The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [141]
Phoebe still paid occasional visits to the Haight, sniffing the bowls of powdered incense at her favorite occult shop, lying on her back in the grass on Hippie Hill. But the pleasure afforded her by these pastimes was fleeting and faint. She felt like the ghost of her former ghostly self, flickering outside even the narrow, shadowy realm where she’d once been at home. And there was nothing to replace it.
Everything should be different, Phoebe kept thinking, now that she knew what had happened to her sister. But that difference had failed to register in the world. Perhaps the problem was that except for Wolf, no one knew what she’d learned about Faith. Tell her! Phoebe would urge herself while she and her mother unloaded broccoli and yogurt from Cal-Mart bags in their quiet kitchen. Go on, say it. But something always stopped her—fear of betraying Wolf, fear of more unpleasantness with her mother that she would be powerless to undo.
During Phoebe’s fourth week home, her mother returned from work one evening and announced, with an odd mix of anxiety and disregard, that for several weeks her realtor had been negotiating with a buyer for the house. As of today, it was sold.
Phoebe took to reading the newspaper voraciously each day. President Carter, Idi Amin, Mayor Moscone—she hung upon their words and deeds as if she might be called upon to respond. John Paul I dead after thirty-four days as Pope, gold at a record high, Isaac Bashevis Singer the winner of the Nobel Prize. Sid Vicious charged with killing Nancy. Sadat and Begin making peace while the Middle East boiled. That was the world. And separate though it felt from the tiny web of hilly streets where Phoebe led her life, she strained to touch it, press her face to the glass. The more she knew of the world, the less painful was its absence.
Early one evening Barry picked Phoebe up and drove her to Los Gatos for the night. He’d fixed up a guest room, daisies by the bed in a blue ceramic vase. They dined at an elegant Indian restaurant tucked incongruously in a vast shopping mall, and both drank too much red wine, nervous, overanxious that the visit go well.
The next morning, still woozy, Phoebe accompanied her brother to work. The friendliness of his colleagues surprised her, to say nothing of their youth; in their Levi’s and longish hair, they reminded her of brainy high school students wired from too many all-nighters.
Barry’s office building was the diametric opposite their father’s at IBM—sprawling and flat, full of glass and light and dozens of the sleek, unapproachable computers, which Barry and his colleagues handled with the same rough ease they might use to operate a sink. There was a grand piano, plus two massive refrigerators stocked with exotic juices. Phoebe had expected her brother to strut and brag in his childish way, steeled herself for it, but Barry’s authority seemed effortless. After all, she reasoned later, the company was his own, all the people there his employees. What was left for him to prove?
Phoebe visited her brother often after that, boarding the train at a station near the Greyhound bus depot. In the flat, open spaces of Silicon Valley he taught her to drive, sitting by with apparent unconcern while Phoebe jammed the gears of his Porsche, narrowly avoiding stray shopping carts in Safeway parking lots. When she was comfortable enough, Barry encouraged her to follow the narrow roads twining up the thickly wooded hills. Descending, he taught her to downshift. “If you’re going to drive, it might as well be fun,” he said.
Phoebe volunteered to help her mother look at apartments, hoping somehow that the project would bring them together. It was dreary business, trudging through abandoned-looking rooms, trying to imagine their lives occurring inside them. Her mother’s anger had winnowed down to a tense cordiality that Phoebe found