Rory, a football player who lived at end of his hall, bought an It’s It from Walter. “Nice job, huh?”

  Walter didn’t particularly like it; working with food felt menial.

  “You get to be outside.” Rory stretched his muscled arms in the sun, cracking his knuckles, taking pleasure in even the small movements of his impressive body.

  At two, when the Campanile stopped chiming and customers dispersed, Walter pushed the closet-sized cart downhill toward the loading dock, where it would be restocked. He held his sketch pad with his thumb on top of the right handlebar. The front wheel bumped over a rock and turned askew. The thing gained velocity. Walter yanked his wrist to rein it in, the pad flew, wheels veered to the left as the cart careened downhill. It was pulling him, but he still had some power if not to stop it at least to steer; he was trying not to knock anyone down as the metal box hurtled faster. He held on, jerking the handles to avoid people, and yelling so they’d get out of the way. He decided to swerve into the ravine. He was running full-out now and for a moment flashed to how much easier it would be if you were trying to mow people down rather than dodge them. He ran, his heart gonging, his pulse fast, drawn by the thing’s speed and heft, heading for the creek until abruptly it stopped with a thud that knocked the cart backwards, slamming into him. He fell. Rory had gotten in front of the box with his roommate, Cub, who’d banked his side against it in a blocking tackle.

  “Ought to have brakes,” Cub said.

  “Weighs four times what you do.” Rory was laughing.

  The cart was partway down the bank of the creek. They pushed the thing back up to level ground. Walter moved to take it from there, but Rory wouldn’t release the handles; he steered it all the way to the loading dock, where Walter signed in, glad to be rid of it. He had to thank the two football players. He wished they hadn’t seen him being pulled like a banner. He went back and found his sketch pad still there on the ground.

  That night in the dining hall, guys he didn’t know looked at him, then to each other, holding in laughter. The football team had heard. He hated his food service job.

  He thought of that bike sale. He knew how to repair bikes. Maybe he’d go after all.

  * * *

  —

  The place to pay tuition in the basement of Sproul Hall had barred windows like a pawnshop. He pushed a stack of hundred-dollar bills through a small tunnel to a woman on the other side. He’d added to the money from Julie.

  The woman gave him a new statement reflecting his payment. He’d known he would still owe hundreds of dollars, but the bill had jumped. December’s rent and food. He was using his mom’s method, after all, paying down a little. That night, he typed his name, date of birth, social security number, and address on a financial aid form. He couldn’t apply as independent; for that, you had to have filed tax returns for five years. The regular application required a parent’s 1099.

  He wrote to his mom, then crumpled the letter. He didn’t want to rub it in that she couldn’t pay. Finally, he walked down the hall. Light eked out below the girls’ door. Susan, wearing a nightie, let him in. You wouldn’t notice right away, but there was really nothing wrong with her body. Carrie sat on the bed, wrapped in a towel, bent over, stroking a tiny brush of red on her toenails.

  “Could I borrow a piece of stationery?”

  Carrie offered old postcards. A Berkeley oak tree, Shattuck Avenue with hand-tinted department stores. He picked a picture of the church by People’s Park. Susan asked if he had stamps and, without waiting for his answer, gave him three.

  Dear Mom, I’m applying for a scholarship and need your tax form 1099. Love, W.

  Scholarship sounded as if he were eligible for some honor.

  Before going to sleep, he imagined opening Carrie’s towel, one end in each of his hands, and sticking his head in, her body giving off steam like a loaf of fresh bread.

  The next day, when he relieved the engineering student of the cart, she smiled, looking at the ground. The news had made it all the way to engineering.

  8.

  Walter found his friends crowded around the TV in Carrie and Susan’s room, the president’s torso filling the screen.

  I have asked for this radio and television time tonight for the purpose of announcing that we today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor…

  He glanced at Ken; a danger Walter had never fully believed in was ending.

  …at this moment in Washington and Hanoi…

  Walter’s skin lifted in goose bumps. He hadn’t paid much attention to Vietnam, but he’d respected Ken’s fears; they were public and honorable. Walter couldn’t talk about his own terror without making his family sound worse than it was.

  “I guess the draft’s over,” Ken said. “If there’s no war.”

  “What about the POWs?” Rory said. “Our guys?”

  “We’ve still got draft numbers,” Cub said.

  A peace that lasts. A peace that heals. The cease-fire will take effect at 2400 Greenwich Mean Time, January 27, 1973.

  “Par-tay!” Rory said, lifting his large arm. Cub slapped his back. Walter didn’t like these two in Susan and Carrie’s room.

  * * *

  —

  Walter found his way to the Piedmont Fire Station early Saturday morning. A man in a uniform shrieked up the metal door to reveal bikes on a cement floor next to a polished fire truck. While he browsed, a woman came in, asking for tricycles. She was young, but her hair was tangled and her bare legs looked more functional than pretty. The man stepped into a back room and returned with a tricycle in each hand. She gave him a ten-dollar bill and carried them off.

  “How much are the bikes?” Walter asked.

  “Depends. Some need work. Make me an offer.”

