Walter called sometimes and told her about his building. She wasn’t really listening.

  “So everything’s okay with you there?” he always asked at the end.

  He told her to send a picture of herself on campus to pin over their mom’s bed. She said she would.

  “I mean, do it,” he said. He’d asked her before, she just remembered. Why hadn’t she sent a picture? Still, Walter had never contended with their mother the way she had. He hadn’t been there for the worst of it. And their mother had always been different with him. Lina desperately wanted not to become her. Walter never for a second even considered that he could.

  Mrs. Anjani told Lina to take a foreign language. Dino suggested Chinese. “There’ll be over a billion Chinese people by the year 2000.” But her mother had studied French. The phrases she dropped into ordinary conversation, je ne sais quoi and fait dans la vie, seemed what she most enjoyed from her education. Lina enrolled.

  The May Company suit went to the back of her closet.

  Her new friends in the dorm talked about sex. All of them had had it. Kim believed she’d given her whole self to the actor, but these girls were nimbly able to have sex and come out unnicked.

  A tall Deerfield girl discovered that she loved econ. “It comes naturally to me,” she said. So far nothing came naturally to Lina, though she was studying more than she ever had. She didn’t like one class above the others. No teacher showed a particular interest in her, either. She had a job interview at the college store. After six minutes, the manager hired her. Maybe this is what comes naturally to me, she thought.

  A handmade sign in the student center said CLAY ROOM, with an arrow pointing to the basement. She recognized the mineral aroma, like the bottom of a well. Electric wheels sat in rows, and only one woman was throwing a pot. Lina asked her if you had to pay. “Student?” the woman asked, then said all she had to do was sign in with Troy. “He’s loading the kiln.”

  In a moment, a guy her age emerged, tall, Black, with long hair in tiny braids. He copied down the number of her student ID.

  “Can I fire, too, and glaze?” Lina asked.

  “Got you set up now. Just sign in every time. If I’m not here, leave the clipboard on that nail.”

  She reached into the barrel of clay, redder than what she was used to and mixed with damp, discarded pots fallen in on themselves. She wedged a cool lump, slicing it with wire to check for air bubbles. She hadn’t felt clay for a long time. After she graduated, she’d never returned to Mr. Riddle’s room; she would have been ashamed not to be in college, and, working at the store, she’d become careful with her clothes. When the clay was smooth, she sat at a wheel and pulled the ball under her hands; she’d always loved the feeling of centering. The first few pots wobbled. It took her a while to find the rhythm of pulling wet clay up between her knuckle and fingers. The guy, Troy, was watching. When she looked at him, he glanced away. She threw eleven pots and kept one, lifting it off the wheel with a wire.

  “You’re no beginner,” he said, sliding her board onto the firing rack.

  “High school.”

  He was a student at Columbia, an art major. She hadn’t seen a lot of Black kids at Barnard. Running up the steps, she felt good. The wheel had bitten down her nails, her hair held the mess and smell of slip. So four days a week, for six hours she sold Barnard regalia: mugs, sweatshirts, blankets, notebooks, and umbrellas—then ran down to the clay room.

  She wrote Julie and asked her to send her old overalls.

  Troy told her she should take a sculpture class. There was a great one, over across Broadway, he said, but she’d be the only girl.

  * * *

  —

  In the library, for her great books class, she read Descartes’ a priori proof of God. She looked up the word ontological. The dictionary declared it an adjective “relating to the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.” Then she looked up metaphysics, which turned out to be “the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space.” She set down the heavy dictionary. From what she could tell, Descartes was proving that God existed because he’d thought of him and nothing that he thought was so wonderful could not not exist. But how was that proof?

  It seemed like her mother’s logic.

  Around her, the only sound in the stately library was the rustle of pages. After all the trouble Mrs. Anjani and her alumna friend had taken to make up for her stupid, proud mistake and all the money she’d borrowed (she hated to think of what it took to transport her here to this carrel), Lina was turning out to be only an average student. In the department store, Ceci had trusted her instincts and Sue had recommended her to be a buyer. Maybe that was where she belonged. After another hour (two more readings of Descartes’ proof), she packed up her books and left. Outside, the leaves were lacy with light, breeze, and shadow. Spring. She was very far from home.

  * * *

  —

  Lina had been counting down the weeks to go back to LA, but Mrs. Anjani decided she should stay at Barnard over the summer to make up the semester she’d missed. She felt an acute longing for home, but she complied. Financial aid had come through for next year, but there was still a shortfall and Mrs. Anjani was helping Julie pay her expenses. Mrs. Anjani figured out that if Lina took twenty-four credits a semester and stayed two summers, she could even graduate early.

  “Will you explain to my mom?” Lina asked Julie.

  Troy turned out to be staying, too. “See, I got in as an underprivileged student,” he said. They were making him take remedial classes all summer. “Reading and shit.”

  She asked him about the Columbia art department. “Come on along,” he said.

  She didn’t have to be anywhere for another hour, so they walked across the street and under the Columbia gate. She followed him into a cool hall. Through an open door, Lina glimpsed a phenomenally large nude woman luxuriating on a plinth, the bottoms of her bare pink feet dirty and a dozen young men sketching her.

