When I got back to the dorm, I opened the door to my room to find my mother sitting next to Bowzer on the floor, or rather, on newspapers spread flat all over my floor, with a large bucket of sand in front of her. A dark-haired girl in a pink hoodie sat on her right. Gretchen sat on my mother’s left. Three other girls who looked vaguely familiar completed the circle around the bucket. Everyone was taking turns scooping out handfuls of sand and dropping them into small paper bags.
My mother looked up. “Oh, hey, honey. How was the test?” She followed my eyes to Bowzer. “Whoops,” she said, standing up. “I’ll get that. It’s just a little. I’ve got wipes in my purse.”
“Hey, Veronica.” Gretchen waved. She looked comfortable, relaxed, as if she had been sitting there for a while. She had also taken the chemistry test that morning. We had caught the same bus and walked into the exam room together. But, of course, she had finished early. “I just came down here to get you for lunch,” she said, shaking out a new paper bag. “And I walked in on this good time.”
I looked down at Bowzer. I looked back at my mother. She’d already dabbed up the pee with one wipe and was now using another to go over the floor.
“Oh,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.” She tossed both wipes into the garbage and used another to go over her hands. “I explained the situation. They all like dogs. It’s fine.”
Everyone looked up, nodding in agreement. I took a step back, and tried to think where I should put my bag. I’d never had so many people in my room.
“We’re making luminarias,” my mother said. She air-dried her hands above her head. “For Christmas. Or I call them luminarias. What did you call them again, Inez?”
“
Farolitos
.” The dark-haired girl looked up and smiled. “They’ll look really good if it snows.” She shrugged. “They’ll look good anyway.”
Inez. Unless there were two girls named Inez on my floor, she was Inez from Albuquerque, the first person from Albuquerque my mother had ever met. She wore silver hoop earrings, large enough for the bottoms to graze her shoulders, and her hair was shiny black and very straight.
“It’s just candles, bags, and sand.” My mother nodded at Inez, smiled, and then looked back at me. “You missed the run to Hobby Lobby.” She lowered herself to the floor again. “Have a seat, honey. You should make a couple. You just put enough sand in the bag to weight it down, then nestle a candle in. It’s relaxing.” She looked up again. “How was the test?”
I shook my head. My gaze moved over the pile of votive candlles in the corner.
“Where are you going to put them?” I asked. My voice, in itself, was a wet blanket. And what was I worried about? Really, we already had a dog in the room. Why not a dog and a fire?
“Outside,” Inez said.
“Where outside?”
“Right outside. In front of the dorm. It’ll look pretty, for once.”
I caught Gretchen’s eye. She looked back at me, frowning. She stopped filling her bag with sand. “Shit,” she said. “You’re right.”
My mother picked up another handful of sand. “Right about what?”
“I don’t know if they’ll let us do it,” I said. “Not on the property. Candles are pretty much banned.”
“It’s not a fire hazard,” Inez said. She gave me a hard look, her chin jutting up. “That’s stupid. Everyone does this back home.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t pretend to know anything about luminarias, and I’d never even been to Albuquerque. I only knew the dorm’s fire code was strict. “We can try to put them outside,” I said. “We could see if anyone says anything.”
“Forget it.” Inez leaned back on her hands and looked at a spot of newspaper on the floor. “I hate it here. It’s stupid to even try.” She looked up and out the window. Her brown eyes glistened, but her face was perfectly composed. “I can’t wait for break. The second I finish my last final, I’m gone. I’m in my car. I’m going home.”
I looked at the floor, and then back at her face. Here was someone who hated the dorm as much as I did, or more than I did. And this someone was younger than I was, and, in so many ways, farther away from home. I’d thought I had it so hard, being a little older than everyone else.
“Let’s just keep making them,” my mother said. Her own hands never stopped moving. “I don’t know what else we can do with all this sand.” She reached for another paper bag. “We’ll figure out what to do with them later.”
