All the Houses (19 page)

“People reinvent themselves all the time,” I said. “They go back to school in their forties. It's not so late. Just because I'm not on the same track you're on—”

“I know you've spent a lot of your life trying to do things differently than I did.”

“It's not like I'm just doing things to be different from you.”

“I didn't say that.”

We were walking down M Street, which was crowded with women younger than us.

“Do you want to stick with TV?” she asked.

“No. I don't know. I mean I want to write, but I know—I'm realistic about the odds of selling anything.”

“I guess it's pretty hard, isn't it. You know what my fantasy job would be? Opening my own café. I always thought that would be cool, you know, I'd want it to have healthy, organic food, but not too hippy-dippy. Not, like, with sprouts on everything. I'd want it to be elegant. Elegant and fresh.”

My sister hardly ever cooked. It was hard to picture her a restaurant proprietor. But what the hell, why not. “Why not?” I said. “Why don't you do it then?”

“That's a daydream. It's not going to happen. Besides, I like my job, it's just—”

“What?”

“Sometimes I feel like my life has become kind of joyless, you know?”

I didn't know what to say. Joy? That was a word I read in self-help books or poems, describing an experience that other people were having. I didn't rule out the possibility that I had felt joy myself, but in feeling it I hadn't bothered to label the feeling and now found it hard to recollect whether those high moments had been truly joyful or just really good. There hadn't been too many of them lately. I didn't want to say something obvious, like
maybe you should work less
.

Courtney said it herself: “I guess I should work a little less hard. But then—I don't know. It's what people expect. And if I didn't work all the time, I feel like there'd be that void.”

“I see,” I said, though I didn't really. “Guess who I ran into?”

“Who?”

“Rob Golden.”

“Oh god. Such bad news.”

“I thought you guys had a thing in high school.”

“He's an asshole.”

“Well, that was high school. He seems all right now.”

“It's nice how you always see the good in people.”

“Thanks.”

“Where did you run into him?”

“In a bookstore.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Is there something you want to tell me?”

And then it all came out like so much swill, I described our encounter in general terms, I attempted to cast myself as reasonable and at the same time tried to present the case in such a way that it might seem possible he really did like me and was just too busy to contact me? Like an idiot I went on, like I was draining a wound, and I suppose I was waiting for my sister to respond in some affirming way or at least reassure me that my behavior hadn't been completely stupid. But it had been, or at least that's what she thought, and all she would say was that it was good he was keeping his distance. “I'm sorry but he is toxic,” she said.

I went on. Though I'd been reluctant to start talking, now I couldn't stop, I felt myself searching for another avenue of analysis, another set of significances, a possible interpretation in which this all had a happy conclusion, even though the more I prattled the more hopeless it seemed. It was as though I were scattering my own self: there was something that I'd made too available with Rob and was once again letting dangle and spew. As though the tryst and this conversation about it were both symptoms of the same ailment, a failure to maintain my integrity in a sense that was practically structural; it was not sex I'd given away but my muscles, my membranes. As though some part of me only existed so long as I didn't deflate it with so much blabbing.

“He is toxic,” she repeated. “Stay away. I'm serious.”

“I don't know. I feel like I'm just not attractive these days, I don't feel attractive, I mean,” I said, suddenly about to fall apart. It was my own fault for trying to get her to reassure me, when I should have known better. Courtney was not the reassuring type. She looked at me and nodded—nodded!—and said, “Well, marriage also has its challenges.”

“I know that,” I said. Why was it that people who weren't alone always forgot what it was to be alone? I told her I would just take the Metro home, because I needed to stop at a store on the way back, though the real reason was that I couldn't stand her, my sister with her husband and her house and her money. In that instant I could not stand her.

All her jabs at me seemed semiconscious, meaning they weren't the product of forethought, and she would forget them afterward, but they were still jabs, even if the reasons for them remained obscure to me and probably to her too. There was one mishap from high school that I felt sure she'd never forgiven me for (though she would've denied it), and then no doubt there were a whole slew of other events, most of them unremembered, that continued to influence us. I did still think about that one accident from the beginning of tenth grade. It had not only made her furious but had cemented my family identity as a hopeless bungler.

 

 

Mid-August, 1986: the city a swamp, window units rattling, buses gasping for breath. Everyone with wet skin, chugging soda from wet cans. The disk drives whirring: Courtney worked on her college essays, composing them on the Apple IIe computer my father had bought and put in his study. There was an unspoken agreement not to speak loudly, or play music, or otherwise disturb her when we were nearby. I would creep past and hear the patter of the keys as she typed. Or I would hear her letting out a long sigh.

Or I would sneak into the room. She sat there in front of the black-and-white screen, intent, immobile, not even noticing that I'd come in—or so I thought.

“Get out,” she said, without turning her head from the screen.

“I was just checking if you needed anything.”

“What's another word for
achievement
?”

“Um,
feat
?”

“
I'm proud of my feats during high school.
I don't think so.”

“How about
conquests
?”

“Shut up.”

“If you need me I'll just be enjoying my summer vacation—”

“Get out.”

Her applications became a family obsession. For us the process of applying to college had been vested with outsize significance, as if the overwhelmed junior administrators who made up the admissions committees at top schools were in fact deciding our ultimate worth, as if there in some dank New England basement they were weighing our souls on silver soul-scales. It's hard to even express how feverish, how snobbish, how riddled with collective self-importance, how idol-worshipping that whole business was, at our school and all the more so at home, where Dad looked forward to our matriculation at colleges as a kind of anointment—for these would be Ivy League colleges, book-lined palaces out of which we would one day stride triumphant in our mortarboards, with snappy a cappella numbers ringing in our ears and our tentative footholds in the overclass made solid and permanent.

