My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin

Author:Daisy Alpert Florin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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MARCH ARRIVED, AND all around, people started waking up to the fact that we would soon leave this place. Debra was making plans to move to San Francisco. Jason was waiting to hear from law schools. Kelsey hoped to find a job at an art gallery in New York. I had no interest in their plans or in making any of my own. Because I’d finally found what I’d been looking for, my purpose revealed on the leather sofa under the eaves. This is why I’d come here, I thought, as Connelly placed his big hands on me, as I peeled off layers of myself and fed them to him. This had always been the reason.

I told him everything, about Rosen’s and growing up in New York, how I loved it, how I feared it. I told him about the first time I’d seen Wilder, junior year, the requisite college tour. My mother had been too sick to come, so I’d taken pictures of everything I thought might please her—the wood-paneled dining hall, stone fireplaces, sculpture garden. When I got home, I had them developed at a one-hour photo shop. The chemo had given her terrible mouth sores, so she didn’t say much as she examined each photo, slowly and carefully, as if she were memorizing them. Later, I noticed she had them propped on her nightstand so she could see them from bed. Sometimes when I walked through those spaces, the ones I’d photographed, I imagined she could see me, even though I didn’t believe in things like that.

I told him about my mother, how she thought I read too much, while Abe thought I read the wrong things. I told him how she valued beauty above all else and that her favorite painting of me was one she made when I was sick, my cheeks flushed pink with fever. I told him how angry Abe was with her for making me pose when I should have been resting, but she’d believed it was worth it, and I agreed. I told him I’d never thought I could be an artist like her because the ways we perceived the world were fundamentally different: she saw things with her eyes while I felt them through the thin skin of my heart.

“But you are an artist,” he told me, and I wrapped myself up in his words.

In exchange, he shared little about himself. Aside from what I’d gleaned from his poems and the magazine article, I knew almost nothing about his childhood or his parents, and we never discussed his marriage, how it came to be, why it endured. I’d dug up the bitch slap interview Debra had done with Roxanne. It focused mostly on her time as an undergrad. Stories about the early years of coeducation at Wilder were legendary, the hostility and harassment, the alumni who openly questioned whether the presence of women would change Wilder’s “character.” The women who’d paved the way for us were largely considered heroes, but Roxanne had a different take.

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