Every Day Read Online Free Page A

affair with him.” Of course I didn’t mean this. I was close. I’d been going for extra help. He’d suggested Saturday morning coffee elsewhere. He’d probably never met a girl who was half Jewish.
    “No can do,” Pam said.
    “Why not? You’ve got a better shot at him than I do.”
    Pam was languorous, blond, ready. I was thinner, more nervous, smaller in almost every way. She dropped a whole, burning cigarette into the grass and laughed self-consciously.
    “I don’t want to get near the guy. He might find out how dumb I am.”
    “So?” We laughed.
    “It’s not like it’s a government secret,” Pam said. “All you have to do for people to figure out you’re brainless is to get yourself sent to a school where at least one building bears your family name.”
    We stopped at some trees near the north entrance
    “Fucking amazing moon.” Pam said.
    “God, will you look at it? I might puke,” I said. I was referring to a dorm meeting I could see taking place in the common room. A lot of the girls were already in sleepwear. Pam and I wore T-shirts to sleep, even if it was below zero out.
    “Could I have a camera over here?” Pam yelled loud enough to be heard through the open window. “Is this an ad for Lanz?”
    I stayed under the trees. I watched Pam, for once not envying her, thinking there was something sad and off-balance about this beautiful rich girl yelling to no purposein the New England wilderness, and wondering what my connection, a girl of very different social and economic bearing, who was actually in love and not just playing at it, to her really was.
    •   •   •
    That my truancy, and not Pam’s, became public, has left me very sour on the subject of her. Although I have no cause to see or speak to her now, and the only news I have of her is that she lives in Newport with her husband and a pair of stunning twin daughters (their picture was featured in an alumni bulletin, which amazed me, as the Pam I knew would have torched such mail before responding to enclosed questionnaires), I sometimes imagine a reunion. We have lunch somewhere ludicrous for my budget, cheap for hers, and she tells me how bored she is and that she’s having her house redone at great expense. I show her my children’s pictures, one of Isaac in his sky-blue baseball jersey ready to swing, a young Fowler with his eyes typically narrowed to focus on any place other than where you stand beholding him. One of Jane ready for a birthday party on the front steps, looking ever so pleased with herself. One of Daisy in a sunhat, a wondering smile directed at our tiny garden. She shows me a clipping of her twin beauties, each holding up a tennis trophy. We eat, laugh a bit, and then I tell her I haven’t forgiven her for telling whoever it was that I was pregnant, for forcing me into hiding, for making a fiasco out of what could have been seen simply as a misfortune. Of course, I was the obstinate one, wanting to go through with Isaac. But I can’t think of anything without him in focus, and Pam is only guilty of having a bigger mouth than I thought she had.
    She was out cold, not even under the covers of her twin iron bed, after a brutal field hockey scrimmage, the night Fowler knocked once and blew into our room. I was at my desk, my Bible open to Job, my mind on Fowler as an undergraduate at his Southern college. I’d been reading up on himin the orientation handbook for the fiftieth time, mulling over his credentials and trying to picture him in a pair of ripped jeans and sandals, fine hair to his shoulders, in the middle of some campuswide protest. Impossible. He didn’t waste time on politics. He probably tore around that campus as he did ours, white shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, tie loosened to accommodate his whirlwind, leaving trails of people dazed or irritated or swooning or all three. He probably hadn’t even waited around to attend his own graduation.
    “Come on,” he said. “We’re going to