Boston was red the first time Sophy was here-and now, her second time, it is blue. There are other differences which do not seem worth writing in her journal. She is older now, and visiting a man. She came here from New York this time, not California. But in a journal these facts are implied-and so she writes about colors, the pale blue flannel on this man's futon and the deep brick red of the building where she stayed with her mother when she was nine.
She is twenty-one now, which means he can take her to Irish bars where they can't hear each other. Last night they did that, and this afternoon Roland is sleeping, and tonight he will take her out again. Now Sophy is writing, her hip curled into the small of his back. She memorizes the room: his black hair on the light blue pillow, the blue futon on white carpet, clerestory windows that fill the room with light from the top down, like water in an aquarium. She'd read the word "clerestory" and never knew what it meant-windows near the ceiling, made for light but not for looking. It won't be this way again, she thinks-the bed like a wide cloud, the quiet electric fan.
This is what she writes in her journal:
Roland: is breathing grows black hairs and white ones has soft ears won't touch me comes naked from the shower drinks smoky green tea worries about his bar exam owns furniture did not like New York did not mention the photos I sent him is sad and slow, won't say why he loved me last summer won't touch me yet makes me think
She hopes that sleeping Roland will slide his arm around her, that when he wakes up he'll smile. Maybe he'll want to cook dinner together, she thinks, and decides to chop the vegetables and let Roland be chef. She hopes that later when some beer is in him they will lose this silence which had not found them last summer. And if the silence stays, she hopes they will be fish in the blue-lake bed, watercolor cartoon fish with graceful empty speech-bubbles floating above them.
What will happen is this: Roland will get up and lock the bathroom door, won't smile. At dinner-Indian takeout- Sophy will watch him read the sports section. Later they'll go out into the pale orange evening, the air which holds a little warmth from the day. When Sophy's hand swings near Roland's, Roland's will hide in his pockets. It is September and a few leaves are on the ground. They will kick them a little as they walk from bar to bar.
* * *
It was summer of her ninth year the first time Sophy was in Boston. She'd never been to New England before, never left California even for Hawaii or Reno. Ione and Gary (her mother and father) were not the Reno kind of parents. Casino-places made Ione sad, and Gary was too busy teaching to go anywhere. When Sophy was a baby, they went to Hong Kong but Sophy stayed home. Afterward they couldn't go anywhere for years, but they all three liked to plan road trips.
Sophy remembers the yellow kitchen table in California, remembers eating there in June with a daffodil wind puffing out the curtains. Dinner was over and Ione and Gary were talking about a Great Grand Canyon Road Trip. Sophy was drinking Ione's coffee (milk mostly) and Gary was drinking his own coffee (black mostly). They had talked about this trip before. It would be all three of them and Victor (their green VW bus). They would bring guitars, eat burritos, see sand and red cliffs and jackrabbits. Sophy would get pieces of turquoise and jars full of rocks. She told everyone at school.
But now Gary was tapping his fingernail on his coffee cup. He said he got a teaching fellowship, he applied for it in March, it was in Washington DC and he was going there to teach Shakespeare.
"We can visit him, Sophy," said Ione, not looking at Gary. "You've never been to the East Coast."
Where they were going was Back East, even though Sophy and Ione were from Out West. Sophy would have to tell her friends she's not going to the Grand Canyon. And now she would never use Victor the Volkswagen's special road trip furniture, the folding bed and the little curtains and the closet.
* * *
Now they are in DC, all three of them. Sophy and Ione came here on an airplane ten days ago. Ione took Sophy to all the monuments and a FBI show behind bulletproof glass and they dropped a penny off the Washington Monument. Gary has been here for a long time, staying in the teacher-dorms at the university. He teaches here but Ione and Sophy are on vacation, and tomorrow they are driving north but he is staying.
Gary likes to take walks. He has found, just for them, the best firefly place, which is where all three of them are now. The air is hot tonight, and dark except for the fireflies. Sophy is excited-California doesn't have any fireflies. She had a book about a boy who caught fireflies in a jar, to keep them, but they died. She always thought the boy was stupid, the story simplistic. She felt tricked. "Everybody knows you punch air holes, and besides it's mean," she told her parents.
