The Bones of Grace Read Free Page B

class on semiotics, the fraud that was Slavoj Žižek. I had gotten to know them well; they spent a lot of time at our apartment, drinking tea and watching television ironically. My own friends from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, on the other hand, preferred to get drunk on weekends, letting themselves into the prep lab or falling asleep between the shelves of the Invertebrate collection.Bettina often joked that I was in the wrong department, but there was something pleasantly straightforward about scientists, and I found I could live among them without giving much away, and, in those days, hiding in plain sight was what I did best.
    I caused a stir as I moved through the crowd. A cheer went up from somewhere in the kitchen. Bettina, larger than me in every way, bones and height and volume, enveloped me in a smothering hug and passed me a plastic cup of sangria. ‘So what happened?’ she asked, pulling her thick hair into a ponytail.
    I plucked an orange segment out of my cup. ‘It was so strange. I was listening to the music, and there was this guy there, and then I started to cry.’
    â€˜It was bound to happen,’ Bettina said, fanning her face. She liked to act as if nothing could surprise her when it came to men. I took a large gulp of sangria and followed her into the living room. Bettina and I had met a few weeks into my first fall at Harvard, when I had decided to take a shortcut through Tozzer Library on my way to the Museum of Comparative Zoology. I entered the building, expecting an ordinary arrangement of books, but instead came upon a very dark room, and, when I dove further in, the lights suddenly came on and illuminated a totem rising two, three storeys into the gallery. I was terrified and let out a small yelp, which Bettina, a few feet behind me, witnessed and found hilarious.
    We started talking and she mentioned she was looking for a roommate. At the time I was living in a tiny room in one of the dorms off Kirkland Street, and the walls were so thin I could hear my neighbour, a doctoral student in Political Philosophy, clicking her retainer into her mouth at night. It turned out Bettina’s first choice, a law studentwhose boyfriend lived in New York, so she would only have been there a few days every week – absence being the holy grail of roommate desirability – had backed out at the last minute.
    Our first weeks together were awkward, because Bettina seemed to inhale all the oxygen in the apartment, but it didn’t take long for little tendernesses to grow between us. One day I offered to make dinner, and Bettina fell in love with the one dish I could cook competently, which was dal with spicy omelette. And then, in the first cold snap of the year, I caught the flu, and Bettina made ginger tea and introduced me to TV I’d never seen before, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Gilmore Girls . After that, we shopped at Trader Joe’s on the weekend, went to the occasional movie together, and even sat in on each other’s classes. (I accompanied her to Homi Bhabha’s seminar on melancholia, and she came to my Analytical Palaeontology course. She claimed I got the better deal, and I had to agree.)
    Bettina’s parents had helped her buy the apartment, a two-bedroom flat on Trowbridge, when she had started graduate school. I brought back a few things from Dhaka after the first winter holiday, a clock made out of recycled paper, a length of cloth studded with small round mirrors creating a partition between the living room and the kitchen. We found a battered sofa on the street and dragged it inside with the help of Bettina’s boyfriend, a master’s student at the Ed School, who was dispatched a few weeks later when she grew bored of him. We named the sofa Edvar, after him, and the armchair, donated by an aunt of Bettina, Maude. The apartment was warm and more like home than I had ever imagined I could be in America, and,