“Whatever?” Lewis repeats. “Are you feeling all right? Don’t you mean antediluvian vagaracity or something?”
Here goes the dictionary shit. I didn’t even have to pull out the book. “Vagaracity isn’t a word,” I reply flatly.
Lewis ignores the retort, something he’s infuriatingly good at, and nods confidently to himself. “There’s definitely a girl.”
Fitz
I GET TO the Brown information session at ten minutes to ten and out of breath. There’s a punishing hill between the bed-and-breakfast where Lewis and I checked in this morning and the campus. By the second block of close-to-vertical sidewalks, my legs were burning and I felt sweat stains forming under my parka. They’re practically neon lettering over my head proclaiming, Hey, everyone, Fitz is out of shape. It’s a cool look for possibly running into Juniper and Matt.
The Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center is full of prospective students and hovering parents. Hours-old snow dusts the sculpture in the courtyard and the patio furniture. I walk into the foyer, pretending I’m not checking the hallway for a certain ponytail. In the presentation room, I choose a seat near the back with a view of the rest of the rows.
I watch the door. I don’t even reach for the dictionary tucked into my parka pocket. Sempiternal and verisimilitude will have to wait. Bouncing my knee nervously, I try vainly to remember it’s unlikely Juniper and I have booked the same session.
People file in the double doors behind me. I watch kids in Brown sweatshirts and bright-eyed parents enter the room, quickly picking out seats and, probably, checking out the competition. I couldn’t care less who the competition is.
The doors close. Despite telling myself I likely wouldn’t see Juniper, I can’t help it. I’m disappointed. I guess I was stupid to guess she’d be in today’s ten a.m. session just because we’d both been in the ten a.m. BU presentation. It’s typical me, hoping nothing ever changes.
The presentation begins. I pull out the dictionary.
While the presenter regales us with the usual routine of facts and figures, photographs and platitudes, I focus on the words. Quixotic. Definition: impractically idealistic, foolishly unrealistic, e.g., a quixotic undertaking.
I thumb the pages until finally the presentation ends. We’re divided into tour groups, and I halfheartedly follow my guide, who looks impossibly thrilled to be escorting twenty parents and kids like me through his campus in the snow. While David, the sophomore who’s concentrating in public health, escorts us into the Ruth J. Simmons Quadrangle, I check out. I catch myself repeatedly watching crowds of visitors and groups of students, looking for familiar brown eyes and wavy hair.
Knock it off, I order myself.
We finish our route, ending up in front of the campus center. David the Sophomore Concentrating in Public Health enthusiastically wishes us good luck with our applications. I decide to keep wandering the campus. The freezing weather reddening my nose and watering my eyes, I stuff my hands into my pockets and walk into the College Green.
This campus is different from BU, contained and classically old. The uniform brick of the buildings, the white columns framing wooden doors, wrought-iron fences around quiet quads. Wandering to the corner, I reach the Italianate tower that caught my curiosity on the tour. The tower’s bricks climb higher than every other building nearby. Four clocks the color of old copper face the campus in every direction. THE CARRIE TOWER reads the inscription carved over the door. I circle the structure and find more details carved into the back.
It’s a memorial. It commemorates Carrie Mathilde Brown, from her husband.
It feels futile. Sure, everyone who walks this campus will see her monument, and everyone who reads the inscription will know the name Carrie Mathilde Brown. What the tower can’t tell them is the color of her hair, the sound of her laugh, what kind of friend she was, what she enjoyed. If we could reduce everybody’s essence into enduring physical objects, we would. But we’re only pretending the memorials we erect could possibly embody those we’ve lost. Memory and memorial may share a linguistic root, but they’re estranged brothers, not twins.
I think of pulling well-worn novels from bookshelves. I think of folding Thanksgiving tablecloths and eating