Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation

Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation

Though I am gone, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.

By John Lewis 

Mr. Lewis, the civil rights leader who died on July 17, wrote this essay shortly before his death, to be published upon the day of his funeral. 

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity. 

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on. 

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars. 

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain. 

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself. 

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it. 

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others. 

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring. 

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.

Doomsday And The Dark Forest

Doomsday And The Dark Forest: The Fall Of The Berlin Wall And Our Quest For The Stars 

by Jochen Szangolies 

J Richard Gott and the Fall of the Berlin Wall 

J Richard Gott, now an astrophysicist famous for the notion that the universe might have created itself by reaching back through time, visited the Berlin Wall in 1969, while an undergraduate at Harvard. There, he made the following prediction (paraphrased): 

The Wall will stand for at least 2 and 2/3 years more, but no longer than 24 years. 

On November 9, 1989, a rough twenty years later, his prediction came to fruition, and the Wall came down, precipitating the reunification of East and West Germany. 

How did Gott arrive at this prediction? Did he have some special insight into the sociopolitical climate of the times? Was he so convinced of the inherent flaws of Soviet communist ideology that he could confidently predict its downfall? Or did he merely note a structural weakness in the construction itself? 

The answer is, of course: none of the above. For his prediction, Gott needed only one single point of data: how long the Wall has stood so far. At the time of his visit, the Wall had existed for about eight years—construction having begun on August 13, 1961, two months after GDR council chairman Walter Ulbricht’s emphatic declaration that ‘nobody has the intention of building a wall’ (“Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten”). 

Armed with this knowledge, Gott estimated that the Wall would stand between one third and three times that time longer. For this, he needed to appeal to two further assumptions—the Copernican Principle, and the Principle of Indifference. 

The Copernican Principle: The Earth (‘Mundus’) as one among many similar stars. From Johannes Kepler’s Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae. 

The Copernican Principle is a lesson in cosmic humility: like it or not, you don’t occupy any privileged position in creation. The Principle of Indifference, by contrast, is a guiding rule for adjudicating between competing hypotheses: absent relevant further evidence, belief in each of a set of possibilities should be equally distributed. 

Together, these allow Gott to stipulate that his ‘position’ within the lifetime of the Berlin Wall (the date of his visit) is typical: it essentially corresponds to a random draw from all dates at which it is possible to visit the Berlin Wall—that is, from its total lifetime T. From this, the above conclusion follows almost immediately: half of all visits to the Berlin Wall will occur during half its lifetime. One half of its lifetime lies between a quarter and three-quarters of T. Should you visit the Berlin Wall at the point where one quarter of T has elapsed, it will continue to exist for three times that time; if you visit it when it has stood for three quarters of T, it will continue to stand for one third of that time more. 

Consequently, for half of all the visitors to the Berlin Wall, it will be true that it will continue to stand between one-third and three times of the duration it has endured at the time of the visit. Gott’s prediction was, therefore, probabilistic in nature: while it will hold true for half of all those who could make this argument, the other half will end up proven wrong by history. It doesn’t so much establish a matter of fact, as a way to bet, given our knowledge of the situation. 

Incidentally, an immediate consequence is that, since the expected future lifetime depends on its duration so far, the greater that period, the longer it is expected to last: old things endure. 

Gott’s argument: every visitor in the shaded region will correctly estimate the lifetime of the Wall. 

Both the Copernican Principle and the Principle of Indifference are assumptions, and thus, may fail to hold. The number of visitors to the Berlin Wall might vary in time—perhaps, as a tourist destination, it might fall out of fashion. Likewise, we might have access to additional knowledge that tells us whether we have arrived at a special point in time during the Wall’s existence—for instance, having just heard Günter Schabowski’s somewhat premature announcement of the opening of the GDR’s borders, expecting the Wall to remain standing for one third to three times its current age would be absurd. 

Still, Gott’s technique demonstrates a powerful way of getting lots of information out of very little data. As such, it can easily be generalized to different settings, from the run time of Broadway shows to baseball victories. 

However, this style of reasoning had its most famous outing in the ominously titled Doomsday argument: predicting, given the total number of humans that have lived so far, how many humans will exist in total—and, given reasonable estimates on population dynamics, how long our species will endure. 

We can reason as above: given the assumption that you’re a typical human being, you should consider yourself to be equally likely to be each of the however many human beings there ever will be (let’s call that number N). Therefore, with 50% probability—as, recall, the claim is necessarily true for 50% of all humans—between one third and three times as many humans as have been born before you, will be born in the future. Consequently, learning ‘your’ number n, like learning the age of the Berlin Wall at the time of visiting, allows you to make an estimate of N. 

Estimates for the total number of humans to have lived so far vary, but a rough median number is around 100 billion. That, with the above logic, puts the total number of humans to ever be born, with 50% probability, somewhere between 133 and 400 billion. Given an estimate of the population dynamics over time, we can turn this prediction into a date: as about 140 million people are born per year, we will reach 133 billion cumulative total about 235 years from now; should this rate hold (which it very likely won’t), 400 billion will have lived by about the year 4150. 

The precise value of these numbers isn’t too important. The lesson taught by the argument is, rather, the following: the mere fact of our ‘early’ birth makes it unlikely that humanity will continue great lengths of time into the future. As we will see, there are further considerations greatly reinforcing this conclusion. 

Of course, likelihood isn’t certainty, and somebody making this argument around the year 1000 would have been badly mistaken in their estimate—but given the assumptions made, the smart bet—the one that ‘pays’ for the greatest number of those that make it—is that the Wall will fall sooner, rather than later. 

Enrico Fermi and the Great Silence 

Let us now change focus from the Berlin Wall in the 1960s to another Cold War hot spot, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the summer of 1950. Here, we meet Enrico Fermi—another physicist with a penchant for drawing quick and accurate conclusions from sparse data. Indeed, such was his reputation that the problems known as ‘Fermi problems’ to this day serve as a gauge for one’s ability to make rough-and-ready estimates based on little information. Thus, when you’re asked to calculate the number of piano tuners in Chicago during your next job interview, and can’t think of an answer, perhaps deflect the examiner’s attention by relating the story of how Enrico Fermi estimated the power of the first atomic bomb explosion by watching pieces of paper float to the ground. 

Fermi asked a question that is, in some sense, the opposite of Gott’s: rather than ‘where are we headed?’, he asked ‘where is everybody else?’, thus originating what is now called the ‘Fermi paradox’. ‘Everybody else’, in this question, refers to alien civilizations, and the ‘paradox’ is that we have yet to observe any evidence of their existence. 

Admittedly, at first, this seems barely a puzzle, much less a paradox: given the vastness of the cosmos, not having found aliens so far seems like it should hardly be a surprise. But Fermi was keenly aware of something that has heavily impacted on public consciousness in recent times, due to the COVID-19 pandemic: the power of exponential growth. 

Going at the speed of our fastest space craft, the Parker Solar Probe, reaching the nearest star would take around 6,500 years. So say that it takes about 10,000 years to reach a new star system, for each system visited so far. Then, the number of visited stars doubles every 10,000 years. There are approximately 300 billion stars in our galaxy. At this pace, it takes a mere 38 doublings, somewhat less than 400,000 years, to get to slightly under 300 billion, and visit every star in the galaxy. 

Cosmologically speaking, 400,000 years is barely a blip. Tyrannosaurus Rex and Stegosaurus existed nearly 77 million years apart—thus, any species colonizing the galaxy starting around the time of Stegosaurus would have ample opportunity to engrave ‘Zorblax was here’ on every grain of sand of every beach on every planet orbiting every star in the galaxy before T Rex ever shows up. 

It would have taken just one such enterprising civilization, arising a few hundred thousand years before us, to seed the galaxy with life all over. A quarter of all stars, given recent Kepler data, are estimated to harbor Earth-like planets. Yet, looking out into the vastness, we see only void, and listening with giant radiotelescope ears, hear nothing but silence. Where is everybody else? 

Cixin Liu and What Lurks Between the Stars 

There are multiple answers, of varying degrees of plausibility, for both the Doomsday Argument and Fermi’s question. In both cases, we could just have gotten lucky: some people must be among the first (few billion) to ever be born; some civilization must be the first to ever gaze out into space and marvel at the silence echoing back. Other civilizations may hide from us, or simply not be terribly interested; space travel could be vastly more difficult than we imagine it to be, and simply not worth the risk and resources. 

Whether we reach for the stars, with an exponentially increasing population for each new star visited (‘Expansion’), or remain on Earth (‘Stagnation’), all of humanity so far occupies a minuscule fraction of the total population (hatched area). 

But still. One can hardly help, given the sheer numbers involved, to suspect something else at work. Moreover, the Fermi problem exacerbates the reasoning of the Doomsday Argument. If we ever do take to the stars, the majority of humans—by vast amounts—ought to find themselves within a thriving interstellar community. Only a tiny percentage of all humans, we should expect, are born during the period where humanity is ‘Earth-locked’. 

How come we are among them? Moreover, how come we seem to find us at this precise moment in time, just before we are able to make the jump beyond our ancestral home? 

The realization that the time in which we live is special breaks the symmetry between us and the rest of humanity—like Günter Schabowski’s announcement of the opening of the GDR’s borders breaks the symmetry between the Berlin Wall visitors. If humanity were to engage in widespread interstellar travel, the chances of you being born right here, right now drop into the minuscule. 

Sometime between Fermi searching the skies for alien civilizations, and Gott predicting the ruin of humanity, science fiction writer Cixin Liu is born in a country famous for its own Great Wall—which, incidentally, we should expect to remain standing for 770 to 6900 more years: old things endure. Liu, in his Remembrance of Earth’s Past-trilogy, has popularized an answer to Fermi’s question that doubles as a solution for the puzzle of our special place in the history of humanity: the Dark Forest theory.

Consider that any form of life desires to stay alive. Consider, further, that there is no way to know, a priori, whether another form of life is hostile. Then, the safest—indeed, the only safe—possible option, once becoming aware of another civilization, is to act swiftly and mercilessly, exterminating what must be considered a potential threat. After all, by the same logic, they would have acted in the same way—and thus, they are, in fact, the threat they appear. 

In Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the Joker fits two cruise ships with explosives, giving the passengers of each the trigger to destroy the other. He then threatens that, should none blow up the other, he will blow up both. 

This is life in the Dark Forest: each civilization knows that another holds the key to its destruction. The question of why they should act in this way—competition for resources, xenophobia, or sheer manic aggression—is less important than the fact that they could. Moreover, as much as you are suspicious of them, they must be suspicious of you—thus entering into a downward spiral, a ‘chain of suspicion’, that seems like it can only end in annihilation. 

Ultimately, this becomes an evolutionary issue: only those civilizations that abide by the laws of the Dark Forest are likely to survive, with those newcomers arriving to the scene, foolishly announcing their presence, finding a swift end. This is, then, why we have so far failed to detect any signs of alien life: those that are there, are hiding, from whatever else is out there, lurking in the void. 

