The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [42]
The most Madeleine could muster in the way of preparing for the future was to peel herself out of bed once a day to check her P.O. box. In April, she’d been too distracted by work and love to notice that the fifteenth came and went without a letter from Yale arriving. By the time she did notice, she was too depressed about her breakup to bear another rejection. For two weeks, Madeleine didn’t even go to the post office. Finally, when she forced herself to go and empty her overstuffed mailbox, there was still no letter from Yale.
There was news, however, about her other applications. The ESL organization sent her a gushing acceptance letter (“Congratulations, Madeleine!”) along with a teacher enrollment form and the name of the Chinese province, Shandong, where she would be teaching. There was also an information packet containing various bold-faced sentences that leapt out at her:
Sanitation facilities (showers, toilets, etc.) may take some getting used to, but the majority of our teachers come to enjoy “roughing it.”
The Chinese diet is quite varied, especially as compared to American standards. Don’t be surprised if, after a few months in your host village, you find yourself eating snake with pleasure!
She didn’t return the enrollment form.
Two days later, she received a rejection letter through campus mail from the Melvin and Hetty Greenberg Foundation informing her that she would not be receiving the Greenberg fellowship to study Hebrew in Jerusalem.
Back at her apartment, Madeleine confronted the cluster of shipping boxes. A week before they’d broken up, Leonard had received positive word from Pilgrim Lake Laboratory. In what had seemed a significant gesture at the time, he’d suggested that they live together in the free apartment that came with his fellowship. If Madeleine got into Yale, she could come up on weekends; if she didn’t, she could live at Pilgrim Lake over the winter, and reapply. In short order, Madeleine had canceled her other plans and had begun packing boxes of books and clothes to ship to the lab ahead of their arrival. Since Madeleine had been questioning the intensity of Leonard’s feelings for her, his invitation to live together made her blissful, and this, in turn, had played a strong part in Madeleine’s avowal of love a few days later. And now, as a cruel reminder of that disaster, the boxes were sitting in her room, going nowhere.
Madeleine ripped off the address labels and shoved the boxes into the corner.
Somehow, she turned in her honors thesis. She handed in her final paper for Semiotics 211 but failed to pick it up after the exam period to see Zipperstein’s comments and her grade.
By the time graduation weekend rolled around, Madeleine was doing her best to ignore it. Abby and Olivia had tried to get her to go to Campus Dance, but the thunderstorms that rolled through town, bringing winds that blew over cocktail tables and ripped down the strings of colored lanterns, caused the festivities to be moved inside to some gym, and nobody they knew went. Needing to occupy their families, Abby and Olivia had persisted in going to the clambake with President Swearer on Saturday afternoon, but after a half hour they sent their parents back to their hotel. On Sunday, all three roommates skipped the Baccalaureate ceremony at First Baptist Church. By nine o’clock that night, Madeleine was in her bedroom, curled up with A Lover’s Discourse, not reading it, just keeping it nearby.
It wasn’t clean-sheet day. It hadn’t been clean-sheet day for a long time.
There was a knock at her bedroom door.
“Just a sec.” Madeleine’s voice was raspy from crying. She had mucus in her throat. “Come in,” she said.
The door opened to reveal Abby and Olivia, shoulder-to-shoulder, like a delegation.
Abby came