“It showed on the X-ray.”

“That’s hard to believe. Now you have to eat all that boring food you don’t like.”

“I know.”

“How do you feel now?”

“O.K. The pain was mostly in my back and chest, instead of my stomach.”

“Then, they might have made a mistake,” he said, his voice becoming lively.

“No. The pain went away immediately with the new diet.”

“Where were you this evening?” he asked.

“I went out to a restaurant.”

“By yourself?”

“No, with the doctor who took care of me.”

“Oh,” he said, putting his hands under his head. “Is that why you’ve been hanging around here? You obviously weren’t in a rush to come back.”

“You know that’s not why—I had to stay.”

He pulled the blanket over his head.

“Tony,” I said after a moment.

He did not reply.

15

I lay awake, thinking about Tony as if he were still far away. Indeed in that short period of separation I had grown more apart from him than I would have believed possible.

I thought of what it was like when I had just met him. A white light had begun to shine on things so that everything seemed extraordinarily bright. In that blinding light I almost totally submitted to him, letting him lead me, seeing things through his eyes.

Before meeting him I was lost and confused. I had not been prepared for the small girls’ college near Boston. Life in the dormitory with its long, gray walls and uniform rooms, students wearing lipstick and walking around the halls with curlers in their hair. The midnight fire alarm when the entire student body swarmed into the street, the mixers with nearby boys’ schools, the swings under the trees where students sat with their dates, holding hands or kissing, the beauty contests, the prayers before meals in the large dining room, the compulsory church and Vespers, masklike faces that smiled and talked to me but really said nothing, the voices, monotonous, meaningless, the English language itself ….

The houses were identical, their doors closed, with no children playing in the street. Everyone rode past in cars with windows up. I thought there was nothing really interesting about the country and no one seemed to be enjoying himself. Everyone in cars, everything wrapped within something else.

I skipped classes whenever I could. I lay in bed in my room, looking at the rows of trees in the yard or the leaves falling, aware of something important dissolving. I became empty of everything except for the thin, frail threads of the past. The bell announcing classes or mealtimes jarred my nerves. Now it is time to get up, dress, walk, talk, eat. Now it is getting dark. There are rapid footsteps in the hall, whispers. The long night is ahead of me. I would listen to a clock I had brought with me. It ticked the way it had in my room at home.