Admission (58 page)

Though he—Tom—was already gone, off on a train somewhere, with Winky or Stinky. Probably raising a glass of red wine to toast
the adventure under way. It made her sick.

This gave her an idea. She went down an alarmingly narrow stairway to the bathroom, tiny and unclean, and efficiently threw
up. Then she came back to the table and ordered tea.
“Thé,”
she said hoarsely.
“Por favor.”

Not right.
It would occur to her about two minutes too late.

When her tea arrived, she downed it, scalding her mouth. Now that felt horrible, too.

Common sense, of course, should have dictated that it would end this way, give or take a location and what was on the plate.
Tom was always going to be heading off with a Winky or a Stinky, bound for the future he—to his credit—had never once told
Portia he didn’t want, a future of law firms and the lonely fellowship of Massachusetts Republicans and the tailgate martinis
when Dartmouth played Harvard or Brown, the athletic children and beach stickers from the Vineyard on the back of his car.
Their time together, she now understood, had been exotica for him, perhaps a defiant gesture that he was so much more than
the stock character from the stock prep school novel that he appeared to be, he was a complex man who chose whom to love and
cared not a whit for the trappings of American class, which anyway everyone knew did not exist. For a blessed year, he had
brandished Portia at fraternity events and family gatherings, daring his friends and relations to sputter their approval for
his choice and their admiration for his independent spirit. Here was Portia, child of a self-declared feminist and rabble-rouser,
born without a discernible father, rocked in a cradle of hemp, nourished by herbs and yogurt. Here was the product of no family
in particular, from no particular place, and anyone who even thought about questioning the wisdom of this pairing would find
him selectively deaf and entirely silent, for he was far, far superior to such base notions. His parents and brother and cousins
and schoolmates, the people he had known forever and would always know, whose children would play with his children and go
to school with his children, who years from now would still be around him and alongside him—Tom owed them nothing. He made
his own choices. He was a modern man living a modern life.

And he had been very understanding to Portia, there, under the colossal destination board at the Gare du Nord. Very solicitous
for her well-being. And full of suggestions for what she might do next. Could he buy her a coffee? Take her to speak with
the train clerk? His French, he noted proudly, was now nearly fluent. Would he like her to look into flights home for that
day? Or the next? Did she need help finding a hotel?

No. And no. She actually let him pat her on the shoulder. She actually hugged him back when he hugged her warmly. To her horror,
she realized that she was declining his aid not because she didn’t need it, but because she seemed intent upon making this
nicer for him. The impulse, moreover, felt disturbingly natural, as if she had done it before—many, many times before. Easier
for Tom, who seemed impervious to the fact that the woman within his warm embrace was disassembling: synapse from synapse,
sinew from sinew, muscle from muscle, held together (she greatly feared) only by those strong encircling arms. Impervious… just
as he was to the fact that his mother hated Portia, or that Portia’s mother hated him, and the fact that he had dominated
Portia’s social life (did he never wonder why she had made no other friends?) and that they had never once slept in the various
dormitory rooms she had been assigned, which were more private than his room on the loud (and smelly) upstairs corridor of
his fraternity house, or the fact that, more than halfway through her time at college, she seemed to have formed no real academic
purpose and certainly no vision of a gratifying career. He had missed many things, it seemed clear to her now, but by the
same token he had never actually been dishonest. There had been, certainly, attestations of love, but love of the moment,
not—and this was a fine distinction—lasting love. Certainly there had been no offer of permanence, no talk of marriage or
even a vague future together. She must have inferred these things, conjuring them out of sensual happiness and what still
felt like clear affection, mindlessly assembling a prospect of shared time, shared contentment. For the first time in her
life, she felt brutally stupid.

And so, in the great tradition of ill-treated women everywhere, she decided to blame herself.

Astoundingly, both earlier on the echoing floor of the train station and now, who knew how long after in the awful café, what
she found herself thinking of most was not his cruelty or even his prior affection, but the outer edges of his body, the planes
and depths of him, the variant textures. Scenes and sounds assailed her, rattling through her head without stopping, as if
some part of her brain were trying to flush the information and another part barring the door, desperately storing the data
where it could not be dislodged. She longed, with an addict’s longing, for numbness, would have given anything for numbness,
but was too afraid to be drunk in a foreign country where she was alone, and despite an upbringing that was close to reprobate
as far as others were concerned, she had never ingested a drug stronger than marijuana, which in any case had made her only
paranoid and very hungry. She was on her own. With her tearing pain and surging nausea. And she hadn’t the first idea what
to do with herself.

She paid by putting her largest bill on the table, watching the waiter reject it (too big to make change for—she got that),
and substituting another, which was grudgingly taken. With this transaction complete, she gathered her things and left the
café, walking back in the direction of the train station, if only because that felt familiar. It was getting dark quickly
now, and there was a quickening along the streets, converging on the Gare du Nord. Portia joined in, letting the herd carry
her back into the station. She set down her backpack in the middle of the crowd and, like everyone else, looked up at the
immense destination board. Around her, people arrived, paused, departed. She peered at the lines of text on the board overhead,
trying to figure out which words went together and what they meant. This seemed like more of an intellectual exercise than
a practical one, which was just fine, since she wasn’t really thinking about getting on one of the trains.

