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  He said, "Why don't you come over?" And when she didn't answer, he said, "Take a taxi. I'm not really as far as you think."

  She didn't know where to sit once she was in his apartment. The couch was serving as a table; stacks of magazines and newspapers and books took up its length, and the chair under a reading lamp was clearly Tim's, so that the only other possible chair was the beanbag in the corner. "From somebody's youth," he said, "probably mine."

  She moved around the room. She looked at the books on his shelves: biographies—Ernest Hemingway, Adlai Stevenson, Frank Lloyd Wright—and in a cleared space a picture of a dour little girl and another picture of her, younger by years, smiling on a lawn in a skirted bathing suit. "My niece. My sister's children. They live with the folks in Ohio. The little boy's name is Ted. He's six, I think, or he may be seven." The little boy was cuter than his sister, freckled, a little like Tim. "He looks like you," she said.

  "I'm flattered," he said. "I'm glad. I've got beer and beer. What would you like?"

  "Nothing."

  "Really?"

  But she joined him in a beer, clinking bottles as he moved his chair closer to the couch, remarking that they had more than Siddons in common; they were both from the Midwest. Yes, he said. He knew that, and Tim was glad she had called, had come; he had been wondering about her visit to Astra Dell.

  "Yes," she said.

  "So?"

  "The girl slept the whole time. She opened her eyes when I first got there, and she may have seen me. I don't know. The nurse said she would tell Astra I'd been there." Anna drank and shrugged her shoulders, said she was tired. She said, "So," said, "Nothing much to say except I'm depressed."

  He took the beer from her hand and kept her hand in his and looked at her in that Tim Weeks way he had, and he was adorable again.

  She said, "Well, I'm not suffering, am I? I came here, didn't I? I'm sitting with you and drinking beer and playing the sad sack when what do I have to be sad about?"

  "Don't be so hard on yourself. You have reason to be sad. There's something wrong about a child gravely ill. There's the memory of your brother."

  "You think they could fix it by now. You think they'd know more."

  "Next time maybe I should go with you," and he let go of her hand.

  "I'm not being hard on myself. I was glad for an excuse to call you."

  He smiled. He talked about quiet experiences and how it helped to see a lot of foliage from the windows of his apartment. "Look," he said, and she did, and she saw the leaves on the cherry trees were small and ovate and a yellow-red that looked edible.

  "I like where you live."

  CHF

  By the time Car got to the hospital, visiting hours were almost over, but Astra was awake, and when the girls saw each other, they cried. Astra was hooked to ma chinery and fenced off behind a castered table, so that Car stood aloof and cried. The words for what they were feeling were ordinary, familiar words, and Car was sorry to say them. Even the language behind her silence was worn and uninspired and whapped the way balloons did without surprise or weight. And what had she brought to show Astra? Old photos, the colors too bright; the beach, a hurtful white against the blue of everything else. Astra in a tented costume and Car in a bathing suit, and both of them laughing at Car's father, who had taken pictures then. The girls eating lobster. Car asleep in the hammock. The girls older and eating lobster. Sweet peas whimsically tangled on tepeed trellises, and hydrangeas, so heavy headed from a rain, they flopped on the lawn as if playing dead. Pictures of the front of the house swept and raked. Thor, more of Thor, this time with his bone. Kayaks far out in the bay. "That's us," Car said. "Remember? That was the same day we saw Will Bliss and met his friend from Taft. Remember?" Astra remembered. There had been a party on the beach, a bonfire. Astra said, "Will Bliss, just the name. You have to love him. Besides, what's wrong with looking cute all the time and being the favorite friend of little children?"

  Car smiled. "What was that song those boys were singing?"

  What was it? But Car didn't remember what it was or what she was going to say next, and she opened the present she had brought for Astra while Astra watched: a bracelet, light as the cotton it was swaddled in, from Cartier, thin as a string, a silver bracelet beaded with silver beads. Astra's mouth opened in a kind of smile, her tears looked milky, and Car was ashamed to look at Astra and turned her attention to the upright row of cards.

  "All your cards!" Car said. "This one," and she opened and read and put it behind another card. "Lisa Van de Ven has the neatest, fattest handwriting. 'Dear Astra ... at least you're escaping Mr. O'Brien's first-period Monday class ... ugh. I'm sure you're happy about that. And you'll be able to catch up on the sleep...' Lisa is such a bore." Car took up another and read aloud: "'Remember the chorus trip when we stayed up all night and talked about EVERYTHING!!!?' Who is this from? Edie, I should have known. And Alex of AlexandSuki, what did they have to say? I miss you a lot, and I know so many people have said that to you, but I know that you know that coming from me...' Alex is so crazy. You know she's making a video about the senior experience? She thinks it'll look good on her applications." The rest of the cards Car read to herself, and when she turned back to Astra, her best friend's eyes were shut. They were shut and her face settled in a way more final than before, and Car knew she was asleep. Someone rapped at the door; visiting hours were over; it was time. True enough, the room had darkened. The corridor, too, was asleep, and the nurses' station empty, and the doors along the hall were half shut on screened-off beds, and nowhere was there music or TV, only the nurse on spongy soles, moving just ahead, checking on the darkness from room to room, saying to Car as they walked down the corridor, "She's looking pretty good, your friend."

