Admission. Part 30

Astoundingly, both earlier on the echoing floor of the train station and now, who knew how long after in the awful cafe, 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 a.s.sailed 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 subst.i.tuting another, which was grudgingly taken. With this transaction complete, she gathered her things and left the cafe, 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 Crepy 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 pa.s.sing 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 ca.n.a.ls, 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 cafe 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, cafes, lounges heady with cannabis, even a movie theater where some Dutch doc.u.mentary 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 Pa.s.ses 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 cafes, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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: Fr 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?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.

I'M NOT HERE NOW

At the bus station in Boston, Portia was about to buy herself a ticket to Northampton when she suddenly realized that she didn't live there anymore. Only a few months earlier, she had helped her mother pack up the house and ferry her belongings up 91 to Hartland, where she then spent a couple of days repainting Susannah's bedroom lavender with white trim. And all of this, she now understood, had simply slipped her mind as she had numbly made her way across the ocean, unthinkingly imagining herself back in the house and on the street where she'd grown up. She stood at the ticket window with two shuffling bodies behind her, waiting for this curiously elongated transaction to conclude so they could get wherever they were going, but Portia had abruptly found herself without a destination and taken on the general demeanor of a pillar of salt. There was no longer any reason to be in Northampton. She felt no desire at all to go back to Dartmouth, where she wasn't supposed to be now and wasn't at all sure she'd ever want to be again. And something in her quailed at the idea of going to Hartland, presenting herself to the three of them-Susannah, Frieda, and Carla-a wayward young lady indeed. Those women, veterans of protests and marches, strikes, actions, sit-ins, initiatives, drives, and boycotts-they would encircle her with comfort and affirmation, a.s.sure her that she had been horrendously victimized, shelter her from the wackos at the clinic (if the state of Vermont had managed to produce any), and make sure she got all the pain pills she was ent.i.tled to. They would do this out of love and also pride, because wasn't this precisely what they had worked and pet.i.tioned and agitated for? So that she, a young flowering woman who had every right to determine what was best in these unfortunate circ.u.mstances, would not have to put herself in the hands of some slimy pract.i.tioner or stick a wire hanger up inside herself and bleed to death?

And she did want to be taken care of, didn't she?

And she did want that clinic, and the pain pills, and for it all to be over. Didn't she?

Apart from the nausea, Portia had done a pretty good job of repressing the whole thing. Her clothes still fit, though admittedly she hadn't worn anything very form-fitting in her tramp around Europe. It was true that she had avoided the mirror, unwilling to confront the more subtle changes under way, but that was very deliberate on her part, as she had no wish to subject herself to more distress. Now the termination couldn't be more than a few days away, and she might come out the other side without ever having seen herself pregnant. But when she tried to imagine where this liberation would take place, she found her head spinning. The line behind her grew longer and more impatient. There were too many options and nothing she could hold on to. Boston itself, of course. Portland. Providence. Burlington. New England must be jammed with politically evolved places for a girl to get out of trouble. There were hotels everywhere. There were pharmacies and hospitals. Did it even matter where she went? Just as long as Susannah wasn't there, she thought suddenly. And this thought was so alarming that she quickly stepped out of line and let the person behind her move up to the window.

It made no sense, thought Portia, shouldering her backpack again and walking across the room to an empty bench. Why should she do this without Susannah? Her mother would want to help, to support her and be of use. And Portia obviously needed the help; no one should have to go through an abortion alone-she knew that much. A few minutes ago, she'd been so intent on finding her way home to the nest that she'd forgotten the nest wasn't there anymore. Now she was prepared to go anywhere her mother wasn't. Because, she thought, beginning to prod this paradox, I don't want her to know that I was dumb enough to get pregnant? Because I don't need to hear her opinion of Tom, thanks very much? How about, she thought, moving closer to it, because I don't want her to know what I am going to do, in case she tries to stop me?

She smiled at this initially absurd notion.

Susannah, who had once claimed to have written the slogan "If you're against abortion, don't have one"? Susannah, who had been a volunteer at the clinic in Springfield, holding a blanket over the scared girls as she led them inside, taking the brunt of the curses herself?

And of course, I believe in it, too, thought Portia.

She just didn't want to.

She began to sweat, still in her warm winter coat, clutching her backpack against her belly.

Because it was murder to kill it? she thought very, very carefully.

It was not murder.

Because I want to have a baby? I want to be a mother?

She did not want to have a baby or be a mother. It was absurd to think of doing that-that was for later, when she was no longer a child herself. When she was with someone. She didn't want to do it the way Susannah had done it. She wanted the normal things: love, partnership, hearth, and home. Of course she wanted children. She just had never thought about it before.

