Free My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff

anger—“but Mr. Salinger has explicitly instructed us to turn down all speaking engagements. It’s been a pleasure talking with you and I’m sure you’ll find a perfect speaker for your commencement.”
    I hung up the phone. My sweater was soaked through under the arms, though my boss had decided to air out her office: an icy wind was now snaking through her windows, swirling around my desk. My body convulsed, briefly, as the chill air insinuated itself into my hot points. Confrontation made me very, very anxious. Then it hit me: I wasn’t anxious. I was ill. I had a fever. As a kid, sickness came upon me this way, out of nowhere: my head suddenly too heavy to keep up.
    I stood up from my chair, my legs wobbling dangerously. Halfway across the office, I realized I was
running
, fueled by adrenaline.
Slow down
, I told myself, forcefully. Under the thin, anemic glare of the bathroom’s fluorescents, I splashed water on my face—noting my forehead’s coolness—then caught myself in the warped, peeling mirror: My cheeks were flushed pink, my eyes glistening brightly. This wasn’t illness. This wasn’t anxiety.
    This was excitement.
    Things were happening. I wasn’t
becoming
part of something. I was
already
part of something.
    My best friend from high school, Jenny, worked a few blocks away, in the McGraw-Hill Building, editing social studies textbooks. Or text
book
, for she spent the entirety of her tenure working on one enormous project, a fifth-grade social studies primer that was being adapted for the public schools of the state of Texas. Apparently, Texas was so enormously powerful—so large, with so many schools and students, so much money—that it could demand a textbook tailored specifically to its needs, with a whole chapter on the Alamo, and another on the history of the state, and—most distressingly—the chapter on the civil rights movement omitted entirely. Jenny made light of all this, but she was genuinely troubled by it, and yet she also loved her job, the cleanness and rigor of it, the meetings at which her presence was required. She had drifted through college, transferring twice and picking up a variety of prescriptions along the way, but now she had a purpose, a structure to her life. Now she had Texas.
    “It’s so nice just to be
normal
,” she’d told me a few months earlier, when I returned from London. In high school, we’d not wanted to be normal. We’d made fun of the normal people. We’d hated them.
    “I know,” I said reflexively, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be normal. I wanted to be extraordinary. I wanted to write novels and make films and speak ten languages and travel around the world. I wanted everything. So, I’d thought, had Jenny.
    Perhaps as much as normalcy, she loved having money, her own money. She had a fraught relationship with her parents—more so than any of our friends—and she’d rushed into the trappings of grown-up life earlier than the rest of us. Editing textbooks paid far more than the literary jobs availableto those who had recently graduated from Swarthmore with a degree in poetry—as had Jenny—and, thus, she’d made a calculated decision to toil in the less glamorous realm of educational publishing. At the time, this was unfathomable to me. As was her equally calculated decision to move to a remote, cultureless, suburban section of Staten Island, in a newly built complex of identical fiberboard apartments. The commute to midtown took her a full hour and a half—each way—and meant that she couldn’t, for instance, meet after work to go to the Angelika for the new Hal Hartley movie, or for drinks at Von, or—certainly not—to see a band at Mercury Lounge. She had to join her fiancé, Brett, at the train and start the arduous journey home.
    But Staten Island was cheaper, she said, than any of the neighborhoods to which my other friends were moving, most of them in Brooklyn: Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, the Fifth Avenue part of Park