To See You Again Read Free

ready. And so, reluctantly he does; he gets into the living room just in time to hear Rose say, in a shakily loud voice, “No one who hasn’t actually experienced rape can have the least idea what it’s like.”
    Such a desperately serious sentence could have sounded ludicrous, but it does not. Graham is horrified; he thinks, Ah, poor girl, poor Rose. Jesus,
raped.
It is a crime that he absolutely cannot imagine.
    In a calm, conciliatory way, Susannah says to Carol, “You see, Rose actually was raped, when she was very young, and it was terrible for her—”
    Surprisingly, Carol reacts almost with anger. “Of course it’s terrible, but you kids think you’re the only ones things happen to. I got pregnant when I was fifteen, and I had it, a girl, and I put her out for adoption.” Seeming to have just now noticed Graham, she addresses him in a low, defiant, scolding voice. “And I’m not thirty. I’m thirty-five.”
    Graham has no idea, really, of what to do, but he is aware of strong feelings that lead him to Carol. He goes overand puts his arms around her. Behind him he hears the gentle voice of Susannah, who is saying, “Oh Carol, that’s terrible. God, that’s
awful.
”
    Carol’s large eyes are teary, but in a friendly way she disengages herself from Graham; she even smiles as she says, “Well, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that. But you see? You really can’t tell what’s happened to anyone.”
    And Susannah: “Oh, you’re right, of course you are.…”
    And Rose: “It’s true, we do get arrogant.…”
    Graham says that he thinks they should eat. The food is hot; they must be hungry. He brings the dinner to them at the table, and he serves out hot food onto the heated plates.
    Carol and Rose are talking about the towns they came from: Vallejo, California, and Manchester, Vermont.
    “It’s thirty miles from San Francisco,” Carol says. “And that’s all we talked about. The City. How to get there, and what was going on there. Vallejo was just a place we ignored, dirt under our feet.”
    “All the kids in Manchester wanted to make it to New York,” Rose says. “All but me, and I was fixated on Cambridge. Not getting into Radcliffe was terrible for me—it’s why I never went to college at all.”
    “I didn’t either,” Carol says, with a slight irony that Graham thinks may have been lost on Rose: Carol would not have expected to go to college, probably—it wasn’t what high-school kids from Vallejo did. But how does he know this?
    “I went to work instead,” says Rose, a little priggishly (thinks Graham).
    “Me too,” Carol says, with a small laugh.
    Susannah breaks in. “Dad, this is absolutely the greatest dinner. You’re still the best cook I know. It’s good I don’t have your dinners more often.”
    “I’m glad you like it. I haven’t cooked a lot lately.”
    And Rose, and Carol: “It’s super. It’s great.”
    Warmed by praise, and just then wanting to be nice to Rose (partly because he has to admit to himself that he doesn’t much like her), Graham says to her, “Cambridge was where I wanted to go to school, too. The Harvard School of Design. Chicago seemed second-best. But I guess it’s all worked out.”
    “I guess.” Rose smiles.
    She looks almost pretty at that moment, but not quite; looking at her, Graham thinks again, If it had to be another girl, why her? But he knows this to be unfair, and, as far as that goes, why anyone for anyone, when you come to think of it? Any pairing is basically mysterious.
    Partly as a diversion from such unsettling thoughts, and also from real curiosity, he asks Carol, “But was it worth it when you got to the city?”
    She laughs, in her low, self-depreciating way. “Oh, I thought so. I really liked it. My first job was with a florist on Union Street. It was nice there then, before it got all junked up with body shops and stuff. I had a good time.”
    Some memory of that era has put a younger, musing look on