by Ann Patchett
“There you are,” she said, and smiled at me. “How are you feeling?”
It would be years before I understood the very real danger of what had happened to me. At the time I saw the surgery as something between a nuisance and an embarrassment. I started to make a joke but she was looking at me with such tenderness I stopped myself. “I’m okay,” I said. My mouth was sticky and dry.
“Listen,” she said, her voice quiet. “It’s me first, then you. Do you understand?”
I gave her a loopy smile but she shook her head.
“Me first.”
The spinners started clicking a jumble of letters and numbers and when they stopped, the sign read harrisburg: 4:05, track 15, on time. Basketball had taught me how to move through a crowd. Most of the poor cows came to Penn Station just once a year and were easily confused. In the collective shuffling, very few turned in the right direction. By the time they’d puzzled out which way they were supposed to go, I was already on the train.
On the plus side, the trip would give me more than an hour to study, time that was necessary to my continuing redemption in Organic Chemistry. My professor, the aptly named Dr. Able, had called me to his office in early October to tell me I was on track to fail. It was 1968 and Columbia was burning. The students rioted, marched, occupied. We were a microcosm of a country at war, and every day we held up the mirror to show the country what we saw. The idea that anyone took note of a junior failing chemistry was preposterous, but there I was. I had already missed several classes and he had a stack of my quizzes in front of him so I don’t suppose it took an act of clairvoyance to figure out I was in trouble. Dr. Able’s third-floor office was crammed with books and a smallish blackboard that featured an incomprehensible synthesis I was afraid he would ask me to explain.
“You’re listed as pre-med,” he began, looking at his notes. “Is that right?”
I told him that was right. “It’s still early in the semester. I’ll get things back on track.”
He tapped his pencil on the pile of my disappointing work. “They take chemistry seriously in medical school. If you don’t pass, they don’t let you in. That’s why it’s best we talk now. If we wait any longer you won’t catch up.”
I nodded, feeling an aching twist in my lower intestines. One of the reasons I’d always worked hard in school and gotten good grades was an effort to preclude this exact conversation.
Dr. Able said he’d been teaching chemistry long enough to have seen plenty of boys like me, and that my problem wasn’t a lack of ability, but the apparent failure to put in the necessary time. He was right, of course, I’d been distracted since the beginning of the semester, but he was also wrong, because I didn’t think he’d seen plenty of boys like me. He was a thin man with a badly cut thatch of thick brown hair. I couldn’t have guessed how old he was, only that in his tie and jacket he resided in what I thought of as the other side.
“Chemistry is a beautiful system,” Dr. Able said. “Every block builds on the previous block. If you don’t understand chapter 1, there’s no point in going on to chapter 2. Chapter 1 provides the keys to chapter 2, and chapters 1 and 2 together provide the keys to chapter 3. We’re on chapter 4 now. It isn’t possible to suddenly start working hard on chapter 4 and catch up to the rest of the class. You have no keys.”
I said it had felt that way.
Dr. Able told me to go back to the beginning of the textbook and read the first chapter, answer every question at the end of that chapter, throw them out, wake up the next morning, and answer them again. Only when I had answered all of the questions correctly on both tries could I proceed to the next chapter.
I wanted to ask him if he knew there were students sleeping on the floor of the president’s office. What I said instead was, “I still have to keep up in my other classes,” making it sound like we were in negotiation for how much of my valuable time he was entitled to. The class had never been asked to answer all the chapter questions, much less to answer them twice.
He gave me a long, flat look. “Then this might not be your year for chemistry.”
I could not fail Organic Chemistry, could not fail anything. The draft was looming, and without academic deferment I’d be sleeping in a ditch in Khe Sanh. Still, what my sister would have done to me had I lost my academic standing would have far exceeded anything the government was capable of meting out. This wasn’t a joke. This was falling asleep at the wheel while driving through a blizzard on the New Jersey Turnpike at midnight. Dr. Able had shaken me just in time to see headlights barreling straight towards my windshield, and now I had a split second to jerk the car back into my own lane. The distance between me and annihilation was the width of a snowflake.
I took an aisle seat on the train. There was nothing I needed to see between Manhattan and Philadelphia. Under normal circumstances, I would have put my bag on the seat beside me and tried to make myself look over large, but this was Thanksgiving week and no one was getting away with two seats. Instead, I opened my text book and hoped to project exactly what I was: a serious student of chemistry who could not be drawn into a conversation about the weather or Thanksgiving or the war. The Harrisburg contingent of the Penn Station cows had been pressed through a turnstile and shaped into a single-file line that came down the platform and into the car, each of them whacking their bags into every seat they passed. I kept my eyes on my book until a woman tapped her freezing fingers against the side of my neck. Not my shoulder, like anyone would have done, my neck.