But moreover, this also yields an explanation for why we are born in these special times, just before bursting onto the galactic scene, so to speak. In the Dark Forest, most civilizations may reach their peak just before the jump to the stars—just before, that is, they become visible on the galactic stage—and thereby, targets. The typical experience, in the Dark Forest, then is not that of a member of a thriving galactic civilization, but that of being within a few hundred years of developing feasible space travel. The Dark Forest makes an experience like ours from an unlikely outlier into a typical scenario. We are right here, right now, because in the future, we won’t be. 

In the Dark Forest, most members of any given civilization will likely be alive around the period of saturating its home planets population level. 

Beyond us, the young civilizations, bursting on the scene, bumbling towards an untimely demise, are then those that have learned the lesson of the Dark Forest—those ever in hiding, ever observant, ever ready to act with maximum prejudice. They are the old ones that have, perhaps, lain vigilant between the stars when Stegosaurus roamed the Earth; they are the ones that will be left, when nothing remains of us but the ghosts of our radio signals echoing faintly within the void. Old things endure, and we are very young. 

Then again, that might be too pessimistic a conclusion. In The Dark Knight, the Joker’s plans are foiled when neither ship decides to pull the trigger. Or, we might simply be the lucky ones: in the history of every pan-galactic empire, there’s a tiny percentage of its total population born before its great expansion to the stars. Of those, one might have written an essay such as this one—and been, happily, proven wrong by history. 

The Depression-Era Book That Wanted to Cancel the Rent

The Depression-Era Book That Wanted to Cancel the Rent 

By Nora Caplan-Bricker The New Yorker

The celebrated urbanist Jane Jacobs never hesitated to name an adversary in print. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” from 1961, she takes special care to criticize Catherine Bauer, the most influential member of a cadre of city planners that Jacobs calls “the Decentrists,” though they were more commonly known as “the housers.” Jacobs accused Bauer and her circle of wanting to stifle the organic growth of cities, siphoning their tumultuous energy into sterile satellite settlements that “resist future change,” since “every significant detail must be controlled by the planners from the start and then stuck to.” 

Sixty years later, Jacobs’s paean to city life, still in wide circulation, is the place readers are likeliest to encounter Bauer’s name. They might reasonably picture a city planner in the mold of Robert Moses—Jacobs’ most famous opponent, who fought to build a highway through Greenwich Village—though in fact Bauer disliked Moses’ ideas almost as much as Jacobs did. Jacobs presented a democratic vision of urban neighborhoods, in which self-governance naturally gave rise to good places to live; Bauer, by contrast, wanted the state to play the role of both developer and landlord. The planned communities of Bauer’s imagination were indeed designed to resist a form of change: the creeping increase of property values that put decent housing out of reach for many Americans. Jacobs had faith that the old buildings in places like Greenwich Village, as long as they were left standing, would remain affordable. Bauer, convinced the market would always compel people to pay too much for too little, better anticipated the world we live in today. 

Bauer’s only major book, “Modern Housing,” published in 1934, was a staple of college reading lists when Jacobs lambasted the housers’ “city-destroying ideas” in “Death and Life.” It spent decades out of print, until its reissue this past April, by the University of Minnesota Press, into the teeth of an economic disaster that may prove as dire as the one that shaped its author. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Bauer was a twenty-four-year-old architecture critic; the beginnings of the Great Depression propelled what she later described as her development from “an aesthete into a housing reformer.” In “Modern Housing,” Bauer makes the case for what critics at the time denounced, more or less accurately, as socialized housing, although she herself framed the issue as a matter of making decent housing a “public utility” and a basic right. She did not think, however, that writing books alone would bring her vision into being. “Movements are not made, when all is said and done, by a handful of specialists,” she writes in the final pages. Change would come only when Americans “demanded a positive program of good housing—not merely for some vague, hypothetical ‘slum-dwellers,’ but for themselves and their families.” After the book’s publication, Bauer put aside her literary career to become a labor organizer and political lobbyist, working to drum up the broad demand she found wanting. She fought to encode her ideas in the New Deal, and largely failed. 

In our current economic crisis, there are signs of the kind of mass housing movement that never materialized during the Great Depression. Across the country, activists are urging elected officials to cancel the rent. More than seven hundred and ninety thousand households have gone on rent strike since March, according to the housing-justice coalition We Strike Together, and it seems likely that more will join them when pandemic unemployment assistance runs dry. Many state-level eviction moratoriums are set to expire this summer, and one real-estate analytics firm estimates that twenty-eight million renters may soon be at risk of being turned onto the streets. Black and Latino tenants, more than half of whom were “cost-burdened” before the pandemic—meaning they devoted more than thirty per cent of their earnings to keeping a roof over their families’ heads—will disproportionately struggle to hold onto their homes. Could the cruelty of evicting people in a pandemic finally elevate the demand for a right to housing into a mainstream political issue? 

Bauer once wrote, in letters quoted in the architectural historian Barbara Penner’s new foreword to “Modern Housing,” that planners and experts could offer, at best, “something to stir up the imagination” and “strike the spark” to ignite broad desire for change. Almost a century later, the ideas in her book still burn. She draws her utopian image of a different America in so much detail that it begins to feel like a real destination. Republished at an opportune moment, her dispatch from another crisis provides context, and perhaps inspiration, for a movement whose like she desperately longed to see. 

Bauer grew up unconcerned about shelter. She was born in 1905 to upper-middle-class parents—her father was a highway engineer—and raised in a three-story house in Elizabeth, New Jersey, a suburb of New York. After graduating from Vassar College in 1926, she discovered modernism on a European tour. She felt drawn to the social ideals expressed in functionalist buildings by architects like Le Corbusier, who famously called a house a “machine” that should generate maximal well being. Bauer was tall and blond, with a frank charisma; “she walked with an enormous stride—you had to run to keep up with her—and always smoked,” one acquaintance remembered. She also possessed a gift for getting to know the right people. Out dancing in Paris, she met the famous Viennese architect Adolf Loos and persuaded him to hire her by the end of the evening. Back in New York, she kept company with artists like Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, and began to make her name as a writer. 

Her door to the subject that would define her life was a love affair with an older man. In 1929, she met the acclaimed cultural critic Lewis Mumford, who wrote about cities and architecture for The New Yorker, and who would be the “potter,” she once wrote, to her “clay.” The intellectual influence ran both ways: Mumford once wrote that Bauer was “the only pupil and collaborator whom I fully respected.” He introduced her to the Regional Planning Association of America (R.P.A.A.), a star-studded group that included the architects Henry Wright and Clarence Stein and the housing reformer Edith Elmer Wood, and which advocated for American housing that reflected the principles of the English Garden City movement, a plan to create bucolic but socially vibrant suburbs. 

Mumford also helped Bauer arrange two trips to Europe to study modernist housing, the second of which they took together, funded by Fortune magazine, which had commissioned Mumford to write a five-article series on European architecture. He brought Bauer as his assistant, which in practice meant that she researched and wrote drafts that appeared, with his edits, under his sole byline. Bauer and Mumford, soon to break up, spent the trip at loggerheads, but were aligned in their aim to mount an argument for the kind of state-subsidized housing then on the rise in countries like England, the Netherlands, and Austria. Their leftist politics scandalized the conservative Fortune, which cancelled the project after three installments. Bauer decided to turn her research into a book in her own name. 

“Modern Housing” begins with a history of the Depression-era housing crisis that will sound familiar to contemporary readers. The supposed prosperity of the nineteen-twenties masked rising rents, stagnant wages, and a significant shortage of low-income and middle-class housing. Only the “upper-third income group” could afford the new homes being built, Bauer writes. The problem, she argues, was not so much the real-estate industry as the basic function of the free market. The cost of housing is tied to the value of land, which is determined by “the most intensive”—which is to say, overcrowded—“future use to which a speculator estimates that the plot can be put.” The price of land thus reflects “the lowest housing standards permissible,” driving down standards of living even for the affluent, and consigning the poor to the slums. This is the basis of Bauer’s core argument, which is that housing must be decommodified. Good housing that is “available to the average citizen is not a ‘normal’ product of a capitalist society,” she writes. 

The dwellings Bauer aspired to see in America, which she terms “modern housing,” must therefore be “non-speculative”: owned by public entities or nonprofit coöperatives. They must be affordable, with the help of government subsidies, to people on the lowest incomes, while also attracting middle-class residents, who will find them airier and more attractive than the free-market alternatives. That these groups should have access to equal amenities was axiomatic for Bauer. “If you start with sun and air and biological requirements, you cannot say that because this family has only half the income of that family, they should have only half as good an outlook or half as big a playground or half as much water or half a toilet,” she writes. Modern housing cannot be designed one building at a time but rather must be conceived as a town or neighborhood, a practice that controls costs while maximizing shared green space, granting “sunlight, quiet, and a pleasant outlook from every window.” 

Such places existed, though not in America. During the twenties, while the U.S. doubled down on a laissez-faire notion of economic prosperity, European nations responded to a post-First World War housing shortage by building at least six million state-subsidized dwellings, four and a half million of which, by Bauer’s calculation, housed “about one seventh” of the families in England, Holland, Germany, and several other countries. (Some survive: more than sixty per cent of residents of Vienna live in social housing today.) The centralized planning of these communities was intended to be more than aesthetically pleasing. Bauer wrote that no modern housing development was complete without a nursery school, and probably also a café. As the historian Gail Radford notes in her classic study of New Deal housing policy, “Modern Housing for America,” Bauer would later promote these shared amenities in the hopes that they would form the basis of “cross-class coalitions” between residents, which could then be converted into political support for more modern housing. 

“Modern Housing” was not only a proposal of something new, but also a rejection of what it would replace. “The ideology of individual Home Ownership must go,” Bauer proclaimed. The idea that every American, if he worked hard enough, could someday afford his own plot of land was part of “the realm of mythology,” she wrote—and the Depression had revealed it to be a damaging myth, as half of all mortgages entered default, wiping out the life savings of millions of families. Culturally, Bauer believed that aspiring to homeownership encouraged people “to approach the housing problem in the role of petty capitalists rather than as workers and consumers,” stifling solidarity between people who might benefit from a different system. She concluded her book: “If only a small part of the vast energy which was once directed toward individual home-ownership were now organized to demand a realistic program of modern housing, … then there would be an American housing movement indeed.” 

As Bauer was writing “Modern Housing,” the U.S. was beginning to build public housing as part of the Public Works Administration. From the start, the new projects hinted at the troubled place they would hold in American life. Due to a deliberate policy of building housing for Black people in what the agency designated Black neighborhoods, the new developments intensified segregation in cities, or sometimes created it. At the same time, the historian Radford notes that P.W.A. projects for both Black and white residents were far better funded than the public housing of future eras, and were seen as desirable places to live. 

