No Such Thing as the Real World Read online

  Mr. LaMotte says I should make things simpler for myself. That a senior thesis is not a whole big book with a leather cover, but some sheets of paper with a staple. He says that fifteen pages will do. “Really, Hannah,” he says, “don’t push so hard. Really, you’ve proven yourself.” But I have only three weeks to figure out time, to figure out life. Time was one thing, and now it’s something else. The afterlife was just an idea. And now it’s a fact, or it isn’t.

  Robbie had a lot of options. He went with Yale. He got up there and he looked around and he said, “This feels like home,” although, let me tell you, our house, our little last-house-before-the-cul-de-sac house, bears no resemblance to Yale or to any of the other millions of colleges we visited for Robbie’s sake, my parents taking me along on every trip, a two-for-oner is what they said. Yale is lots of green walled in by stone. Yale is permanent, and old. It’s like a whole little city inside another city, and it didn’t take much to picture Robbie there, in the center of the center. Robbie’s genius is the uncomplicated kind. He lets it lead him around by the nose.

  Me? I’m just glad I went on Robbie’s college-seeing trips. I’m just glad we did all that ahead of Joelle’s being gone. Because I didn’t want to go anywhere after that; I didn’t want to move, and when it came time for college applications, it was my dad, my super-rational dad, who got me through it. Every night at the kitchen table, for a month or two, he sat reading to me from the college books, showing me more on his laptop, talking me through the pros and cons of big college versus small college, urban college versus rural college, east coast versus west coast. We even looked at Scotland until my mother called, from the other room, “Honey? Isn’t Scotland a whole ocean away?” My dad, being an accountant, has patience for this. He kept spooling through the choices until something sounded good. “Let’s think about your opportunities,” he’d say, and opportunities was a good word, was a whole lot less scary than choices. “If you get there and find it doesn’t fit,” he’d say, “there’s always the transfer option.”

  I decided that I wanted small. I decided that I wanted suburban but close to a city. I decided that I wanted to take classes that could help me think my way more accurately through life, because really and truly, even though Dad didn’t say it, even though I was still thinking tons about what Joelle could have been, where we might have gone together, I got that I was on my own. I wouldn’t have Joelle to count on. I had to count on me. I’d visited Haverford College with Robbie. I decided, with my dad’s help, to make that my number-one choice. Afterward I worked, with Dad, on the applications—for Haverford, for the backups. It was what we did when Mom cleaned up the kitchen, or sat at her little desk in the family room answering her emails, or watched what she called her guilty-pleasure TV, that stupid bachelor show. My dad and I worked all last fall. We were getting somewhere, together. And then I started my senior thesis, and I was on my own. “Leave her be,” I heard my dad tell my mom one night. “She’s got a lot of sorting to do.”

  “Time heals what reason cannot.” That’s what Seneca says, and I hate, hate, hate that I never ever got the chance to hear Joelle on Seneca, that it never even occurred to me that she’d be gone before I had her opinion, that she would, in the end, stop believing in the the change she’d always promised me was coming. I knew that she was sad, but who was I to criticize the thoughts of a serious person? How was I to know that she’d grown any sadder than before? She had been talking about purpose, toward the end. She had been saying that it was a difficult concept. She had been listing all the things that people do that add straight up to nothing. Annie and Marne, the fairytale girls: What was their purpose? she asked me. What about the woman next door, who never came out of her house except to walk her Jack Russell terrier over to the birch tree? What about politicians, who go speechifying all day but can’t find a way to make things better? What about the meter maid, who walks around town, penalizing people for lateness?

  “My grandmother,” Joelle said, “made rugs. She made so many rugs that she practically went blind, and why? What was the purpose of the rugs? People walk on rugs.”

