The Goldfinch(271)
“He does?”
“Well—on some level I can’t fathom that I live so far away. Welty was the one who took me to music lessons and to the symphony but Hobie was the one always home, you know, who went upstairs and made me a snack after school and helped me plant marigolds for my science project. Even now—when I have a bad cold? when I can’t remember how to cook artichokes or get candle wax off the tablecloth? who do I call? Him. But—” was it my imagination, was the wine getting her worked up a little bit?—“tell you the truth? Know why I don’t come back more? In London—” was she about to cry? “I wouldn’t tell everybody this, but in London at least I don’t think every second about it. ‘This is the way I walked home the day before.’ ‘This is where Welty and Hobie and I had dinner the next-to-last time.’ At least there I don’t think quite so much: should I turn left here? Should I turn right? My whole destiny hanging on whether I take the F train or the 6. Awful premonitions. Everything petrified. When I come back here I’m thirteen again—and I mean, not in a good way. Everything stopped that day, literally. I even stopped growing. Because, did you know? I never got one inch taller after it happened, not one.”
“You’re a perfect size.”
“Well, it’s fairly common,” she said, ignoring my clumsy compliment. “Injured and traumatized children—they quite often fail to grow to normal height.” She went in and out, unconsciously, of her Dr. Camenzind voice—even though I’d never met Dr. Camenzind I could sense the moments when Dr. Camenzind took over, a kind of cool distancing mechanism. “Resources are diverted. The growth system shuts down. There was one girl at my school—Saudi princess who was kidnapped, when she was twelve? The guys who did it were executed. But—I met her when she was nineteen, nice girl, but tiny, like only four eleven or something, she was so traumatized that she never grew an inch past the day they snatched her.”
“Wow. That underground cell girl? She was at school with you?”
“Mont-Haefeli was weird. You had girls who’d been shot at while fleeing the presidential palace, and then you had girls who got sent there because their parents wanted them to lose weight or train for the Winter Olympics.”
She accepted my hand in hers, without saying anything—all bundled up, she hadn’t let them take her coat. Long sleeves in summer—always swathed in half a dozen scarves, like some sort of cocooned insect wrapped in layers—protective padding for a girl who’d been broken and stitched and bolted back together again. How could I have been so blind? No wonder the film had upset her: Glenn Gould huddled year-round in heavy overcoats, pill bottles piling up, concert stage abandoned, snow growing deeper round him by the year.
“Because—I mean, I’ve heard you talk about it, I know you’re as obsessed as I am. But I go over and over it too.” The waitress had inconspicuously poured her more wine, refilled it to the top without Pippa even asking or seeming to notice: dear waitress, I thought, God bless you, I’m leaving you a tip to knock your socks off. “If only I’d signed up to audition on Tuesday, or Thursday. If only I’d let Welty take me to the museum when he wanted… he’d been trying to get me up to that show for weeks, he was determined that I see it before it came down.… But I always had something better to do. More important to go to the movies with my friend Lee Ann, whatever. Who, incidentally, vanished into thin air after my accident—never saw her again after that afternoon at the stupid Pixar film. All these tiny signs that I ignored, or didn’t fully recognize—everything could have been different if only I’d been paying attention—like, Welty was trying so hard to get me to go earlier, he must have asked a dozen times, it was like he had a sense of it himself, something bad going to happen, it was my fault we were even there that day—”
“At least you hadn’t been expelled from school.”
“Were you expelled?”
“Suspended. Bad enough.”
“It’s weird to think—if it had never happened. If we hadn’t both been there that day. We might not know each other. What do you think you would be doing now?”
“I don’t know,” I said, a bit startled. “I can’t even imagine.”
“Yeah, but you must have an idea.”
“I wasn’t like you. I didn’t have a talent.”
“What’d you do for fun?”
“Nothing that interesting. The usual. Computer games, sci-fi stuff. When people asked me what I wanted to be, I’d usually be a smart ass and say I wanted to be a blade runner or something like that.”