Tina understood. The thing was to focus and to stick to the sighting. Her mother had lost her way because she hadn’t focused. No matter what the beginning losses, Tina wanted to end up satisfied with her life as Umbertina had been.

That night at the dinner table Tina saw the faces of her relatives: relaxed, comfortable, unperplexed by existential problems, and for a few moments she envied their condition of security and well-being. They had never wrestled with an Italian identity—if you asked who they were, why, they were just American. They had never moved from Gloversville; except to go to college, her uncles had never been away from their hometown. They had been born there, and their children, too; they would spend all their days there. They had friends, continuity, and a sense of their living space. They were good people. Almost imperceptibly Tina shook her head as if consulting with herself: It was not enough. One had to get more out of life than the slot where one was born. Positioning meant moving.

“Well, Tina, still surviving in New York?” her Uncle Sammy boomed. “Been mugged yet?”

When she got back to the city, Tina had a call from Missy, who said she had found an incredible apartment to sublet through an incredible bit of luck. It was on West End Avenue, not far from Columbia.

Tina went to meet Missy there on a bright, cold day. “Sun and light!” she exclaimed as they stood in the living room of the apartment looking out.

“And a tiny view of the river if you stand on a chair in this corner,” Missy said. “Isn’t it great?”

“Just what my Italian soul needs,” Tina agreed.

When they moved in, Tina bought some plants to tend.

43. Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-three

At times Tina thought of Jason. The time she came down with flu and was in bed a few days, the bunches of bright flowers on her patterned sheets filled her feverish head with threatening hallucinations. All she could think of was the poor dormouse of the Christopher Robin rhymes who lived in a bed of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red). And with the recall of the dormouse, Sir Brian Botany, naughty Mary Jane and rice pudding again, Pooh Bear and Piglet and all the other characters came trooping back into her mind. And with them came Jason.

The men Tina was meeting at Columbia had skipped Winnie-the-Pooh. Their education had taken them from comic books and science fiction straight into Henry Miller and New Left liberalism. They had caught the catchwords of student protest and wove their talk around them.

They were interesting the first few times she went out with them, but then she got bored. Her closest friend was a thin, fastidious gay named Allan Saltzman, who was in the graduate department of English and with whom she could have bookish, stolid, opinionated discussions and good food in his well-stocked apartment.