The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [28]
Phoebe continued walking to Hippie Hill, a hump of coarse grass just inside Golden Gate Park. She climbed to the top and sat cross-legged, unwrapping her bran muffin and coffee. Normally she read during lunch—she loved to read and did so quite uncritically, taking each book as a prescription of sorts, an argument for a certain kind of life. But today she ate mechanically, staring down at the trees. Sell the house? Now, after so many years? It was crazy.
And she wasn’t “cut off.” She’d gone with a group of people last week to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where a piece of bread landed in her hair, then on to a Broadway disco where an eel-like man plied her with watery cocktails in exchange for the dubious privilege of wriggling opposite her on the seething dance floor. She wasn’t “cut off.” But try as Phoebe might to blend with her peers, it felt like bluffing, mouthing the words to a song she’d never been taught, always a beat late. At best, she fooled them. But the chance to distinguish herself, impress them in the smallest way, was lost. At her vast public high school Phoebe had felt reduced to a pidgin version of herself, as during “conversations” in French class—Where is the cat? Have you seen the cat? Look! Pierre gives the cat a bath—such was her level of fluency while discussing bongs or bands or how fucked-up someone was at a party.
She was not a presence at high school. If someone thought to include her, Phoebe was included, but if she stood up and left mid-party, as often she had, phoning a taxi home among the bright potholders and fruit-shaped magnets of someone’s kitchen, few people noticed. Handed a hit of acid once, she’d slipped it into her pocket (kept it to this day), but nobody caught the move. “Hey, were you okay with that?” they’d asked days later, for apparently it was powerful, someone had flipped out. Phoebe pictured herself in the eyes of her peers as half ghostly, a transparent outline whose precise movements were impossible to follow. During free periods she had no place to go. Often she simply wandered the halls, feigning distraction and hurry, afraid even to pause for fear that her essential solitude would be exposed. A glass case full of old trophies stood near the school’s front doors, shallow silver dishes from state swim meets, faded ribbons; they were dusty, inconsequential, no one looked at them. As an excuse to stop walking, Phoebe sometimes would pause before that case, pretending a trophy had caught her attention—I’m nothing, she would think, I could disappear and no one would notice—her face reddening in shame as she stared at the meaningless trophies and waited for the bell to class.
But tortured as Phoebe was by her own irrelevance, deep within herself she saw its necessity. For all that surrounded her now was barely real. What about Faith? she would remind herself, walking the smudged halls or eating her lunch alone in the hospital-smelling cafeteria; what about the student strike of 1968? All that was forgotten. Even the teachers who had been there seemed barely to remember. What a nightmare, they would say, rolling their eyes; you kids are much better. But what about Faith O’Connor, who organized the strike and gave a speech in the courtyard? Well, maybe, they’d say. Let’s see … squinting at the window as they reached for some blurred memory to match Phoebe’s encyclopedic descriptions of her sister; but no, incredibly enough, no one remembered Faith, either. They saw nothing but the present. And sometimes even Phoebe would forget, dancing to the Tasmanian Devils or Pearl Harbor and the Explosions; for a moment everything but her immediate surroundings would slip from her mind. But something always brought her back—jerked her, like discovering she’d overslept—and Phoebe would remember that her present life was nothing but the aftermath of something vanished,