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Treat Nights, but Marm and I both wanted to see Mr. Peary.
    The place was packed to the rafters with screaming kids eating peanuts out of paper cones and running onstage to pinch the piano player. When the mustachioed explorer came on the screen, all the girls in the audience cheered. Although Mr. Peary didn’t succeed in his polar expedition,we all felt he was a hero for trying. They filmed his schooner, which he named after President Roosevelt; Mr. Peary plans to use the same ship for what he hopes will be a successful return to the North Pole next year.
    I can almost taste the arctic air, and feel the crunch of snow beneath my feet, the itch to go somewhere. I feel the push inside myself to do something astonishing with my life. If only I could find the bravery, the daring to take such an adventure, despite my being a girl. I think of Anushka down on the farm, and I remember the first day I met her—she had that sort of wildness even then. She always did.
    I remember I stood alone in the corner of Mrs. Browning’s first-grade room, watching all the other six-year-old girls pairing up to play a delicate game of cat’s cradle. I wondered where they all came from and who they belonged to, these girls. I didn’t dare approach a single one of them. Anushka strode up to me and opened her mouth in a wide smile, revealing the startling gap of a missing front tooth. She offered me half of her cradle string. I touched my own teeth—I hadn’t yet lost any—and asked if it hurt, losing the one. She poked her tongue through the gap; she looked a little mad doing that. I burst into gales of laughter, and she joined me.
    I feel that gap now, like a place beside me where she should be.
    Two nights ago I attended the St. Xavier annual without Anushka for the first time—I’m not sure why I bothered to go. Was I hoping to meet someone? I watched all the girls dancing with the fellers, Fanny with Arthur Robertson, Josephine with Willem Stryker, all of them waltzing like grown-ups. I sat, my hands curled like two sleeping dogs in my lap. Nobody asked me to dance. I thought of all the annuals I’d attended, sitting together with my smiling Anushka while the boys made a wide circle around us, glancing at us as if we were storefront curiosities, but nothing desirable enough to engage.
    This year, I had no one to smile with.
    It’s like opening a lock, making a new friend; the key must fit exactly right.

September 21, 1906
    A n opportunity has finally come! I received a note sent from an office expressing interest in me as typist and general note taker. The man set next Tuesday for our meeting time—which seems like years away. Oh, I have thought and hoped so long for this chance, have imagined it so much—walking into an office or hospital in my one good maroon shirtwaist and skirt set, my black hat, my boots polished to a soft sheen. I hope I don’t ruin it with my over-enthusiasm or get too flustered to type properly.
    When I told Marm that it’s a government job with the Department of Health and Sanitation, she held up her hand and disappeared into her room. She keeps private papers and pictures and my father’s things in that room; I do not go in there.
    After a bit, she returned with an old
Scribner’s
magazine. “This came out the year before you were born,” she said.“But now I think it’ll be interesting for you.”
    She opened to an article spread with many detailed drawings based on photographs of buildings and their insides: dirty children sleeping on wood floors, drunks in alleys, flophouses filled to the brim with raggedy men, boys in pants tied up with rope. I had seen these photographs before in Anushka’s father’s bookstore, in a famous book called
How the Other Half Lives.
    â€œJacob Riis, the journalist,” I said.
    â€œThis was his first big article,” Marm said. “Look closely at that one.” She pressed a