The P.W.A. was a temporary agency, but many hoped it would give way to a permanent policy of public housing. The most sustained advocacy arose in the labor movement, which recruited Bauer to lead a new lobbying arm, the Labor Housing Conference, and sent her around the country in search of supporters. “It’s a long jump from a Radical Intellectual to a Labor Skate,” she wrote to a friend from the road, where she lived in cheap hotels or with friends on a budget of six dollars a day. “My old arty self of 1927-Paris would commit suicide at the spectacle—if she were not so thoroughly dead.” In 1935, Senator Robert Wagner, of New York, enlisted Bauer to help draw up a housing bill. The draft legislation would have funded developments for middle- and low-income Americans. Perhaps most radically, Bauer wrote, it included “machinery whereby groups of people who desire to secure better housing for themselves may participate directly in the program,” by forming coöperatives and applying to the government to build developments that they would live in, but not own. The law would have granted tenants control of their surroundings that only homeowners have ever enjoyed. 

Bauer’s timing was off. The real-estate industry, on its knees only a few years earlier, had been revived by the New Deal invention of federally backed mortgages, which continue to benefit homeowners today. It succeeded in quashing Bauer’s vision. By the time the U.S. Housing Act passed in 1937, its purview was confined to the poor, a clientele that the real-estate lobby cared little about losing. Like the P.W.A. projects, the new housing would be racially segregated—an abomination that none of the bill’s authors, including Bauer, insisted against. Bauer did try and fail to prevent an amendment tying public housing to so-called slum clearance, which confined most new developments to run-down neighborhoods and left developers the more desirable land in the suburbs. The bill also capped the construction cost of each new dwelling at levels far below the standard set by the P.W.A. Instead of challenging the primacy of private ownership, the resulting housing attached stigma to the idea of a public alternative. As Bauer later wrote, most American public housing “proclaims, visually, that it serves the ‘lowest income group.’ ” 

As we face the possibility of repeating this battle, it’s worth knowing what happened last time, and how close we came to living in a different world. As Radford observes, Bauer hoped to tackle the housing crisis with a universalist policy that might have united the poor and the middle class in broad support of a new entitlement. Instead, the New Deal ushered in a two-tiered system that persists to this day: generous tax deductions for the most secure homeowners, and underfunded public housing for the least fortunate. “America’s national housing policy gives affluent homeowners large benefits; middle-class homeowners, smaller benefits; and most renters, who are disproportionately poor, nothing,” the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond has written. “It is difficult to think of another social policy that more successfully multiplies America’s inequality.” 

The gulf is growing wider in the pandemic. The cares Act granted anyone with a federally backed mortgage—about seventy per cent of mortgages—the ability to pause payments for up to a year. In June, the real-estate-data-analytics firm Black Knight calculated that the accumulated unpaid principal added up to a trillion-dollar bailout so far. In comparison, the cares Act earmarked twelve billion dollars for housing, almost all of which was directed to public and subsidized housing and services for the homeless, leaving virtually nothing for low-income tenants struggling to stave off eviction from market-rate rentals. 

As in the New Deal era, the map to a different society is sitting on the table, already written. Representative Ilhan Omar has drawn up a bill to cancel rent and mortgage payments for as long as the crisis lasts; Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote another that would halt evictions through March, 2021. In November, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing, a plan to update and decarbonize more than a million units. Just under a week later, Omar introduced the Homes for All Act, a trillion-dollar plan to build twelve million new units of affordable housing—enough to serve the more than ten million Americans, disproportionately Black and Latino, who spend more than half their income on rent. Omar worked with People’s Action, a progressive coalition of grassroots groups; their proposal for a “Homes Guarantee” would build social housing, institute rent control, and pay reparations to Black and Native Americans and other groups harmed by racist housing policies. As Tara Raghuveer, the group’s housing policy lead, said in September, “The theory of the Homes Guarantee is that the market failure has been so profound, we can’t wait around for the market to work.” 

Conventional wisdom has it that Americans will never embrace plans like these, that they aspire instead to all the freedoms embodied in one’s own plot of land. Bauer agreed with Jacobs that the power to shape one’s surroundings was paramount; she called “Death and Life” “brilliant,” despite the way it pressed her into service as a useful foil. A home is an intimate incarnation of an individual life, even if it is provided by public means. “Freedom and flexibility are probably the hardest things to achieve with public policy,” Bauer wrote in 1957. “But a country that can devise the insured mortgage (in all its different forms)” can surely “provide some real selection at all economic and social levels.” 

It’s easy to abandon hope that we will ever accomplish what “Modern Housing” prescribes, but the book prompts us to remember that history is never as predictable as it looks in hindsight. Bauer emphasizes that there was “no ‘inevitability’” preventing achievements like those of Europe: it took a political movement, including mass protests, to create social housing. Bauer’s defeat wasn’t preordained, either. Radford, finding evidence of excitement about modern housing among union members in the thirties, argues that Bauer simply didn’t have enough time to amass the necessary grassroots support. Picturing a world where she did is a ward against cynicism. The New Deal helped tie homeownership to success in our national imagination. But a country where no one would have to fight for a home is also a longstanding American dream.

Federal Agents Unleash Militarized Crackdown on Portland

Federal Agents Unleash Militarized Crackdown on Portland 

Federal authorities said they would bring order to Portland, Ore., after weeks of protests there. Local leaders believe the federal presence is making things worse. 

By Sergio Olmos, Mike Baker and Zolan Kanno-Youngs NY Times

PORTLAND, Ore. — Federal agents dressed in camouflage and tactical gear have taken to the streets of Portland, unleashing tear gas, bloodying protesters and pulling some people into unmarked vans in what Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon has called “a blatant abuse of power.” 

The extraordinary use of federal force in recent days, billed as an attempt to tamp down persistent unrest and protect government property, has infuriated local leaders who say the agents have stoked tensions. 

“This is an attack on our democracy,” Mayor Ted Wheeler of Portland said. 

The strife in Portland, which has had 50 consecutive days of protests, reflects the growing fault lines in law enforcement as President Trump threatens an assertive federal role in how cities manage a wave of national unrest after George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. 

One Portland demonstrator, Mark Pettibone, 29, said he had been part of the protests before four people in camouflage jumped out of an unmarked van around 2 a.m. Wednesday. They had no obvious markings or identification, he said, and he had no idea who they were. 

“One of the officers said, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ and just grabbed me and threw me into the van,” Mr. Pettibone said. “Another officer pulled my beanie down so I couldn’t see.” 

Mr. Pettibone said that he was terrified — protesters in the city have in the past clashed with far-right militia groups also wearing camouflage and tactical gear — and that at no point was he told why he was arrested or detained, or what agency the officers were with. He said he was held for about two hours before being released. 

“It felt like I was being hunted for no reason,” Mr. Pettibone said. “It feels like fascism.” 

In a statement issued on Friday, Customs and Border Protection said agents who made the arrest had information that indicated a suspect had assaulted federal authorities or damaged property and that they moved him to a safer location for questioning. The statement said that the agents identified themselves but that their names were not displayed because of “recent doxxing incidents against law enforcement personnel.” 

The agents in Portland are part of “rapid deployment teams” put together by the Department of Homeland Security after Mr. Trump directed federal agencies to deploy additional personnel to protect statues, monuments and federal property during the continuing unrest. 

The teams, which include 2,000 officials from Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard, are supporting the Federal Protective Service, an agency that already provides security at federal properties. 

Agents have been dispatched to Portland, Seattle and Washington, D.C., to guard statues, monuments and federal property, such as the federal courthouse in Portland, according to homeland security officials. 

But the response by the homeland security agents in Portland has prompted backlash over whether the federal officers are exceeding their arrest authority and violating the rights of protesters by detaining demonstrators in the area around the federal courthouse. 

The agents have the authority to make arrests if they believe that a federal crime has been committed. Homeland security has pointed to dozens of possible crimes in Portland, such as damaging of the federal courthouse, spray-painting of graffiti on federal property and the throwing of rocks and bottles at officers. 

Law enforcement officials say it is rare for local police departments to request help from federal authorities — or for the federal government to deploy in a city without that consent — because of the risk of escalating an already volatile environment. 

“The last people you really want are any of these federal officials,” said Gil Kerlikowske, the former commissioner of Customs and Border Protection and the former chief of the Seattle Police Department. 

Billy J. Williams, the U.S. attorney for the District of Oregon, said in a statement on Friday that he was asking the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general to investigate reports of officers detaining protesters. 

Governor Brown said in an interview that she asked the acting homeland security secretary, Chad F. Wolf, to remove federal officials from the streets and that he refused. She said the Trump administration appeared to instead be using the situation for photo-ops to rally his supporters. 

“They are provoking confrontation for political purposes,” Ms. Brown said. 

In early June, the administration deployed an array of federal agents to cities like San Diego, Buffalo and Las Vegas. 

In Washington, tensions were heightened when the Park Police and Secret Service used chemical agents to disperse a crowd of protesters in Lafayette Park for a photo opportunity by Mr. Trump. Federal agents without any insignia also sparked fear and confusion in the demonstrations, and military helicopters flying below rooftop level sent protesters scurrying for cover. 

Customs and Border Protection also sent drones, helicopters and planes to conduct surveillance of the protests in 15 cities.

Mr. Wolf, who arrived in Portland on Thursday, called the protesters a “violent mob” of anarchists emboldened by a lack of local enforcement. 

Federal officers on the ground in Portland have deployed a range of forceful tactics: They appeared to fire less-lethal munitions from slits in the facade of the federal courthouse, one officer walked the street while swinging a burning ball emitting tear gas, and camouflaged personnel drove in unmarked vans. 

Homeland security officers have been dispatched to help local law enforcement in the past, but typically when a request was made by local government or when there was a “national special security event” taking place that could be especially vulnerable to terrorism, such as the U.N. General Assembly or the Super Bowl. 

Harry Fones, a homeland security spokesman, did not answer questions seeking additional details about the tactics of the officers in Portland, instead referring to a Customs and Border Protection statement that said the federal officers did display insignia. 

Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said in a series of tweets on Friday that the agents from BORTAC, the equivalent of the agency’s SWAT team, would “continue to arrest the violent criminals that are destroying federal property & injuring our agents/officers in Portland.” 

The demonstrations began in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, drawing thousands of people to the streets to denounce police violence and racial injustice. On some nights, protesters would blanket the Burnside Bridge, each lying face down on the pavement for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in remembrance of Mr. Floyd. 

Those mass demonstrations have waned, but hundreds have continued on, clashing with the police almost nightly. They have set off fireworks, lit fires and attempted to create an autonomous zone similar to one that existed up Interstate 5 in Seattle. Police officers have responded with tear gas, although a federal judge has since limited the use of that tactic, and dozens have been arrested. 

The persistent unrest has frustrated city leaders, including Mr. Wheeler, who has often been a target of protesters. Some Black leaders in the community have also expressed disappointment, suggesting that the predominantly white protest crowd was seizing an opportunity and detracting from the vital efforts needed to reform policing. 

City leaders have tried a variety of tactics to calm the tensions. Mr. Wheeler has pleaded for calm. The city’s police chief resigned. City commissioners have moved to cut some $16 million from the police budget. 

