Emily Winslow - The Whole World

“Nothing. Just a break, you know?”

“Sure,” she said. “But really, doing what?”

The whole group at the next table cheered about something.

“Look, nothing, leave it alone.” I didn’t recognize any of the beers advertised on the cardboard coasters. I hadn’t smelled cigarettes in a restaurant since I was a little kid.

She waved her hand in front of my face. “Hello? You were drifting away there for a minute.”

The pub was really noisy. I could barely hear her.

“I think I need to go back to my room. I might be coming down with something.” I got out into cooler air.

It was happening again. I felt strange and kind of out of it. I thought back to those vases she’d told me about before. Clatter-pow.

Newnham is the part of town where a lot of faculty live. It has big houses and pleasant, uncrowded doctors’ and dentists’ offices. Stephen Hawking lives there; I saw him once, whirring by.

Liv took me there to Gretchen Paul’s house to help with the project she was working on.

She rang the bell, and then got out a key without waiting. “Gretchen doesn’t mind,” she explained. “She just wants me to get it done.” The furniture inside, all dark and solid, was interspersed with exotic objects. I figured they must travel.

Liv hadn’t yet been able to figure if their money was hers or his. Gretchen’s husband, Harry, didn’t work. Well, he worked hard, but he didn’t work for money. He bred canaries in a special room upstairs, and was almost always home. He was gentle and seemed like the kind of person who would repair something thoroughly. His last name was Reed; Gretchen used her mother’s last name.

Harry offered us tea and brought it to us in the library: a pot, cups and saucers, milk and sugar. British cookies are brittle, meant for dunking. These had been made from scratch. Harry had a towel tucked into his belt, and wiped his hands on it as he left us to the work. We giggled. I felt like I was in kindergarten, playing tea party. We clinked our cups together in a happy toast. This is what saucers are for: I almost splashed onto Liv’s work, but the little dish caught it and saved me.

There were photos spread all over the table: sepia grandparents and black-and-white babies, vacation shots from the fifties, and orangey snaps of seventies teens. They were in piles, some large and definite, others small and spread out, in the beginnings of a system, like Liv wasn’t sure yet exactly of their classification. “Those are the same person,” I pointed out, indicating two black-and-white photos near each other but not stacked. The woman was beautiful; her eyes and mouth were striking, even at the two different ages represented.

“Maybe,” Liv said. “Or they could be sisters. Or, if they are the same, which of the two sisters is it? See?” There were two “definite” piles, one each for two similar-looking but not really identical women. In those, you could clearly see the widow’s peak on one, and the pointier chin and side part on the other, that differentiated them. The unsorted photos I’d pointed out could each be either.

“No idea,” I finally laughed. It wasn’t a simple project.

One of those sisters was Gretchen’s mother, Linda Paul. The other sister was Gretchen’s aunt, Ginny. Gretchen needed Liv to figure out which was which.

“Gretchen’s mother died recently,” Liv explained. “Linda Paul was this novelist, well, was a long time ago. She was kind of a big deal back in her day. Anyway, Linda always forbade Gretchen from writing a biography of her. She wouldn’t even let Gretchen have these. They were all boxed up in her attic. But now…”

Gretchen was in the garden; we could see her through the window, kneeling, pulling up weeds. She had to identify them by feel. Liv said she worked out there to think. She said that you could tell how stuck Gretchen was on something by how she tossed or punished the weeds as she piled them up.

Harry came into view behind her. He gathered up a small tree that had been leaning up against the shed. Its roots were still in a ball. He took it away and we heard the car doors open and shut.

“What’s he doing?” I wondered. The tree was pretty. It was a lilac.

“Oh, they had a fight about that a couple of days ago. He bought it for her, but she didn’t want it.”

“Mmm,” I replied, still staring out the window. Liv tapped my arm.

“Do you notice anything about the garden?” It was lush and vivid, but so were so many gardens here. The rainfall makes it easy for things to grow. “All the colors…?” Liv hinted. “Don’t you find that funny?”

I wasn’t sure. “I guess it’s strange for a blind person to focus on color.”

“Do you get it now?”

“Get what?”

Liv looked up at the ceiling, annoyed with my incomprehension.

“Just pretend I’m stupid, okay?” I told her.

“He wanted her to have a lilac because she’d smell it. But she thinks that’s condescending. She hates any kind of special consideration. Newnham or New Hall or Lucy Cavendish,” she said, naming Cambridge ’s three women-only colleges, “would have loved to have her. Instead, she came to Magdalene, not too long after they’d finally gone mixed. Some students wore black armbands over women getting in. Does that sound to you like she wants it easy?”

I looked out the window. Gretchen hunched over the earth, digging at something resistant. It was weird to think about how even if she looked up she couldn’t see me back. She probably didn’t even know I was there.

Liv said, “She hates that she needs my help to sort these pictures. I think she picked me because I’m not in her department. It would be, you know, awkward, to let one of her own students see her vulnerable.”

A tune started up in my bag. It grew in volume as I rooted around for the phone. It was Nick calling. “Oh, hi!” I said. Liv didn’t have a cellphone; that’s why he had to call me. “We’re in Newnham.”

The three of us had gotten together before, at the Fitzwilliam. Liv had shown us around, art being her thing. “No,” I said. “This time it’s my turn. We’ll go to the Whipple.” The Whipple is the museum of the history of science. That was my thing.

Later Nick would take me to the Sedgwick, which has geology and dinosaurs. And privacy, in his office upstairs. But there were weeks before we’d get there.

I mouthed to Liv, “Nick?” and she gave a thumbs-up.

“He says he’ll come meet us here in an hour or so,” I said after I hung up.

“Who?” Gretchen asked. I jumped. The house has plush rugs all over; I hadn’t heard her approach.

“Gretchen!” Liv chirped. “This is my friend Polly. She’s helping me with the photographs. I hope that’s all right. I know you want the work done quickly and, well, two heads and all that…”

“I certainly hope there’s been progress.”

“Oh, yes!”

“If you require assistance-”

“I don’t require it, it’s just helpful to bounce thoughts-”

“So long as she isn’t a distraction.”

“She won’t be.”

“I won’t be,” I echoed.

Gretchen turned to me. She knew where I was because of my voice. “Are you a student?”

I squeaked out, “Peterhouse. NatSci.” It’s an abbreviation for Natural Sciences, pronounced like it has a K instead of a C.

“You’re American,” she said, getting that from my few words. “My mother attended a boarding school in Virginia.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off the box in her hands. It was a dirty, decrepit shoe box nestled in a plastic grocery bag.

“Can you tell me what this is?” she asked.

We stepped close and looked in. Small bones and plastic jewelry. Altogether it was shaped like a little dog. The plastic necklaces had been wound around the rib cage. The beads were bright, like tiny beach balls.