By then it was early evening, raining faintly. She had slept a little on the plane, but she was still tired and very dirty, with rapidly diminishing reserves. She felt, more than anything, the need for a decision, even a working plan to get her to some place of rest, where the next decisions could at least be made in some comfort. Portia got to her feet and went back to the ticket booth, taking her new place in line. She looked at the destination board and read down the list: "Worcester, Albany, Providence, Hartford, Lawrence." She had been to all of these places, except for Lawrence. She knew no one who lived in Lawrence or who had ever lived there, and not much about the place at all except that it was not so small that a pregnant stranger would be noted. That realization was suddenly thrilling, because it meant that she could be invisible in Lawrence. Full of purpose, she bought a one-way ticket, a transaction that felt otherworldly, magical. No one would find her in Lawrence, she thought, climbing aboard the bus and making her way to the back. She had not realized until that moment that she had been trying to disappear.

That night, she stayed in a motor lodge near the Lawrence bus station. It was not a restful place. Down the corridor, a couple fought with drunken abandon, but she was irrationally pleased to see American television again and fell asleep to Johnny Carson interviewing a celebrity she did not recognize. She spent the next day in bed, too, except for a midday meal at the IHOP across the road, writing lists of things to take care of on the back of her place mat: place to live, something to do (job? volunteer?), Susannah, school, doctor. Doctor? thought Portia. The word had the impact of a needle, breaking into her reverie of independence. It was not that she had decided to ignore the fact of her pregnancy, only repress it for a little while longer. She had also decided to believe that a college-educated woman who'd possessed her own copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves since the age of thirteen must be capable, on her own, of being responsibly pregnant, not like some seduced and abandoned cheerleader who wasn't even sure how she'd gotten that way. Obviously, Portia had taken a pa.s.s on any tests and medications recommended for the first trimester, but she couldn't have missed anything too important. Women, after all, had been having healthy babies even before Hippocrates, let alone What to Expect. Her European sojourn had featured lots of walking, often with the backpack, so she felt generally well, apart from the daily puking, but that was starting to fade, too-first one fairly good day per week, then three, then five. She had money-that was one thing she didn't have to wring her hands over. She was supposed to be traveling in Europe, staying in hotels, and eating in restaurants. It couldn't cost more to stay in one faded mill town, rent an apartment, and keep still. She was not expected home for two months and at Dartmouth for three. These were problems to be addressed, surely. But she had time.

The next day, restored by more sleep and more showers, she went out and found a furnished apartment to rent, in one of the old textile mills that were being converted to residences. The agent was eager to get bodies in while the construction continued, then out before she hoped (insanely, Portia thought) to sell the units as condos, probably by the fall. Did Portia have pets? Did she smoke? No and no. Was she employed? the woman asked worriedly.

"I'm a writer," said Portia. "I'm working on a book."

She was, in fact, working on a book. She was working on The Pickwick Papers, which she borrowed from the Lawrence City Library, checking it out instead of the mindless fare she'd originally gone in for. Reading her way through d.i.c.kens-Pickwick to Edwin Drood-seemed like a serious project for an English major who had never taken on anything but A Christmas Carol, and that mainly in the form of Albert Finney's Scrooge. In her apartment, which had been furnished in nouveau mismatched castoff, she lay on the faintly malodorous couch and began the picaresque, finishing it three days later. Then she took it back and exchanged it for Oliver Twist.

Portia had called her mother on Christmas Day and New Year's, both times from chilly pay phones located on broad central European boulevards. She called now from the public phone in the library and spoke of thick hot chocolate in the cafes and the smell of chestnuts cooking over coals in the vendors' carts, the boorish American boys who had tagged along with them for a few days, from Paris to Brussels and then on to Munich... details she pulled from the bulletin board in the library bas.e.m.e.nt, events and fund-raisers and church sales, promising her mother that she felt fine, felt safe, was happy, would call again soon. She was reasonably a.s.sured that the old-fashioned rotary phones in the Hartland house would not betray her secret. She was thinking, she might say, of writing to Dartmouth, delaying her return until the summer term or perhaps even the fall. Dartmouth wouldn't care if she moved things around or even-if it came to that-whether or not she graduated with her cla.s.s. That was the point of the Dartmouth Plan, to let her education alter with new interests and circ.u.mstances and be personal and idiosyncratic. It was a great thing, actually. And did she mention how educational it all was? The Mozart museum? The villa where the Wannsee Conference had been held?

It shocked her, how convincing she was, how pleased with herself she sounded. It shocked her how easily she parried Susannah's objections, which were first resentful of the added time away (from school? from her?) and the apparent longevity of Tom's affections, then increasingly resigned to the distance, both physical (away from her) and emotional (between the two of them).

Portia finished Oliver Twist and moved on to The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.

She needed bigger clothes. A book in the library said she ought to be taking folic acid, so she took it.

A woman and her sister moved in next door. The sister had Down syndrome and liked to play checkers. Portia, after a game or two, figured out how to lose stealthily.

