Duluth

There were signs she was leaving, but we mostly ignored them until too late. By then she was gone, leaving behind clues that we could not decipher. I have carried these clues around with me for years, hoping, I think, that I am carrying Belle too. I’ve tried, but I have not been ready to put them down on paper. Writing this story is an admission of unresolved loss: she is gone, none of us know where she went. And maybe we didn’t try to stop her from leaving.

Twenty years ago now, she jumped out of a frame we were just figuring out how to fit into. In this new, angular landscape, the path from college to professional responsibility was lit by the harsh, fluorescent incentives of income and status. Our ideas of the future, tinted by the warm psychedelic colors of another generation, seemed to fade into the remote background. That fading was intolerable to Belle, and she fled, leaving us to fill the space left by her absence. I admired and envied her exit, at the same time that I stayed, trying to fashion a life within those limits.

I have talked to the people I still know from that time. Karyn, who was my roommate then; my younger sister Leigh, who hung out with us a lot in those days; Grant and Jeff, friends who lent her money and stood around awkwardly, shuffling their feet and bouncing her baby. It was the first time it occurred to me that they would eventually turn out to be the kinds of men our fathers were.

All of us remember Belle. She is someone we loved, and her face shimmies to the surface in our dreams. But our stories of her are as much about that time in our lives as anything else. About the way the living, lost, can haunt you, differently than the dead can. The way that Belle has haunted me, all these years. And about the way we have all been haunted, by the waning of one historical moment — a time that was promised to us in songs we heard on the radio, and in the confident swing of long hair, slap of bare feet at the margins of our childhoods — and the dawning of another, much harsher time.

Here, then, is Belle’s story, as I have pieced it together. Of course it is my story, too. So you could say it is an unreliable story about her. I know much more about what happened now than I did when she left our apartment in Boston. In a way, though, I still know nothing about her.

1. The nightly atlas conversation

When I came home from my job, Belle would appear from out of her bedroom. She had come back in winter and moved into the front room of our third floor apartment, which had formerly been the living room. She would have Kateri, her four month old, on her hip, and Karyn’s battered atlas in her hand. Looking at me through her wire-rimmed glasses, she would say something like: Ida, what do you think of Davenport, Iowa? It’s on the Mississippi.

We were far from the Mississippi, in Allston, a working class neighborhood in Boston. A place like Davenport, Iowa, seemed like a fever dream.

After our freshman year at school in Boston, Belle left for Minneapolis, and Grant drove cross-country with a friend of his from high school. By the end of the following year, many of our friends had left as well, including me, Karyn, and Jeff. The registrar’s office and our parents called what we were doing “stopping out,” so as to put a hopeful spin on it and distinguish it from abandoning the project of finishing college altogether. While some of our peers went to Europe or off to do educational Semesters at Sea, we craved Real Life. So we rented apartments in cities picked out of some imaginary atlas of the possible and worked jobs, some potentially leading to middle-class stability, some not.

I left school, worked in a Pottery Barn for...