cory’s happiness. At the end of an industrious day, he would come home from microfinance, and she would come home from nonprofit. They would talk about policy, and problems Greer was having with her writing, and drink beers on the fire escape, and once in a while from that fire escape they would watch fireworks, which appeared at intervals over the skies of New York for no good reason except a general excitement about the city—living there and being young, wanting to see color shoot across its skies. Late at night, when Cory slept, she would stay up beside him in bed with her laptop, writing fiction and essays and notes for articles that she hoped to publish. She’d already started keeping a notebook of ideas.
After college they were going to be living together in Brooklyn and hoping they could find a way to afford it; this was the plan now. They’d have a small, bare-bones apartment. Greer saw a jute rug on the floor, and imagined its unforgiving texture, and then the cold floor a f
ew feet later as she padded to the bathroom after sex in the night, or before work in the morning.
“Neither of us is great at cooking,” Greer noted. “We can’t microwave everything when we live together.”
“We’ll learn,” he said. “Though can you tolerate me cooking meat, and turning the place into a meat palace?”
“Separate pans and good ventilation,” she said. “That’ll help.” Vegetarianism had become a fixed state for her, and she never wanted to go back.
Now, when Greer couldn’t sleep sometimes, she thought of her future with Cory, each detail burnished and discrete. She imagined Cory’s size-13 foot peeping out at the end of the bed, the two of them sleeping together every night, finally, and no longer in a bed meant for a child or a college student. A bed that could hold both of them easily, casually.
Whenever you saw a young couple that had recently moved in together, you knew there was something substantial going on with them. All that love, all that fucking, all that flipping through catalogues on a treasure hunt for linens and furniture and small appliances that had been designed expressly with them in mind. The prices had to be slightly out of range, and yet, upon reflection, not! We can do it, the couple said to each other. We can make it work. The prices spoke of the big step this would be, buying this table or chair or immersion blender; but unlike in the past, when men would leave home decoration and kitchen assembly entirely to women, putting together a life was now a joint activity. It could happen in bed, even, where you might study a website or a catalogue together—the new, engrossing literature of the first flush of adulthood—warm body to warm body, in a festival of imagining. To commit to actual things composed of wood and metal and fabric was to make real the vagueness and unreality of love.
For now, they were tolerating college apart well. They had full course loads, and there had been a thrilling election followed by a new president; and they made weekend trips to see each other, though sometimes Greer could perceive little incomplete flashes of the life Cory led that had nothing to do with her, and she was anxious about them. He might say, “Steers and Mackey and Clove Wilberson are forcing me to join the Frisbee team.”
“They are physically forcing you?”
“Yes. They said I must surrender.”
She had to wonder about Clove Wilberson, whose name came up too often. Greer Googled her, and found an entire Clove Wilberson dossier online, much of it having to do with field hockey, which Clove had played at St. Paul’s School and now played at Princeton. A photo of her, mid-run, featured assertive bones beneath the skin of an oval face, and the obvious exertion that moved her blood. Her ponytail was captured mid-flight. She had enviable upper arms. She was definitely much better-looking than Greer, who sat studying the photo and silently asked: Clove Wilberson, have you been to bed with my boyfriend?
But it was a question she didn’t really want answered. Greer and Cory had originally acted as though being apart for college was a natural occurrence, though all the couples they knew—even the ones at the same school—had broken up after a while, getting knocked off one by one in a kind of protracted Agatha Christie rubout.
Maybe, Greer thought, the sense of longing helped keep her and Cory together. She herself had had moments when she’d almost strayed from him. Sitting at someone’s off-campus party late at night once in the fall of junior year, she felt the hand of her friend Kelvin Yang stroking her hair. They’d all been singing the song “Hallelujah” with its three million verses, while Dog accompanied them on ukulele. They were sitting on a rug in a dim room, wailing the beautiful, dirgelike song that reminded them of young love and what could so easily be lost, and there was big, built drummer Kelvin beside her. She let him stroke her hair and she even leaned against him, noting his unfamiliar smell with almost clinical distance, then deciding she liked it, then actually lying down in his lap. He leaned over and gave her a kiss, a couple of kisses, notching them here and there in a way that was like a parent but not. Greer thought about how her own father had rarely kissed her when she was growing up, and she wondered if, because of this, she had become one of those women who would always disastrously need a man front and center in her life, and who couldn’t manage without one.
