Free What Now? by Ann Patchett Page B

couldn’t get to their destinations fast enough for my sadness to be heard. Ulti-mately this exercise proved as instructive to me as any writing class, since this is where I learned how to transfer the contents of my heart onto a piece of paper. Each letter expressed a different aspect of my circumstances, as each was tailored to its particular 1 1

    reader, but none of them made me feel any better. Writing is good for many things, but curing loneliness isn’t one of them. From my room I heard the voices of the other fresh-men who laughed and talked as if they had all been inseparable since Montessori. There was a river full of life rushing right past my door and I didn’t have a single clue about how I might jump in.
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    In the end I did the only thing I knew how to do, the thing they always taught us to do in Catholic school: I did unto others. If you want someone to be nice to you, you must be nice to someone else, and since I really knew only one person—my newly assigned adviser Chet Biscardi, who had shown me great 1 4

    kindness in our first meeting—I decided I would bake him a batch of cookies. If it sounds hokey then you can rest assured that’s because I was one seriously hokey kid. I walked into town and carried back sacks of flour and sugar and eggs. I bought pans, a measuring cup, a spatula. Because I was on every level starting from scratch those cookies were destined to be the most expensive in history. I mixed up the batter in the little kitchen downstairs in the dorm, beat in the chips and buttered the pans. I set the oven for 350 and waited for it to heat up. I waited.
    After a suspiciously long time I stuck my hand in and then, feeling a chill, touched the racks. Two pans of raw cookie dough neatly arranged into balls wouldn’t have been bad eating but they would have made a very poor gift. I sat there for a minute feeling hopeless, 1 5

    but then decided I couldn’t, since the cookies were meant to cure my hopelessness. I picked up the sheets, fixed the bowl of extra dough beneath one arm, and went outside.
    Next door was another dorm with no doubt equally pathetic appliances, but across the street was a fine-looking house. I don’t think it would be an overstatement to say it was a mansion. It was the kind of house one could be certain would have, at the very minimum, one working oven. I was a shy person, but at that moment I was on the edge. I needed a heating element. And so I marched ahead and, using one corner of a pan, knocked on the door.
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    Alice Ilchman often told this story herself, how during her first week as the new president, still waist-deep in boxes and settling into her house, she opened her front door to find a freshman holding two trays of unbaked cookies. She paused for a minute, wondering if this was some sort of tradition about which no one had informed her, and 1 7

    then she led me back to the kitchen and told me to make myself at home, the most beautiful words that anyone had spoken to me for days. In the time it took the cookies to bake and cool, I met her children and played with her dog. And maybe because I wrote a thank-you note on a paper towel and left it on the table with some cookies, I was invited back to babysit for Alice’s daughter, Sarah, and since I proved to be a reliable babysitter, I was also asked back to serve at dinner parties, and then to cook at dinner parties. After all, I clearly knew how to cook.
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    Had I been the most cunning freshman in the history of higher education, I doubt I could have come up with a plan that would have gotten me the very thing I longed for, which was less an oven and more a family to take me in. I never would have had the words to ask for something as large as that.
    Sometimes the circumstances at hand force us to be braver than we actually are, and so we knock on doors and ask for assistance.
    Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could