The family is standing on a wide lawn. The building behind them is the university dorms, where they are staying. It is black with yellow squares. One of the yellow squares is Gary's room. His brown canvas briefcase is open on a desk, his shoes under the matching bed next to it. Sophy thinks it's weird that her dad has his own room like a kid. She went in there today, to show him her postcard collection. She has cards from all the DC places she saw, and all the DC other places she didn't see. It takes a long time to tell about them. When she finished, Gary said slowly, "That's the third or fourth time you've told me about that." He said it in his Explaining Voice. Sophy got very quiet and left his room.
And now Sophy is dancing on the lawn. She hadn't thought Back East would be like this-the long grass wet on her feet, the air like after a shower, the tiny lights, which are animals, swimming between magnolias. They blink on/off, on/off. Sophy pretends they are spelling their names in the air. When they're off, they aren't anywhere, but if you had them in a jar, you'd know where they were.
The lawns are green, the trees darker, the insects bright. Behind her Ione and Gary talk quietly, a vague dark figure two people wide. Sophy notices that it hasn't been this way in a long time-there are no edges in their voices.
What is Gary thinking? A picture forms gradually in his mind: Ione home at her potter's wheel, clay drying on her arms and throat, her whole attention in the bowl she is shaping.
"Her hair smelled like sourdough toast," he remembers suddenly. "I wrote poems about that."
* * *
Ione and Sophy are driving out of DC, 10 AM. It's hot. The rental car already smells like old cigarettes and Raspberry Hubble-Bubble bubblegum. For years after, those smells will make Sophy vaguely carsick.
Sophy has dug herself into Gary's old Oliver Twist. Oliver Twist is a 1952 hardback that smells like dust and dead silverfish. Sophy is stubborn, reads every word.
Ione stares hard at the road. She is driving them to Connecticut to see her ex-husband Chard and his family. She is choky in her throat but her eyes are just plain empty. What is Ione thinking? She knows she is moving forward in time and backward in husbands but she feels she is not moving at all. The view sure isn't changing, out the window-just the road and the forest beside it, the skinny East Coast trees. Inside there are air-conditioner sounds and page-turnings. Sometimes Sophy asks Ione about the hard words. Ione would like to talk or play Geography but Sophy is busy. Ione knows for sure that Sophy is the most intelligent kid anywhere,that she can remember and she can learn.
But the truth is: she won't know a thing about Oliver Twist when she has finished reading all the words.
* * *
Now Sophy and Ione are in Connecticut, visiting Chard and Barbara. Chard and Barbara are lawyers. They are building an indoor pool so Alexandria, their daughter, can swim in the winter. Right now Chard and Barbara, Ione and Sophy are waiting to pick up Alex after her swim meet. Dusty maples lean over the swimming hole, dropping circles of light into the leaf-brown water. Kids are everywhere, making hoot-hoot noises and shoving each other in. The trees are green still but Sophy will remember them red and orange. In children's books the boy and girl live in a town, swim in a hole, sled in the winter. They eat chestnuts and play Capture the Flag. They catch fireflies beneath maples, which are always fall colors unless it is snowing.
Sophy wonders: If Ione and Chard had stayed married, would their daughter be half her and half Alex? Her name could be Alexy. Alexy would have mittens and know what a chestnut looks like.
Actually: Alexy would listen in bed while Ione threw the vacuum cleaner down the stairs.
* * *
Sophy drops white paper on Roland's blue pillow. She is going to lunch with her friends. The card falls across Roland's black hair, makes a rustly noise. He doesn't wake up, just smushes his nose farther into the pillow. Sophy sees his cheek twitch. Is he dreaming?
She stands for a minute looking. The card is a white sheet on a blue flannel day. It has a photo of sky and half a motorcycle reflected in a parking-lot puddle. Sophy shot it for her photo class, made a postcard size for Roland. The sky in the photo was just that way all summer in Manhattan.
Sophy is the kind of photographer who spends hours in the darkroom and minutes shooting. Her negatives are low-contrast and badly composed. She prints with filters for more black and more white, shapes the photo with solar flashes, sepia tones, dodging and burning, scissors. She aches past midnight in the darkroom, and when she is done the prints emit light.