  “Maybe she just liked to make rugs,” I said, but Joelle would have none of it. It wasn’t that Joelle argued back, because she never did, at least with me. She just chose not to agree. Were those warning signs? Would you call them that? Would you have done something different, had you been me? Should I have called someone up? Told a parent? Scheduled a meeting with Mr. LaMotte? Had I been looking at something that I couldn’t see? I was her best friend. Her best friend. I blame myself for not listening well enough. For not noticing that she was through with waiting.

  Time heals what reason cannot.

  Come on, Houdini. Heal me.

  You could write about time forever and ever and miss out on some of the key facts. You could write in circles. I was mostly almost done with my senior thesis when I came across stuff on water clocks and decided that I had to fit that in. Water clocks were like hourglasses, but without the sand—they were bowls made out of stone, the bottoms punched with a tiny hole. Through the hole the water dripped, while etched-out lines on the bowls’ insides marked how the time was passing. Time was a drip, drip, drip. An Egyptian pharaoh had a water clock in his tomb, and the Greeks liked the idea of them too. The Greeks even had a word for them, a word I understand, clepsydras, which means water thieves. Water thieves. I think that’s just perfect. Joelle, I’m almost sure of this, would have loved the concept, too, put it right up there high, with her afterlife of motes. I do my research on water thieves and write it up, for both of us. I scrunch my eyes and I can almost see Joelle saying, sighing, “Well, you know.”

  Then I lie down on my bed and I close my eyes and I dream of water clocks. I dream of the Egyptians and of the Greeks and of the Chinese, and water in bowls, and water over wheels and water in an endless drip, and when I wake, there is a storm outside. I can hear the rain falling down on the roof, the rain collecting in the gutters that go across the house and then down the house, spilling into my mother’s white azalea garden. There are little gurgles of thunder but no white strikes. There are times when the rain comes hard, then eases off, like someone leaning against the window, then moving away, then coming back again, craving attention. Where does a soul go after a body’s gone? Maybe it comes down at you in raindrops.

  “Joelle.” I say her name out loud, and all of a sudden I remember another rainy day, two summers before, just after Joelle got her license. “We’re going to the beach,” she told me that day, and it was just a boring old Tuesday and Joelle had a secondhand car, and our parents approved, so we went—Joelle picking me up from my house around ten o’clock, her towel and her beach bag in the Honda’s backseat. She had her aviator shades on, her hair up in a knot, a map thrown down on the passenger’s side. “You’re navigating,” she said when I got in, but of course she didn’t need any help from me; she always knew where she was going. I sat back and I let her drive. The windows of the car were down. The wind messed with our hair.

  It was a ninety-minute drive, maybe, and when we’d started there was sun with clouds, but as we got closer, it was mostly clouds, some sun. I was watching the sky, and Joelle was, too, but the darkening of the day did not concern her. The closer we got, the slower she drove. “Do you hear the gulls?” she asked, and I said, “Yes.” “Do you smell the seaweed?” she wanted to know, and I guessed that I did (except what is a seaweed smell?) and nodded. She had a black T-shirt on and baggy pants, a tank suit under that. She had never turned the music on. We mostly drove in silence, Joelle concentrating, because she’d never driven so far before. We’d never gone off to the beach by ourselves, gone off like this, together.

  “Do you know what I like?” she asked, when we were blocks from the shore, when her grip on the steering wheel got lighter.

  I shook my head no, didn’t want to look stupid with a bad guess.

  “I like the way the ocean seems to go on and on forever.”

  I waite
d.

  “I mean, think about it, Hannah.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The ocean is ocean way past the horizon.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s probably even deeper than sky.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The ocean doesn’t have to think, because it just is. Imagine just being, not thinking.”

  We drove by the ice-cream shop, the rafts-and-buckets store, the fudge-and-taffy vendor. We drove by people in flip-flops and sunblock, drove slow. There was this little kid dragging this big, huge garden shovel, and Joelle took her eyes from the road, just for a second, to watch him. “All the way to China,” she said, and now we were right up as close as a car could get to that particular shore. She pulled into a parking spot, shook her hands free of the old steering wheel. “That was easier than I thought it’d be,” she said, and I laughed and she shrugged; then we reached into the backseat for our stuff. We walked the hot sidewalk to the planked boardwalk, between the sea grasses and the dunes. We walked across the sand that went from soft and hot to hard and cool.