“Orry Chantilly Creil Clermont St. Just,” read the first line. And the next: “Dammartin Crépy Soissons Anizy Laon.” And the
next: “Orry-La-Wille Chantilly Gouvieux Creil.” And then: “Compiegne Saint-Quentin Aulnoye Maubeuge.” The only destination
she recognized was “London Waterloo,” but something in her recoiled at going back on the very train that had brought her here
only a few hours before, so happy and excited to begin. Then, near the end of the list, she found another line of names she
could decipher: “Bruxelles Berchem Rotterdam Amsterdam.” A woman with a large suitcase jostled her and moved off without apology.
Or perhaps, thought Portia, watching her go, that mumble she’d made had been an apology, and that tiny fact, that there might
be some comfort available to her that would miss its mark simply because she wasn’t capable of receiving it, made her suddenly
angry. She looked up at the board again, alighting on the few words she could understand, and decided on the spot to go to
Amsterdam, where—while English was hardly the official language—at least no one would be surprised, let alone offended, that
she spoke no Dutch. It was, besides, a four-hour journey, which meant four hours of being able to sit, staring at nothing
out a dark train window, with no one wondering if there was something seriously wrong with her. That the train would deposit
her alone in a strange city late that night did not trouble her, given the general precariousness of her situation: Surely
four hours would be enough time to figure out how to fix the mess her life had suddenly become.

At the last stop before Amsterdam, a tall Dutch man with stud earrings and a pink Mohawk got on the train and began passing
out flyers to anyone who looked like a tourist on a budget. Portia got one of these: an ad for a youth hostel not far from
the station, in a barge on one of the canals, no less. When they arrived in the city, she followed the man, along with a trio
of American boys from the Midwest, to this marvel of hospitality, paid her nominal fee, and picked out a top bunk, where she
fell mercifully asleep. In the morning she began walking the city, hunched against bitter winds in her red down jacket, hands
clenched in her pockets. She went to the Van Gogh Museum and Anne Frank House, numb to both in her private misery, and ate
dry sandwiches in a café near the Rijksmuseum. That night, she went with the midwestern boys to a club in an old warehouse,
where multiple stages showcased a variety of terrible techno-bands, cafés, lounges heady with cannabis, even a movie theater
where some Dutch documentary about tanks rolling into a gray Eastern European city seemed to play on continuous loop. “This
is stupid,” said one of the boys, whose name was Dan, or Ben. They got up and left, but Portia stayed, watching the tanks
roll on and on through the gray winter streets. In the morning, she went back to the train station and took a train to Munich.

Later, it was clear to her that any sensible person would have headed south to someplace warm, parked herself in a pleasant
spot, and taken a couple of weeks to figure things out; but she was hardly sensible just then. The trains themselves, she
discovered, were where she wanted most to be, not the destinations, always in transit and never arriving. On the trains, it
wasn’t noteworthy that she was by herself, sitting silently, staring forlornly out the window. That was how people were on
trains—all people, not just abandoned American girls who had just realized they were pregnant. At first she worried over her
destinations, not because of money (the Eurail Passes she and Tom had bought were good for any train in the network), but
because she didn’t want to get to a city in the middle of the night. In Berlin, however, she found the station at two a.m.
comfortingly busy, with young people sleeping in alcoves and blearily drinking coffee in the station cafés, and she stopped
worrying about this, too. Through the holiday season she took the trains, duly walking the cities, respectfully viewing the
landmarks, eating—when she could eat—the culinary highlights of wherever she happened to be, and then moving on, speaking
only to fellow travelers and guides, waiters, and hotel or hostel employees. She was not very responsible about addressing
the considerable problem she faced, but she did, as the days and then weeks passed, discover that the very fact of the problem
was gradually muting the blow of Tom’s desertion, deflecting her pain into the worry about her situation.

She had never questioned the right of women to terminate their pregnancies, and she certainly did not question it now. With
Susannah, she had boarded the middle-of-the-night buses at the gates of Smith College for the long, long drives to Washington
to march for the right to keep abortion safe and legal. Not in denial of the life it terminated—like most sane advocates of
abortion rights, Portia certainly acknowledged that there was another life involved—but because a woman’s ownership of her
own body trumped that incipient (not yet viable) life. She had always taken it for granted that were she ever to find herself
in precisely these circumstances, abortion was the option she would choose. Not—certainly—without regret, but with sober acknowledgment
that termination was the right decision in some cases. That it had happened to her, that there was actual life inside her,
did not compel a sudden reversal of her convictions, but she wasn’t stupid. She was only a little pregnant, despite what anyone
said. She had some time. And she had no wish to experience an abortion in a foreign country where she might not have the language
to ask—for example—for more pain relief or an extra blanket. And she was far from ready to face Susannah and hear what Susannah
had to say about all this, to defend her scrupulous use of the diaphragm and her alliance with Tom, who was far, far from
the reactionary dolt he—all right—appeared to be, but a real, complex man who, just like her, struggled with the transition
from who he was raised to be to who he wanted to be. A few more weeks, she could stay away from her mother, away from the
inevitable clinic and table and stirrups. A few more weeks of her now almost cherished trains and blurry landscapes of farmland
and dreary cities, the screeching of steel on steel as they slowed into a terminal, the echoing loudspeaker voices in French
or Dutch or German and then in languages she couldn’t immediately name. She spent Christmas in a hotel room in a nondescript
town on the French-German border and New Year’s in the restaurant of an inn near Prague, fending off the attentions of two
drunken Italians. She dragged herself through Mozart’s Salzburg birthplace and inspected the carefully worded memorial stone
before Hitler’s childhood home in Linz:
Für Frieden, Freiheit und Demokratie nie Wieder Faschismus Millionen Tote Mahnen
. Finally, in Vienna, she bought a ticket to an afternoon demonstration at the Spanish Riding School and sat in her chilly
seat, watching the great white horses parade and pirouette beneath their grim-faced Napoleonic riders, leaping like frogs
in their jangling tack. This is stupid, Portia thought.

And then she went home.

It’s 11:38 on December 31st, and I have 22 minutes left to write my essay to Princeton, my dream college. What should I say
to let you know that Princeton and me are a perfect fit?