they watch you walk past and so on; but what else was there to do? If I stayed home, my mother was there, and I couldn't walk around the city all day.
So March went by and most of April went by. All fog. Fog and movies.
I was walking home from school one afternoon by one of my variant routes, and passed the First Congregational Church. A sign outside it announced that Friday night there would be the spring performance of the Civic Orchestra, Leila Bone, soprano, works by Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Antonio Vivaldi, and Natalie Field.
I T'S A BEAUTIFUL name: Field. I see the curve of a field on a summer-colored hill, under the sky. Or the long furrows on a winter field, dark brown, throwing shadows in the long sunlight.
It hurt a lot. It hurt incredibly much, and not a clean hurt either, because half of it was envy, the lowest kind of envy. But no matter how low I got, and it was unbelievable to me how low it was, still there were a couple of things I couldn't do. One of them was, I couldn't not go to hear the first public performance of compositions by Natalie Field.
So as I walked on past the church, I already knew I had to go. But the idea of going, and going alone, of course, was part of the hurt. It seemed like the end of something. It was the last thing I had to do that meant anything, and it was just left over from the time before, when things used to mean something. After it, there wouldn't be anything left to do. Ever.
I got home, and the mail had come. There was a letter for me from the admissions office of MIT. My mother had left it out on the chest in the hall, but she didn't say anything or ask about it. I took it up to my room and read it. It said I had been admitted, and they would give me a full tuition scholarship. I should at least have felt a little proud or, what's the word, vindicated, but I didn't. It made no difference whatever. The scholarship was still way short of what it would cost to get to Massachusetts and live there and pay all the costs, and anyhow I wasn't going there. I was supposed to answer within ten days, but I just stuck the letter into the drawer of the desk and forgot about it. I mean I really did forget about it. It just didn't mean anything.
Jason wanted to go to a show Friday night, but I said I was doing something with my parents; and I told them that I was going to the show with Jason. I was doing a lot of lying like that. Just dumb lies that didn't hurt anybody or make any big difference; it was just easier to tell lies about things than to tell the truth. If I told Jason I didn't want to go to a show, he would have argued. If I told either him or my parents that I was going to hear this concert at a church, they would have thought it was a funny thing to do, and I was sick and tired of always being the only person who ever did funny things. They might even have noticed the sign then and seen Natalie's name, and that was none of their business. And Jason might have come with me, because he was so bored he'd do almost anything so long as there was somebody to do it with. So it was a lot easier to lie about it. If you lied about enough things, then everybody else got involved in the fog, too, and they couldn't see you, or touch you at all.
I felt very peculiar going there, Friday night. It was late April and one of the first warm nights, warm and windy, all the flowers out in the gardens, and clouds blowing across the stars. Walking to the church I felt dizzy. You know that feeling where you seem to have done something before? Well, this was just the opposite. It was as if I'd never seen any of the streets before, though I walked them twice a day, five days a week. Everything was different. I felt like a stranger in the late evening in a strange city. It was frightening, but I liked it too, in a way. I thought, what if none of the people in the houses I passed and the cars passing me were speaking English, what if they were all speaking some language I didn't
So March went by and most of April went by. All fog. Fog and movies.
I was walking home from school one afternoon by one of my variant routes, and passed the First Congregational Church. A sign outside it announced that Friday night there would be the spring performance of the Civic Orchestra, Leila Bone, soprano, works by Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Antonio Vivaldi, and Natalie Field.
I T'S A BEAUTIFUL name: Field. I see the curve of a field on a summer-colored hill, under the sky. Or the long furrows on a winter field, dark brown, throwing shadows in the long sunlight.
It hurt a lot. It hurt incredibly much, and not a clean hurt either, because half of it was envy, the lowest kind of envy. But no matter how low I got, and it was unbelievable to me how low it was, still there were a couple of things I couldn't do. One of them was, I couldn't not go to hear the first public performance of compositions by Natalie Field.
So as I walked on past the church, I already knew I had to go. But the idea of going, and going alone, of course, was part of the hurt. It seemed like the end of something. It was the last thing I had to do that meant anything, and it was just left over from the time before, when things used to mean something. After it, there wouldn't be anything left to do. Ever.
I got home, and the mail had come. There was a letter for me from the admissions office of MIT. My mother had left it out on the chest in the hall, but she didn't say anything or ask about it. I took it up to my room and read it. It said I had been admitted, and they would give me a full tuition scholarship. I should at least have felt a little proud or, what's the word, vindicated, but I didn't. It made no difference whatever. The scholarship was still way short of what it would cost to get to Massachusetts and live there and pay all the costs, and anyhow I wasn't going there. I was supposed to answer within ten days, but I just stuck the letter into the drawer of the desk and forgot about it. I mean I really did forget about it. It just didn't mean anything.
Jason wanted to go to a show Friday night, but I said I was doing something with my parents; and I told them that I was going to the show with Jason. I was doing a lot of lying like that. Just dumb lies that didn't hurt anybody or make any big difference; it was just easier to tell lies about things than to tell the truth. If I told Jason I didn't want to go to a show, he would have argued. If I told either him or my parents that I was going to hear this concert at a church, they would have thought it was a funny thing to do, and I was sick and tired of always being the only person who ever did funny things. They might even have noticed the sign then and seen Natalie's name, and that was none of their business. And Jason might have come with me, because he was so bored he'd do almost anything so long as there was somebody to do it with. So it was a lot easier to lie about it. If you lied about enough things, then everybody else got involved in the fog, too, and they couldn't see you, or touch you at all.
I felt very peculiar going there, Friday night. It was late April and one of the first warm nights, warm and windy, all the flowers out in the gardens, and clouds blowing across the stars. Walking to the church I felt dizzy. You know that feeling where you seem to have done something before? Well, this was just the opposite. It was as if I'd never seen any of the streets before, though I walked them twice a day, five days a week. Everything was different. I felt like a stranger in the late evening in a strange city. It was frightening, but I liked it too, in a way. I thought, what if none of the people in the houses I passed and the cars passing me were speaking English, what if they were all speaking some language I didn't
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