The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [54]
Helen stiffened, then relaxed, hugging Phoebe back. “We tried to keep your place,” she said, “but the bloody guy wouldn’t let us.”
“I found another hostel,” Phoebe said. “It’s sort of gross.”
“Well, look, we’re all back at that pub you just passed,” Helen said. “We knocked on the window, but you were walking too fast. Come have a pint.”
The bar was packed with young people smoking cigarettes. Diana, Helen’s sister, sat at a table with two American guys who Phoebe guessed were in college. She sat down. The Americans were playing a game of some kind that involved coins and mugs of beer. “You from Australia, too?” one of them asked Phoebe.
She shook her head. “I’m American.”
“Where from?”
“San Francisco.”
“Fucking A. I love that city, man.”
Phoebe smiled. She felt deeply separate from these people, as if her experience today had driven a final wedge between herself and her peers. She longed to bridge the gap.
“What did you do all afternoon?” Helen said.
“Heineken Brewery,” said one of the guys. “Plus we did Anne Frank’s house.”
“I meant Phoebe,” Helen said, laughing.
They all looked at her. Phoebe panicked over what to say, and suddenly was angry at Helen for putting her on the spot.
“Nothing,” she said dismissively. “Just walked.”
She saw confusion in Helen’s face. There was a beat of silence, then the boys resumed their drinking game. Diana and Helen opened Let’s Go and leaned over it, planning their next day in Amsterdam. Phoebe sat in silence, sipping her beer. It was enough just to be near them.
Later, lying on her bunk bed staring at the murky window, Phoebe thought again of Faith’s postcards. At night the stars are so pretty, her sister had written.
Phoebe had forgotten even to look.
eleven
Dear Mom and Phoebe and Barry, From Namur Wolf and I and some others took off to Keims, France …
Phoebe followed her sister’s postcards from Amsterdam to Namur, Belgium, where she spent a week. In her own company she felt inhibited, shy almost. After dinner each night at the youth hostel, she would linger at the table, then, dreading to be alone, move to the noisy common room until bedtime.
… because someone knew this French guy in Reims who we could stay with. Well but the poor French guy had no idea we were coming and his apartment is so small …
When she returned to her room and looked into the mirror, her face looked strange to her, the cheeks hollow, the eyes larger, dark. Objectively, she approved of these changes, but her own reflection startled her.
… It’s a little crowded but I keep asking people please be neat and they are. P.S. The way they say Reims in Trench, it sounds like someone snorting!
It was time to move on—overdue—but she couldn’t bring herself to go. Reims, she thought, Reims, and tried to feel anticipation. She wished she had someone to stay with.
On her second day in Belgium, Phoebe has rented a sturdy black bike and pedaled beside a river to Dinant, a tiny nearby town that Faith had mentioned in her postcards. There she checked her bike at the train station and, still tracing Faith’s steps, followed a narrow street uphill until the houses fell away and Phoebe found herself in an oceanic sprawl of land. It rolled and tossed in grassy swells, curves of bright green. Crushed silver rock filled the road. She saw horses, brown, silky gray, hindquarters flecked with white. The distant hills were studded with sheep.
A town appeared in the distance. Reaching it, Phoebe was startled by its silence, nothing but a rush and tumble of wind past empty-looking houses. She went inside a tiny shop and bought a bar of white chocolate from an old woman wearing a silk scarf and bright, heavy makeup. When she left the shop, Phoebe was surprised to find several children waiting for her outside.
“Hel-lo. Hel-lo,” they said, accenting the first syllable of the word so it seemed less a greeting than a kind of chorus, like bird-song. There were five of them, all boys, the youngest five or six years old, the oldest maybe fourteen. All were slim, olive-skinned.