But the protests have continued. 

Mr. Trump has vowed to “dominate” protesters and said last week that he had sent homeland security personnel to Portland because “the locals couldn’t handle it.” 

“It’s a pretty wild group, but you have it in very good control,” he told Mr. Wolf. 

One recent video appeared to show a protester, Donavan La Bella, being struck in the head by an impact munition while he was holding a sign across the street from the federal courthouse, leading to a bloody scene. His mother has told local media that he suffered skull fractures and needed surgery. 

Members of Congress from Oregon have called for an investigation, and Mr. Williams said the encounter had been referred to the Justice Department’s inspector general for further investigation. 

Kelly Simon, the interim legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, said that the alarming federal tactics, such as the unmarked vans, have been used at times to intimidate immigrant communities, and that she worried the use of the tactics was growing. 

“What we’re seeing in Portland should concern everybody in this country,” Ms. Simon said.

Many a Little Makes : A short Story

Many a Little Makes 

By Sarah Shun-lien Bynum The New Yorker

Mickle. I hope I’m texting you at the right number. I tried sending you a message on FB but it seems you don’t go on there anymore. Good for you! I keep meaning to close down my account but then I see a photo of someone’s kid at a march and I get sucked in again. Speaking of which LOVED the video of Rose’s cello recital. I know it was from last year but literal tears when I saw it bc of listening to Bach suites with you when we couldn’t fall asleep remember? 

Rose is such a beautiful accomplished creative young woman and I just wish the kids could meet her they would love each other. They are all so big I can’t believe it. Life out here agrees with them but the bus can feel very small at times and especially when they’re fighting hahahaha. Bark beetles continue to decimate in nightmarish fashion but silver lining my study has been extended six months. Big hole in the canopy now sadly and so much more light coming through so collecting new data on red squirrels and snowshoe hares. Kids complain my hands always smell like peanut butter!!! I tell them not bad as far as occupational hazards go. 

Jon busy doing online portion of reiki certification and fingers crossed will get license when we go home next year. Strange to write that bc here has started to feel like home and I am tbh kind of dreading going back. Quite amazing the resources out there for people in our boat (hahaha BUS). Homeschooling community…wow! Impassioned. Kids are learning Japanese! They wrote a tanks about blue spruce I want to show your mother. TANKA sorry clearly phone doesn’t speak Japanese. 

The texts arrived from a number Mari didn’t recognize. Even the area code was unknown to her, and it didn’t help that she thumbed through the messages in reverse order. But there were only two people in the world who called her by that name, and Imogen’s various phone numbers (N.Y. cell, D.C. cell, office, home) were already saved in her contacts. So it had to be Bree. 

In the sixth grade, on the subject of Bree, Mari’s mother had this to say: three can get complicated. She was talking about the dynamics of female friendship, a topic that Mari did not relish discussing. In general, she found her mother’s warnings reliably wrong but also impossible to forget, like shampoo slogans or camp songs. When, one Friday afternoon in November, she discovered herself lodged between Imogen and Bree in the backseat of a car heading to the mall, this ear worm wriggled to the surface and she thought at her mother: HA. 

They were fine. 

A thin stream of air flowed over them, and the radio played a song they knew most of the words to. Bree was saying that they should buy their tickets before they got food in case the movie sold out, and Imogen was saying that a dog waiting at the corner to cross looked a lot like a larger, fluffier version of her dog, Hamish. They all craned their heads to look at the dog. Mari could jump in at any moment with a funny or pointless comment if it occurred to her, but if it didn’t she didn’t have to say anything at all. 

Imogen had befriended Mari at the beginning of the second grade, when Mari was the only new girl in the class. Years passed and then Bree arrived, along with an assortment of other sixth-grade girls. Out of all of them Imogen chose Bree, for reasons not obvious to Mari. Bree wore eyeglasses with tinted plastic arms that swooped downward in a secretarial way. She had short, brown hair and the long, waistless torso of a dachshund. On the first day of school, she appeared in a teal sweatshirt violently spattered with paint, a top that Mrs. Schmidt said was jazzy. It looked store-bought, not homemade, like something she had saved up for. 

Bree took the trolley to school from a town called Revere with the help of a student-transportation pass that hung from a lanyard around her neck, which she removed every morning and tucked carefully in her book bag as she entered the building. In the locker room, Mari had overheard some girls pronouncing Revere as “Ruh-vee-ah” in order to amuse one another, and this was how she learned that Revere was an undesirable place, inhabited by people who couldn’t tell how thick their accents were. But Bree didn’t say it that way; she spoke quickly and correctly and without any accent at all, participating in class with palpable happiness no matter the subject. She was “bright,” Mari saw early on, which was probably what made her interesting to Imogen. Any girl at their school had to be smart, or at least well-organized, but not many of them, not even a few of them, had an air of intensity. 

To be clear, Bree wasn’t excessively studious or preoccupied with cerebral pursuits, and Imogen and Mari weren’t, either. They didn’t read Russian novels or follow current events or dismantle electronics to figure out how they worked. Together they circled the mall and talked about their teachers and occasionally stopped to go inside a store and touch things that they wanted to buy. They ate swirled frozen yogurt and then watched a blockbuster movie full of French kissing and shoot-outs. But if, for instance, the sight of a botanical rendering of lavender wrapped around a bar of soap should suddenly fill Mari with a rich, heady, Eleanor of Aquitaine feeling, and if later she went home and pulled off the cookbook shelf an illustrated guide to medieval herbs from which she painstakingly copied out on little sheets of paper the properties and uses of yarrow, chamomile, mugwort, and horehound, and then dipped the sheets of paper in tea and dried them outside so as to make them look more like parchment, neither Imogen nor Bree would wonder at it. Not that they would ever do the same; they weren’t excited by herbs. It’s just that they would recognize, wordlessly, the impulse to do so. 

That’s what the three of them had in common. Otherwise, Mari and Bree were short and Imogen was tall. Imogen and Bree were white and Mari was Japanese. Bree lived in Revere and Imogen and Mari did not. Their differences were evenly distributed, yet when Mari glimpsed a reflection of them gliding past a department store’s plate-glass window, she saw with perfect clarity that Imogen belonged to another species altogether, like a wood elf among dwarves, or a human escorting hobbits. Her hair shone in the muted light pouring through the atrium. Her shoulders were pulled back, and her neck was long. When she laughed, she opened her mouth wide, and you could see practically every one of her straight, gleaming teeth. She didn’t have a single cavity. But sometimes her breath up close could smell a little bit sour, a detail you’d have to be her best friend to know, because to the rest of the world she was just a radiant creature passing by, laughing, her head floating well above the other two. 

What did they talk about? 

“They’re making us do the mile run next week.” 

“Who told you?” 

“Coach Bell.” 

“I love Coach Bell. I wish we had her more often.” 

“I can’t do it. I will die. I will collapse from exhaustion, and then they’ll try to revive me on the side of the field and realize I’m dead.” 

“What if we walk? Like speed walk? Or jog very slowly and then walk?” 

“Last year I tried that, but Coach Boudreau threatened me and said she’d make me do the whole mile over again if I didn’t start moving.” 

“Moving with a greater sense of urgency.” 

“That’s why you guys always say that?” 

“She got the second-fastest time in the grade. And she had a cold.” 

“Shannon was so much faster than me, it wasn’t even close.” 

“I don’t like being timed. It makes me feel like a racehorse.” 

“I’m more like a cow. Cows move at their own pace.” 

“We should tell them we’re cows and that running is not in our nature.” 

“Running for a mile. That’s dangerous for a cow.” 

“Don’t say that. You’re not cows. You’re more graceful than cows.” 

And so on. 

Mari hadn’t had a new friend in so long that she had almost forgotten what it was like to go to someone’s house for the first time, the inevitable shock to the senses. The smell, most of all, not unpleasant but unfamiliar. The school year was nearly finished when Bree invited them over, and it turned out that she lived on the right side of a graying clapboard house that had an identical left side, where a different family lived. A flight of concrete stairs rose from the sidewalk, and at its top was a shallow concrete porch, and there stood two front doors, exactly symmetrical even down to their storm-door handles, which meant that one door opened up to the left and the other one to the right. Squashed behind the storm door on the left was a scarecrow holding a sign that said “welcome” in autumn colors. “We don’t talk to them anymore,” Bree whispered as she extracted her lanyard, which in addition to her trolley pass held her house keys. “Long story.” 

She opened the door, and out leaped the smell of her house, indefinable but strong, a little reminiscent of chicken-noodle soup in a can. Soon enough, it went away. Bree had cable TV, tropical fish, and a toilet lid covered in burgundy carpeting. The three of them bargained over which channel they would watch, and somehow it felt easier to be flexible and magnanimous when more than one other party was involved in the negotiations. As they were eating cereal and watching music videos, Bree’s mother appeared, holding Bree’s younger sister, Bevin, by the hand—and although Bree’s mother looked about the right age for Bevin, who was four, she didn’t look like she belonged to Bree, despite having a lot of the same soft, unformed features. With her ponytail and scuffed-up sneakers, she looked more like a big sister, like the eldest in a family of sisters fending for themselves after their parents died in a tragic car accident. Or maybe Mari’s and Imogen’s parents were simply old. Mari couldn’t recall seeing any of them wearing tennis shoes while not playing tennis. “Make yourself at home, girls,” Bree’s mother said to them, with strange formality, and ushered Bevin upstairs for a bath. 

Darkness fell, and Bree suggested baking a cake. She made it sound like the idea had only just occurred to her, but in the kitchen she pulled out the bowl and the hand mixer and the measuring cups and the cake mix from a single cabinet, all ready to go, and Mari suddenly filled with so much tenderness that her eyes watered. The mix was Duncan Hines and the flavor was, mysteriously, “yellow.” At Mari’s house, what passed for cake was a nearly flavorless sponge that her mother bought at the Japanese bakery and then urged guests to try, assuring them that it was “very light” and “not too sweet.” When Bree dumped the yellow mix into the bowl, it sent up a mushroom cloud of synthetic sugariness that caused Mari to choke. Imogen perched on the counter and sliced a plastic spatula through the air, as if felling enemies. She didn’t try to contribute anything. She looked on good-naturedly as Mari and Bree followed the box’s directions, and when the cake pans, trembling with batter, were slid into the oven, she held out her arms to receive the empty mixing bowl. 

“Oh, nice,” she said. “You left a lot on the sides.” Without hesitating, she sank the spatula into the bowl, circled it around, lifted it back up, and inserted its entire drippy width into her mouth. It came out clean. “Share,” Bree said. Imogen scraped the bowl again and Mari watched the slathered spatula head disappear inside Bree’s mouth. 

The third time Imogen dipped into the bowl, she presented the spatula to Mari. 