When Courtney was just a freshman in high school, Dad led our whole family on an Eastern seaboard trip that just happened to include Cambridge, New Haven, and Princeton, where we were the youngest non-Asian kids on the campus tours. Dad had graduated from Cornell, but he never took us there, even Cornell wasn't good enough. He wanted something else for us, more ease, more access, a status-granting vitamin X that had not been part of his youthful diet, but he didn't really know what it was, or where we might acquire it. He decided it must be at Yale.

As a seventh-grader my interest was limited to the pizza we ate in each town, and I was young enough that I was not overly mortified, or at least not as mortified as Courtney was, by Dad's endless questions for those backward-treading tour guides. I do remember that after we passed a science building on one of the campuses he asked a question about “the new physics.” The guide, ever cheerful, didn't have an answer for him.

During Courtney's junior year, the college bulletins started flocking to the house, in bright, chirruping clusters, and Dad's anticipation grew all the keener. At night he would nestle into a chair and open those bullish gazettes as if peeling the wrapper from a fine cigar, reading even the brochures for schools we never would've considered. “Juniata College!” he would announce bluffly as he turned the pages. “Let's see here.” My own leafing through the brochures had revealed them to be nearly identical; at every college, winsome students tossed Frisbees across a grassy quad, performed plays, and conducted experiments in science labs. But Dad would actually read the text—sometimes aloud, when a sentence struck him as funny. “A dedication to harvesting the seeds of intellectual inquiry!” he'd snort. “Why wait for them to grow?” (He'd go on in that way until he had beat the thing to death.) “Educating the leaders of tomorrow,” he'd say, and then, lowering his voice: “
with tomorrow's curriculum
.” Or he might hold up something for us to see: “A nice picture here of their new parking garage.”

Yale was his first choice and Courtney's. Her application for early admission was due in mid-September. By the time the school year started, she'd more or less finished the essays, but she kept tinkering with them when she was at home. She didn't let anybody else read what she'd written. Soon, though, I had assignments to do, and one afternoon shortly before her deadline, I went to the study to type up a history paper while Courtney was at tennis practice. The computer had been left on, and one of her essays-in-progress filled the screen.

“My intellectual interests are wide-ranging,” it said. “One of my favorite courses in high school was 11th grade English,” it said. “I also believe in the importance of community service,” it said. “My participation in athletics has taught me invaluable lessons,” it said.

How jarring it was to read those sentences, written by Courtney, about Courtney, and yet containing nothing of Courtney. I didn't recognize her in those polysyllabic assertions, the candidate-speak. It made me feel strange, to see all the games she'd played reduced to invaluable lessons.

Those were the early days of home computers, and I'm still not sure how it happened. I opened a new document, typed my paper, printed it out, closed the document. Maybe I'd closed the word processing program as well, I don't remember. But that evening, a wail sounded from the study. The essay wouldn't open. A message on the screen told her the file was password-protected.

I sat under the kitchen lights, staring at the vinyl tablecloth.

“What did you do?” Dad kept saying to me.

“I don't know,” I said. Soon I was crying too.

Then Dad was on the phone to the software store, to the company that had made the software, but the file still wouldn't open. At some point my sister had printed out a draft, but we went through the garbage and couldn't find it. She had to rewrite the essay in two days. She'd stared at the lost essay for so long, she must have known much of it by heart, and the next day Mom called her in sick to school, so that she could stay home and finish—what I'm trying to say is that the rewriting she did, of a two-page personal statement, was not a superhuman feat. Yet we all treated it as though it were. She would've never done anything in such a slapdash way, writing entire paragraphs at the last minute, though that was the way I wrote everything. She finished, and my father drove the application to the post office, and all was calm.

A day later, however, she went back and reread her essay and discovered two typos, which she'd missed in the rush to finish it. An essay with two typographical errors had been sent off to Yale, and there was nothing she could do. I was to blame, I knew. I had ruined Courtney's application.

Later on (and I mean years later) the loss of the original essay would come to seem emblematic, in that so much Atherton family data was eventually lost. All our papers and letters and records from those years were stored on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies, while technology moved on, until the files could no longer be accessed and the disks were thrown out. Whatever history of our family was contained in those documents, it wound up in the garbage.

 

 

No one else could rile me the way Courtney could. It wasn't anything she explicitly said or did, so much as the attitude, the superior stance. She was the older sister with her shit together and I was the incompetent, self-absorbed, lost one. She'd found this place for herself, a fancy pouf to park her butt on, and from it she watched me and criticized me and offered up stupid suggestions until I just wanted to kill her. I don't mean that only figuratively. I can remember fights we had as girls, the kicking and the biting that would begin tentatively and then turn vicious. The urge to annihilate each other had always been there, tamed over the years but never uprooted.

I e-mailed Rob. A half day with my sister had left me wanting a treat, better yet the one treat that would stick it to her. I sent the e-mail vengefully, not expecting a reply, much less one with exclamation points.

Hey! I broke my phone/lost your info! What's up?

Though I wasn't proud of my meager studio I invited him over, excited not only by the prospect of sex but by the realization (and it did feel like a Realization, a bell going off) that I'd come to the wrong conclusions about him, and that probably all my judgments over the past several weeks had been clouded by living with Dad and seeing so much of my family. I felt newly righteous about having found my own place. Maybe the apartment had changed everything after all.

In bed, after we'd slept together, Rob put his hands behind his head and started telling me something about his work, and I was content enough to have him there, to hear him talking, to look at his forearms or his chest the way I might look at a diagram, discovering the way one part was connected to another. He got up for a glass of water, and when he came back he was holding a few pages I'd printed and left on the table.