To Wound, to Tear, to Pull to Pieces

This begins years ago, when I was young and recovering from a case of heartbreak. I met a friend for lunch in the small Wisconsin town where we both were living at the time. We talked for a while, and when we parted, I felt better. I can’t say exactly why.

This is a ghost story.

A case of heartbreak. That’s what I call it now. As if the only thing to do anymore is laugh—a little jaundiced, a little prideful. I abandoned graduate school to live for six months with an older man, a professor of linguistics named Jeremy Kite, and when, one might say, my shine wore off, he asked me to leave, and I left. I fled homeward, to my parents’ house in the town where I’d grown up, to submit to their tender, suffocating attentions and ready my return to the life I’d been leading before.

Which I eventually did. That’s all Jeremy Kite turned out to be: a bump in the road.

Some clichés save us more than time.

It’s also too simple to say Joanna and I were friends. We’d known each another in high school—I played volleyball and field hockey; Joanna cheered. We knew many of the same lazy, athletic, breezily handsome, utterly thoughtless boys—but I don’t believe we ever had a conversation. I remember admiring her, in a way. Joanna was tiny and plump, redheaded and pretty, her freckled knees flashing below the hem of her cheer skirt on game days. Plucky was a word I may have used to describe her. An overachiever.

Of course I believed I was more the type of girl the boys we knew were really interested in. But it was Joanna who ended up marrying one of them.

Away at college in Madison, I found myself endowed with new freedoms, new powers. I’m not just referring to sex, though I’m referring to that as well. I didn’t burn any bras, but I did replace a few of the full, pearlescent, matronly designs my mother favored with bright, filmy things that crumpled as easily as afterthoughts. I did see draft cards burned, and I sang songs for racial equality and an end to the war, and I conducted a series of what I called liaisons with young men whose gauzy ideals masqueraded—sometimes charmingly—as real ideas.

I had a job shelving books at the university library, where I spent a long autumn leaning on my cart in the stacks, living through War and Peace. (Years later, reading Adrienne Rich, I would suffer a pang of recognition: “you watched Natasha grow into a neutered thing.” In Natasha, I thought I saw my mother, who still existed as a mischievous girl, dark and grinning as a wood sprite, in old photographs.) In a Russian literature class, I read Turgenev’s “Bezhin Lea,” with its ring of firelight, its haunting cries echoing over the river. I appreciated these things, I decided, in a way my classmates did not. I developed a vertiginous sense of my own possibilities.

Meanwhile there was Joanna, back in my old hometown, living my shadow life.

At eighteen she’d married Kyle Bohannon, a lanky, sweet-faced varsity hurdler who’d kissed me once, suddenly, at a party after a football game. Like that kiss, the wedding arrived without warning, seemingly without prelude or courtship, without even a period of engagement. When I heard about it, I remembered the glow from his flushed face and the sour whiff of his breath, his lips pressed together as if to hum into my mouth. Their first child, a boy, arrived that winter—a scandalously brief interval.

“There’s a story there, you know,” my mother said.

She called every Sunday, the dormitory pay phone ringing, one girl or another knocking on my door to let me know. This mortified me, as though having a mother were my unique disfigurement. She would be standing in the kitchen, I knew, looped in the cord. I hated her swooping, loaded tone...