“No, thanks,” Mari said lightly, and drew back. She deliberately did not say what she wanted to say, what was foremost in her mind, what was exactly the thing her mother had spoken ominously of: salmonella. Because her mother was usually wrong. Her mother, for instance, had assumed that, just because Bree was eight years older than her sister, there had to be “different fathers,” as she put it. Something about the tactful tone she used made Mari want to strangle her. “It’s the same dad,” Mari had announced in a clipped voice. “And don’t worry, him and her mom are married. And, yes, she will be at home the whole time we’re there.” 

“He and her mom,” her own mother had answered, at which point Mari had covered her ears and let out a moan. 

Yet three large eggs had plopped glisteningly into that batter, three large raw eggs probably teeming with bacteria, and just the sight of the yellowness slicking the spatula was making Mari feel queasy. That and the sickly sweet smell. And the buzzy fluorescent lights in Bree’s kitchen. And all the saliva being passed around freely. 

By now her friends were looking at each other and smiling. They’d seen right through her airy demurral. Panther-like, Imogen hopped down from the counter while Bree closed in on Mari from the other side. 

“Just try some,” Imogen murmured. “You’ll like it.” 

She handed the spatula off to Bree but held onto the bowl, dragging the length of her finger along its interior and then extracting it, coated. She slid the finger into her mouth. 

“It’s the best part,” Bree said. She swam the spatula closer to Mari’s face. “Trust us. It’s delicious.” 

“I don’t want to,” Mari said from under the collar of her T-shirt, which she’d pulled up over her nose. 

“Just a little,” Imogen said. “Just a little tiny taste.” Bree stuck out her tongue and delicately pressed the spatula to its tip. “See?” Imogen continued. “It’ll be that tiny. You’ll barely taste it.” 

Mouth ajar, Bree darted her tongue in and out, in and out, in and out, very fast. Where did she learn to do that? It looked disturbing, like in a Prince kind of way. A yellow droplet sat at the end of her flickering tongue. Mari twisted her head aside. 

“You’re pressuring me.” Her voice was muffled beneath the T-shirt. “I don’t like eating batter or being pressured or throwing up all night and getting hospitalized.” 

“Who said anything about throwing up?” 

She yanked her shirt back down and glared at them. “Hello—salmonella?” 

Somehow it sounded less insane when her mother said it. Imogen and Bree stared at her, speechless. Then they both cackled. “Salmonella?” they repeated. “Salmonella?” Their eyes glittered. A look of silent understanding passed among the three of them. 

With a gasp, Mari shoved past Imogen and dove toward the TV room. They flew after her, unleashed, made swift by their socks on the linoleum. Over and around the leather sectional they chased her, careful to avoid the glowing fish tank, no one shrieking or laughing because, upstairs, Bevin was already asleep. Just their heavy breathing filled the room, and when the two of them finally pinned her to the floor, she could feel how all of their chests were heaving rapidly, in unison, like they had run a mile together with matching strides. 

“Chariots of Fire” was one of her top-five favorite films. Though she didn’t like to run herself, the sight of British men running was very moving. Whenever they sang “Jerusalem” in morning meeting, she and Imogen and Bree would entertain themselves by surreptitiously acting out the words: they would mime the seizing of the bow, and the spear, and the countenance divine shining forth upon the hills, and they would attack the low note in “arrows of de-sire ” with fake solemnity. But even as they joked around, Mari found the song unspeakably beautiful. That ardent phrase—“Bring me my chariot of fire!”—stirred her. 

When the cake batter touched her face, it was not cold, as she thought it might be; it felt only thick and wet. Her eyes were closed at this point. And her mouth, too, of course. Nothing—not Duncan Hines, or egg-borne bacteria, or anything not her own—would cross the threshold. Her lips were squeezed so tightly that they tingled. No one was getting in or out: she kept herself intact, impervious to the panting weight of Imogen and Bree on top of her. With satisfaction, she felt their bodies slacken, the energy dissolving—they were thwarted, and there was nothing to do now but smear batter on Mari’s face. Even with her eyes shut, she could tell when it was Imogen doing it and when it was Bree. Like in “Chariots of Fire,” where the two men ran extremely fast but for different reasons: the Scottish one because he believed so much in God, the Jewish one because he wanted to fit in and show that he was better than all the anti-Semites he met in college. The perfunctory swipes across her cheek—that was Imogen, having already lost interest in the whole thing—but in the precisely centered dabs on her forehead, her nose, her mouth, her chin, she felt the warmth of Bree’s attention, her thoroughness and care. 

After they hoisted themselves off her, Mari made her way unsteadily toward the hall bathroom, eyes slitted and face sticky, and it was here that she caught a whiff of the cake baking in the oven. She had never smelled anything like it before. Initially, it reminded her of the cloying scent of Play-Doh, which she had always hated, and in fact hated so much that when she was small she’d refused to touch the stuff, but as she inhaled again she found something spreading underneath the sweetness, a smell similar to that of butter and eggs and vanilla and flour but not quite the real thing, a smell that was artificial but also intoxicating and somehow more intoxicating for being fake. She didn’t have to taste it to know ahead of time how much she was going to like this cake. How moist it would be and how warm, how its faint chemical aftertaste would make her go back for more. Wiping off her face above the sink, she decided to tell her mother that from now on the only kind of cake she wanted for her birthday was yellow cake from a box. 

In the middle of seventh grade, Mari heard the Smiths for the first time, on a late-night radio show that played the day’s most-requested songs. She had to spend extra money when buying the band’s record, because it was imported from the U.K.; it had a Dutch-blue cover with a black-and-white photograph on it of a handsome man in profile, in a tank top—a man who turned out not to be one of the Smiths, despite a superficial resemblance to their bass player. Printed tinily on the inside record sleeve was every word to every song, which is how she learned that the correct words were “I am the son and the heir” and not “I am the sun and the air,” as she’d originally thought. At first, she felt unsophisticated for having heard it this way, but then it occurred to her that maybe the ambiguity was deliberate, a mark of genius. 

After Mari bought the record, the Smiths became the most important part of her life. She made friends with a girl in her class named Melanie, because Melanie was the only other person she knew who had heard of them. For Mari’s birthday, Melanie wrote a pretend letter in which Johnny Marr, the guitarist, declared his love for her. Speaking as herself, Melanie pointed out that the similarity between Mari’s first name and Johnny’s last name couldn’t be entirely coincidental. 

Imogen and Bree didn’t have strong feelings either way about the Smiths—Imogen liked soft rock with soaring choruses, and Bree listened to the kind of dance music played on Kiss 108—but still they were Mari’s best friends. She went back and forth between trying to convert Imogen and Bree to her excellent taste and wanting to keep the Smiths as something sacredly her own. But how could you help but share that which took up so much space in your mind? She talked about the band daily, and, although her friends wouldn’t necessarily know a Smiths song if it hit them over the head, they could recite the names and instruments of the band members, and could recognize them in photos; they now knew that Manchester was a city not only in New Hampshire but also in Northern England, that there was nothing Morrissey relished more than going to a stationery shop and sniffing envelopes. They trailed behind Mari and took turns carrying her book bag as she drifted down the dim aisles of Paine Brothers, inhaling, grazing the reams of paper with her fingertips, attempting through her senses to transport her soul elsewhere. 

When that didn’t work, they went across the street to get pizza. Each of them could order for the others: Bree always got sausage-and-mushroom with a medium-sized Sprite. Imogen liked Hawaiian, her favorite meat product being Canadian bacon, but Dino’s didn’t offer that by the slice; you had to order a whole pizza. For just a slice, she’d take pepperoni, as long as there wasn’t too much oil pooling in the pepperoni cups. Mari had stopped eating animals and wanted only two cheese slices and a cup of water, which was free. Without needing to confer, they headed to the booth in the back corner, so that Bree could gaze up at the wood-veneer wall and enjoy the signed photograph of the baseball player who looked like Bruce Boxleitner, star of “Scarecrow and Mrs. King.” That was her favorite TV show, just as Imogen’s was “Jeopardy!,” just as Mari’s was “Masterpiece Theatre.” 

The facts in which they were fluent could fill a three-drawer file cabinet: age at which ears were pierced, history of broken bones and origins of scars, score on most recent math test, recurring bad dream, favorite words in French, despised body parts, last book read, secret source of pride, pet peeves, pet names, scents of deodorant and hair conditioner. 

There were also things about one another that they didn’t know. 

For example: Mari got her period in the sixth grade, right before she turned twelve. By the time she exited the bathroom—sobered, walking strangely, feeling diapered—her mother had already placed calls to her father (he was at work) and to both of her grandmothers (California, Ohio) to tell them the news. From that moment on, Mari didn’t speak of her period to anyone. Discreetly, she carried the necessary implements in an unassuming cotton pouch that looked like a mouse. She had found it in the top drawer of her mother’s dresser, a home to scarves and handkerchiefs and the occasional purposeless gift from relatives in Japan. It was an abstract, teardrop-shaped mouse, with a few inches of silk cord extending from the bottom and, where the tip of its nose would be, a single snap. With this snap as the only form of closure on an otherwise open-mouthed mouse, the pouch was not capable of safely holding much—not money or makeup and certainly not jewelry, nothing small. But Mari discovered that it did well enough with pads, and, in fact, the pads made the mouse look plump, almost like a stuffed toy, and soon the sight of it nestled in her book bag ceased to cause her any embarrassment, so that eventually, a year later, when she had graduated to tampons, she kept these along with her pads inside the mouse, which by then had lost its tail. 

One winter afternoon, as the seventh graders were packing up their binders in the final minutes before the bell rang, Mari’s book bag tipped over onto the floor, and the force of the fall sent the tailless mouse sailing out of her bag like a missile, nose first; a single slender-sized tampon came shooting out of the mouse’s open mouth. It was like one of those fireworks that explodes only to reveal that there’s another, smaller explosion inside it. The tampon slid across the homeroom floor without resistance, and Mari watched its journey in frozen horror. It didn’t make the slightest difference that only girls went to her school. Girls in her class thought that periods were disgusting: see how someone had tortured Holly Maynard by leaving a used-looking pad, colored red with a felt-tip marker, on the seat of her chair. 

Yet three rows ahead of Mari was Bree’s solid dachshund body, which happened to be bending down patiently to retrieve a highlighter from under her desk just as Mari’s tampon came gliding toward her; she scooped it up, tucked it inside the sleeve of her sweatshirt, and sat back up without glancing around to see where it might have come from. Mari dropped onto her knees to recapture the mouse, and Bree bent over again to pick up the highlighter for real, and there among the legs of chairs and desks and classmates their eyes met. Nodding at the cotton pouch clutched in Mari’s hand, Bree mouthed, “I have it.” 

After the last bell, they found themselves laughing uncontrollably in the empty restroom across from the admissions office. Bree had Mari’s tampon and she also had her period—not right then but in life—and she also had got hers the year before. In February. Only weeks after Mari. How could they be such utter idiots? Their laughter made them hold onto each other for balance. “Remember when I said that the gyros from lunch were giving me a stomachache?” Bree asked. “That was cramps!” Mari was laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe. To think that they had been suffering silently, side by side, this whole time: it felt like both the saddest and the funniest thing that had ever happened to them. As Bree wiped her eyes on her sweatshirt, she asked, “Are we going to tell Imogen?” but before she had even finished the question she was already saying, at the same time as Mari, “No.” 