  A girl passed wearing peacock-green tights and Doc Martens. People in the art building looked less normal than in the rest of the school.

  Lina bought a peach for dinner at the corner Korean market and ate it on the stone steps of the art building. She bit into the tight skin and, inside, fine chains of crimson beaded through the orange. Juice sprayed her hands. She’d check out a class.

  * * *

  —

  That first summer, she wore overalls with tank tops, and her hair carried the stony, cool smell of clay. She added a drawing class. The teacher arranged still lifes and roamed the room with an eraser. He erased the part of your drawing he wanted you to do over. Look again, he said. Look better.

  When Lina asked Julie if she’d told her mother why she wasn’t there, Julie quickly told her yes, yes, she was fine. She understood. Lina doubted that.

  * * *

  —

  “Still liking school?” Walter asked. Now it seemed she liked it more than he did. When she asked him about graduating, he changed the subject. He’d finally gotten his license, he said, and was driving to the Central Valley every day. Julie and Donnie sounded good, he told her, maybe better than ever.

  Now that I’m gone, Lina thought. “What about Mom?” Lina called the ward, but her mother was so quiet on the phone. Lina could hardly get anything out of her.

  “Me neither. I’ve stopped expecting much.”

  She didn’t tell Walter that she was taking two art classes in fall. It seemed a wise thing to keep from a person who was helping pay for her education so that she would eventually have a means of support.

  Most of her Barnard friends were gone for the summer. Jess had a job in a microbiology lab; Lauren was in Mississippi, interning for some southern center for injustice. Or justice, it must have been.

  In the art department lounge, there was a pot of bitter coffee and people stood around talking about Arshile Gorky. More than one loved Picasso, most revered Pollock. Troy stomped in and fanned out pictures of graffiti he’d photographed downtown. The rumor was that a kid did it, a Black kid, still in high school. The department was mostly guys, but there were a few Barnard girls taking classes.

  A girl in a slip dress and combat boots painted standing beside a large dog asleep on the cement floor. Her canvas was abstract and layered, thick with paint but still pretty. Lina’s eye kept going to one spot of orange. While she worked, the girl whistled a raspy melody. Another girl wore white blouses every day and, even drawing with charcoal, her cuffs stayed white.

  She also knew how to use a drill, Lina found out the first week of fall classes. In Introduction to Sculpture, when the teacher asked everyone to say what they wanted to build and what tools they’d need, the girl in a white blouse said she planned to build a dollhouse. Lina wished she’d thought of that.

  The sculpture class was all men, besides the girl and Lina. Barnard girls take painting but they don’t sign up for sculpture, the teacher said. It wasn’t only the students. The sculptors they talked about and loved—Calder, Brancusi, Arp, Judd, Noguchi—were not only men, they were men who’d all known each other. Calder, it turned out, had a degree in mechanical engineering and had worked as a forester and on a boat. Thinking about his accomplishments made Lina tired.

  Her Barnard French class was all women and one gay guy. The thing about French was it made you realize how little grammar you knew, even in your own language.

  46.

  Walter bought an eleven-year-old pumpkin-colored Karmann Ghia for six hundred dollars from Rory’s dad’s car lot and Susan invited herself along on one of his expeditions. “We’ll see the world,” she said, and put her feet up on the dashboard. She had nice feet. She slid in a cassette. Dance music.

  “I brought the Stevie Wonder and Keith Jarrett,” she said. “For those too brilliant for fun.”

  “If I’m driving, maybe no music yet.”

  “Are we visiting random towns?” She said she was moving to Sacramento for a summer internship in the new governor’s office.

  “I met that guy once at the place for my mom. He was secretary of state then.”

  “Good that he was there. Maybe he’ll do something for mental health.”

  “Yeah, but look at Kennedy. I loved Kennedy. And he was the one who started all the trouble.”

  “Why? What did he do?”

  “He passed the law that emptied out the institutions. Kennedy had a retarded sister. She could read Winnie-the-Pooh but not much else.”

  “You know that’s not a good word to use.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.” He wanted to explain, but once someone thought you were a jerk it was hard to prove why you weren’t. “She fell down curtsying when she met the queen of England and they gave her a lobotomy. She was in a hospital the rest of her life. So Kennedy hated institutions. And shut them down. It was the last bill he signed.”

  “How’s your mom?” she asked, after a silence.

  He shrugged. “Pretty much the same.”

  They saw six buildings that Saturday: a canning factory, a barn, three warehouses, and an abandoned school. None met the criteria the man in Chicago had given Walter over the phone. Visibility. Access. Plenty of parking. Walter was planning to take only two classes in fall. Once he found the building, he could catch up. The worst that would happen? He’d graduate late. His sister was in college finally. His brother and Julie were quiet. No one needed him.

