Circles around the Sun by Molly McCloskey

Author:Molly McCloskey [MCCLOSKEY, MOLLY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, PSY022050, FAM000000
ISBN: 9781468303919
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

Eleven

They meet as though on the other side of something, a space containing all that has happened in the six years since they were last alone together. See them sitting opposite each other, in a boarding house with furniture that reeks of cigarette smoke and some ineradicable dampness. Young, rail-thin, a little shell-shocked. Since the late spring days of 1968, of his pressed white dinner jacket and the pink flower pinned to the strap of her dress, since the talk of having kids together and the letters written those summers apart and all the other inexpressible wonders of first love, they have passed, each of them, through a dark wood.

There is no awkwardness, nothing phoney. No isn’t this great, I haven’t seen you in years kind of thing. Neither of them pretends that anything is clearer than it is. But there is an understanding between them. If anyone can understand him, it is Lara.

They haven’t spoken since they broke up. He sent a few notes first term, and flowers on her birthday, but they never met – in four years, never once ran into each other on campus. She spent her junior year in Europe – supposedly studying French and theatre in Lyons, but really only showing up for exams. Instead of going to classes, she drove around Europe by herself in a car she’d bought in a café for next to nothing. She had wanted to learn by experiencing; experience everything was the phrase she was prone to repeating then. If it all led to greater self-knowledge, how could it be bad for you? She thought she was invulnerable, but she got burned, like a lot of people she knew. She wound up in jail, arrested for sleeping on top of a railway car in Yugoslavia, then had a terrible car crash in Spain and ended up in hospital. Back at Duke for her senior year, she lived off-campus, going to classes and choreographing dance pieces, but mostly trying to pull herself together.

She lives in Canada now, some kind of communal set-up, but is down in North Carolina visiting her parents – they’ve moved back from Memphis – when she learns that Mike is in town. He has come from Oregon. After passing the summer of ’74 there, he once again upped stakes and made his way back east, his sudden departure taking everyone by surprise. It seems I cannot worry anymore, our grandmother writes. I do not know what happened but I suppose it is True Faith, or I realize no matter what happens we live through it all.

Lara finds him fragile, less physically present than before. (She herself has got thinner. Never heavy to begin with, she has lost some of her curves and acquired a litheness that is accentuated by her long, straight, unstyled hair.) She senses that he has cut himself loose from everything and everybody. Clearly, he feels like a mess. But it doesn’t occur to her that he is going over the edge. For he is also lucid, self-aware, and unashamed of how things stand with him.

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