The Whole World: A Novel - By Emily Winslow Page 0,9
the celibacy.
She laughed. “It’s a religious thing. It’s okay to know if someone’s religious. Can I help it if his religion is obsessed with sex?”
Just then—this freaked me out a little—he walked by. Being a Fellow, he’d eaten at the High Table at dinner. We’d stood up, as required, when he’d walked in. We ignored him now. I hoped he didn’t notice us. He didn’t stop to look or anything, but he might have heard us. I was mortified.
When he had passed, Liv leaned over and moaned, “Oh, Richard!”
“Why is it any of your business who has sex and who doesn’t?” I was peeved.
She retorted, “What do you care?”
Then she pretended to be from France to a couple of guys. It was weird but pretty funny too. Her accent was terrible. At first I kind of distanced myself, but at last she cracked me up. She did a little victory dance. I clapped and, just like that, everything was right between us again.
I thought about Liv’s lost money the next time I looked at Gretchen’s photos.
The best of them were those from the Brussels Expo in 1958. This is something I didn’t know about, but apparently it was a big deal at the time.
Gretchen told us about it. Liv used Gretchen’s computer upstairs to Google for specifics about various scenes, so she could label them properly in the spreadsheet. There was the Atomium, a massive building in the shape of an iron molecule. There were pavilions representing different countries.
We laid all the Brussels pictures out on the table at once. The nanny was blond and so always obvious. Until we could for sure call one sister Linda and one Ginny, we called them “side part” and “widow’s peak.”
The two sisters had laughed together in front of an African hut in the Belgian Congo sector.
Side part, the nanny, and Gretchen posed in front of a pagoda in the Thai pavilion.
Three of them stood in front of a lawn dotted with white flowers, part of the German pavilion. “Ginny took that,” Gretchen told us. “She tripped backing up to get a second shot, and twisted her ankle. I stayed with her at the motel the second day.” But that itself didn’t solve the problem of telling the sisters apart, because the Linda in that photo had turned her head. She was facing away, and blurry from motion.
I noticed that there were four photos of “widow’s peak” and six photos of the nanny, each alone. Maybe that meant that those two went to the Exhibition the next day, and just took photos of each other. Gretchen agreed that that sounded plausible. That made Ginny the one with the side part.
This was confirmed by Gretchen’s recollection of dinner atop the Atomium. In one picture, all four of them sat with a man at a table with an incredible view. They’d convinced the man to buy them dinner. “They all flirted with him,” she said. “The food was too fancy for me,” she added.
Then, “Ginny accidentally dropped a glass! I gave her mine. A waiter took the photo for us.”
Sure enough, there in the photo, the sister with the side part had a shot glass in front of her while the other adults all had wineglasses. Gretchen didn’t seem to have any idea what it was; I think she thought it was just some kind of kiddie cup. It must have been the only child-sized glass the restaurant had on hand.
So that was Linda (widow’s peak) and Ginny (side part) solved! Liv whooped. She said we should celebrate.
She wanted us to go out for shots ourselves. She tugged on Nick’s sleeve, past the point where it would have been charming, but he said he couldn’t go. He had something else to do. So then it was just the two of us, but I didn’t feel like drinking. I had a book to read for class.
“Aw, come on!” she said.
I resisted. It went back and forth like that as we walked toward town.
“This is why I don’t always tell you stuff,” she finally exploded. “You can be so prissy.”
“What?”
“Like about Gretchen’s computer. That really hurt my feelings.”
Gretchen didn’t want the photos leaving her house, so Liv used her computer upstairs to do research about the Expo. When Liv later tried to tell me stuff she’d read in Gretchen’s email, I’d told her I didn’t want to hear it.
I rubbed my forehead. “I never meant to hurt your feelings.”