  Walter’s heart sped. He’d fixed his sister’s bike. “Five for twenty-five?”

  The guy sucked his cigarette. “Give you all seven for thirty. We can both go home.”

  Walter made three trips, one bike in each hand, then rode the last, a five-speed Raleigh, made in England.

  Carlos, the dorm janitor, let Walter store them in the basement. Sunday, Walter and Ken pounded out dents on two upended bikes, with Ken’s transistor radio going. Ken tied a bandanna over his hair, which he’d let grow and had to rubber-band for ROTC. When a song came on that he liked, he set down the hammer and lifted his arms, swaying.

  They decided to paint the bicycles white. One color would be cheaper. Berkeley Bikes, they’d call them.

  * * *

  —

  Walter checked his mailbox every day. After three weeks, he called home.

  “Mm-hmm. I’m looking for it,” his mom said.

  After another week he wrote his sister:

  Make mom send her tax return. I need it. No joke. When you apply to college, check the box for financial aid. No matter what she says.

  Susan and Carrie were rushing. Sororities didn’t seem at all Berkeley, not Walter’s Berkeley, anyway. The old Greek houses above campus had stood mostly empty since the sixties, he’d heard, and were starting to fill again. Even Melinda, who, at the beginning of the year, had set her hair in rollers, wore jeans now, and when she raised her hand in chemistry, Walter saw she’d stopped shaving under her arms.

  He hadn’t told anyone about the dorm bill, but he had the feeling Ken knew.

  * * *

  —

  Lina called. The bank had written her, asking her to come into the branch. She’d thought she was in trouble. Maybe a sixteen-year-old wasn’t supposed to deposit in the night slot. But two bankers brought her into a private room and showed her three checks with her name signed in what even they recognized was not her penmanship. Lina knew immediately that it was their mother’s but didn’t tell. They asked if she had all her checks. She looked; four had been ripped out from the back. Because one was still missing, they said they had to close her account.

  “So it’s closed,” she said, and Walter heard the catch of a sob.

  He had to leave for class in seven minutes. “What did she use your checks for?”

  “Gas stations,” Lina choked out.

  He felt for their mom then, for the first time since his own fury about the mythic Afghans. “I guess she had to get to work. It isn’t as if she’s out buying fur coats.”

  “But parents manage!” Lina shrieked. “They don’t use their kids’ money to buy gas!”

  What did she want from him?

  “Most parents don’t need to.” Walter had gone days without thinking about any of them. His guilt pulsed with his sister gulping on the other end of the line. But did she have to cry so much?

  “I can’t wait to get out of here,” she whispered.

  She took things too personally. She told him then about getting arrested for throwing oranges at Henry Kissinger. “I called you from jail.”

  Walter had tried to return her call, but when Beverly Hills Police answered, he assumed it was a wrong number and hung up. Now hearing she’d been in jail, he felt protective. He should be there.

  “How much of your money did she spend?”

  “Almost three hundred.”

  He remembered Lina riding her bike home from that ice-cream store late at night. He’d first learned how to make repairs on that bike.

  “I can send you money,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Lina whispered, and he heard the swoop of relief. It was the first time he felt the power of generosity—generosity, in this case, above his means. But Lina was young. He wanted her and Donnie to believe that the world was safer than it even maybe was. The shrill accusation left her voice. She sounded shy, grateful. He’d always suspected things would be better with money. Here was proof. He wrote a check for three hundred dollars, sketched the bungalow, its peach tree, and mailed it.

  He needed to pile up money. He never wanted to get sent back to Go.

  9.

  Walter asked at the desk for books on bicycle repair. He’d found nothing in the card catalogue. “Try the public library. We don’t”—the student pronounced his t with exaggeration—“stock repair manuals. Or any self-help, for that matter.”

  “ ’Cept Plato,” Walter mumbled.

  His Lit Core teacher had thrown a paperback Phaedrus at Rory, who’d fallen asleep in class. “Think of it as self-help,” she’d said. “To teach you to live without illusions.” So Friday, after his shift, Walter set out for the public library. He stopped in the eucalyptus grove to read on a stump. He loved the smell. He was reading Vitruvius’s treatise from the first century. Jan Tudor had written firmitas, utilitas, venustas on the board: solid, useful, and delightful. Half-shred strips of bark curled up off the eucalyptus trunks and the air opened small folds in his lungs. Jan Tudor had called his dorm block Fascist architecture.

  Corbusier wrote, The styles are a lie. But he’d also said, Our own epoch is determining, day by day, its own style. Our eyes, unhappily, are unable yet to discern it. What was the style of 1973? Walter didn’t know if he’d like it. His favorite building was still the church by People’s Park. His taste embarrassed him. He wanted to be a modernist.

  The house is a machine for living, Corbusier wrote. One can be proud of having a house as serviceable as a typewriter. Walter and Ken’s room was serviceable; they had what they needed and no more.

  Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep. Walter couldn’t live on space and light and order; he needed his bed and cafeteria pass more. Corbusier would have, too.

