Windfalls: A Novel Read Free

crossed the foyer on leaden legs and left the building. The world outside looked strange, somehow both flat and sharp, as though it had been smashed into two dimensions. The late winter light was greasy, the sky low and gray. Students pushed past her from every angle, their chins buried in their coats, their feet heavy in their boots. They were hurrying to their final classes of the week, or else racing home, drawn like a tide to the promise of Friday night. They were all born, Anna thought dumbly. They all happened to someone. Each one of them had interrupted someone else’s life.
    She stopped, stared at the brick wall of the building she was walking alongside, the mortar frozen like stone icing between the cold brick. Reaching out her forefinger, she fitted it in the groove, ran it along the mortar furrow until the pad of her finger hurt. Then she headed off across the cold campus, her body aching with the ugliness of everything she saw—the mounds of old snow crusted with dust and gravel, the sodden yellow lawns studded with a winter’s worth of dog shit, the passing students huddled against the gritty wind. Who would want to be born? she wondered.
    When she reached the decrepit Victorian mansion on the edge of campus where she rented an attic room, she paused for a moment on the broken sidewalk to look up at it. An American flag hung upside down in a second-story window, and a string of faded Tibetan prayer flags festooned the railing of the widow’s walk, fluttering in the cold breeze like last year’s leaves. From where she stood she could feel the throb of the sound system in the living room—Mick Jagger singing about some girls—and she knew that a party was already percolating inside.
    A car filled with frat boys careened past, shedding its own music as it went, its wheels sending an impersonal spatter of gravel across the sidewalk. She took a last breath of icy air and headed up the weathered steps and past the department-store mannequin that stood like a sentinel on the porch. Someone had dressed the mannequin in a new outfit—a bikini, a muskrat coat, and a Ronald Reagan mask.
    When she opened the door, she was assailed by a blast of sound. Music pounded inside her rib cage like an extra heart, and the smoke that billowed out at her was so dense, she had to fight to keep from gagging. Peering through the gloom, she could see that the front room was packed with students and strangers, and even several hip professors. Everyone was yelling and laughing and passing things—joints, cigarettes, jugs of wine—in eccentric circles. Strings of bulbous Christmas lights hung from the ceiling, and a black light illuminated the room with its menthol glow. In front of a blaring speaker, a woman in a glowing white dress danced by herself, flipping her waist-length hair like a feathered whip.
    Ducking her head and clutching her books, Anna dove into the room. She thought she heard someone call her name, but she kept moving, pushing and twisting through the crowd as though she were running an obstacle course. She had almost reached the hall when she felt someone touch her shoulder and heard a voice in her ear. “We’ve been looking all over for you.”
    She turned and saw the dancer in the white dress—Estelle—her face flushed with excitement. Beneath the taut fabric of her dress her breasts were lithe, precise, her rib cage a series of descending ripples. “Go get your camera,” she cried, opening her mouth in a wide laugh that the music swallowed.
    “Not now,” Anna answered. “I—”
    “Arden and Rick made a mold of Samantha’s body and cast it in Jell O. They’re in the kitchen right now, handing out spoons. Hurry,” Estelle urged.
    “I’m not—I really …” Anna hesitated, passing her hand across her forehead.
    She was grateful for the volume of the room, which hid the wobble in her voice, but even so Estelle suddenly looked concerned. “Are you okay?” she yelled. “You don’t look that