unpredictably, he turned the table on me and asked the same question. Had I liked it here?
I said I had. Very much.
But I knew I was speaking in retrospect.
“I learned to love Harvard after, not during.”
“Explain.”
“Life wasn’t easy,” I said, “and I don’t mean the course work—though there was plenty of that, and the standards were high. What was difficult was living with the life Harvard held out for me and refusing to think it might be a mirage. I had money problems. There were days when the margin between the haves and have-nots stood not like a line drawn in the sand but like a ravine. You could watch, you could even hear the party, but you weren’t invited.” What was hard, I was trying to say, was remembering I’d already been invited.
I was the outsider, the young man from Alexandria, Egypt, forever baffled and eager to belong in this strange New World.
The rest I didn’t want to think about or remember, much less discuss right now. Besides, the during memories of my years at Harvard felt tucked away still—not necessarily forgotten, but as though put on ice for a day in later life when I’d have the strength and leisure to revisit them. But now wasn’t the time. For now, it was the magical after love I wished to convey. It had stayed with me all those years and yanked me back to days I missed a great deal but knew I would never for a minute wish to relive again. Perhaps the after love was what made me embark on this odyssey of college stops with my son, because I longed to set foot in Cambridge again—with him as my shield, my cover, my standby.
How to explain this to a seventeen-year-old without destroying the carousel of images I’d shared with him since his preschool days? Cambridge on quiet Sunday evenings; Cambridge on rainy afternoons with friends, or in a blizzard when things went on as usual and the days seemed shorter and festive and all you wanted to imagine was tethered horses waiting to take you to Ethan Frome places; the Square abuzz on Friday nights; Harvard during reading period in mid-January—coffee, more coffee, and the perpetual patter of typewriters everywhere; or Lowell House on the last days of reading period in the spring, when students lounged about for hours on the grass, speaking softly, their voices muffled by the sounds of early summer.
“I loved it,” I finally said. “I still do.”
By then we had entered the Coop.
“Don’t ask if they still have your Coop number,” implored my son, who knew how my mind ticked and didn’t want me to embarrass him by growing nostalgic about times past with a salesclerk who couldn’t have cared less.
I promised not to say a thing. But when I bought two T-shirts, one for him, and one for me, I couldn’t help myself. “346-408-8,” I said.
I told the clerk that I still remembered the number because I would always say it out loud when buying a pack of cigarettes at the Coop. And in those years I’d buy a pack a day, twice a day.
The salesclerk checked his computer and said I wasn’t in their system.
The way my old phone number here was no longer in my name, I presumed.
The way, unless we do something with our lives, some of us come to Cambridge, spend a few years here, then leave this place and then the planet without a trace.
Not in the system, it was called. It made me question whether I’d ever really been in the system here.
I belonged here once, but had it ever been my home? Or was it my home, though I could never really claim I’d belonged here? Not in the system covered both options.
My son was urging me not to engage in a conversation with the salesclerk. But something in me didn’t wish to accept that I was not in the system or had never been. I asked the clerk to check once more and repeated my Coop number.
“Apologies, sir,” blurted the young man. “Your number is still under your name, but you will need to reactivate your Coop number.”
So I was in the system but inactive, like a mole, or a spy, forever in but on the fringes. That summed it all. I did not wish this for my son.
When we approached Brattle Street, I suddenly realized how much and yet how little the block had changed. The Brattle Theatre hadn’t budged; but it