  * * *

  —

  Carrie was camp-counseling in Yosemite. He liked thinking of her there, her brown stick-legs in shorts. Ken trucked back and forth to Blodgett for soil science research in the mixed conifer forest. Melinda worked in a sleep lab. He saw Jaws with Melinda and Ken, and when the theater rocked with screaming, Walter walked out to go home to bed. He left at six every morning. He’d become a nimble driver. At the end of the summer, when school started, he still hadn’t found a site that excited Chicago. Once classes began, he stopped talking about his fugitive trips, because his friends looked at him with things they weren’t saying. He hoped Mr. Wimmer hadn’t lost faith in him. At dusk, when he took the Ashley exit and drove uphill, it seemed amazing to see Berkeley still intact, cool and waiting.

  On October 23, Walter found an old high school, the name “Central” inscribed over the door. Gutted, the brick walls painted, it could be beautiful, he told Mr. Wimmer from a pay phone in Clovis. Central was the seventy-third site he’d seen, the ninth he’d submitted to Chicago, with Polaroids and specs. And six drawings: his.

  47.

  On parents’ weekend, Lina took a bus to Princeton to see Lauren, who’d written that she was in love with one guy and best friends with another. The best friend came along to meet Lina at the station. As they walked to campus, he and Lauren argued about the idea of government, something that had never interested Lina but now did, as they disputed who should be paid more: janitors, surgeons, or artists. They ran into people Lauren and the best friend knew; Lina was introduced; those friends joined; they ate; she lost track of time and she was never once, not for even a moment those thirty hours, alone. Getting ready for a party while still debating whether people who loved what they did for a living ought to be paid less because they received nonmaterial compensation, Lina asked, “Do I look all right?” and Lauren said, “Of course.”

  Lauren seemed surprised by this new insecurity. In high school, Lina had always known she was beautiful, behind her shield of hair. Here people didn’t see it. “Really? You look the same to me. And you’re much more open to ideas now. In high school you were so unimpressed with everything. Remember how you hated Virginia Woolf?”

  “You mean I can think better, even if I’m no longer good-looking.”

  At the party, while Lauren stood in a cluster of young women furtively glimpsing the guy she was in love with, Lina talked to the best friend. He told her that he and Lauren had the same values. For both of them, friendship was the most important thing. They were both trying to figure out what to do with their lives. They wanted to be useful. That mattered. “We can’t all be artists!” he said. Lina flushed. She’d told Lauren her secret ambition, in private. The best friend said he wanted to marry Lauren but understood that he would have to wait. He kept glancing at the man Lauren was in love with.

  On the bus back to Barnard, Lina already missed Lauren, for whom friendship really was the most important thing. You might be small and anonymous in the world, she’d decided, but you could be deeply known by your friends. The bus hurtled into Port Authority. Still, Lina had to do more. She owed the world. She sometimes wondered what her mother’s life would have been if she’d had only Walter. Just by being alive, Lina had harmed her. She needed to justify being luckier than her mother.

  At the bottom of everything was always her mother.

  Back at Barnard, parents were everywhere. Her roommate stood with two white-haired people in a whispered colloquy, which resulted in an invitation to join them for dinner. But Lina had to work at the store. By closing time she’d sold out the barnard mom mugs, and only seven barnard dads were left on the shelves.

  * * *

  —

  Lina hadn’t known that de Kooning’s wife, Elaine, was a painter herself. She’d read that Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, was an artist, too, but she hadn’t heard that she practically worked as his gallerist. Krasner was still alive now and painting, even with arthritis. The girl who wore white blouses worked for her twice a week. A small group stood on the sidewalk outside the Hungarian Pastry Shop. Vistas were opening. The girl who painted in a slip dress (with a plaid coat thrown over it now in the first snow) held the leash of her straining dog. She and the woman with white blouses were characters in Lina’s life, not friends exactly, but they mattered. The girl with the dog was a better artist than Lina. The one in white blouses caused a different agitation. Looking at her dollhouse, Lina felt she could have made it, if only she’d thought of it first.

  There was a bookstore across from the Columbia gate that Lina used as a library. She walked over that afternoon—the sky seemed to be wringing its light out early, in the winter dusk—to look for a book about Elaine de Kooning. She couldn’t find one. She did see a picture of her in a book about her husband. Elaine was beautiful. Lina stood for an hour, leafing through the book. When she heard a name she didn’t know in class—and nearly every day there was at least one—she would look for that name in the art section here. One cold Sunday, she’d sat in a corner and read a whole book. No one seemed to mind. The people who worked here barely noticed her, except for one kid who was always shelving and said, hey.

  48.

  Susan told Walter she didn’t have a date for the Winter Ball. “So you wanna come?” Carrie would be there; would it be strange to show up with Susan? He’d never been either’s date. But the truth was obvious: Carrie wouldn’t care. So Walter asked Mr. Barsani if he could borrow a suit. Mr. Barsani said, “Sure. Fits you. You’re lucky. Most people have to at least hem. Just make sure no one spills on it.”

  At eight in the morning on a December Wednesday, Walter was eating cereal remembering that yesterday Susan had asked if he had a tuxedo, when the phone rang. He didn’t have a tuxedo. Mr. Barsani kept tuxedos in a special closet, only one in each size. Susan had said a suit would be fine, but now he wished he’d said no to the whole thing. Who could be calling so early? It had to be something bad.