The Translator Read Free Page B

apparently trying to sign up for Comparative Literature 401, The Reading and Writing of Poetry. The anxious students in their duffel coats and canvas bags, white breath coming from their mouths in the unheated building, made Kit think of people in Russia lined up to buy something scarce, toilet paper or salt fish.
    It was all gone, though. The graduate student was trying to explain: the class was filled.
    Kit finished her list, getting from each station a punch card to be handed in the first day of class; then she and jostling numbers of others (her forehead was growing damp and her heart beat hard) were pressed through a passage where cashiers from the registrar’s office awaited them. When it was Kit’s turn, and she had laid down her hand of cards, her bill was totted up. At seven dollars a credit hour it came to ninety-one dollars, plus a ten-dollar lab fee for Psychology, where she would be doing what, exactly; and Kit put her hand into her crowded big pockets for her money. Her father had taken her to a bank and opened her an account, but because his check would take days to clear he had also given her an envelope of cash with which to pay her tuition.
    And it wasn’t there. Not in her brown handbag either. The folded plastic checkbook was there but not the heavy fat envelope. She put down on the cashier’s desk her cascading class materials and handouts, syllabi, lists of recommended reading, and searched her pockets again.
    Oh God nope.
    What was awful in that year was how every bad surprise or scare seemed to be one with all the others, all of them recurring at once within her in a flow of blinding freezing panic: caught. “Okay,” she said.
    “Okay.” Around the cashier’s patient folded hands were displayed several checkbooks from various town banks, which you could use if you 18

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    had forgotten to bring your own. As though hitting on the right plausible lie at the last minute, Kit pulled out her own checkbook, unclasped it and flattened it with a hand, and filled in the first virgin oblong, number 0001. “Okay,” she said again, and ripped it from its fellows.
    The envelope of money was back in her room, it had to be: she could see it, lying among the bedclothes or on the floor, she tried to feel in advance the relief and exasperation she would feel when she found it.
    Then down to the bank and deposit it.
    She couldn’t find it in her room either, though. Lost somewhere between here in her room and the cashier’s table. Somewhere between morning and noon, lost along the way.
    She sat on the narrow bed. At Our Lady you weren’t allowed to use your bed during the day. If they’d allowed it, half the girls would have done nothing but lie there.
    Retrace your steps: she heard her father’s voice saying it. She pulled herself erect and retraced her steps, down the hall and stairway and out into the quads amid students who had not lost all their money.
    In the field house, the bazaar was over, the set being struck. Men in overalls were pushing, with brooms absurdly huge, the masses of the day’s waste paper into great heaps. She thought of fairy tales, impossible tasks that magic helpers taught you how to do. The workmen’s voices echoed like faint song, and there was almost nobody else in the building; someone far off in an overcoat, looking at a book. But the tables were still in place, and the signs above them. She decided to go back to each, and stand in the lines she had stood in. French. Phys Ed.
    Psychology. At each station she walked forward studying the remaining litter.
    English Composition. This was basically stupid and hopeless. Lost money is one of the things that doesn’t return: even she knew that much. It had been so much, though, more cash than she had ever held in her hand at once. Why did that give her hope? A disaster so great was just too rare, too unlikely: following on all that had happened to her. Just too sad, statistically.

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