I had heard this line from her many times. Over the years, on cold afternoons and in Girl Scout meetings, whoever was under my mother’s care had been encouraged to make more cookies than anyone could eat, more ornaments than anyone could hang, and more candle holders than anyone could possibly want. And if our creations burned, broke, or just looked stupid—no big deal. It was all about the making for my mother. She was never that concerned with the end result.
But Inez was listless as she dropped handfuls of sand into a bag, and the look on her face made it clear that she was only continuing to be polite to my mother. We worked without speaking. I could hear the sound of sand falling, the paper bags crinkling. Gretchen shifted and sighed.
My mother nudged me. “Do you have any holiday music?”
I looked up from my paper bag. “Do I have any holiday music?”
She nodded.
I shook my head. She seemed surprised, but no I didn’t have any holiday music. I was a junior in college. I lived, essentially, in a high-ceilinged box. But she seemed disappointed, as if, after all these years, I had finally admitted that despite all her years of careful teaching, I didn’t write thank-you notes, or wash my hands after using the bathroom. My mother had a lot of holiday music. Her favorites were Handel’s
Messiah
and an album that ended with Judy Garland’s sad voice singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” I’d heard all that and more played over and over every December of my childhood. Her music was maybe packed in a cardboard box now, probably out in the van.
A girl across the room raised a sandy hand. “I have Jingle Cats.”
We all looked at her. She was pretty, with long, curly red hair. She smiled, revealing braces.
“You know, the cats that sing? They’re real cats.
Meowy Christmas
?” She looked back at all of us, incredulous. “Oh my God. You don’t know it? My whole family loves it. And we’re Jewish.” She shrugged, shaking a bag full of sand. “They do ‘Hava Nagila,’ too.”
The cats helped quite a bit. I put the CD in my little player, and almost right from the start it was funny. It wasn’t so funny that you would die laughing, but it was hard to listen to and keep a straight face. By the end of “Silent Night,” even Inez had cracked a smile. We all kept working, filling the bags with sand, which felt smooth and soothing in my hands. I felt as if I were decompressing, some hidden muscle in me finally relaxed. We were all quiet for a while, and there was only the sound of the cats and the music and sometimes some of us laughing.
Of course, I thought of who would love this, who should’ve been in the room. I touched my mother’s arm. “Did you ask Marley?” I whispered.
She nodded without looking at me.
“Is she in her room?”
She nodded again. She still didn’t look at me. But when I stood up, shaking sand off my hands, she reached above my boot and squeezed my knee.
The gray carpet in front of Marley’s room already looked a little more faded than it did in the rest of the hallway—it was the only section that regularly got sunlight. She almost always left her door open when she was home—a steady, hopeful invitation to anyone walking by. Or almost anyone. From the hallway, I could see just the tip of one of her pig slippers on the floor. I hid behind the wall when I knocked.
I moved quickly to the interior of the room. As soon as she saw me, she looked back down at her work.
“What do you want?” she asked.
She was sitting at her desk, or what I assumed was her desk—the room was clearly divided in two. The bed behind me was as neatly made up as a store display, with a floral dust ruffle that matched the sham pillows. Sorority letters, painted blue with tiny daisies, hung on the wall overhead. On the bureau sat several framed pictures of tan, smiling girls in formal dresses, their heads resting on each other’s shoulder, their arms almost always interwined. I squinted at each picture, trying to pick out Marley’s roommate. It wasn’t all my fault that I couldn’t do it. She really wasn’t ever around.
The other bed was unmade. The quilt that Marley always dragged out to the lobby was twisted across the bed, and a pillow, with a pillowcase that did not match anything, had fallen to the floor. In the corner of the room, wadded up on the floor, was the flowered dress she’d been wearing when I yelled at her. The French horn lay at the foot of the bed, looking beautiful and complicated with all its swirling tubes.
“What do you want?”
