An Uncommon Education (37 page)

“Let’s run,” I said. She studied me for a moment, and I thought she might turn from me to go back to sleep. But then she got up, and as I watched her walk silently to the closet, pull on a sweatshirt, then sit to tie her shoes, I could let myself pretend that we had been freed of everything between us, as though being released into a regular, unaffected action that could let us resume where we should have been.

Just as we walked out the door, Jun stopped. She put a hand on my back and one on my arm, stopping me before holding up one finger to ask me to wait. She had forgotten her keys. It was an unmistakable simulation of her father’s gestures; I had seen him act out the very same movements at Thanksgiving. Jun had gone ahead of me into the dining room and he had stopped her: one hand on the back, another on the arm, then a finger, signaling for her to wait. It struck me when she mirrored it; and the extent of the shift she had enacted within herself was all at once apparent. She did not only fear her father’s reaction; she was inviting him into the situation. I am convinced she wanted him to be there with her.

During the winter we had run only occasionally and had stuck to the indoor track, but that morning we took to the lake. The path was almost dry for the first time in months, and there were long stretches of light dirt. We ran for over an hour, until we were both exhausted. We made our way to the lake’s only beach, a small, rocky clearing that always surprised me with its waves. Spring in Massachusetts usually surprised me, arriving so definitively after such a long wait. In a few short months it would be summer, hot and humid, and I would be home, probably for the last time.

When I next looked at Jun there were tears on her face. It startled me to see them, but she didn’t react to my surprise. I felt I’d stumbled upon one of the deer that sometimes lost their way onto campus, that if I moved too suddenly she might take off. I felt often that way about Jun, come to think of it, that her friendship was a rare and delicate thing. I wanted to reach out to her, but it would have been a commentary on her tears, and she wouldn’t want that. I waited beside her. It was probably only a few minutes until she spoke.

“How is your mother?” she asked.

I began to say something else but she waved me off. “She’s better.” I lied. I hadn’t been home since my father’s birthday, in March, which he hadn’t wanted to celebrate. “Jun,” I said, struggling.

“There’s nothing you can do.”

“But you’ve done nothing wrong,” I insisted. I felt I was speaking off topic, but I couldn’t understand yet why. “Isn’t that significant? I mean, your parents will know it’s all nonsense. They’ll be outraged on your behalf.” I felt so naïve, but also so stubbornly sure that her innocence deserved someone’s idealism, some assertion of its rights.

“I’ve done nothing wrong,” she repeated.

“So,” I said, still trying to win the argument, “you need to say that. I can help you say that. I know you did nothing wrong. They want us both to say just that.”

She didn’t respond to what I just said. She picked up a handful of stones and began tossing them idly at the shore of the lake. “Did you know that Tiney and I joined the society together?” she asked me after a while. “We were roommates first year, and we joined together.” She smiled. “God, it was a great year. The society was at its best. Incredible actors in the senior class. You should have been there.” She turned her smile to me. “We both took to it like fish to water. For a while, Tiney and I really were friends.” She paused. “Have you met her parents?” she asked me. I nodded. I had only seen them once, but I remembered.

“I thought they were snobs at first, too aloof to be welcoming. But it’s more than that. Her father is a cold man,” Jun said. “That’s all I can say definitively about him, though his coldness runs deep. It runs through Tiney, too. Toward the end of first year I saw it in her. She wore it, subtly, like an extra skin, but once you saw it, it was hard to ignore.”

“What happened?” I asked, afraid she would stop.

She sighed, summoning energy she didn’t seem to have. “There was a girl on our hall who was failing, who came to Tiney for help. Tiney would tutor her, but after the girl left, she’d be smirking over her shortcomings. Triumphant. She even laughed outright a few times, maybe she thought we were sharing a good joke.” Jun wrapped her arms around herself. “She helped a few other girls that way. Couldn’t have been more gracious or careful with them; then they’d leave and she’d cut them down.” She looked at me, to be sure I was listening. “She took such pleasure in it.

“Once, a girl had lost something, a journal, and came to all our doors, tearfully, asking if we’d found it. She was kind of a sad sort; it wasn’t the first time we’d seen her in tears. But a few days later, Tiney showed up with it, told me she’d found it on a bookshelf in the common room, and was snickering like someone who’d won a prize.