She finished Nicholas Nickleby and started The Old Curiosity Shop.

In March, she found a doctor in an old Victorian on Haverill Street with a downright d.i.c.kensian sign out front: SMITHFIELD, BEERKIN, AND NOGGS, INFERTILITY AND OBSTETRICS.

Hers was Beerkin, and he saw her first in an office that had once been the house's front parlor, complete with fireplace and window seat. "Who have you been seeing up until now?" he asked her, noting that she was probably at sixteen weeks.

Portia explained that she had recently returned from Europe. "I've sort of been doing it on my own," she said to his obvious disapproval.

He examined her, made notes, p.r.o.nounced her healthy, gave her proper vitamins and a test for gestational diabetes. When they returned to his consulting room, Portia told him that she wanted to discuss adoption with someone.

He looked at her blankly. "Discuss?"

"Adoption."

"You mean, you're giving up this child?"

Now the disapproval was palpable.

"I'd like to consider it."

"May I ask why?" he said.

She looked at him in complete disbelief. "No," Portia said. "You can't."

After a minute, he said: "I know a group here in town that takes in young women in your situation."

"I don't need to be taken in," she said unkindly. "I just want to talk to someone who can explain the options."

He frowned at her. "I don't know if you really understand the trauma of giving your baby away," he said with highly disingenuous concern.

"I don't either," Portia said deliberately, as if to a child. "That is why I would like to discuss it with someone." She got up. "Do you have a name for me?"

He held her gaze for a long moment. He must not, it occurred to her, be used to single pregnant girls who gave him a hard time.

"The nurse has a list," he said finally.

Portia collected the list and took it home with her. Catholic Adoption Services. Lutheran Services. LDS Family Services. New Hope Christian. The idea of the people who would call these agencies, people who only wanted a baby sanctioned by their own faith, appalled her. At the bottom of the page, in a different typewriter font-as if it were a grudging afterthought-was the state agency number for adoptive services. They could see her the following week.

She paid her rent in traveler's checks. When those ran out, she drew on her bank account in Hanover. One of the librarians who saw her every day asked if she would tutor a couple of seventh graders who were failing English. Their names were Milagro and Gloria, and they were cousins. Portia had never taught anything except soccer, but the girls tried hard and got a little better. She was in the library study room with them when the baby kicked for the first time. Squealing, they put their hands on her belly.

Portia finished The Old Curiosity Shop on the morning of her appointment with the social worker, a transplanted Californian who asked to be called Lisa and whose husband taught Latin just over the hill at Andover. To Portia's disappointment, Lisa, too, seemed quite taken with the idea that Portia couldn't know what was best for her, that she must be unaware there was support, in the state of Ma.s.sachusetts, for single mothers.

"I get calls every day," she explained patiently to Portia. "Women who gave up their babies in the fifties and sixties. They've never gotten over it. It ruined their lives."

"My life will not be ruined," Portia said firmly.

"Back then," the social worker went on, "the idea was that the baby would get a family that could give it what a single mother couldn't, and the birth mother would just magically forget that she had ever given birth. She was supposed to go back to school, meet somebody, get married, and have her real babies. But you couldn't become a mother and then sign a piece of paper that said you weren't a mother. Biology is a little tougher than that. And today there isn't the stigma of a single parent."

"I'm aware of that," said Portia, who was, after all, the daughter of a militant single mother.

"You're clearly an intelligent woman. You can go to college, and the college might well have day care facilities. You'd be eligible for medical coverage and other benefits. You think you can't do this, but you can."

"I don't want to do it," said Portia, losing her temper. "That's the reason. Would you be happier if I had an abortion?"

"You can't," said Lisa. "It's too late."

"I know it's too late!" Portia told her. She was just barely in control by this point. "I mean, if I'd had one. Listen, I'm pro-choice, and this is my choice, okay? And please don't tell me there won't be families willing to adopt a white newborn."

Lisa sighed. "No, I wouldn't tell you that."

"Because you can't have that many white newborns coming down the pike, I'm guessing."

The woman shrugged. Portia almost felt sorry for her. But not sorry enough to stop making her perfectly valid point.

"How many? I'm just curious."

"What?" said Lisa, though she probably knew exactly what she was being asked.

"White newborns. Available for adoption in this state. Last year, say."

She waited.

"Oh... well, I'd have to look it up."

"Ballpark." Portia folded her arms.

Lisa sighed. "I do remember one, last year. I don't think there were others."

"And how many families willing to adopt that one white newborn?"

The social worker looked at her. She was no longer trying to be nurturing or even polite. "Quite a number," she said at last. "As I'm sure there will be quite a number hoping to adopt your child. If you continue to make that decision."

"Past tense," Portia said unkindly. "I've made it."

