The Best Place to Be by Lesley Dormen

Author:Lesley Dormen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

As soon as November arrives, the air turns raw, and the idea of home begins to re-form in our imaginations. Thanksgiving is just ahead, past the presidential election we’ve been talking about in American Studies, past midterm exams, past the last of the fall mixers with the boys who populate the schools around us.

Mother mentions Percy, the man from California, in every letter. I know that Percy smokes a pipe and wears tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, and Mother makes a point of telling me he’s “well-read.” Mother’s vivacious and nice, but she’s impressionable.

Phoebe and Claire get a big kick out of her social life, and I’ve taken to reading some of her letters out loud. “I am sure I love Percy,” Mother wrote in the last one, “but I keep reminding myself that I loved Al, too, at one time, and Herb.” I look up—they’re hanging on every word. “Percy is like no one in the world I have ever known,” I continue. “I trust him so completely with all our lives. He weaves words into the most beautiful patterns. He talks from his heart and soul.” Claire claps her hand over her mouth. Phoebe snorts admiringly. When I read Mother’s letters out loud, I know who I am. I’m the girl with the dating mother.

Claire and I wind up going to the senator’s speech together. He’s old and elegant and kind of boring and his hair doesn’t flop. I can barely keep my eyes open, and Claire keeps pinching me to stay awake. When the speech is over, we don’t hang around with the pale, serious girls to shake his hand. What’s the point?

“Well, it’s his own fault,” Claire says apropos of nothing.

I don’t know why this makes me laugh. “He has no one to blame but himself,” I say.

We walk over to the dining hall to get in line for supper, and we keep saying stuff like this back and forth and over and over, just nonsense, so many times and with so much feeling we forget what we mean, but each time we say them we laugh harder and somehow they feel truer. The thing is, Phoebe is clever and brave, but Claire has this sly sense of humor that sneaks up on you if you let it. I feel protective of Claire. I’m never sure she’s even playing the same game.

The bulletin board outside the dining hall is already papered over with requests for rides, with ads for airline and bus tickets. At the table, as we pass the platters of food around, the names of friends from home are resurfacing in the hum. Tonight, for example, Claire announces receiving a few Bob sightings from one of her hometown friends. Bob at the high school track field. Bob at a bar in a distant suburb. Bob’s car parked in front of Quality Cleaners.

“Are you going to see Bob when you’re home?” Phoebe asks her.

“Oh. Well, I guess so,” Claire says, as if the idea is only just occurring to her.

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