  "Was that good?" and when the nurse didn't answer right away, Car said that maybe she could come tomorrow. Maybe, yes, she should come. Tomorrow. Tomorrow was school again. Folio meeting. She had AP calculus to do. No frees tomorrow except lunch. No lunch tomorrow. Tomorrow no food, nothing, only water.

  Siddons

  Edie Cohen explained right speech involved abstinence from "lying, telling tales, harsh language, and frivolous talk." In the first skit at morning meeting, three girls were talking, and as a fourth approached, one girl said to the others, "Don't let her join our group." In the second skit, four girls were talking and after one of them had left, the others spoke behind her back: "She is a drag. I wish she wouldn't follow us."

  In the third skit, four girls were talking and then one of them walked to a pile of book bags and took something that was clearly not hers. When later she had the opportunity to confess, she lied: "I didn't take anything."

  Marlene played the student who said, "Don't let her join our group," a line she had heard: Lisa Van de Ven, eighth grade, middle school. The jittery disconnect and suddenness of middle school: breasts and stinks. Rumors, boys, dances. The boys froze some fatty's bra and waved it like a flag in Frost Valley.

  Unattached

  Anna Mazur did not like Tim Weeks's apartment as much as she liked her own. Hers had a view of the East River. Every time she opened the front door to her apartment, she walked toward the restlessness, the choppy, mostly dun-colored or black shivering river as seen from the picture window, a view that powerfully affirmed the rightness of her relocation from Michigan. Hers was a postwar building, and the windows were modern with wide panes—she needed to get them washed—and the rent for her apartment was a matter of its view and the floor, the twelfth floor, a junior one-bedroom, which meant not quite a studio, not quite a one-bedroom, but five hundred square feet of living space for a large chunk of what she made every month. Her mother had asked more than once, "How much can you save living in a city like New York?" Money for Anna, at age twenty-eight, was not the point; she had wanted sophistication and experience. The private school in Michigan where she first taught had a B reputation, or so said her cousin, the lawyer—and who better than the lawyer to know? In Anna's eighth-grade classro
om at Siddons, early in the teaching year, she had one day come into class and started the lessons—always, always, she forgot to take roll—while two of her students hid under her desk. They would have seen the entire class through from this perspective except that their delight in the prank, and their classmates' laughter, gave them away. Other missteps included her constantly confusing the names of two black girls—"Do we all look alike, Miss Mazur?" The problem was the girls did look alike.

  She remembered other embarrassments. The class trip to the cheese factory where she stepped in something that stank up the bus. Those moments—all too many of them—when pride overrode discretion, and she let loose her voice in a communal song; she let her florid soprano flail upward and over the ordinary sound produced by those gathered at the start of the new school year. Her voice, a fat girl's vanity, drew too much attention in a school setting, and only in church could she freely sing. However had she managed to get through the first year at Siddons? Anna suspected it was finally her friend's good word, Sharon Feeney, the darling Miss F, who had known Anna at the university and had written on her behalf. The darling Miss F—"I can't carry a tune!"—was a favorite among the administrators. To be favored, a favorite, that was Anna's ambition, but she was not so confident of this happening as to decorate her apartment with the view of longstanding employment. This was her third year of teaching at Siddons.

  Tim Weeks was thirty-three years old and had been at Siddons for six years. His apartment was darker and had no river view, but there was permanence in the oak shelves and books and photographs. Anna had no photographs; her personal history shamed her for being as ordinary as mud. Her mother had worked in a nursing home and her father on assembly at the GM plant. Their house was split-level in a ditched development, no water in sight, stunted trees, and culs-de-sac. Her father once in the car saying, "Oh lordy, Annie, it's just a fancy word for dead end."

  Marlene

  On clubs afternoons when Marlene was free—she wasn't a joiner—she walked to the hospital and sat with Astra Dell. If others were there or arrived, she cut the visit short and only left off whatever she had brought to read to her because Astra had said she loved being read to, so that is what Marlene did. She read stories from Dog Fancy's "Therapy on Four Legs." She brought in stories about heroes and miracles that might make Astra feel good, and they did because she smiled when Marlene read them. Astra said, "Marlene, you're weird," but she smiled when she said this. Astra always thanked her, and she thanked Marlene in a genuine way. Her smile seemed to Marlene entirely sincere; even on those afternoons when she was in pain and noddy with medicine, when her voice broke and she only waved good-bye, Astra seemed glad to have seen Marlene, and so Marlene came to the hospital on other days, not just clubs afternoons. She would have visited on the weekends except the weekends were Mr. Dell's. On this day, as on so many days, Marlene Kovack left school and her last name—the nasal sound of it when said at school—she left behind, and she walked along the East River down the broad avenue to the hospital.

