Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

When I entered homeroom the next morning, Emily was sitting at her desk. Her ankles were crossed under her chair. The yellow collar of her shirt lay neatly on her dark green sweater. On the back of her left hand was a small white square of gauze, taped on all four sides.

On the way to English she said, “He doesn’t want me to scratch it.” She gave a little shrug. “Some sort of skin thing. It’s embarrassing.”

“No it isn’t,” I said. “No way. Absolutely not.”

During Christmas vacation I spent so much time at the Hohns’ that my mother started saying things like “We hardly see you anymore” and “I hope you aren’t wearing out your welcome over there.” Once she looked sharply at me and said, “Is everything all right, Will?” Every morning I took the long cold walk to Emily’s house; I returned only at night, driven by Mr. Hohn. Late one afternoon the sky turned dark and a heavy snow began to fall. I was invited to spend the night in the upstairs guest room, under a sky-blue quilt covered with pictures of gray cats and red balls of yarn. I wore a fresh-laundered pair of Mr. Hohn’s flannel pajamas, too wide and too short, striped white and dark blue. Emily, looking in on me, said, “You look — you look—” and gave a whoop of laughter, then covered her mouth with her hand. “Just let me know if you need anything,” Mrs. Hohn said, and closed the door.

I lay in bed, in the quiet house, under the thickly falling snow. A novel by Turgenev rested open and facedown on my stomach. On the dresser stood a little porcelain man playing a fiddle, a blue glass bird, and half a dozen tiny dolls seated on two wooden benches, facing a miniature teacher standing at a blackboard. Over the dresser hung a painting of a deer in a forest, drinking from a sunlit stream. When I turned out the lamp on the night table, I could sense, behind the drawn shades, the snow falling in slanting steady lines. I imagined the streetlights shining through the falling snow.

For a long time I lay awake and peaceful in the dark, listening to quiet bursts of warm air coming through the vent at the base of the wall and a faint creak of floorboards in the attic. When at last I went to a window and pulled aside the heavy stiff shade, with its strip of wood in the cloth above the shade pull, I was startled to see a clear night sky. In the light of streetlamps, a glowing snow lay over sidewalks and bushes. It covered the fire hydrant across the street, rose thick along tree branches, swept up to the top of a corner mailbox.

Late the next morning I sat in the warm yellow kitchen peeling potatoes onto a paper towel, while Mrs. Hohn reached into a chicken and pulled out glistening dark innards, like wet stones. Emily and her father were out doing errands. “You know,” I said, “I can’t help thinking about Emily’s hand. I was wondering—”

“There’s not a thing to worry about, Will,” Mrs. Hohn said. “It’s just a pesky rash. Be a dear and fetch me down that platter, the bone-china one with the windmills. I don’t know what those people were thinking, putting up shelves fit for a giant.”

School startled me. It was as if I’d forgotten all about it during that snowy vacation, composed, it seemed to me, of long evenings playing Scrabble with the Hohns under the flame-shaped bulbs and one brilliant blue afternoon in the backyard building two snowmen with Emily: one with a wide-rimmed red hat on its head and a paper rose stuck in its chest, the other with a pipe in its mouth and an empty can of Campbell’s tomato soup on its head. School was a clash of olive-green lockers, a scraping of many desks. Already I was looking forward to summer. I would be sitting near Emily in the warm shade of her backyard, in an aluminum chaise longue with six adjustable positions, reading a library book whose stamped card served as a bookmark, while beside me, on a round white wrought-iron table with an openwork top, a glass of homemade lemonade with a slice of lemon in it stood next to a plate of fresh-baked brownies with walnuts.

One morning toward the end of January I stepped into homeroom and saw that Emily wasn’t there. I could feel disappointment spreading in me like tiredness. And yet, at the very center of my disappointment, I was aware of a prickle of satisfaction — for hadn’t I known she was bound to be absent again? All that day I tried to savor her absence. It would, I told myself, make her presence all the more vivid and dramatic. The next morning, when I entered homeroom, I didn’t allow myself to look in the direction of her desk. Instead, I imagined Emily seated there in her dark green or burnt-orange sweater, with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms and the collar of her shirt lying on both sides of her neck. When, overcoming my reluctance, I turned to look at her, I was so shocked by the sight of her empty desk that I glanced down at my watch, as if to see how much time was left before she really wasn’t there.

At home I sat on the wooden steps between the kitchen and the back porch, with the telephone cord squeezed in the closed door, and called Emily. Mrs. Hohn answered. Emily was fine. She’d had to have a little work done on her hand; she was resting now. I wanted to know what kind of work. “Some minor surgery — nothing to worry about, Will. She came through with flying colors. I’m so proud of her. She’s resting now. She ought to be back to school in a couple of days. I’ll tell her you called. She’ll be so pleased.” Only in my room, as I sat bent over my typewriter on its rattly metal table next to my desk, did I understand what I’d wanted to say to Mrs. Hohn. Why didn’t you tell me? Why? In my mind I shouted into the telephone. Anger burned in me like fever.

She was absent the next day, and the next. I called each afternoon; always Mrs. Hohn assured me that Emily was resting. The medication had left her feeling a little woozy, Dr. Morrison had said it might have that effect, she’d be up and about in no time. The next day Emily was absent again. At home I sat on the wooden steps, on the cold porch, with the phone in my lap, and did not call. I understood that Mrs. Hohn would tell me nothing — that my questions disturbed her. I called my friend Danny and invited him over for a game of chess.

The next day she wasn’t at her locker. I was unsurprised — so deeply unsurprised that I felt no disappointment — and as I entered homeroom I glanced wearily in the direction of her desk, which when it was empty always stood out sharply, like a chair in an old View-Master reel. Emily was sitting quietly there. I’d been so certain of the empty desk that for a moment I became uneasy, as if I were in one of those TV dramas where you open a familiar door and enter another world.

She was sitting very still. Her books rested in two neat piles on the rack under her chair, and her forearms lay on the blond writing surface. She was wearing a pleated tan skirt and a dark red wool pullover with the sleeves pushed halfway up her forearms. On her left hand she wore a white glove. The glove was tight at the wrist and then flared out a little. Her gloved hand lay motionless, the fingers curved and slightly spread, facing down. She sat upright and stared straight ahead. The whiteness of the glove, the stillness of her arms, the slight tension I could see in her neck, all this made me think that it must be another girl, who was wearing Emily’s clothes and taking her place in class, so that the other Emily, the one who didn’t wear a white glove, could continue to lead her life elsewhere, for reasons she would later explain to me.

I sat down and looked over at her. She sat to my right and two seats up. She did not glance over to me. Her hair, thick with complicated small waves, concealed most of her face, except for her small rounded chin and the sharpish tip of her nose. I wondered who she was, this statue-girl with her one white glove. I glanced at the clock. I looked down at my own left hand, which had assumed the position of the gloved hand, and glanced back at her. She had turned her head in my direction and was giving me one of her slow smiles — and I felt so filled with gratitude that it was as if I had wronged her and been forgiven.