  The clouds kept coming in more thickly, and the tide was out. There was plenty of room on that beach for us. Joelle chose a spot and we flopped out our beach towels—put them side by side to make an almost square and sat down to face the waves. We were close enough to the water’s edge to see the little pinkish-shelled clams coming up for air before digging back in. There were gulls beaking around for scraps, checking out a washed-up horseshoe crab, tiptoeing around the squirmy bits of jellyfish. An older couple walked slowly by, her leaning into him. Four girls in white bikinis. A couple of guys. Behind us were the others who did not mind the clouds, and there was a game of volleyball a little farther down, a game of tag. There was that kid with his shovel, digging in, his father sitting beside him in a striped canvas chair, reading a newspaper. Joelle was my best friend. I knew to let her be. To wait for her to talk, or to sit there silently.

  “You think it will rain?”

  I looked up. The clouds were thick. “Maybe,” I said.

  “Well, you know,” she said.

  I waited.

  “Rain could be pretty cool.” She seemed happy with the idea of it. I was happy because she was.

  The day went by, and we sat. The kid behind us dug deeper. The tide had turned, the water was coming back in, and little by little there were fewer people out on the beach, holes in the sand where the sun umbrellas had been, no more volleyball, and somehow or other, I couldn’t guess how, the older couple had made it across the hard sand to the soft sand to the asphalt beyond. I had my own opinion about what should happen next, but Joelle had driven and that meant she was in charge, and I pulled an extra towel over my shoulders, because of the breeze that had started to blow, more like a wind. The ocean had gone from green blue to green gray—big waves way out there, curls of white toward the shore, a line of sea foam at the very edge, the little clams in their pastel-colored shells not coming up for air anymore, the horseshoe crab grabbed back by the tide.

  I felt the first drop of rain in the side part of my hair. I felt the second on the knuckle of the ring finger of my right hand. Soon the ocean had bigger waves and the pucker marks of rain. It was the sound of something coming toward us. All around us people were gathering up their things. They were running toward the soft sand and the planked walk so that they might beat the storm.

  But Joelle—she still had her wide shades on. She wasn’t taking cover. She stood. She stretched her arms out straight. She turned, a perfect circle, her face thrown back to catch the rain.

  “This is so incredibly perfect,” she said.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Take a swim,” she said. “Of course.”

  She didn’t take her glasses off, or her T-shirt, her baggy pants. She didn’t turn back, toward me. She just kept on walking, through the rain, across the foam, toward the waves, up to her shoulders. She started bobbing then, keeping her face above the line of water, until she lay straight back and floated, and sometimes the waves got high and I couldn’t see her, and then they settled and there she was—her long legs, her long, wet ponytail, her eyes behind her shades. She was, she always was, so original.

  The rain by now was coming on strong. My towel was getting wetter, my hair streaking through. I wrapped my arms around my legs, rested my chin on my knees, shivered and tried to stop myself from shivering. But I didn’t call her back. I wouldn’t call her back. I just watched her ride the storm. She splashed and went still. She splashed and went still. I could almost see her smiling. Even the boy with the shovel had left his dig. Except for a dog down the way, we were alone. The sky was all clouds and the sea was all gray, and then something spectacular happened. Something I remember now, this night, just twenty-two days before I graduate, after I dream of stone bowls keeping track of time, dream of the Egyptians and the Greeks. Out past Joelle in that storm, in that sea, came a gorgeous slice of silver. It rose, it fell, it rose again, and within it she, the queen of the motes, was perfectly suspended. It took me a while before I understood that the dolphins had come to Joelle, that perhaps she had drawn them toward her. She waited for something, I’ll never know what, then reached out with her long arms to touch them. Then it was the most complete stillness, like nothing moved at all—not the dolphins, not Joelle, not the sea. Nothing rising, nothing falling, the slightest hint of purple.

