The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

San Andreas is on the edge of the continental plate – plates, of course, are the rigid pieces of the earth’s crust that make up the continents and ocean floors …”

      The oven was warming the kitchen, but Barbara didn’t smell cake, only the heat of her sinuses. The dishes seemed a creation of the sink, which heaved them onto the counter, weird saucers, wooden spoons. In December more people from House magazine, including a writer named John Nissing whom Barbara had so far met only by telephone, would be coming to shoot the house’s interior. They should have come today instead, she thought, and caught the house au naturel, caught Barbara in her chair, bowing in confusion and looking at the flour-dusted wrists in her lap. In her dream last night Luisa had had these hands, these rings, these wrinkles.

      When Audrey’s younger daughter Mara was Luisa’s age she’d already run away from home three times. She’d been expelled from Mary Institute and arrested for shoplifting and possession. Concerned relatives, namely Barbara and her father, agreed that the Ripley household was (to say the least) doing Mara little good, and Barbara overrode Martin’s objections and offered to take the girl in until she cooled off or got a diploma. Mara had always, to Barbara’s discomfiture, looked up to her and liked her, as the token grownup she could stand. She accepted the invitation, and Barbara tried to be understanding and be a good foster mother, and repair some of the damage. But after two months, on a Sunday in March, she and Martin returned from a brunch and found Luisa, who was ten, sitting in the kitchen with a frown on her face. Her indirection was elaborate.

      “Sometimes,” she said, “I think about rooms we don’t use?” She felt sorry for the unused rooms. And all the things in them? Like in the basement. And on the third floor? It was funny how she never went up there? Did Mommy ever go up there? Wasn’t there an old sewing machine with pedals? And lots of things of Daddy’s? And an old sofa, sort of?

      Barbara calmly cored an apple for her and sent Martin up to the third floor, where Mara (who was supposedly “outside someplace”) and a boy her age were hastily dressing. Martin said Mara had to go, and Barbara agreed. She was chastened to discover that only Luisa mattered to her, that a scratch on her daughter’s psyche worried her more than a festering hole in Mara’s. Did Luisa know the suitcases in the front hall were the direct result of her testimony? Had she made a connection between having sex and getting thrown out? Did she know it was done on her behalf? A very peculiar sort of distrust arose in Barbara: how much are we really keeping from her? A lot, or only a little? She wished she’d been granted a mind unable to perceive so clearly the mathematics of Luisa’s growth, or a body that could have given her more than one child, anything to relieve the terrible specificity of her conscience. If only it didn’t matter exactly what became of Luisa, and what she became, and how it happened, through what fault and what virtues of Barbara’s. If only she were like Audrey, to whom things happened unaccountably. Or like Martin, who didn’t seem to care.

      Upstairs she heard footsteps. The thump of books. Luisa had come in through the front door and gone straight to her room.

      Three weeks passed. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and the high school was in turmoil. After fifth hour the clots of pep, the organizers and combatants, began to rove the halls at will. They carried orange and black threats, threw orange and black confetti, stapled orange and black crepe paper to the ceiling tiles. It was Pep Wednesday, the day before the Statesmen played the Kirkwood Pioneers. At three o’clock the Rally would be held, and then at eight o’clock the Bonfire, when five hundred of the faithful would gather at Moss Field to witness the burning, in effigy, of Kirk E. Wood. This true Pioneer would be roasted, tossing in a danse macabre, while smoke and cheers drove the school spirit to painful heights for tomorrow. Tomorrow was Turkey Day. Tomorrow was the day.

      Mr. Sonnenfeld shut the door. He cast his pinkened eyes on the class before him. He stuck out his lower lip and blew air through the thin hair on his forehead. “Forty-five minutes to go,” he said. “Be glad when it’s all over.”

      The class did not look at him. They heard his words in mute boredom, as a humbling judgment on them. Yes, sir, it’s just like you say. Fluorescent light filmed their tired hair, tired jeans, tired purses. They were a group as gray as the cold clouds outside. They came because Sonnenfeld would not fail anyone who attended class regularly. The boy next to Luisa in the back row was slouched so low in his seat that his knees butted the underside of his desk. His name was Archie. He was black. He was drawing on his desk with a pencil, expanding a solid gray dot into a larger dot.

      Luisa rubbed the back of her hand across her nostrils. Whenever she did this she could smell Duane. Washing masked the smell, but not for long. He came from inside her. More and more his smoky human smell lodged even in her nostrils; in her brain.

      Her mother had said: “What do you keep doing that for?”

      “Doing what?” She’d dropped her hand, locking it between her legs. She saw how people accidentally develop disgusting nervous habits.

      “Smelling your hand like that.”

      “I’m—not.”

      Mr. Sonnenfeld moistened his fingertips and walked up and down the aisles distributing copies of poems. “I’ve selected four poems to introduce you to the work of William Carlos Williams,” he said. Luisa took her copies but was careful not to show immediate interest in them. She was only here because this course fit into her unruly schedule this quarter. She felt conspicuous. One row over, in the corner, a girl named Janice Jones was watching her. Janice was wearing loose jeans with no belt, a biker’s jacket, and an embroidered Indian shirt with the top four buttons unbuttoned. She had tiny, stoned-looking eyes. Her name was scrawled on lockers and walls around the school, JANIS JONES GIVES GOOD HEAD, JJ = JOBS. Every day she stared at Luisa for no apparent reason; no malice when their eyes met, no smiles, no connection.

      “… I think when you look at these poems you’ll see a lot of similarities with Ezra Pound and the other imagists we started with.” Sonnenfeld’s collar bit deeply into the roll of fat around his neck as he handed the mimeographs across two empty desks to Janice Jones. He nearly lost his balance. Archie sniffed. He seemed to have seen it without looking up.

      “Now, first of all, has anyone ever read anything by Williams?” Sonnenfeld hopped backwards and sat on his desk. He pulled up his pants legs to relieve the stretch.

      White pages turned. No one answered. This was the only class Luisa had in which she hardly knew anyone. People she knew would have said something.

      “Does anyone know what Williams did for a living?”

      “He’s a faggot,” Archie muttered.

      “Archie?”

      Continuing to draw his dot, Archie smiled and did not elaborate. Trouble had been brewing between him and Sonnenfeld since the quarter started two weeks ago, and the mood was dangerous today. Usually Archie was silent in class. He was loud in the halls, though, where all the black kids lost their shyness. They scared Luisa. They didn’t like her, and she felt she’d never be able to relax enough to indicate neutrality, to give them even a small sign that she didn’t necessarily dislike them.

      Sonnenfeld put his hands on his hips and assumed a disappointed tone. “William Carlos Williams was a doctor. He lived all his life in Paterson, New Jersey. As we go on, we’ll find that it’s not unusual for American poets to have other full-time professions. Many have been teachers. Wallace Stevens, who’s perhaps our greatest poet of this century, a very hard poet, worked for an insurance company. He was a vice president when he died. Sylvia Plath, whom I’m sure you’ve all heard of, was a mother and a housewife.”

      Vague guilt fluttered in Luisa’s stomach. The Wallace Stevens book her mother had given her.

      “Archie?”

      Archie shook his head patiently. Luisa looked at his long, angular fingers. She thought of Duane’s hands. On the palm of her own left hand his name was written in black ballpoint ink. She’d written it in Calculus, half-asleep. She’d hardly slept last night. For the third time in a month, she’d sneaked out to be with Duane. She’d gotten to the sundeck from her bedroom