Free Disturbances in the Field by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Page B

went home.”
    “So you’re glad you stayed?” asked Nina.
    Esther looked around at all of us. “Now? Sure! Sure I’m glad I stayed. I’m fine now.”
    We all went home for Thanksgiving, and on the first day back Nina tucked in the lower right-hand corner of her mirror, the place where some girls kept photographs of their boyfriends or families, a three-by-five card. On it, typed, were the questions that members of the sixth-century B.C. Pythagorean Brotherhood asked in their daily examinations of conscience: In what have I failed? What good have I done? What have I not done that I ought to have done?
    “What is that supposed to be, a mother substitute?” Esther demanded.
    Nina smiled. She rarely tried to justify herself.
    “You told us we took it too personally,” I reminded her.
    She smiled.
    We pointed out that the card was inconsistent in spirit with what was ranged on the dresser top just below it: Revlon Touch & Glow liquid make-up, Jean Nate spray cologne, Nivea cream, Cutex colorless nail polish, an ashtray with tortoiseshell barrettes for her mass of black hair, perpetually bridled, silver-handled hairbrush, five lipsticks. She accepted our teasing and said, “It may be best to stay in balance by keeping one foot in the real world and one foot in the ideal.”
    “And who said that?” Esther wanted to know.
    “No one.” She smiled in earnest this time. “I made it up.”
    On the three mornings we had The History of Philosophy we would meet downstairs at a quarter to nine and walk over together. Nina began not appearing. “She was already gone when I woke up,” Esther reported. “That’s odd, isn’t it?” She would greet us in class, composed as ever, maybe a bit quieter than usual. Since Nina was not the kind you could interrogate, Gabrielle, the ever-resourceful, undertook some research. The Pythagorean Brotherhood, she learned, followed a moral and mystical regimen for purifying the soul and attaining wisdom. “‘They performed their morning walks alone and in places where there was appropriate solitude and quiet; for they considered it contrary to wisdom to enter into conversation with another person until they had rendered their own souls calm and their minds harmonious. It is turbulent behavior, they believed, to mingle with a crowd immediately on arising from sleep,’” she read to me. “Is that what we are, a crowd?” We were wounded.
    “She’s probably working on her memory, too. Listen to this. ‘To strengthen their memory the students began each day, on first waking up, by recollecting in order the actions and events of the day before; after that they tried to do the same for the preceding day, and so on backwards as far as they could go, taking care to make the order of recollection correspond with the order in which the events had actually occurred. For they believed that there is nothing more important for science, and for experience and wisdom, than the ability to remember.’”
    I tried it for three days and gave up. I could remember many things, but not in the order in which they occurred. They regrouped themselves in thematic patterns like music, as if memory were coaxing life to make more structural sense than it possibly could. “Do you really do it?” I asked Nina, alone. She nodded. “It helps keep things in order.” “I thought you had things in very good order.” “Oh no, Lydia. Inside is all turmoil.” Her face was troubled. Unblinking and unsmiling, it seemed to cover webs of complexity. But I couldn’t press her further. The others were about to join us; we were having a Chinese dinner on Broadway to celebrate Nina’s nineteenth birthday.
    The pre-Socratics were superseded. Only in poetry did they remain unsurpassed. Earth, water, air, and fire. The way up and the way down, eternal and reversible. Professor Boles confessed she had lingered too long under their spell; now we must move more swiftly. Past Plato and Aristotle and the medieval schoolmen.