Cover

Title

Dedication

For my friends

1

IN THE SEPTEMBER of her nineteenth year, Maggie Arioli did not cover a slender mattress with an extra-long fitted sheet. She did not thrill over the single dorm room her sophomore status at Carlton College would have won her. She did not buy expensive textbooks. She did not lug books or anything else down campus sidewalks shadowed by trees, their leaves green but leaning toward gold. She did not admire the elegant marble pillars or trust the keepers of the columned edifices to edify her, shape and improve her, deepen her like a well and then fill her with wishes. She did not sidle between young men or young women or gaze up at the mountains of two ranges. She did not walk by McCullers Hall, with its white cupola, or the Stanton Center and its bell tower. She did not visit the musty quiet of Swan Library. She did not enter the electric sparseness of a classroom.

She prepared to leave the valley, put the mountains behind her, and stay with her mother’s sister, Aunt Wren, in New York, not the city but the state, a western portion and probably, in general, an infrequently imagined place. The aunt, whose artwork entailed communications with larger, livelier worlds, said as much to her niece during the awkward phone conversation when the arrangements were made (“for your sabbatical,” as Maggie’s mother had lightly coined it).

“It feels like an apology,” Aunt Wren had said, “clarifying not the city, the state, pointing out the seven-hour distance between my version of New York and other people’s. I’m between Rochester and Buffalo, I’ll say. Then it’s: Oh. Where it snows so much. That’s what we’ve got—weather.”

As if to prove it, from nine in the morning until three-thirty in the afternoon, the span of the September trip, rain fell with increasing violence. Through the initial sprinkle, as her mother drove, Maggie mentally said good-bye to Vermont—Carlton, in particular, not just her college town but her hometown. She was half-mournful. The other half of her: Fuck this place. I never want to see this fucking town again.

Scotia. Amsterdam. Green interstate signs, alternately Something-Spa and Something-Falls, signaled her and Mom’s proximity to Saratoga destinations. Their route took them close to a hillside town over a river. Dark buildings, severe and brick and incongruously ruffled with gingerbread trim, sat blank-windowed on their craggy inclines above the brown water, like hopeless giants reduced to their lace-edged underwear and contemplating death by drowning. New York, Maggie decided, was bleak and ugly.

Then suddenly, the mountains disappeared. Just like that. The earth flattened. She couldn’t see what was coming. She couldn’t see what she’d left behind. What she saw was sky, and rain filled it.

Bleak and ugly and flat.