  In the distance, Walter saw Carrie, holding books to her chest. He stood and called her. The ground was spongy with fallen leaves. He’d been reading for the class she’d talked him into taking; he should probably thank her, he said, even though she’d bailed. “I love it. I don’t consider this homework.” It seemed inevitable that she’d led him to his passion.

  “I would’ve taken it if it were any other time.”

  “So are you an English major now?”

  “I want to be a poet. But my dad says as soon as I graduate, he’s not paying my rent. My mom worked as a saleswoman at Bonwit Teller after college. Maybe I’ll do that.” I’m not special, I know that, she seemed to be saying. An enchantment. He wouldn’t mind an ordinary life with her. He would know she was a treasure, even in a shop, disguised as a salesclerk.

  She was on her way to her professor’s house. Walter walked her there. In a few minutes, maybe, he would slip his arm under her hair and pull her toward him to whisper—but what? Whatever you said so that, from then on, you became a couple. He loved her, but he didn’t know her well enough to say that.

  Suddenly, rain clattered in the trees above them. Carrie opened a pretty blue-and-orange umbrella.

  He blurted, stupidly, “I remember how you wanted to get into that poetry class.”

  “With some things, the best part is getting in. Cheerleading was like that. But this class is the most, I don’t know, meaningful thing I’ve ever done. It’s hard, though.”

  Walter felt that about architecture.

  “My teacher’s paralyzed. A football player carries her into class.”

  A football player! Walter remembered his disgrace. He hoped Rory hadn’t told Carrie about him flying behind the food cart, calling attention to his underdeveloped muscles. His sister had called him Gandhi Legs.

  The teacher’s house was a 1930s cottage behind two ancient redwoods. People congregated here every Friday to read poems, Carrie told him. When the front door swung open, the professor called from her chair by the fireplace, “Come on in. Sit down.”

  Walter held up his hands. “I’m not a poet.”

  “Come in anyway, have a sandwich.” She had a small, round head. Propped on a chair, she made a straight diagonal, unbent as a log. Walter noticed the room. Everything was where it should be.

  “Tea or wine?” the professor asked. Carrie said wine and he said tea. A young woman served and the professor introduced them to a couple who owned a small press. Most people in the room looked middle-aged. Logs broke in the fireplace, opening flames and sifting ash. This was the first private home Walter had been inside in Berkeley.

  A young man read a poem about dying. Walter didn’t understand certain phrases; they were abstract and could have meant several different things. A man over forty, with a full beard, read a love poem. He told the younger writer, “I’m the one who should be thinking about death. You should be writing love poems.”

  After more poems that Walter could make neither hide nor hair of, the professor read one that she said was written by a seventeenth-century Japanese traveler.

  Falling sick on a journey

  My dream goes wandering

  Over a field of dry grass

  When the professor talked, you forgot she couldn’t walk or probably even hold a teacup. Her hands were gnarled, the fingers bent over each other.

  Walter stood up to find the bathroom, mostly to see the house. He admired the layout: a dining alcove opened to the living room, the fireplace in the center of the wall and casement windows. A simple, narrow kitchen that reminded him of the bungalow.

  He should have said something to Carrie. He couldn’t say I love you, but he could have said something. What, though? I want to date you? Date was an inadequate word. And they were friends. He didn’t want to lose what he had. If he said the wrong thing, she might pity him and never be herself with him again. If only he knew his life would work out right, that he could feel about someone the way he felt about Carrie and live with her in a house like this, then everything would be bearable. But he didn’t have the certainty of a good ending. Through a window shoved up in the professor’s clean bathroom, he heard rain. By the toilet a steel bar had been installed. He wondered whether the professor could manage the bathroom by herself. He hoped she didn’t need a football player to help with that.

  He’d been down at the end of the hall where the football players wrote the names of girls they’d had sex with on the back of Rory and Cub’s door. Walter had read the list quickly, relieved not to find Susan’s or Carrie’s name. Ken never spoke about sex, but his laughter seemed deeper. Could Walter be the only male virgin left in the dorm?

  He should have said something to Carrie. The eucalyptus grove had been his chance.

  Now Carrie was opening her spiral notebook. She took a gulp of wine, then read a poem called “People’s Park” in a small voice. Her wrist trembled.

  Her talent stunned him. People murmured when she finished. He felt lucky to know her.

  But she looked at him with miserable eyes. “Was that okay?”

  How could she wonder? “It was great. Can I have a copy?”

  She ripped the page out of her notebook and gave him the paper with its confetti edge. Then she handed him her wineglass, to sip. They shared it back and forth, their fingers touching on the glass stem. A woman with a long gray braid read a poem with the refrain for friends share everything.

  I like that, the man with the beard said. Walter did, too. Friends share everything.

  Walter had to get to the library before it closed. He needed a repair manual. He put the poem inside Vitruvius and thanked the professor. She tilted her head to the left. It seemed the only mobile part of her. She asked him if he knew any athletes. Her helper, she said, was leaving for school year abroad.

  Walter said he’d ask around. Had she not asked him because he didn’t look strong enough? Should he have volunteered to carry her? He left, liking the idea that the people there would think of him and Carrie as a couple.