"But you don't have to make it yet. You can wait. You can see how you feel once your baby is born. I can promise you, there will still be families then."

"No," Portia said icily. "Look, it's my life and my decision. I'm trying to do the right thing, for both of us. Can you just explain to me, what is the problem here?"

But she was the problem. In the silence that followed, Portia understood this very clearly. There was something off about her, a woman who clearly could raise her own child and bafflingly didn't want to. It had not occurred to her that she would run into this difficulty. Honed as she was on the brutality of the clinic bomber, the "pro-life" a.s.sa.s.sin, and the prayerful protesters helpfully pointing out that young girls terminating their pregnancies had the agonies of h.e.l.l to look forward to, she'd naively a.s.sumed that choosing to carry and give birth to her child would have everybody standing up and applauding. Not so.

The social worker leaned forward and spoke softly. "Can I ask you, is this pregnancy the result of a rape or an incestuous relationship?"

Disgusted, Portia shook her head.

"Is there something you'd like the police to know about?"

Yeah, she thought fiercely. I'd like the police to know that I'm asking for an entirely reasonable and not to mention perfectly legal form of help and not getting it.

"No. Look, are you going to be able to handle this adoption? Should I go to New Hampshire or Vermont?"

Lisa looked sharply at her. "That's not necessary. I just wanted to be sure you had adequate counseling. In fact, I'd like to refer you to one of our staff therapists. It's part of our service package," she said.

Portia looked down, intensely irritated. Then she agreed, made another appointment for the following month, and left. She had given them the very least amount of information she legally could: a name, a Social Security number, birth date, level of education. She'd said nothing about Tom except that he, like her, was Caucasian and college educated. No, she did not wish to give his name.

"Has he been notified of the pregnancy?"

Portia hesitated. "Yes," she said.

"And you have discussed this decision with him?"

What did they want from her? thought Portia, struggling to contain herself. "Yes. Sure."

"All right," Lisa said sadly. "I'll get the paperwork started."

There was no master plan. Portia did not intend to micromanage the adoption, choose the family, name her baby. She had no wish to present Tom with the fact of what had happened, torment her mother, explain herself to Dartmouth College, or do any single thing that might bring any other human being into her confidence. She barely wanted to be in her own confidence. She would be writing no letters, contacting no registry, doing no search for the child she was determined to relinquish. What she wanted-the only thing she truly wanted-was to place her healthy baby in good, responsible hands and then do the very thing Lisa had declared to be impossible: magically forget that she had ever given birth. She refused to believe it would not be possible. Those women, the ones whose lives had been destroyed, they weren't like her. They'd been forced and pressured and abandoned. Of course they'd felt violated. Of course they'd been distraught and enraged. But this was different. Not because she was a better person. There was nothing to be proud of. She had been born later and given choices. She felt for those women, of course, but she would be able to do what they could not do: become a mother and then sign a piece of paper that said she wasn't one.

By the time all this was over, she would have been in Lawrence for seven months and three seasons. She would have read thirteen d.i.c.kens novels, with only Edwin Drood left to finish (she would somehow never, in the ensuing eighteen years, find time to finish it), and coached Milagro and Gloria to final grades of B and B plus, respectively. She would have paid rent for the first time and interviewed doctors for the first time (after the unsavory encounter with Dr. Beerkin, she shopped around until she found a grandmotherly OB-GYN in an office at the hospital). She would have lost upward of fifty games of checkers to the woman with Down syndrome next door, whose delight at winning never seemed to diminish.

It hadn't even been especially hard, she would think years later. Ever since she could remember, she had fretted about the idea of growing up, always somehow worried that she would not be able to actually achieve adulthood when the time came. Since freshman year, she had watched women about to graduate go sloping off to interviews at Career and Employment Services, unsteady in unfamiliar heels, their customary sweats and jeans replaced with broad-shouldered suits. Sometimes they would fly off to Cleveland or Chicago or New York for further interviews and return with incredible stories of hotel rooms with concierge service and in-room movies-everything on the corporate tab. After commencement, off they would go to their tiny apartments and the late night car service home (again, on the company) when the account or the deal required them to stay late. They came back to visit and brought new tales of their new lives in the great world. To the college girls still in their nightgowns with their open chem or econ textbooks and powdered cocoa, they spoke of group runs with the Roadrunners Club in the park, summer shares on Fire Island, credit cards, dry cleaning, and wine tastings. Somehow, Portia had allowed herself to believe that this-this package of employee perks and health club memberships-represented adult life, not just because the former rowers and field hockey players and sorority treasurers had transformed themselves into businesswomen, speed-walking to work in their Lady Foot Locker sneakers, but because their lives didn't look remotely like Susannah's life. That part of it was a good thing. That part of it, Portia thought she might like very much. But in the end, she didn't think she could ever pull off such a transformation.