Was it okay that she needed Cory the way she did? What would Faith Frank have to say about this? Everyone seemed to want love, whether they admitted it or not. This Greer knew as she let herself be kissed by Kelvin, just a little. She disliked it when her friends remarked on the longevity of her relationship with Cory, as if it were such an unnatural feat. “You guys are amazing,” said Zee. “I have never had a relationship that lasted even two months.”
Cory was the only one she wanted to see in the morning, not a stumbling fleet of dorm-mates, and not a roommate in some tiny railroad apartment. Roommate culture was booming. People found other people to live with easily these days through websites and message boards, and they moved in together and marked their milk in the refrigerator and left each other notes when something had been done that wasn’t to their liking. A friend who had graduated a year earlier described standing tensely in place when she found a note that read, “Kindly dispose of sushi containers THE NIGHT you get them. The next day it smells like a fish factory in here, FOR FUCK’S SAKE.”
The kindly was deadly. Greer and Cory would never write kindly. Their own sushi containers, which would hold his tuna and eel, and her inside-out avocado roll, would be disposed of or not, and if their little phantom apartment smelled like a fish factory, so be it. Love was a fish factory—love, with all its murk and stink. You had to really love someone to live with him or her in close quarters.
“Soon,” Cory said, “soon,” willing time to pass in the way it did when you were young. Later, Greer knew, when they were finally living together and taking for granted the small details of a life spent close-up in a broth of shared DNA, and swirled sheets, and a havoc of days and nights, she would think, Slow down, slow down. But for now, still in college, heading toward what was theirs, they both thought, Hurry up.
THREE
Cory had been born Duarte Jr., but because his name was foreign and his parents were immigrants with accents, right before the move from Fall River when he was nine years old he’d announced that he was changing Duarte Jr. to something else. The new name he picked was as American as possible. Cory was the main character on Boy Meets World, which Duarte Jr. had watched obsessively for years. Cory was such a popular and reassuring and normalizing name. He had to beg his parents to call him that, though his father refused. “Duarte is my name too,” his father said. His mother was resistant at first as well, but then she caved out of love.
“Is important to you?” she asked, and he nodded, so she said, “Okay.”
Not long after his new name had become fully affixed to him, he realized it was embarrassing to have named himself after a character on a TV sitcom. But Duarte Jr. had become Cory now and forever, an American boy like all the other American boys in school. And he did fit in well in Macopee—an outgoing, quick-witted, exceptionally tall boy. In Fall River there had been a significant Portuguese population. Here it was different. When Duarte Sr. and Benedita came to the Macopee science fair, his mother stood in front of an experiment involving condensation and asked in a loud and unembarrassed voice, “What this thing do?”
The following day, Cory heard the condensation kid say to someone else, using an accent, “What this thing do?” followed by skittering laughter.
Cory burned from this; he twisted and he burned, but he fiercely ignored it, drawing attention away from his parents by continuing to be smart and strong and funny and capable and outgoing. Somehow these traits, strenuously demonstrated, were the antidote to being seen as different. Only when he got home from school at the end of the day, unlooping the straps of his backpack and dropping it onto the floor in the front hall of the house, did he feel he didn’t have to prove himself. He knew he could be himself at home, and th
at it would be welcomed.
His mother had loved him since birth with fierce reverence, never holding back the way his father did, but instead depositing trace kisses all over Cory as if scattering rose petals. He came to assume that he had earned this kind of treatment, and over time he figured that one day a girl would love him the very same way. He was confident of this throughout childhood and then even during the hideous period in which he was so underweight and long-limbed that he looked like one of those handmade wooden folk-art marionettes. He was confident even as a vague mustache formed itself like spreading mildew above his lip, while the rest of him stayed boylike, the chest concave. Then he was no longer a marionette, but instead he was one of those mythical half-and-half animals. Except instead of being half-man, half-horse, Cory was half-man, half-boy, forever trapped in a mortifying between state.
Still, somehow, he remained confident, having spent his entire life with his parents praising him and calling him Genius One, or Gênio Um. His brother, Alby, was Genius Two, or Gênio Dois. Both boys had been similarly anointed, and all they had to do was keep being brilliant and industrious. They were never asked to help out around the house; that was women’s work. All they needed to do was learn, and prove themselves academically, and soon suitable rewards would come.
One day in seventh grade on a trip to the relatives’ house in Fall River for Christmas dinner, his cousin Sabio Pereira, known as Sab, who had been his close buddy when they were very young, beckoned Cory upstairs. From deep inside his closet Sab proudly produced a copy of a magazine called Beaverama. “Where’d you get this?” Cory asked, shocked, but Sab just shrugged and gloated at his secret access to hard-core porn. The women in the photos were pliant, both literally and figuratively open.