“It was still on her desk the next day. She caught me looking at it, she must have known what was on my mind, and she made a big show out of having forgotten to return it, marched it over to the girl’s room straightaway. It was almost like she could read me well enough to know just how uncomfortable I could get before turning away from her, and then she’d do the right thing. I think that bothered me most of all; she knew how others reacted to her, but sympathy never stopped her. Only the fear of losing something herself. I know she feared losing me as her friend, but I started to think that she liked me only because I did so well at school, because I was in some way as untouchable as she was academically, in the same league. You know, keep your friends close, your enemies closer?” Jun sighed. “Tiney wants the Marshall, Naomi.”

I told her I didn’t understand.

“It’s very rare that they give it to more than one Wellesley student in any given year. Tiney and I are both planning to apply for it senior year. She didn’t know until this year that I had citizenship and could apply.”

Jun looked at me. “She knows who I am, Naomi.” She paused as if wondering how much more she needed to explain. “She knows this is not a fight I’d choose.”

I was incredulous. “You mean that you won’t speak out against her? That you’ll let her win?” I heard my nine-year-old voice in the emergency room, studying the plastic heart and marveling at how different it was than I had imagined.

“No,” Jun said. “That I’m fighting a bigger battle. Listen”—she turned to face me, the sun throwing half her face in shadow. I remember wanting to turn her so that the whole of her face would be shown, wanting to make her squint in the light. “This isn’t something you need to fix,” she told me. “It’s between Tiney and me. You should never have been involved.”

Twenty-Seven

J
un’s father arrived on campus that night, her mother in tow.

I came home from afternoon classes to find our door open but blocked, Mr. Oko standing in it, watching Jun move slowly around the room and her mother fuss, packing a small bag. Jun saw me first, and Mr. Oko turned around when she looked up. He bowed slightly, and I used my bow to duck into the room and drop off my things. I meant to dash back out, but I would have had to rush by him, so I just stood in one corner, watching them. Jun’s mother was smaller than I remembered her and looked even more birdlike darting around our room than she had flitting through the large Manhattan apartment. I ended up directly across from Mr. Oko, in the farthest corner of the room, though while I was trying my best to be inconspicuous he seemed intent on making a keen impression of the room and everyone in it. Mrs. Oko was the only one speaking, asking Jun hushed, urgent questions, in Japanese, about her belongings. Finally, she zipped the bag, and Mr. Oko stepped forward to pick it up. He looked at Jun and nodded in my direction. “We’ll be at the Four Seasons in Boston,” Jun said to me before following her mother, now scurrying out the door after her father. When they were out of sight, she turned back quickly. “I’ll try to call.” She shut the door firmly behind her.

I threw myself down on my bed. The Okos had left a fresh, foreign scent, but the room felt strangely undisturbed, despite the flurry that had been there. It suddenly felt too quiet. I picked up the phone and called home. My father answered.

An hour later, he had driven the twenty minutes to Wellesley and was waiting for me outside the dorm, his headlights casting the only light on the dark circular driveway.

Massachusetts is not well-lit at night. I have thought sometimes it clandestinely resists any complete conversion from its seventeenth-century roots. We passed ghostly, dim Victorians and neatly vacant concrete strip malls, reaching the highway before my father spoke.

“Do you want to tell me what’s happening?” A shard of light through the windshield glinted off his glasses. He looked like he’d been getting ready for bed before he picked me up. He had on what he called his reading cardigan, and his face was showing the beginning of a gray shadow where he’d have to shave in the morning. “Are you not doing well at school?” The skin on his face looked slack, almost relaxed.

I looked out the window, watching the trees on the side of the highway, same after same. “Maybe not as well as we had hoped.” Some lovelorn graffiti on the granite above an underpass. I could sense him swallowing the urge to ask more. “I guess, maybe, I won’t get to know everything after all.”

“Who can know everything?” my father asked, surprised.

I looked back at him, equally surprised.

He took his eyes off the road to look at me. “Oh. That does sound like something I might have said.”

“Maybe,” I replied. “It’s one of my friends,” I told him. “Not me.”

“Is it Jun?” he asked.

