The Whole World: A Novel - By Emily Winslow Page 0,8
Not a historic one, one of the kid ones from the activity corner. It wasn’t expensive, but it wasn’t hers either.
She had it out on her desk like she wasn’t ashamed.
I didn’t say anything.
We had on our black academic “gowns” for dinner at one of Magdalene’s daily “formal halls”: a fancy meal, candles and everything, for cheap. You wait for the Fellows at the High Table to sit, and then the gong goes, and then the grace in Latin. I had to shush Liv sometimes to make her stop giggling. Then we would get to eat. There’s a set menu of multiple courses served by waiters. There’s wine.
We usually got tipsy at these things. This was one of those conversations. We hung out afterward, on the steps by the water in front of her building. Magdalene is one of the few colleges on the river. “Why does she care so much?” I said.
“Mmmm?” Liv asked.
“Gretchen,” I said. “Why does it matter so much to her that she had this posh childhood?”
“Do you really not get it?” Liv said this like I was stupid to have to ask. “Money’s important. What, are you so rich you don’t need to care?”
“I’m not rich.”
“Well, I was, once. My dad made four million dollars at a dot-com startup. That’s the truth. Then we lost it all when the stock tanked. Believe me, it matters.”
I gaped. “Where does four million dollars go?” I asked, trying to imagine a number that big, and how something that big could just disappear. You’d need something on the scale of a meteor and total climate change. That kind of money is at least as big as a dinosaur.
“It was the whole Silicon Valley bubble. My dad’s an engineer, and his company got bought by Racer. It was this huge deal. We moved up to Livermore, which is this mini wine country—no way near Napa or even Sonoma, but cute, and lots of new housing. We had a view of grapes through huge windows. There were Internet plugs in, like, every room. And we got it on a mortgage, not because we needed one, but because the rate on the mortgage cost us less than what we were making by keeping the money in stock. That was the thing to do. Everybody did it.
“Then, when NASDAQ crashed, we needed to sell but no one was in a position to buy. Our neighbors were trying to sell too. Half the houses hadn’t gotten curtains and blinds yet, and now no one could afford it. We could all see each other. You had to find a corner to get dressed in. And we could all see down into each other’s backyards, and half of them were still churned-up dirt. People couldn’t afford to do the landscaping.
“So we eventually sold, for less than we’d bought. Dad got another job. We moved into an apartment, an okay apartment. I mean, it wasn’t a house, but it was one of those nice places with cookies and newspapers in the pool house. So it was okay. But it wasn’t special. You remember the special. It felt good to live in a house like that. It felt like … it felt like you deserved it. I know that’s not true, but that’s how it felt. Just having it felt like you were the kind of person who was supposed to have it. That feeling is the kind of thing you hold on to.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Then my parents got divorced, and that sucked. I mean, that really sucked. So I remember not just the big house, and the Internet plugs, and that there had been this fountain, an actual fountain, in our yard. I remember that we were together there.”
I made a mental note to get friends tipsy more often.
She kept talking. “Holy crap, Nick is so hot. He never comes to these dinners. I saw him earlier today and asked if he was coming. He was busy or something.” I felt embarrassed, like I always did when she talked about Nick. She went on, “He was with his thesis supervisor. They were having this deep conversation. It just made me crack up, how serious they were. Richard—that’s his supervisor; he’s a Fellow here—is nice, but so weird. I heard that he’s been celibate,” she whispered that part, “between wives. Can you believe that? It’s been, like, ten years or something. He’s getting married again at the end of term.”