Siri didn’t seem to be floating. She seemed to know exactly who she was. Teaching gave me a sense of who I was supposed to be at twenty-eight. But there was something of Siri’s earnestness that was my should-have-been younger self, the person I might have been at eighteen. I remember thinking, looking at her, I could have worn my hair that way.
Me, at eighteen: It was the end of August, when all my friends were going off to college for the first time in faraway towns. It was the dwindling end of summer. One by one they left in roof-packed cars, me helping to tighten their bungee cables, kissing them on their cheeks. Some remarked that I should have been the one to go away, that I was too smart not to go, that I would love their school. Others admired me for my resolve to stay back, work, and save for a year. I put on smiles and told them my plan—I’d spend the year reading all of Shakespeare and teaching myself Latin. I’d publish a short story before I even applied to school. The truth was that we didn’t have the money for me to go.
The days grew short so fast, the community pool too cold to swim in, no one left in town to go with anymore.
In our house it was a September of tears and one-sided arguments. Stupid things. Me slamming the door. Me slamming the door, never my parents. Me losing my temper because the town was too small, because I got passed over for a promotion at the supermarket when the managers knew I needed it more than any of the others. Because I was talking again with my parents at dinner while my friends were in college cafeterias. Because even after I slammed the door, they opened it softly and told me they understood what I was feeling, but they couldn’t help but feel glad to have me at home with them for another year.
So I felt, when it happened, that I’d brought it on myself.
At the hospital, I was shepherded into a little green room. The yellow-haired counselor asked if I could call another family member to come get me. But there was no one else. It had only ever been the three of us. Dancing on the linoleum, cooking beneath the open window of the kitchen, looking at the stars while lying on our backs on the patio table. There was no one else. A family of three is like a bet.
I was too old to be an orphan. Old enough to drive. Too young to know I wouldn’t be able to make things work alone. They had been driving on the harbor bridge, on their way home from dinner in Port Llewelyn, from a restaurant I could never remember their going to without me. There had been a young college student on a bike. His girlfriend was sitting on his handlebars, and my father swerved, but he lost control of the car and it went off the bridge into the water, just before the posts where the ferries came in. I grew up watching those ferries from my bedroom window, their faraway lights like stars to wish on.
The story was in all of the papers. And then it wasn’t. People could not understand that I had no other relatives. The people in town who knew my introverted parents were first sympathetic to me, then more and more started to become curious, demanding details. We drive that bridge every day, they’d say. How could that have happened?
When I met new people, I did not tell them about it. The nature of my parents’ deaths made it hard for me to talk about. The idea of their drowning in a car—I feared that by sharing it, the image would continue to live in other people’s minds. And they’d want to say something, but what can someone say? The car would just rev and dive in the strangers’ thoughts, and they’d be left on the bridge without a clue how to respond to me. I came to believe the most polite thing to do was let the memory of it die inside me. And part of me started to die away with it.
I was too young to go through that alone. But I was old enough to balance a checkbook. Too young, perhaps, to anticipate the predatory instincts of some men. Old enough to know how to assuage a social worker’s fears. I learned to lie. The years passed. I stayed adrift. I floated. I turned inward, my whole life a serious-mouthed hum.
Ensam. Loneliness.
After that conversation with Siri, I grew more hesitant to correct the first-language words in my students’ essays, afraid I would tread on something important and untranslatable. I made a list of them. I related to the way any topic I assigned could become, for them, an essay on homesickness. For all of us, the college was a planet far away, and our growing index of untouchable words a language by which to navigate it.
“Why are we learning personal essays?” one of my students asked. They always wanted to tie what they learned to the real world. “Do you ever write such essays for pay?”
Hesitantly, I told them that outside of school I was a technical writer. Manuals. Warranty guides. Contracts and operating instructions and warnings in big letters appearing prior to the step to which they applied.
My students were all intrigued by this, and one girl asked, “How does one break into such a field?”
That girl was an expressive, beautiful writer. I told her she should never aspire to do that kind of work.
“Why not?” she asked. “People need safety instructions.”
It compromises you, I wanted to say, feeling the layers of that word inside of me.
“How do you find such work?” Word of mouth. “Where do you do this work?” In my bed. “Where did you learn how to do this?” I always knew how to do this. “How do you get paid?” By the hour.
“Well, what did you want to be?” a boy asked, and I was caught off guard.
The students in my classes had traveled on their own from far away. For so long, I’d lived within myself, growing smaller and smaller—but they were bold, adventurous. I didn’t know how they managed, but I admired them. I loved drawing out their stories. And I enjoyed being with them, something I learned early on not to share with the other professors.
“I’ve always just wanted to be here,” I told them. “With you all.”
I somehow sensed in Siri’s gaze that she knew the parts I’d left unsaid. Hers was a gaze that always waited an extra moment, should you want to say something more.
“Besides, this kind of writing is important,” I said. “Knowing how to express yourself to one another in real ways…it can help with loneliness and distance. It can help when you are feeling ensam.”
I saw Siri sit up straight in her chair like I’d called her name.
I WORKED MY first year at Stella Maris at the campus library, checking out A/V equipment and helping professors pull books for their courses and unlocking the shredder cabinet when SecureShred came once a week, and repairing microfiche, and emptying wastebaskets. And reading, my ankles wrapped around the legs of a stool late nights when it was just me and a hive of students, with their headphones like blinders and gigantic 7-Eleven Slurpees.
I loved Stella Maris even then. It was nothing like the nondescript university I had eventually attended in New York, with its lecture halls designed by the same people who planned state prisons. My old college was better known for the force of its wind than anything else. There was a rumor that petite women had to wear weight belts there in the winter lest they be blown from campus. That fable was the most magic the place afforded me, but without anywhere else to go, I did graduate work there, too.