  The spired entrance was marbled and churchlike in its serious human traffic, and Marlene was an old parishioner, a woman in black on her way to prayers. She didn't have to ask where, she knew. The back banks of elevators, the higher floor, the long corridor, turn left, and another five rooms down, and she was there, Astra's room, the door ajar and sometimes other visitors but most often not, most often on clubs afternoons it was only Marlene. Once when Miss Mazur and Mr. Weeks had come, Marlene had stayed on. She wanted to know teachers the way Astra knew teachers, and Marlene liked Mr. Weeks. Marlene did not know Miss Mazur, but it was her opinion—and she shared it later with Astra Dell—that Mr. Weeks felt sorry for Miss Mazur, which was why he was with her. Miss Mazur's face was wildly askew. Every feature went its own way, and her nose was a large distraction. Most clubs afternoons Marlene had Astra Dell to herself. Astra sometimes slept; she opened her eyes sometimes only just long enough to say, I'm not feeling very well. Astra wasn't feeling well on this clubs afternoon, so Marlene did not stay but left a note on the bedside table for her signed love. And for this, Marlene thought better of herself, and once home she was a sharpened arrow thrummed from the bow and hitting its target. Steadfast, selfless, purposed to comfort her friend, her only and her best. Couldn't she say that? Yes, Marlene thought, however unacknowledged, she was Astra's best friend.

  A Daughter

  The nurse informed them that Astra wasn't feeling very well today. "We won't stay long," Lisa said. Miss Wilkes in a louder voice to Astra, "We just wanted to say hello." Lisa moved away from Miss Wilkes so that Astra could see her and she could see Astra, but the sight of Astra weakly propped against the pillows surprised Lisa, who had not visited before and had had no idea of how worn away her friend would be, how see-through thin.

  Lisa and Miss Wilkes, uncertain in the semi-dark of Astra's room, whispered to each other, was Astra asleep?

  "I'm not asleep," Astra said.

  "'How are you' seems like such a stupid thing to ask," Lisa said, "but how are you?" One stupid question after another followed. And afterward in the booth at the coffee shop, Lisa said she was stunned. Astra seemed to have shrunk already. Lisa said, "Obviously, I didn't know what to say."

  Miss Wilkes was forgiving. She said she liked Greek coffee shops. Posters over every booth—white, hilly villages, crags to the sea. Behind the glass door in the refrigerated case the usual desserts, thickly frosted cakes, rice pudding, liquidy fruit.

  Wet water glasses were swiftly set before them and then the heavy coffee-shop crockery, coffee for Miss Wilkes, hot water and a tea bag for Lisa, who sighed out how unfair it was, Astra Dell, how awful, how confusing, how messed up it was, and it was! No one ever said the world made sense, but Lisa had expected that hard work and earnest intentions would pay off to some degree. Maybe the school reward system was the problem. "We need a much more arbitrary system," Lisa said. "Grades should be picked from a hat." No more elections and auditions. The fateful nature of the world was what should be taught because outside of school that was how it was. Money, scarce among the teachers and rarely talked of and then as an evil, was undervalued in school when, in fact, it decided so much. Lisa said that Suki Morton would end up at Brown because of it.

  "Who are the Mortons?" Miss Wilkes wanted to know.

  "They're the soup people."

  Miss Wilkes said, "I'm ignorant of high-end experience, so I don't feel the lack."

  "I don't either," Lisa said, "at least not until the girls come back from spring vacation blonder and tan. Then I'm jealous." She shrewdly shoved aside her parents' summer home on the Jersey shore.

  Miss Wilkes remembered a senior with high style whose disc player blew up in Dr. Meltzer's class. There were sparks, or that's what everyone said. Dr. Meltzer screamed at the girl, "Who do you think you are?" One of the drawbacks of the fourth floor: Dr. Meltzer was there, throwing chalk. "I hear him screaming a lot."

  "Dr. Beltzer," Lisa said.

  "So he said, 'Who do you think you are?' and she said, 'A Du Pont.'"

  There were, in Lisa's opinion, so many ways to be disappointed in school. "Prize Day, if you want to know. Prize Day is a reason to give up. I lose sleep, friends, and hair, so I can sit through an eternity of the 'Everything Lisa can't do' show. I have to pay attention because my mother will want to know names so she can torture me with them."

  "But you've won prizes."

  "The nice-girl prize, yes, twice. I had them fooled."

  "You're not a nice girl?"

  "No," Lisa said, pulling at the skin on her thumbs, "I'm not a nice girl."

  "I have that habit, too."

  Lisa said, "I know." She said, "Graduation seems so far away," and she sighed theatrically. Lisa said, "I don't really want to talk to anyone at school anymore. Not because of you. Just because there is no reason to make an effort. It's not real at Siddons." Margaret Schilling and Jennifer Mann, stupid, glossy, social girls, not long out of Siddons, were on the gossip shows n
ow. Margaret Schilling had recently posed in an emerald dress with a pug in her arms for one of those horsey magazines. "My mother buys Town and Country." Lisa thought many of the girls in her class were simply making themselves into the perfect corporate wives of tomorrow. "I heard, swear to god, word for word, Alex Decrow say, 'All I want is to smoke and party and marry a rich guy.'" Lisa thought that the importance of money should be taught; at least then girls would be prepared and might go through life less bitter.

  "Are you bitter?" Miss Wilkes asked.