1.

I told them I could be free by the twenty-first, and that I'd come home the twenty-second. (June.) But everything went better than I expected - I had all the examinations corrected and graded and returned to the office by ten the morning of the twenty-first, and I went back to the apartment feeling so footloose, so restless, that I started having some second thoughts. It's only a five-hour drive from the University to the ranch, if you move along - if you don't stop for orange juice every fifty miles the way we used to, Judith and I, our first two years in college, or at bars, the way we did later, after we'd studied how to pass for over twenty-one at under twenty. As I say, if you move, if you push a little, you can get from Berkeley to our ranch in five hours, and the reason why we never cared to in the old days was that we had to work up to home life by degrees, steel ourselves somewhat for the three-part welcome we were in for from our grandmother and our mother and our father, who loved us fiercely in three different ways. We loved them too, six different ways, but we mostly took our time about getting home.

It wasn't three-part any more - the welcome. Our mother died three years ago (much too young but I'm not sure she thought so) and she would therefore not be present at Judith's wedding. Unlike me. If I went, and of course I had to, I'd be very noticeably present in official capacity - the bride's only attendant. She asked me by letter, and I didn't give her a straight answer, because I'm shy, particularly of weddings, but I did say I'd be home the twenty-second, and I had unconsciously cleared the way by the twenty-first, which in June is the longest day of the year. After I got back from taking the examinations to the office, it began to feel like it. I walked around the apartment and looked two or three times inside the refrigerator, so cold, so white, so bare, and more times than that out the big west window at the bay with the prison islands in it and the unbelievable bridge across it. Unbelievable, but I'd got to believing in it from looking at it so often, and it had been looking quite attractive to me off and on through most of the winter. All but irresistible at times, but so was my analyst, and they cancelled each other more or less out.

I went out and stood on the deck and thought it over - how hot it would be at home, how searingly, curingly hot, and how nice it would be to see the dog and the current cat and my father and my grandmother. And my sister. Judith.

The bridge looked good again. The sun was on it, and it took on something of the appeal of a bright exit sign in an auditorium that is crowded and airless and where you are listening to a lecture, as I so often do, that is in no way brilliant. But lectures can't all be brilliant, of course; they can be sat through and listened to for what there is in them, and if the exit sign is dazzling it can still be ignored. Besides, my guide assures me that I am not, at heart, a jumper; it's not my sort of thing. I'm given to conjecture only, and to restlessness, and I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I'd go home, attend my sister's wedding as invited, help hook-and-zip her into whatever she wore, take over the bouquet while she received the ring, through the nose or on the finger, wherever she chose to receive it, and hold my peace when it became a question of speaking now or forever holding it. I'd go, in all likelihood, and do everything an only attendant is expected to do. I'd probably dance attendance.

I didn't even know who the groom was beyond that he was a graduate medical student she met in New York, and his name was Lynch, or maybe even Finch. Yes. Finch. John Thomas Finch. Where'd she meet him - Birdland?

I left the deck and went back into the apartment and locked the door and pulled the cord that closed the curtain across the west window. I'd had enough of the view for this semester. I wandered around and ended up at my desk, looking at the page that was in my typewriter, specifically page fifty-seven of my brute thesis, my impressions of the novel in France - my big academic lunge. I turned on my lamp, my desk lamp of countless adjustments, and read what there was of page fifty-seven and laughed out loud, but not because it was amusing - because it was such busy work, this whole thing of writing a thesis so that I could become a teacher instead of a writer, particularly when the thesis is about writers, very current ones, women mostly and young, not much older than I am but whom I was exploiting ruthlessly to provide me with a thesis. I'd really have preferred it the other way around, to be myself the writer and have all those others writing their theses about me; but I have a peculiar problem in that my mother was a writer - author of two novels, and three plays, and quite a few screenplays, all quite well known, and it's not easy for the child of a writer to become a writer. I don't see why; it just isn't. It's something about not wanting to be compared. And not wanting to measure up, or not measure up; or cash in either. It's not that I have anything against my mother. I loved her, I think; but my mother's only been dead three years, just short of three years, and I'd rather wait a decent interval and then try. Or not try. But first write the idiotic thesis and get the gap-stopping degree.

I pulled the page out of the typewriter, crumpled it up and dropped it into the wastebasket beside the desk, shuffled the other fifty-six pages until the edges lay smoothly together, put them into a folder and then into the top drawer, and snapped the cover onto the typewriter. If the apartment should catch fire while I was at the wedding, the world would never know what it was I was at such pains to say about the novel as currently practised in France by mere girls, and some boys. But it wouldn't catch fire. And when I got back I would undoubtedly pull the crumpled page out of the wastebasket, uncrumple it, copy it word for word, and be back in business. Two weeks from now, maybe only a week.

It was increasingly clear to me that I intended to go, that I didn't intend to spend another night, at least not this one, in the apartment. There were all kinds of indications: I stripped the sheets off my bed and put them into a laundry bag; and I folded the cover over the keyboard of the piano, a piano which was half mine, but which I'd scarcely touched, as they say of pianos, since Judith, who owned the other half, went to New York. I should have folded the cover over the keyboard nine months ago, and locked it. There was a key someplace.

But I didn't stop to look for it and by three that afternoon I was halfway home, and sitting in a bar, one of the ones we used to stop at in the old days. It was quite dark and air-cooled and I had in hand a lemon squash with some vodka in it in deference to my grandmother who hates the smell of alcohol on anyone's breath - particularly girls' breaths. I'm very fond of my grandmother, we both are, and I'd picked up a box of chocolate cherries for her before I left town. They were out in the trunk of the car, melting, while I sat here in the cold bar getting solidified and hoping that I had not put the chocolates on top of the box with the dress in it - dress I'd picked up before I left town and charged to one of my grandmother's accounts as she frequently implored me to do. It was a white dress, and it would probably do for the wedding. In fact I didn't even have to wonder about it - it was very simple and elegant and costly, it would do for anything anywhere, and my grandmother, high as her standards are, would know it when she saw it and thank me for doing her so much honour. She liked to see girls look nice, she said so all the time, and whether or not this had anything to do with it I developed a taste for sweatshirts a full ten years ahead of the trend. Also for sneakers, and if I knew my grandmother, she would love this dress. It would be a big relief to her, besides serving to keep the account active.

I looked across the space behind the bar and saw my face in a blue mirror between two shelves of bottles. The bottles looked familiar enough, but I didn't immediately recognise the face, mostly, I think, because I didn't want to. It's a face that's given me a lot of trouble.

But I looked again in a moment or two, unable not to, and this time I let myself know who it was. It was the face of my sister Judith, not precisely staring, just looking at me very thoughtfully the way she always used to when she was getting ready to ask me to do something - hold the stopwatch while she swam four hundred metres, taste the dressing and tell her what she left out, explain the anecdote about the shepherd and the mermaid. They were the kind of thing a younger sister asks an older sister, and it was all right with me except that I wasn't all that much older. I was only eleven minutes older. It was on our birth certificates that way. The one named Cassandra was two ounces heavier and eleven minutes older than the one named Judith.

By a firm act of will I forced the face between the shelves to stop being Judith's and become mine. My very own face - the face of a nice girl preparing to be a teacher, writing a thesis, being kind to her grandmother, going home a day early instead of a day late or the day I said, and bringing something decent to wear. But it can give me a turn, that face, any time I happen to...