“Young man,” she said, and then looked down at the suitcase by her feet. She was somebody’s grandmother who wondered how she had found herself in a world in which men allowed women to wrestle their own bags onto trains in the name of equality. The cows behind her kept pushing, unable to understand the temporary blockage. They were too afraid the train might leave without them. I got up and hoisted her luggage—a sad suitcase of brown plaid wool cinched at the middle with a belt because the zipper could not be trusted—onto the overhead rack. With this single act of civility, I advertised my services as a porter, and women up and down the length of the car began to call. Several had Macy’s and Wanamaker’s bags full of wrapped Christmas presents in addition to their suitcases, and I wondered what it would be like to think so far in advance. Bag after bag, I worked to cram items onto the metal bars above the seats where they could not possibly fit. The universe might have been expanding but the luggage rack was not.
“Gentle,” one woman said to me, raising her hands to pantomime how she would have done it were she a foot taller.
When finally I looked in both directions and decided there was nothing more that could be done, I turned against the tide and pushed my way back to my seat. There I found a girl with loopy blond curls sitting at the window, reading my chemistry book.
“I saved your place,” she said as the train lurched forward.
I didn’t know if she meant in the book or on the train, and I didn’t ask because neither had required saving. I was on chapter 9, chemistry having presented me with the keys at last. I sat down on my coat because I’d missed the chance to put it overhead.
“I took chemistry in high school,” the blonde said, turning the page. “Other girls took typing but an A in chemistry is worth more than an A in typing.”
“Worth more how?” Chemistry had a better chance to serve the greater good, but certainly many more people would need to know how to type.
“Your grade point average.”
Her face was a confluence of circles: round eyes, rounded cheeks, round mouth, a small rounded nose. I had no intention of talking to her but I also didn’t know what choice I had as long as she was holding my book. When I asked her if she’d gotten an A in the class she kept reading. She’d stumbled onto a point of interest and in response to my question gave an absentminded nod. She found the chemistry more compelling than the fact that she had once gotten an A in chemistry, and that, I will admit, was winning. I waited all of two minutes before telling her I w
as going to need the book back.
“Sure,” she said, and handed it over, one finger marking the second section of chapter 9. “It’s funny to see it again, sort of like running into somebody you used to spend a lot of time with.”
“I spend a lot of time with chemistry.”
“It doesn’t change,” she said.
I looked at the page while she rifled through her bag, pulling out a slim volume of poetry by Adrienne Rich called Necessities of Life. I wondered if she was reading it for a class or if she was just one of those girls who read poetry on trains. I didn’t ask, and so we sat in companionable silence all the way to Newark. When the train stopped and the doors opened, she took a stick of Juicy Fruit from the pack in her pocket and stuck it into her book, then she looked at me again with unbearable seriousness.
“We should talk,” she said.
My girlfriend Susan had said We should talk at the end of our freshman year before telling me we were breaking up. “We should?”
“Unless you want to take down the luggage for all the women getting off in Newark and then put up the luggage for all the women getting on.”
She was right, of course. There were women glowering in my direction and then looking pointedly up at their bags. There were other able-bodied men on the train, but they were used to me.
“So you’re going home,” my seatmate said, leaning forward, smiling. She had put something on her lips to make them shiny. From a distance a person would have thought we were engaged in meaningful conversation, or that we were engaged. I was close enough to smell the vestiges of her shampoo.
“For Thanksgiving,” I said.
“Nice.” She nodded slightly, holding my gaze in a lock so that I could plainly see the slight droop in her left eyelid, a defect that would have passed unnoticed had it not been for an episode of intense staring. “Harrisburg?”
“Philadelphia,” I said, and because we were for that moment very close, I added my suburb. “Elkins Park.” I forgot for a minute that I didn’t live in Elkins Park anymore. I lived in Jenkintown, inasmuch as I lived anywhere. Maeve lived in Jenkintown.
At the mention of Elkins Park a light of familiarity sparked in her eyes. “Rydal.” She touched the blue wool scarf that covered her sternum. Elkins Park was one town over from Rydal, which meant that we were practically neighbors. A woman leaned over us to say something but my seatmate waved her away.
“Buzzy Carter,” I said, because his was the name to drop when speaking of Rydal. Buzzy and I had been in Scouts together and later played on opposing church league basketball teams. He was born popular, and by the time we got to high school he had good grades, good teeth, and a knack for racking up forty points a game, not including assists. He was playing at Penn now on a full ride.
“He was a year ahead of me,” she said with a look on her face that girls got when thinking of Buzz. “He took my cousin to junior prom though I never knew why. You were at Cheltenham?”
“Bishop McDevitt,” I said, not wanting to get into anything complicated, “but the last two years I went to boarding school.”
She smiled. “Your parents couldn’t stand you?”
I liked this girl. She had good timing. “Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.”