  “The ocean just is,” Joelle had said, and right then Joelle just was, too. It wasn’t purpose that she wanted in that one moment, but living, which is better. It wasn’t questions, but answers. She was alive in the sea and the storm. She was alive; she was happy; she was calm. This is so incredibly perfect. And this is the image that I wake with this night—Joelle in the company of dolphins, Joelle in balance. Down on the roof, into the gutters, into my mother’s garden, the rain is falling, and suddenly I am crying. “Mom?” I call, and she calls, “Honey?” and she is here, in my room, on my bed, on my quilt, cradling my head in her hands. She is here, and that is all I need. I don’t say anything, and Mom doesn’t ask me.

  “I think I finished my senior thesis.” Finally, I tell her.

  “Oh, honey,” she says. “I’m so glad.”

  The next morning my dad says, “Can I drive you to school?” and I say that I would like that. And he waits for me, he reads his paper, while I have my breakfast and brush my teeth a second time, and print out my thesis, hammer a single staple through it. He’s not rushing out the door, which isn’t entirely rational.

  “You’ve done a lot of work,” he says, and I nod.

  “I’d love to read it,” he tells me, “when you’re ready.”

  I say that maybe I’ll be ready soon, and he puts his arm across my shoulders as we make our way out onto the drive. He walks me to the passenger’s side, opens my door, waits for me to climb inside, closes me in. The streets are wet from the night before. There’s a silver glisten on the leaves of trees, on the lips of irises and tulips, on other people’s cars, on the porch of Mr. Watkins’s house next door, which is still wrapped up with Christmas lights despite the fact that it is May. We drive past everything familiar, everything I’ll leave when this summer ends and I’m packed for Haverford. I wonder how this place will look in memory, when I think about it later.

  “Hannah?” Dad says, and I turn toward him, study him—his really large and really great green eyes.

  “Yeah, Dad?”

  “What do you say we drop your thesis off to Mr. LaMotte, then take a drive somewhere?” He scratches the side of his head the way he does when he feels shy, when he isn’t really certain about an answer, which is hardly ever at all. People are people, my dad once said. It’s numbers that follow the rules.

  “Don’t you have to go to work?” I ask.

  “What’s one day?” he says. “Who’s going to miss me?”

  But I know that everyone at his work will miss him, because they all depend on Dad. I know that he hasn’t gone off for an unscheduled d
ay for years, that he goes to work no matter what, that if he has any pride at all, it’s a pride that is all wrapped up with his not actually nerdy but weirdly indestructible reliability. “You mean it?” I ask.

  “Of course I mean it,” he answers. “You finished your thesis. We should go and celebrate.”

  “All right,” I say, trying to imagine where we might go, how far one can travel in one day. Time is the longest distance between two places. Thank you, Tennessee Williams.

  “All right?” Dad stops scratching his head, takes a long look at me. “Did you say all right?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “All right. Absolutely.” I shrug my shoulders, up and down. And then, in spite of myself, I laugh, and when I stop, the world’s not quite as hollow.

  About Beth Kephart

  Beth Kephart is the author of the National Book Award finalist A Slant of Sun: One Child’s Courage. She also wrote the teen novels Nothing but Ghosts, House of Dance, and Undercover, as well as Into the Tangle of Friendship: A Memoir of Things that Matter; Still Love in Strange Places: A Memoir; Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World; Ghosts in the Garden; Endings, Beginnings, and the Unearthing of Self; Zenobia: The Curious Book of Business; and Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River. Beth won both the Speakeasy Poetry Prize and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2005. She is a ballroom dancer and an avid gardener in Pennsylvania, where she lives with her family. You can visit her online at www.beth-kepart.blogspot.com.