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Nora had a nose job when she was sixteen, the bump she had seemed not to care about was gone. She told Emily, when they met, that she wasn’t going to be a writer. They were standing on the corner in front of the house that had replaced the forest. Peter walked by them. Back then he had been Emily’s boyfriend, a slight dark boy with big, meaningful eyes. His features, as he grew older and bigger, enlarged, leaving traces of someone once vulnerable, but Emily had to squint her eyes to see him like that. His older sister was rumored to be wild, but when they were children she used to dress Nora and Emily in costumes of her own design. They’d do that on rainy afternoons, while Peter sat in a corner; everyone said his older sister was the creative one. Emily spent part of fourth and fifth grades playing kissing games in Peter’s closet. They also passed afternoons climbing into houses that were under construction along with Harvey, an overweight boy with a reading problem. Harvey fell through an unfinished attic floor, and they ran away. The contractor gathered together all the kids on the block and demanded to know who’d done it. There was an uncomfortable silence until Peter stepped forward and said his mother had taught him never to lie and that Harvey had done it. That ended climbing in houses and Emily was forced to look at Peter with new eyes and juggle, like an acrobat, the contradictory values of truth and friendship. Their kissing games halted when Peter’s mother made slighting remarks about Emily’s character to her mother, overheard by Emily, who experienced deep humiliation. Peter walked past Emily and Nora as if this history had never existed between them. He waved his hand brusquely, as befitted an upperclassman. Emily waved back and turned from the sight of him, and the memory, to Nora, who looked so different with her new nose.
Her mother had taken a part-time job and wasn’t at home when Emily got there and walked past the piano that no longer was played. We should sell it, her mother would say. I may play it again, was the answer. Emily mother was working in the local community house, the only interracial center in town. Emily turned on the television and opened her book. One eye watched the movie, the other, her paperback on the American Revolution. Revolution or evolution, her young male history teacher had asked. The question plagued Emily, who could find no easy answer for it, yes or no, and it seemed to be both. But was that an answer? The movie was Duel in the Sun and Emily was distracted from the American Revolution. Gregory Peck, who she thought looked a little like her father, and Jennifer Jones, madly in love, dying, crawling toward each other for one last embrace, after they’d shot each other. They loved each other but they had to destroy each other. That was as big a problem as the American Revolution and exciting, in a different way, from thinking, for instance, that it’s impossible to know anything for sure.
Emily’s mother complained about having to work, but she had a lot more to talk about since she started the job. And Emily had the house to herself for several hours every day, which made her feel almost grown-up. Her mother now knew all the black leaders of the community and gave a few parties that were really integrated. She’s probably the talk of the town, Emily thought. Her mother seemed oblivious and it made Emily proud. Her mother never mentioned civil rights. It was as if she was doing what she was doing just because she was who she was and no one was going to tell her who to be friends with. Indeed her mother sometimes seemed oblivious to anyone’s rights but her own. Still, Emily thought that on the face of it it made her mother more like a person than a mother.
She had figured out that the American Revolution was best called a rotation. It combined both aspects that she so desperately wanted to mesh. She wrote ten handwritten pages and gave them to her teacher, becoming her history teacher’s favorite student, not because she did everything right, but because she argued ferociously about issues most kids understood as academic. “It’s life or death to her,” the teacher told his wife. “Very peculiar girl. Maybe she’s in love with me.” “Maybe,” his wife said. “It could be a schoolgirl crush, or it could be something else.”
Her parents thought she stayed in too much, and Nora’s thought she went out too much, but since the ex-best friends’ mothers still weren’t talking to each other, and Emily still didn’t know why, they didn’t compare notes, but complained in the privacy of their bedrooms that the other teenager was better adjusted.
Nora’s remodeled nose gave her the feeling that now she was like everybody else, and so she went to more and more parties, where she met more and more boys. Emily went to a few parties, to keep up appearances, but preferred to read about them in books. She’s not normal, her father would say. Oh, she’s probably normal enough, her mother would say, but not to Emily. To Emily her parents presented a united front. Why can’t you be more normal? The one thing Emily wanted less and less was to be more normal.
Emily found herself thinking about Hilda. The piano had been sold, over her protests, and she mourned its passing as if it had been alive. Hilda had been different. Now the living room had a big hole in it. It has no heart anymore, Emily felt, no heart. She started to dream about Hilda and wished off and on to find her, as if by finding her she could always be a child. But she didn’t even open the telephone book to call her. It was more like a novel that was living in her head and at the end of it there Hilda would be and everything would be all right again.
They were now seniors and both girls were supposed to apply to college. Nora got into a not very good one that she’d drop out of, she told herself, as soon as she met someone. Emily, as much as she said she wanted go to college, applied late everywhere, and ended up at a city university. She’d have to live at home in the city. She discovered that she didn’t care; she didn’t want to go away to school. She told her friends that she’d much rather go to a school that didn’t look like a school. “She’s too much of a homebody,” her father complained. “It’s not normal.” “She’ll be all right,” her mother said. “Once she’s in college. She won’t be so out of place there.”
In Nora’s first year she met someone who was a senior and going to be an accountant. Emily was introduced to him during intercession. In the room where she had once hidden under the table saying her heart was going to stop, Nora announced: “I love him and I’m dropping out. We’re getting married.” Emily regarded the object of Nora’s quest as a curiosity. This is what she’d been waiting for. He seemed nice enough, but looked like he’d aged very quickly for his years. She wondered what Nora’s mother, who had finally gotten her law degree, thought of him. For some reason or other, Emily didn’t go to the wedding.
Emily wasn’t sure why she wasn’t living at home anymore with her parents. At the same time, she was convinced that in her day and age it would be completely wrong not to leave home. She moved out almost automatically to live in another woman’s apartment.
She was lying in bed and didn’t want to get up and leave her room. She was remembering things. She lived in a small room that had once been for the maid. The woman who rented her the room was a widow whose husband had died eight years before Emily moved in. But, for a while, Emily thought he had just died because the widow, Edith, talked about him every day as if he’d just slipped away. Edith had two grown daughters who hardly ever wanted to spend any time with her. It was odd to see the other side of it. Considering how much they didn’t want to see her, Edith did all right. She thought about her husband, saw friends, went to work, concerts, and plays, and watched television. She didn’t want to remarry. Emily’s mother would tell her that people who didn’t remarry showed that they didn’t like being married the first time, otherwise, she’d sum up, They’d do it again, wouldn’t they? Emily gave Edith the benefit of the doubt. Maybe no one could fill the dead man’s shoes, if he were so wonderful, the way she said, for more than a night or two.