It was hard to imagine Imogen having bodily functions. Of course, they had on countless occasions heard her peeing in the next stall over, but the girl who emerged a few seconds later appeared not responsible for the sound. Her bathroom at home was spotless: on the sink sat a cake of soap, a boar-bristle brush, a tube of baking-soda toothpaste. The porcelain had a lovely soft look to it, owing to age and to abrasive cleaners. A tarnished silver baby cup held Imogen’s toothbrush, and though it looked like an antique from the Victorian era, like something you’d find inside a glass case, she used it every morning and night when brushing her teeth. On its rim was a pale crescent of mineral residue. 

Imogen’s house was full of such objects. There was a low-slung leather rhinoceros, long enough to sit on, with “Liberty of London” stamped on the underside of its ear. There was a needlepoint sampler hanging on the wall that said “Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore / And that’s what parents were created for.” There was a collection of Edward Gorey books—not the big paperback compilations that Mari owned, but original editions, of varying small sizes, with jewel-colored book jackets—“The Doubtful Guest,” “The Hapless Child,” “The Epiplectic Bicycle,” “The Glorious Nosebleed.” There was a zither and a tabla. A hand-carved bellows beside the fireplace. Dark-blue candles, in pewter candlesticks, that were lit every night at dinner. Also a candle snuffer. 

Suffusing everything was the faded smell of woodsmoke from the fireplace, and the stronger smell of eucalyptus branches in earthenware jugs. On top of that, when he came in wet from outside, the musty smell of Hamish. 

Hamish was Imogen’s cairn terrier, and she also had a brother named Nicholas. He was older than Imogen by two and a half years. He was large and shaggy and beautiful, not an athlete but the co-captain of the debate team at his school. For Mari, who didn’t have siblings, his presence was slightly stupefying. If they encountered each other in the kitchen, he would greet her with an electric smile and a booming, “Hey you!” but then have nothing more to say. They would go about their business in cordial silence. Wanting to feel like Johnny Marr, she once asked Nicholas if he would show her how to play a chord on his guitar, and after a strenuous minute of wrestling her hand into position, he finally said, “Huh. You’ve kind of got stubby fingers, don’t you.” 

When Bree first became friends with them, she was unrestrained on the subject of Nicholas. She embarrassed both Imogen and Mari by acting ridiculous as soon as he left the room: shaking her head in disbelief, fanning her face with her hand. Eventually she caught on and cut it out, or at least she stopped doing it in front of them. But that didn’t mean her worshipful feelings had changed. At school, during midday lulls, Melanie liked to liven things up by going around the lunch table and making each girl disclose the identity of her crush, and the moment it was her turn Bree would pause, look down at her tray, try not to smile. “No one,” would be her faltering response, a performance that was tedious for Mari to watch. She could only imagine how bad it was for Imogen. 

Yet Imogen continued to invite them both—not actually invite, because inviting was a nicety no longer needed, but simply to accept that on any given weekend Bree and Mari would be coming over. By the eighth grade, they had reached an unspoken agreement that, among the three houses, Imogen’s was the one they preferred—the closest to school, the most comfortable, the coziest, her parents visibly amused by their enthusiasms. The pantry at Imogen’s house was kept magically full. Every Friday afternoon, they would find it restocked with the snacks they liked most: cheese-flavored popcorn, kettle-cooked potato chips, the dark-chocolate biscuits with the picture of the French schoolboy pressed into them. No oranges or bananas looking tired in a fruit bowl on the counter, but a basket of washed strawberries chilling in the refrigerator, or freshly cut cubes of pineapple—which they wouldn’t hesitate to help themselves to, feeling healthy in advance of phoning in their order at Dino’s. 

Imogen’s father didn’t complain about driving them to the video-rental place, where the decision-making process was long and difficult, Mari going off on her own to comb through the old titles, in search of “A Taste of Honey” or “Billy Liar” or anything else about growing up working-class in the North of England, and Imogen and Bree tracking her down in the back of the store to say that the only black-and-white movie they would consent to watching was “Psycho.” Mari was in the thick of developing her sensibility, an essentially solitary endeavor, yet she liked doing so within earshot of familiar voices in the comedy section a few aisles away. 

She was not alone in pursuing private, ongoing projects. It had become impossible to deny the fact that Bree’s appearance was changing. The glasses were gone: her parents had finally relented and deemed her ready for soft contacts. Her hair, which she’d been growing out, turned blondish overnight—or “Sunkist,” as she described it jokingly, “like the soda.” She corrected anyone who said she’d dyed it, pointing out that lemon juice is all-natural and actually good for you. Though she remained as short as Mari, she had grown confoundingly slim, and was now behaving like a thin person—wearing tops with spaghetti straps, slicing off the legs of her old jeans—and while Mari tried not to take it personally, she did experience an occasional pang of abandonment. “Cow” no longer applied in the affectionate plural. 

Not all of Bree’s self-improvements were successful. One morning, she arrived at school looking different in a way that Mari couldn’t pinpoint. 

“It’s my eyebrows,” Bree said. “You hold a pencil along the side of your nose and where the pencil meets your eyebrow, that’s where you start plucking.” 

She took a yellow pencil from inside her desk and pressed it up to her cheek to demonstrate. Now Mari saw what was strange about Bree’s face. She asked, “Are you supposed to pluck from that side of the pencil or this side?” and touched the raw gap between Bree’s brows to show where she meant. 

“Ohhhhhhhh.” Bree exhaled, letting the pencil fall. “I wondered why my eyebrows didn’t look like the picture. You’re saying they’re too far apart.” She smiled bravely at Mari. “But that’s what makeup is for, right? I can always fill them in.” 

The rigors of change did not discourage Bree. It required trial and error, dedication, regular servicing. She had taken to shaving not only her legs and armpits but also the tops of her feet, her underwear line, and, rather weirdly, Mari thought, her forearms. She had figured out a way to isolate the body part she most despised—what she coldly called her double chin but was really just a little softness, a minor lack of definition—through a series of muscle contractions. “It’s like sucking in your stomach,” she explained, “but instead I’m sucking in the area under my chin.” 

Mari confessed that she hadn’t noticed, and that, in her opinion, Bree’s chin, her jawline, looked perfectly fine. 

“That’s because I’m sucking in all the time,” Bree said. “I’m making it look fine.” 

Imogen usually didn’t contribute to these conversations. There wasn’t any disapproval in her silence, or squirminess, and she didn’t act bored. It just felt as if she had politely stepped away for a moment. In fact, she seemed to have excused herself altogether from the fray—the consuming, frantic efforts of creating a self. She still looked like the girl who had befriended Mari in second grade, and Bree in sixth—same heavy curtain of hair, same orderly teeth and narrow body and marvellous skin—except that she was taller now, of course. She liked particular things but was not given to obsessions. She was known for being good at sports, singing in a clear contralto, and leading the student council with Cabinet-level skill. She was curious about other people. She could do complex math problems in her head. She had a delighted-sounding, unrestrained, bell-like laugh. When Mari stopped to think about it, her feeling of wonder was undimmed: How did she ever get so lucky as to have Imogen as her friend? 

But by the eighth grade there was something about Imogen that Mari couldn’t quite put her finger on—that refused to be asked about, that was at once much bigger and subtler than the accident involving Bree’s eyebrows—something that had to do with her sense of Imogen staging an imperceptible retreat. Imperceptible, because she was still firmly at the center of everything: a school day felt desultory without her, the weekend shapeless if not spent at her house. Yet Imogen occupied this position while also making herself absent. Sometimes literally—one Friday afternoon, she startled Mari and Bree by appearing in her kitchen clad in the gym clothes she had brought home over the weekend to be washed. She passed right by them—they were standing in the pantry, opening a new box of Petit Écoliers—and headed for the back door. “Where are you going?” they called after her. “Running,” she called back. “On your own?” Mari asked incredulously. “For fun?” But Imogen didn’t hear her; the door had already swung shut. 

Still, she was Imogen; she commiserated and argued and teased; she planned birthday parties; she initiated cookie-eating contests; she filled the car or the locker room or the kitchen with her laugh. At the same time, she was elsewhere, and Mari couldn’t tell if her gaze was turned inward or directed at a spot so far in the distance that it was beyond Mari’s ability to see. 

For several months, Mari endured the uncertainty of whether she and her friends would go on to high school together. Life as she knew it felt suddenly provisional. Bree said that her family was waiting to see if the school would give them more financial aid, and then there was the question of where Bevin would be going, the possibility of added tuition. “Can’t they just put her in public school until sixth grade,” Mari asked. “Like they did with you?” Imogen’s having a sibling was also proving to be a problem, with her parents making her apply to the boarding school where Nicholas was going to be a senior, on the tiresome principle of exploring one’s options. “But why be in someone else’s shadow?” Mari said. As for Mari, she didn’t want to be the only one remaining for the duration. She was threatening to enroll at her enormous local high school and take her chances on getting into the alternative program where students voted on things and called teachers by their first names—a threat that her mother failed to treat at all seriously. 

In the end, Mari and Imogen and Bree decided to stay at their school, a relief that also felt slightly like a prison sentence. Four more years of all girls—and despite the promise of coed leadership conferences and community-service outings, or the annual spring musical with their so-called brother school, this felt like a long time. 

The question of how and where to meet boys began to circulate among their classmates, and, resourcefully, Bree started the summer by finding one in her backyard. Mari and Imogen were sitting cross-legged on the floor of Imogen’s room, eating frozen fruit bars, when Bree told them. His name was Alex, he was fifteen, and he lived in the other half of her house. 

“You don’t understand,” she said. “My parents aren’t like yours. When I say they’ll kill me, I’m not talking metaphorically. They will kill me.” 

“But all he said was hi,” Mari clarified. 

“And smiled,” Bree said. “And then took his shirt off.” 

“That’s something I always want to do,” Imogen said, “when it’s hot out and I’m playing basketball.” 

“The thing is,” Bree said, “he hadn’t even started playing yet.” 

Mari had been in Bree’s backyard only a couple of times, because it wasn’t really a backyard, more like a paved-over area where cars could be parked. At one end, a basketball net had been erected. Two wide wooden porches hung off the back of the house and overlooked the parked cars, or, when there weren’t any cars, a makeshift half court. The porch on the first floor belonged to Bree’s family, and it was where they kept the hibachi and Bevin’s Big Wheel, along with her old stroller and play castle and other abandoned baby equipment. 

“How did you not notice him before?” Mari asked. 

“I did. He was just shorter then and a little chunky. There’s four of them. My mom calls them the brood. You should hear them coming down the stairs in the morning.” Bree wiped a drop of melted strawberry from the hairless expanse of her leg. “He’s not the oldest but he’s the tallest. Over the winter he got tall. And now he’s practicing all the time out in the back. Not with the other kids—by himself.” 