When the train left the station again, we resumed our commitment to be strangers, she with her poetry book, me with my chemistry. In our peaceful coexistence, we very nearly forgot about the other altogether.
When the train pulled into 30th Street Station, the woman with the plaid suitcase, the one who’d started it all, shot straight to my side and dragged me down the aisle to get her bag. It really was stuck up there, jammed between all the other bags. Even if she’d stood on the armrest she couldn’t have reached it. Then another woman needed help, and another and another, and soon I started worrying that the doors were going to close and I’d have to ride the train to Paoli and double back. I saw the blond head of my seatmate going towards the door. Maybe she’d waited as long as felt prudent, or maybe she hadn’t waited at all. I told myself it didn’t matter. I tugged down one last bag for a woman who seriously seemed to think I was supposed to carry it to the platform for her, then I shook myself loose, grabbed my coat and suitcase, my textbook, and slipped off the train just ahead of the closing doors.
My sister was never hard to find. For one thing, I could pretty much count on her being taller than everyone else, and for another she was always on time. If I was coming in on a train, Maeve would be front and center in the waiting crowd. She was there on this particular Wednesday before Thanksgiving across the terminal, wearing jeans and a red wool sweater of mine I thought I’d lost. She waved to me and I lifted my hand to wave back but my seatmate grabbed my wrist.
“Goodbye!” she said, all blond and smiling. “Good luck with the chemistry.” She hoisted her bag up on her shoulder. I guess she’d put it down to wait for me.
“Thanks.” I had some strange inclination to hide her or to shoo her away, but there was my sister, striding towards us. Maeve wrapped me in her arms, lifted me an inch or so off the ground, and shook me. The first time she’d done that was the first Easter I’d come home from Choate, and she’d kept up the tradition just to prove she could.
“Did you meet someone on the train?” Maeve said, looking at me instead of her.
I turned to the girl. She was a perfectly average size, though everyone looked small when they stood between me and my sister. I remembered then that I hadn’t asked her name.
“Celeste,” the girl said, and held out her hand, so we all shook hands. “Maeve,” said Maeve, and I said, “Danny,” and then we all wished one another a happy Thanksgiving, said goodbye, and walked away.
“You cut off your hair!” I said once we were out of earshot.
Maeve reached up and touched her neck just below the place where her dark hair ended in an abrupt bob. “Do you like it? I thought it made me look more like an adult.”
I laughed. “I would have thought you’d be sick of always looking like the adult.”
She linked her arm through mine and dipped her head sideways to touch my shoulder. Her hair fell forward and covered her face for an instant, so she tossed her head back. Like a girl, I thought, and then remembered Maeve was a girl.
“These will be the best four days of the year,” she said. “The best four days until you come home for Christmas.”
“Maybe for Christmas you’ll come see me. I came to see you for Easter when you were in college.”
“I don’t like the train,” Maeve said, as if that were the end of that.
“You could drive.”
“To Manhattan?” She stared at me to underscore the stupidity of the suggestion. “It’s so much easier to take the train.”
“The train was a nightmare,” I said.
“Was the girl a nightmare?”
“No, the girl was fine. She was a big help, actually.”
“Did you like her?” We were nearly to the door that led out to the parking lot. Maeve had insisted on driving in to get me.
“I liked her as well as you like the person you sit next to on the train.”
“Where’s she from?”
“Why do you care where she’s from?”
“Because she’s still standing there waiting and no one’s come to meet her. If you like her then we could offer her a ride.”
I stopped and looked over my shoulder. She wasn’t watching us. She was looking in the other direction. “Now you have eyes in the back of your head?” I had always thought it was possible. Celeste, who had seemed so competent on the train, looked decidedly lost in the station. She had saved me from a lot of luggage handling. “She’s from Rydal.”
“We could spare the extra ten minutes to drive to Rydal.”
My sister was more aware of her surroundings than I was. She was also a nicer person. She waited with my bags and sent me back to ask Celeste if she needed a ride. After taking a few more minutes to scan the station for some member of her
family—it had never been made clear which one of them was supposed to pick her up—she asked me again if she wasn’t going to be a huge imposition. I said she was no trouble at all. The three of us walked to the parking lot together while Celeste continued to apologize. Then she crawled into the back of my sister’s Volkswagen and we drove her home.
* * *
“You were the one who said we should give her a ride,” Maeve said. “My memory on this is perfectly clear. We were going to the Gooches’ for Thanksgiving and I needed to get home and make the pie, then you said you’d met this girl on the train and promised that I’d drive her home.”
“Utter bullshit. You’ve never made a pie in your life.”
“I needed to go the bakery and pick up the pie I’d ordered.”
I shook my head. “I always took the 4:05 train. The bakery would have been closed by the time I came in.”
“Would you stop? All I’m saying is that I’m not responsible for Celeste.”