The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [100]
The cousins, variously, resent Linda or are solicitous. It is understood that she is damaged, though they do not know, and will never know, the specific crime that caused her to be banished. It is a secret between the aunt and Linda.
______
The aunt is now the unimaginable age of fifty. She has papery skin with fan wrinkles, eyebrows dotted with bits of gray. Her mouth has puckered, creasing her upper lip. To make herself look younger, the aunt has dyed her hair blond, the result a strange alloy of brassy gold with dark silver roots. Despite the difference in age, however, it does not escape Linda’s notice that, in certain lights, she resembles her aunt. In fact, she looks more like her aunt than some of the cousins do — an intimate connection that makes none of them very happy.
Every day, the aunt goes to Mass. Her missal sits like a bomb on the arm of the sofa in the den — a bomb about to explode with liturgy and dire predictions of the aftermath of sin.
______
Linda begins her senior year at the public high school during the first week of October. She dresses in a charcoal skirt and a white blouse of Eileen’s, but she refuses Patty’s offer to paint her nails, being self-conscious about her hands.
The school is located at the end of a long peninsula. It appears, at first glance, to be a prison. The low brick building is flat-roofed and is bordered by chain-link fencing to keep the students away from the water. There are no trees and only an asphalt parking lot. It is the sort of building that suggests guards in towers.
The high school seems to have little to do with its surroundings, as though it purposefully ignored them. On that particular October morning, the ocean dazzles, and the sky is an unblemished blue. In the distance, Linda can see Boston. The school is, like the town itself, anomalous: as if a working-class community had been transplanted onto what might have been, had things turned out differently, the most expensive real estate south of Boston.
Inside the high school, the windows are opaque with sea salt and wire netting, protection from the gulls that periodically try to batter the glass to get in. They want the students’ lunches. High on the list of school rules is this one: Never feed the gulls.
The cousins have not been discreet, and rumors have flown before Linda has even arrived. The vice principal regards her warily, making note already of infringements. “Get rid of the skirt,” he says.
Putting Linda in her place. Just in case she has ideas.
______
Linda follows corridors and stands before an orange door with a narrow slit of glass. Through the slit, she can see a teacher and a group of students — the boys in colored sport shirts, the girls with curled hair. When she opens the door, the teacher stops talking. The faces of the students are a blur. There is a long silence, longer than it should be — seeming to stretch beyond endurance, though it cannot be more than ten or twelve seconds at the most. The teacher, who wears black-framed glasses, asks her her name.
“Linda,” she has to say, wishing she were a Gabrielle or a Jacqueline. Anything but a Linda.
The teacher gestures with his hand to take a seat. In Eileen’s stacked heels, she walks to a desk behind a boy.
“We’re doing Keats,” he tells her under his breath.
Linda studies the boy’s profile. Arrogant and aristocratic are words that come to mind. He has brown hair, slightly dirty and worn as long as is acceptable, and when he turns, the jawline of a man. There is a boil on his neck she tries to ignore. He must be very tall, she thinks, because even slouching he is taller than she is in her seat.
He hovers in a half-turn, as if bringing her within his sphere, and from time to time he gives her, sotto voce, bits of information: “Keats died when he was twenty-five”; “Mr. K. is a good guy”; “You have to pick a poet for your paper.”
But Linda knows all about Keats and the Romantic poets. Apart from having learned how to use a washing