My gaze moved over her bulletin board. She’d tacked up a postcard of a boy with a french fry in his nose, and another of a ferret getting a bath. She had a large black-and-white poster of a man in a bow tie blowing into a French horn, but even that was just taped to the wall. There was only one framed picture, and it was on her desk. A woman in black glasses sat at a piano, with a little smiling girl next to her on the bench. I bent over and squinted to get a better look.
“Is that you?” I asked. “Is that you and your mom?”
She picked up the picture and turned it so I could no longer see the front. “Don’t come in here and ask me things. Don’t come in and ask about my mom. You’ve never even been in my room before.” She looked up again. “What do you want?” she asked. “For the last time. I’m busy. Obviously.”
I stood on my toes to see what she was working on. Sheet music was scattered across her desk, her own handwriting scrawled above and below and beside all the rows of notes. I don’t know why this struck me as strange. I had an idea of people who played instruments just sort of magically picking them up and playing them. I knew they must practice. But I didn’t think of them as studying music, thinking about it, the way I might think about a book.
“Will you please come down to my room?” I started to sit on her roommate’s bed, but then thought maybe I shouldn’t. “We’re making luminarias. You already know that. You should come down, Marley.” I ducked, trying to catch her eye. “Please? I really wish you would.”
“I’m never going in your room again.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She looked up. Her nostrils were flared, and her eyes were blank with sadness. I understood then how much I had hurt her, and also how much she was already hurt.
“I appreciate that. Now please go.”
I held up one finger, trying to think. Just that morning, during the exam, I had struggled to come up with solutions to one problem after another. I had gotten most of them wrong. But not all of them. I tried to think.
“What if I leave?” I asked. “What if I go right now, and I promise not to come back for several hours? I mean, it’s me that’s the problem, not the room. Right?”
Headway. She lifted her eyebrows. “That would work,” she said.
I told her I just needed a few minutes to get my things. Baby steps, I told myself. She wouldn’t forgive me all at once. And that wasn’t the point anyway. She needed the company more than I did, and I at least owed her that.
Back in my room, I grabbed my bag and my coat and my keys and announced, to no one in particular, that I had to leave for a while, and that Marley would be coming down. My mother and Gretchen watched me move around, but neither of them said anything. I didn’t know where I would go, what I would do with the afternoon.
Before I actually left the dorm, I stopped by Gordon Goodman’s office. He frowned when I used the words “candle” and “paper bag” in the same sentence. But when I told him about Inez, and how homesick she seemed, he scratched his chin and looked thoughtful.
“Tonight?” he asked. “You want to put them out tonight?”
“Tonight would be best,” I said. If we had to fill out forms and wait a week, Inez would be right: where we lived would not feel like our home.
“I’ll make some calls,” he said. “Come on in and sit down.”
He had a tall stack of papers and a calculator on his desk, but he moved both to the side. I said I could make the calls myself if he told me who to call and gave me the numbers. He seemed pleased that I offered, but he waved me off. Housing would want to talk to him, he said. And he was already on a first name basis with almost everyone at the fire department, because of all the stupid false alarms.
“I think it’s great that you’re doing this,” he said, the phone tucked between his head and shoulder. His smile was so approving that I felt guilty. He thought the idea had been mine. I couldn’t tell him that my mother was the one who had organized everything, or that after two days, she was doing my job far better than I had in four months. All I could do was sit there and look grateful as he made four phone calls and spent a total of twenty-five minutes on hold.
I was grateful, and also, despite my misrepresentation, encouraged. Some people would always go out of their way to help, once they saw that you were really trying.
When we got approval, I texted Gretchen: they could put the luminarias out that night. I suppose I could have called, and maybe heard a group reaction to the news. But by the time I walked out of Gordon’s office and past the beeping video games in the lobby and out into the afternoon, I felt so awake and calm in my own head that I didn’t want to talk at all. The sky was still clear, the air cold, but I felt fine once I started walking.