Mari waited to see if Imogen wanted to say something. She herself was finding it hard to speak in the breathless tone that Bree seemed to expect of them. Finally, she said, “I don’t think there’s anything for your parents to be worried about. That’s normal, isn’t it, for a neighbor to say hello. I say hello to our neighbors practically every day.” 

Bree smiled, almost sadly, at Mari’s vast innocence. “This is different,” she said. “Completely different.” 

“Because he took his shirt off?" 

“No,” Bree said. “Because of the way he looked at me.” 

“And how was that?” (Mari didn’t add “exactly,” but she wanted to.) Bree couldn’t put it into words, she said. It was just a feeling. A back and forth. A spark. She frowned at the feebleness of her phrases. “This sounds arbitrary,” she said, “but it’s sort of like when you’re about to take a test and you turn it over and read the first question and immediately you know the answer, and you know it’s right? It’s that feeling in your chest when you know you know it.” 

Mari felt her own chest growing tight as Bree spoke. She tossed her popsicle stick in the vicinity of the wastebasket; unexpectedly, it went in. She tried summoning up the reason that Bree’s family no longer spoke to their neighbors. Was it the noise? Or something about a dog? A pitbull? Nor could she quite remember where they came from, though she was pretty sure it was somewhere that started with a “C.” They were either Cape Verdean or Colombian. Or maybe Cambodian. 

Bree was saying, “I could tell from the way he acted that he could feel me looking at him.” 

“He started missing the basket?” Imogen asked. 

“Nothing that obvious. Though he did miss a few. It was more like he started walking and moving around in a different way, more slowly than before but also with more energy—” 

Mari laughed abruptly. “You put a new spring in his step?” 

“It was like he was slowly vibrating when he moved.” Bree’s voice was far away, her face dignified. “And after he smiled at me, he never looked over at me. Not once. Not even when it would have been natural to glance in my direction. He made himself not look. And that’s how I could tell.” 

“Well, just try not to get pregnant,” Mari said flatly. 

But Bree was too happy, too exalted, to even roll her eyes at this remark. 

Bree didn’t get pregnant that summer, but she did end up having sex, and more than once. When Mari found out, her numb first thought was, But I was only joking. The acceleration induced a sort of whiplash: how was it possible that Mari and Imogen, who between them had never kissed a single boy, or held hands with a boy, who didn’t really know any boys, had a best friend who was now experienced at having sex? 

Bree told them nothing at the time. Throughout the summer, she offered up a handful of distracting details: notes written and exchanged, with the play castle as a mailbox; late-night meetings by the trash cans, parents not registering a new readiness to take out the garbage; brief conversations on the back-porch steps; spasms at the sound of a screen door swinging open. Mari imagined a forbidden love unfolding chastely in a Revere that was gritty and poorly lit but in a picturesque way, as if Bree had been cast in a community-theatre production of “West Side Story.” 

The whole time, however, actual real-life sex was being had. And not with Alex, the vaguely brown boy next door, but with Nicholas. Nicholas Pickett. Imogen’s brother was home for the summer before his senior year, and Bree had sex with him. Or he had sex with Bree. Even years later Mari wasn’t sure, when forming the sentence in her head, who to make the subject and who the object of the preposition. 

Imogen’s house didn’t have an ordinary backyard: what stretched behind her house was more like a woodland garden, everything shady and dense, with only a small, irregular patch of lawn. A little creek ran through the greenery, and, though you couldn’t always see it, you could always hear its trickling sound. The creek was so narrow that you could easily step over it, but nevertheless a low stone bridge had been built. Moss grew in abundance, also ferns and hostas. A mass of rhododendron turned different shades of pink in the spring. Knee-high statues rose up at random from the undergrowth: an upright frog with arms akimbo, two cherubs grappling, a rabbit absorbed in reading a book. In the sun-speckled depths of the garden stood an obelisk and several urns. 

When Imogen and Mari were much younger, they played there after school. Back then, there was less statuary and a little more wilderness, also a primitive tree house and a rope swing and a short zip line. Mari was afraid of heights, afraid of insects, wary of dirt, alert to poison oak, always dodging spiderwebs whether they were there or not. The only pants she owned had an elastic waist and were made of velour. Yet Imogen didn’t despair of her. She remained cheerfully deaf to worries and complaints. Unflappably, she coached Mari over boulders and under fallen branches and through soggy patches. She didn’t sigh when Mari lost her balance or needed to stop and catch her breath. Despite Mari’s hopelessness, Imogen kept inviting her over to play, week after week—months passing, and then years. 

Mari would not forget it: the feel of Imogen’s bony grip on her wrist as she pulled her up through the rough opening in the tree-house floor. 

The summer before high school began, the girls barely ventured out to the backyard. Maybe once or twice to hose off their feet or to find mint to put into a pitcher of lemonade. Mari’s second attempt at smoking occurred early one morning, alone, beneath the crabapple tree. After swimming in the neighbors’ pool, sometimes they draped their bathing suits on the Adirondack chairs in the backyard to make them dry faster, but usually they just hung them up in the bathroom. Bree always seemed to forget where she’d left her clothes and so had to run through the house in her damp bikini searching for them, squealing with cold. 

Because it was summer and they were going into high school, they could sleep over not only on Fridays but on other days of the week as well. On one such night, Mari stumbled upon Bree pushing open the French doors from the outside, stepping into the living room from the garden. She scared Mari nearly half to death. What on earth had she been doing out there? It was late—the middle of the night—Mari didn’t know what time it was. She had awoken with a terrible thirst that only not-from-concentrate orange juice could quench, and was making her silent way to the kitchen. 

For a moment Bree didn’t seem to see her. Her face was blank, and she was barefoot, wearing the oversized T-shirt she had put on before bed. 

“You gave me a heart attack!” Mari whispered, and Bree jumped, sucked in her breath. 

“What are you doing up?” Mari asked, but, before Bree could answer, a large shape appeared behind her in the doorway. It was Nicholas, dressed in his regular clothes, the same khaki shorts and wrinkled white Oxford he’d worn during the day. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. 

“Hi Nicholas,” Mari said automatically. And then, stupidly, “I was just getting some orange juice. I think I might be coming down with something.” 

The words issued forth without her thinking. As if she were apologizing, as if she were the one who had interrupted or disturbed. 

And this would be the moment when she knew. Without needing it spelled out for her, without questions and answers. She would take it all in—the late hour, the naked feet, the two bodies standing in the darkness, one right behind the other—and she would understand. She would see them, and she would know, and Bree would know that she knew. The two of them knowing it together. 

Yet this wasn’t how it happened. This was solely the fantasy that Mari concocted—her unwitting discovery, her reservoir of intuition. A look shared between her and Bree in the shadowy living room, followed by an understanding beyond her years. 

Since you’re not on FB I don’t know if you saw but no small feat getting bus up and running. Jon very handy to be fair but I gravely underestimated. The moral is never buy school bus off Craigslist! 

So first it was engine that needed to be replaced. No big surprise there. Otherwise bus would still be in use right? But who knew diesel engines cost A LOT. Like down payment on a house a lot. Then brakes failed inspection. FYI bus has air brakes not hydraulic brakes and air brakes are of course way more! Imogen literally saved our lives by paying for complete overhaul new compressor new lines new valves the WORKS. Plus labor. She wanted everything all new. Our third day a deer jumps out right in front of us and was I ever glad for brand new brake system! Whole process one miracle after another. Stunning moments of kindness from unforeseen sources. Largely reaffirmed my faith in humanity which was at low ebb for multiple reasons as I’m sure you can relate. It was Jon who after much arguing and defensiveness overcame my reluctance re fundraising page. He said people want to help and website just makes it easier to do so and though I hate to admit when he’s right he was right. 

Mari didn’t stumble upon Nicholas and Bree in the middle of the night. And at no point that summer did Bree confide in her. Mari had to be told—by Melanie, of all people—while flipping through the new-imports bin at a record store near one of the unavoidable universities. They were music shopping before the start of school. Melanie didn’t break down but seemed instead to expand under the weight of her conscience. Her eyes welled up as she told Mari, but Mari remained stony. It was only when her mother picked her up at the end of the afternoon that she slammed the passenger door shut and wept. 

Her mother, who was a tentative driver to begin with, drove home extra slowly, as if steering a small craft through a squall. Mari had resolved not to say anything, but that resolve was hard to maintain once she was inside the warm hull of her mother’s Toyota. She couldn’t identify what hurt more: the fact that Bree had had sex; or that she had had sex with their best friend’s brother; or that somehow with all her dumb vamping she’d actually won the attention of golden, unattainable Nicholas; or that Mari had to hear about it secondhand from a random person like Melanie. It was like probing for the fracture in a limb that was alight with pain. As she sobbed, her mother kept asking mundane questions: “Is Bree fifteen now?” (No, fourteen, her birthday was in April), and “Does she still live in Revere?” (Yes, obviously), and “Remind me, how old is Nicholas?” (Sixteen! They had that big party with the tent; you were there. Last fall). Questions with easy answers, the sort Coach Bell would ask when you banged heads with another girl while playing field hockey in P.E. class. 

At home, Mari’s mother guided her through the front door, made a pot of tea, and then parted and brushed her hair. Once she finished both braids, she said quietly, “You have to tell Imogen, and I have to tell her parents.” She was standing behind Mari, who was sitting in a kitchen chair. Mari didn’t see why Imogen’s parents needed to know anything, and said so, but her mother then began to undo and rebraid her hair as she explained the meanings of various legal terms: “in loco parentis,” “liability.” When she stepped from behind Mari’s chair to turn on the faucet, Mari saw the look on her face. She feared for an awful moment that her mother was about to cry. But she didn’t; she rinsed out the tea cups and scrubbed the pans left soaking in the sink and paused only to look up briefly and say in mid-thought, to either Mari or her own reflection in the window, “They opened their home to her.” 

Imogen looked so plainly delighted when asked to return to the tree house that Mari felt like a monster. “We haven’t been up here in ages,” Imogen said, and stretched her arms up, oblivious to the accumulation of cobwebs. “Look! I’m hitting the ceiling now.” 

But, as Mari talked, Imogen’s arms sank down to her sides. She bent over so she could rest her elbows on the filthy edge of the window, and she allowed her sheet of hair to fall forward and hide her face. Mari knew that she was crying, but she also knew not to put her arm around her. When Imogen finally spoke, she didn’t turn to look at her: “This whole time I thought Alex was the one she liked.” 

Her voice had a hitch in it, and that made Mari start to cry. 

“I thought so, too. I mean, that’s what she told us. But maybe she was just using him as a cover? I don’t know if there was anything really there.” 

Imogen was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Maybe she wanted to talk about what she was feeling without having to say who the person was.” 

Mari nodded tearfully. “Right. Like a decoy.” 

Imogen continued to stare out the window. 