She pads out in her socks and quietly shuts the door. She sits on the stoop, ties her shoes, wonders how Roland will wake up. Will he read the card but not look at it?
Good morning! Have a lovely day. Hope you slept well. -Me PS see you at 4
Will he think, "three hours" and go straight to the shower? He will not remember the sky in Manhattan. Her last boyfriend loved her, but she made him a photo-clue treasure hunt for his birthday and he never got around to following it. The boy before that spilled pickle relish on her negatives.
Maybe Roland is sad, wonders why he doesn't want this Sophy now that she likes him. He courted her last summer with orange lilies, and toast in the morning.
* * *
The first time Sophy was in Boston, she and Ione stayed in the South End with Marilyn and Nancy. They all had funny names that week, something about when Marilyn and Ione were in college together. Ione was Eye-oony, Marilyn was Mary Lynny, Nancy was Nancy Rae, and Sophy was Soofy-Kaboofy or Soofy-K for short.
Sophy remembers crossing a big street, eating rum raisin ice cream. Eye-oony is holding her not-ice-cream hand, and Nancy Rae is holding hands with Mary Lynny. They're all going from the brick red ice cream store to the red brick brownstone. Men in overalls push wheelbarrows of fireplace bricks up a ramp into a downstairs window. Mary Lynny and Nancy Rae bought the building together and are going to rent out the bottom part. Soofy-K is thinking that even though Mary Lynny and Nancy Rae aren't married really, they are like Chard and Barbara because Chard and Barbara are building an indoor pool.
Soofy-K bites into her ice cream. She doesn't like rum raisin but she's trying to, because Mary Lynny said "Kid has guts!" when she ordered it. Eye-oony talks for a while and then her face goes sad. Mary Lynny takes her hand, so now they are all holding hands.
These are the things Eye-oony says when Soofy-K is busy with her ice cream: "All this red brick is like the red clay I have at home. I was thinking about a big round water pot, and I could inlay a design with black slip."
"Slip?" asks Mary Lynny.
"It's wet clay. Scratched-in designs filled with black clay."
"Sounds great! Wow," says Mary Lynny.
"Yeah, really beautiful," says Nancy Rae.
Eye-oony is quiet for a minute.
"You know," she says slowly, "I always show Gary my work and he tries to care but I guess I don't really need to show him, do I?"
No, honey, no honey you don't.
* * *
Sophy is on the green line, going from Roland's apartment to meet her friends Luna and Ginger. Her train crosses the river, where sailboats fly like slips of paper. She tells herself that this is beautiful, but it isn't. There is a dead frog feeling in her stomach. She cried a little this morning while Roland was still sleeping. It is one-thirty and she hasn't had any water.
Sophy brought her camera today. She thinks maybe after lunch she'll want to take pictures, after some real food, water and coffee, and Luna and Ginger with their funny stories and boy problems. There Sophy can make a fake-sad face and say, "He didn't even kiss me!" They'll laugh but Luna will tell all about when the same thing happened to her, and later Ginger will give her a real hug. Maybe the waiter will be cute. She reminds herself to look.
Then Sophy thinks about red bricks, and how Marilyn and Nancy broke up two years later. She wonders if Marilyn saw Nancy again, if they were friends like her parents were friends for a few years, holding on in an occasional lunch way until it became clear they'd already lost each other.
She is thinking too much to see the people in her car. The man next to her is wearing a bowler hat and cleaning his fingernails with his tietack. A photographer should notice empty faces and anxious hands, should see people sneak looks at each other as their heads are haloed in the river sun reflection.
Sophy will eat lunch and feel reassembled, cheerful if not happy. She will then have quiet tea with Roland while he tells her he doesn't want to see her, which she knows, and she will go alone to the bus station.
She'll sleep on the bus and dream of a pale highway. In her dream there is desert out the bus window, she has slept past New York and has no reason to turn back. The road is gray and lavender in the early morning light. In her dream she trusts it, and goes back to sleep. It is a lovely straight road that furrows through desert, then cornfields, and will take her to wake up in Mexico or Someplace entirely new.