I tried to catch his expression, but he was watching the road again. I nodded, though he couldn’t see me. “Yeah,” I confirmed. I didn’t know how to explain. What did I have to explain? I felt restricted by Jun’s own silence, as if she would sense any word I might say about her.

When it was clear I would say nothing more, my father reached over and cupped my chin in his palm. He had a way of touching my face that made me want to fall into his hand. We were nearly home. The porch lights had been turned on for us. I assumed it was my father who’d turned them on as he left to get me, but my mother was sitting up in the kitchen, wrapped in a ratty brown-and-white velour blanket that had floated around the downstairs of our house for as long as I could remember. It once had the pattern of horses, or lions, but the imperfect creatures were faded now. She led me unsteadily to my room, explaining that it was clean and ready. Perhaps my sudden call had reminded them of a time when I was more in need of them, when my needs were more easily met.

“How long can we expect you to stay?” my mother asked after she’d switched on the small, shaded lamp beside my bed. Her hair had come undone around the sides and I noticed a few streaks of gray at her temples. I told her it would be a few days, thinking I had no idea what would happen until I knew what would happen with Jun, where she would be after the pretrial meeting with the dean. I knew I couldn’t be in our dorm room, her absence constantly reminding me of where she was and why.

I brushed my teeth in the small, cold bathroom across the hall from my room and went to bed immediately after. I fell asleep almost at once, then woke up an hour later. The house was quiet, and I suddenly realized that, in a dream, I had seen my mother as well. I wanted to get up and go look at her, but instead I lay in bed, holding on to the illusion until I fell asleep again.

I
had class the next morning, a review for an upcoming exam I was not well prepared for, so I hurried out, borrowing my mother’s old car and accepting her invitation for lunch. I drove back to campus, wondering how long the dip back in time would last; I was still at home, my mother wasn’t so weak, I was always dashing off when my father hoped I would stay a bit longer.

My mother made a soothing if mild fish-and-potato bake for lunch, one of her specialties. She served it with frozen peas, barely cooked, and a tart lemonade from a carton. The kitchen had been rearranged. My mother explained that they were considering further renovations. She had spilled some peas on the counter and was retrieving them, one by one, returning them to the bowl she’d chosen. The kitchen table had been pushed up against one wall, a chair on either end. I pulled out mine so that I could sit beside my mother instead of across from her.

My father was home but had taken his plate into the next room to eat in front of the television my grandmother had set up there for just that purpose and left behind. I realized my mother must have had to buy the fish that morning, not having expected me, but she dismissed my concern over the trouble she must have taken, telling me she was going to use it for their dinner but that it was an easy switch. I wondered how my father would feel about his dinner becoming a leftover; he liked to have his freshest, most complete meal at the end of the day. It occurred to me that this, too, might have changed, that for all I knew they were ordering in every night, eating in front of the television on portable trays. The whole of the house had taken on a hollow, convenient feeling, as if there were a set path within it that my parents stuck to, all of the other rooms growing dusty and shadowed.

My mother and I took our time over our lunch, and she did not ask me to explain why I was there, why I’d come home abruptly in the middle of the week, or what had sent me running. I was grateful for that kind of attention, the way it felt removed from anything else on my mind. The afternoon was clouding over, but my mother rarely turned on the lights during the day, so we sat in the fading sunlight as she made tea and rummaged for a box of cookies. She told me once that one of the few responsibilities she’d had as a girl was to arrange company plates of appetizers or desserts. When she did so, she became almost girlish in her absorption, laying them upon each other like dominoes.

The canned sounds from my grandmother’s television drifted in from the hall. I was abruptly absorbed by another memory of an afternoon with my mother. I must have been about seven, and the weather was warm, spring or summer; we were outside together and she was laughing, which made me giddy and I jumped away, challenging her to a race, which made her laugh again. She had her hair down and it blew around her face, and in my memory she looked almost as young as I was. I think most children must have a similar experience of their mothers at this age, when we are young enough to catch her as a girl herself, yet old enough to understand the privilege of what we’ve glimpsed. I don’t think there’s been a year in my life when I haven’t wondered about my mother at the same age, always looking for signs that I might be the echo of the life just beyond my reach. I wonder if all girls feel this way about their mothers, if we all want nothing more than to internalize them and, in return, are forever frustrated because we cannot, because we are always too young.