“No boyfriend?” she’d asked, the first night we’d gone out for drinks.
“No one special right now,” I’d said, and given her the abbreviated version of Andy and me, and how that had all ended in my junior year. I thought we’d been fine after the disastrous formal, but whenever I called his dorm room, Andy was out or busy, more often than not, and when he was around, he didn’t have much to say—he was either exhausted from a workout or preparing for a meet or on his way out with his teammates. After he didn’t return my calls for two weeks straight, I got the message. He didn’t want me anymore.
I had dropped out of the Gammas that spring—or, rather, I’d gone inactive, telling my puzzled parents that it had been too hard to study with all the parties, hinting that the rampant disordered eating was also a factor. All I had to do was say the words not the healthiest environment and my mother was on a plane to help me find a new place. I should have felt guilty—the environment in the Gamma house was no more or less healthy than the atmosphere anyplace else on campus—but I didn’t. After the formal, I’d started to see the sorority, and all of Beaumont, through Andy’s eyes—its whiteness, its richness, its manicured, almost stagy perfection, and even though I’d tried, I couldn’t un-see any of it. It was irritating, as if I’d been wearing a pair of proverbial rose-tinted glasses, and Andy, who was supposed to love me, slapped them off my face.
The apartment my mother and I had found off-campus wasn’t all that different from my suite in the sorority house—it had been carved out of the upper floors of a Tudor-style mansion made of cream-colored stucco and dark wooden beams. My suite had a fireplace, in addition to a black-and-white-tiled bathroom with a big old bathtub, a small but functional kitchen, and a little balcony.
Even though Andy and I hadn’t officially broken up, it seemed like all the guys on campus had gotten word of my single status over the summer. When Charlie Corman asked me out in October, I didn’t feel guilty about saying yes. I dated Charlie and a few other guys my senior year, a few more since I moved to Manhattan. I still felt Andy’s presence, hovering over my life, informing my decisions, always there, like background music, faint but discernible, and none of the guys could banish his voice from my head.
When I applied to NYU my senior year to get a master’s degree in social work, my parents had been dubious—about New York, about social work, about me spending my life with the poor, the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally unwell. I’d never told them about what had happened in Atlanta with Bethie Botts, or with Andy at the formal. What I’d said was that the world was a hard place, much harder for most people than it was for us, and that I wanted to help if I could. “You sent me to all of that Hebrew schooling, and they kept talking about tikkun olam—how it’s our job to heal the broken world. I want to do that.” My mother had gotten weepy, and even my dad, who I suspected would have been happier to see me as a teacher or a librarian or, best of all, a stay-at-home mom, had said gruffly, “I’m proud of you,” and pulled me in close for a kiss.
My next visit that morning was with Brenda Perrone. Mother of three, ex-wife of two, Brenda had been the first case I’d handled completely on my own, after she’d shown up at our office in July, frantic and furious and dragging her children behind her, complaining that she’d come home to her apartment in Red Hook to find the door padlocked and an eviction notice stuck above the padlock.
“You knew this was coming,” Amy had said as she handed me Brenda’s file. “Rachel will be handling your case now.” Ostensibly the office had gone to a computerized system years ago, but the reality was that there were still paper files, stuffed full of disturbance-of-the-peace citations that looked almost exactly like parking tickets; mimeographed copies of the inventories the corrections officers took when you went to jail. One nail clipper, one wallet, brown leather, containing one five-dollar bill, three one-dollar bills, two quarters, a nickel, and two pennies. I flipped through Brenda’s file until I found the eviction notice and copies of the three follow-up letters that had been sent via certified mail.
“You signed for these,” I said. “Did you even read them?”
Brenda tossed her long black hair and tugged at her short leather jacket before looking down at the pile, then up at me. She was thirty-three and improbably pretty, given the hard life she’d led. Her own father had been abusive, her mom had died young, and she’d dropped out of high school, moved in with her boyfriend, and had her first baby at fifteen. “My girlfriend Celinda, the same thing happened to her, only it never happened. Nobody locked the door to her apartment.”