Another possible explanation suddenly reared up in Mari’s mind, and she felt her stomach lurch. Maybe Alex had been not decoy but practice. Like a warmup. Low stakes, no pressure. Vaguely brown, formerly chubby Alex. Like shooting baskets in the backyard before the big game. She shuddered. She could never say that aloud. 

“You know what?” Imogen said. “I really wish they hadn’t taken down the zip line.” 

Mari joined her in gazing at the yard. Below them spread a low layer of broad, glossy foliage. It looked like a shimmering green carpet floating just a few inches above the ground, lush but uncomfortable to lie down in. In, not on, because of course the carpet wasn’t solid but made of large, stiff-leaved plants that would crowd in on you or get crushed under you if you were to try to have sex in their midst. This was part of the strangeness of Mari’s fantasy—there really was no welcoming spot in this woodland garden for two people looking to have sex. Or at least sex according to how she imagined it. To her mind it required a reasonably comfortable surface, one that was by necessity horizontal. Never in a million years would she consider the following possible: on the hood of a Volvo; folded over a table; standing on one foot, pushed up soundlessly against a bathroom door. 

How did they begin the conversation with Bree? 

“We need to talk to you. About something serious.” 

Or: “Melanie told us.” 

Or: “Will you close the door?” 

Or: “I don’t even know what to say right now.” 

All plausible, but none certain. None sounding even faintly familiar. However hard Mari tried, she couldn’t remember. Not what was said, or where. The total blankness made her wonder if a conversation had ever happened. Did Imogen speak alone with Bree? Was Mari not a party to it? Did parents step in and make arrangements among themselves, with the thought of sparing them the pain of talking? Or was Mari’s mere presence during this conversation ignoble enough that her memory now refused to summon it? All plausible, too. 

What Mari did know was that whatever happened in such a conversation, however the information was conveyed, Bree would remember. She would be able to recall every detail of it clearly. 

Just as Mari could recall where she and Melanie had been standing in the record store that August afternoon; what Melanie was wearing (a saggy blue cardigan over her Buzzcocks shirt); what they had just eaten (roll-up sandwiches with tahini dressing); what was playing on the store’s speakers (Nick Cave doing a cover of “Hey Joe”). 

Another detail, impossible to forget: the phrase that Nicholas had pressed into her, hotly and permanently, a phrase describing her mother. During one of the phone calls between her mother and Imogen’s, Nicholas had picked up the receiver in another part of the house—an interruption that wouldn’t even be possible now—and spoken at her mother furiously, in the relentless, punishing style of a seasoned debater. Afterward, she’d walked into Mari’s room looking dazed. “He called me, among many other unpleasant things,” her mother had said, sinking onto the bed, “a busybody. A pathetic busybody who wants to make everyone else as miserable as I am.” 

Acooling of relations ensued, but despite what Bree later claimed, it couldn’t be rightly called a banishment. The interlude resembled more of a breather, a period of recovery, than an actual estrangement. After their talk in the tree house, Mari had pictured Imogen and her moving side by side down the school hallways, heads bowed like novitiates, with Bree maintaining a respectful distance, back turned to them, as she spun and spun the combination dial on her locker. And for the first weeks of high school they did give her some space. But not unkindly. They continued to exchange smiles with her; they offered to lend her a pen when she needed one; they waved and said hello, liked her new jacket, laughed when she said something funny in class, held the door open for her. 

Being a duo again brought with it the ease of travelling light. Maybe Mari’s mother hadn’t been completely wrong about two being less complicated. On some days it felt good, the way that depriving yourself during Lent felt good, the invigoration of being disciplined and lean. But on some days it was terrible not having Bree at her side, and Mari walked through the school building feeling wobbly and exposed, buffeted by air, as if riding along bumpily in a jeep without a door. In the lunchroom, she watched from the corner of her eye as Bree made forays into other groups—for a while she joined the musically gifted girls, the ones who spent their Saturdays at the conservatory, and then she seemed to hit it off with a new girl named Pam, who lived in a town even farther away than Revere. There were also the two Alisons, whom Bree had always liked and been chatty with. She never sat by herself, in other words; she wasn’t friendless. 

One day, Mari saw her leave the lunchroom holding the palm-tree-covered cosmetics bag in which she carried her tampons and briefly felt sick with missing her. 

But in only a few months they were back to being friends. The three of them had been placed in the same advanced French class, with sublimely silly M. Bernard, and it was hard not to sit together when there was so much goofiness and group work and all the ridiculous skits going on. Then, separately, Imogen and Bree became possessed by the crazy idea of rowing crew, Bree as a coxswain and Imogen as a bow, and, before long, they were all at Imogen’s house on a Friday night, eating Dino’s. Lifting a slice of Hawaiian pizza from the box, Bree asked, “Am I off probation now?” And even though she asked it sincerely, without any sarcasm or humor, Mari and Imogen both laughed gently, as if she’d made a sweet but impenetrable joke. And so they picked up again, the three of them. The various parents supported it, some more cautiously than others, on the understanding that certain ground rules would be observed. 

If Mari was being honest, however, she would admit that even as their friendship continued—and it did continue, ever-shifting in closeness and distance, through high school and college and deep into adulthood—she carried with her an unwanted residue, a sort of fine, nearly invisible grit she’d tracked in without noticing. Hard little traces of something that refused to be swept or smoothed away. When Mari eventually brought a boy around—it took a while—she had to brace herself. She was watchful. Noting the moments Bree turned her smile on him, or touched his arm, or looked up at him from under her cascade of sun-kissed hair. And all her tireless self-grooming—it was no longer a curiosity but a threat. The absurd amount of time Bree needed to prepare herself before leaving the house became enraging, resentment-stirring. Mari knew it was unfair to feel this way. Unfair to perceive what would have been merely annoyances in another friend as evidence in Bree of a failing that had already revealed itself, treacherously. But this was how she felt. 

Are your parents still living at same address? That question was original impetus for now epic-length text! So saddened by news of Imogen’s parents selling theirs. Hard to think of them in a condo. I hope yours have stayed put for now—can’t imagine all those paintings and plants belonging anywhere else. My first time at your house I thought I was inside museum! But seriously I loved stillness and calm and smell of soil from all the pots. I can’t walk past a bromeliad without thinking of your mom. 

I’m ashamed it’s taken me this long to send proper thank you note. Also the kids tanks. Hahaha tanka. Sent email of gratitude immediately via website but want to do something better for her. Every time I pull food from fridge or turn on stove or put clothes in washer I thank her. All our tiny appliances. As lifesaving as the brakes! Please send her my love and confirm address. Also update from you please! No need to write 19 c. Novel like this one but miss you and want to hear how you are. xoxoxoxo 

Mari felt unsteady. She had to put down her phone. She felt a shrinking all over her body, and then a wave of prickling, an intolerable heat. 

How had she not told Bree about her mother? 

She didn’t need to calculate how long it had been. She knew it already; she knew it down to the day. On Saturday, it would be four months. Four months, plus the preceding six months of treatment, and in all that time she hadn’t managed to tell Bree. 

There had been long spells of silence before, on both sides—growing longer as they themselves grew older. Mari hadn’t known, for instance, about the beetle study or the bus. She couldn’t remember if she’d mentioned to Bree anything about their moving. She sent holiday cards every year; they texted each other on their birthdays with strings of fond, exuberant emojis. There was no sense of neglect, no recriminations, between the two of them, or none as far as she knew. But this omission on Mari’s part was different—not in degree but in kind. It was a disgrace. 

Her mother had made a donation, clearly, and by the sound of it not a small one. This was Mari’s first time hearing of it. Which was surprising, considering that throughout her treatment her mother had been nearly obsessed by the task of getting her accounts in order and taking care of what she called housekeeping. She had enlisted Mari in cataloging the paintings, for instance. She’d said that Mari’s father wouldn’t remember where they had come from, which ones were valuable and which not. She was also preoccupied by the kind of food he was feeding the cats. Mari kept bringing her back to more important matters—financial paperwork, friends she wanted to see. Yet her mother hadn’t said anything about Mari’s friend, or the fund-raising page, or the money she’d given her. 

Mari wondered if her gift might have had something to do with the news—her mother used to refer to herself somewhat indulgently as a cable-news junkie, someone who cancelled plans in order to stay home and watch Senate hearings or follow breaking stories—and so much of the recent news had made that particular summer feel close again. The past looked different now, and especially the sex. Why was Bree the bad apple? The one needing to be banished? How could a girl of fourteen be the one held responsible? This wasn’t the first time such questions had occurred to Mari: she was a feminist, for heaven’s sake; she did go to college. But maybe all the zeitgeisty talk had led Mari’s mother to reconsider what had happened decades earlier, and, if it wasn’t too strong a word, to repent of her part in it. 

The thought was desolating. Her mother—her practical, refined, brisk, unsentimental, highly opinionated and discerning mother—was capable of experiencing a change of heart, when Mari was not. For all the years she had spent fancying herself a sensitive person, cultivating her feelings and perceptions, her heart had remained tough. Unyielding. No matter how hard she tried to view the past from an enlightened perspective, no matter how much she wanted to see it with clearer eyes, her heart kept stubbornly placing Bree as the subject of the sentence. As agent and initiator. The active, desiring, incautious subject. That was her friend, the girl she remembered. But her mother, evidently, had come to see things differently. 

Now, after the awful flush of heat, a coolness. Mari touched her forehead, her cheeks, and felt that they were damp. Picking up her phone, she tapped the screen and looked again at the unfamiliar number. “I’m ashamed it’s taken me this long to send proper thank yo…” There was no chance that she would ever delete the texts, but, at the same time, she couldn’t imagine ever knowing how to reply. 

Bree was the one who invented the names. They evolved over time, as nicknames tend to do. First came Imogen’s—it wasn’t so far to get from Pickett to Pickle. This was probably in the seventh grade. The name suited her precisely because it was so perfectly wrong. Nothing salty or squat about Imogen, the very last person you’d expect to find inside a dark briny barrel—which was why it must have been so satisfying to call her that. After months of being addressed almost exclusively as Pickle—your turn, Pickle; can you pass me that, Pickle; merci beaucoup, Pickle—Imogen answered one day with, “You’re welcome, Brickle,” for obvious reasons. And so Bree became Brickle, a name that eventually got shortened to Brick. Upon the introduction of Brickle, Bree made the regal decision that Mari had to have a name, too. During lunch she led them into the school library and heaved open the giant dictionary resting on its stand. She flipped through chunks, then leafed through single pages, then stopped and peered down at an entry. 

“Good news!” Bree said. “Guess what it means.” Her finger inched across the page. “Mickle means ‘much, or a large amount,’ as in the phrase ‘Many a little makes a mickle.’ And guess where it means that?” 

Behind her glasses, her face was lit up. 

“Guess.” 

Imogen and Mari couldn’t guess. 

“In Northern England.” She smiled at them exultantly. “Where Manchester is!” she crowed, as if Mari’s happiness was her own. 

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of “Madeleine Is Sleeping”