Slonim Woods 9: A Memoir

1The alarms kept screaming, and we ignored them. While we lined the path waiting for the all clear, Santos and I collected rocks, which we were piling to build a makeshift wall against the cliff outside our dorm. False alarms were frequent and familiar occurrences at Sarah Lawrence, and I’d grown accustomed to pretending a whole building hadn’t just begun to squawk when I walked past one on the way to class. Our dorms were called Slonim Woods; they squatted at the bottom of a cliff on top of which was a copse of trees—the “woods” for which the dorms were named. In the brisk New York autumn air, herded into the canyon formed by the buildings and the cliff, Santos and I constructed our wall.All the residents of Slonim were wearing what looked like costumes of our normal selves, having been rushed out of a shower or roused from an afternoon nap. Santos and I were managing a prodigious stack of rocks, what had turned out to be a surprisingly sturdy monument to our boredom. We had no way of knowing how long it would take the firefighters, who were probably as frustrated as we were, to identify which oversensitive alarm had been set off by some toaster crumb just large enough to have become kindling.“It’s unbelievable,” Santos said, handing me a rock. I considered the cliff for best placement. “What’s happened to them is insane. Talia looks like she’s this scrawny girl or something, but she’s the toughest person I’ve ever known. Growing up in the Bronx was nothing compared to some of the stories she’s told me from the shelter.” Santos and I had been friends ever since we’d been randomly assigned to live together in our first year. He’d been the best roommate you could ask for. He had tough, Dominican parents, which was why, I guessed, he cleaned our whole room practically every day. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t drink, he didn’t even really listen to music. I did every single one of those things, and tried my best to introduce him to them.The rock I had just placed on the top of the wall wobbled, a little too big. “In my elementary school, we were building something like this at recess once, and two kids were carrying a heavy rock and it slipped,” I told Santos. “One of them had to have the tip of his finger removed. Everyone always made fun of him after that. I can’t remember why exactly. They said he smelled bad, I remember that. I think they said his finger was rotting or something, and that’s why he smelled.” The alarm continued to wail, muffled through our house’s brick walls. “Do you know Talia’s dad at all? I mean, have you met him?“No, not besides what she’s told me. I know he was in the marines and everything, and he’s done some intelligence work. When they’ve talked on the phone, Talia’s put him on speaker with us. Me and Isabella.”I looked up. In the woods on top of the cliff was a ropes course no one used. Mostly people would just sit up there and drink or smoke weed as they watched people stroll by on the path below. In the summer before the school year, our roommate Gabe flew out from California a week early by accident. He tried to secretly camp in this little strip of woods until classes started. He barely avoided getting kicked out of school for that.“Larry’s really excited to see her again,” Santos continued. “Everything that happened to them is so unjust. He’s really, really smart and has battled through so much.”“Right.”“I think that’s why Talia is the way she is. She blows my mind sometimes.”“He gets here next week, right?” I asked. “He’s staying with us?” The wind blew stiff down the path, dislodging a couple of the more precarious stones. They clattered among the bright yellow leaves at our feet. The air was brisk enough to wear jackets, the sun hot enough to sweat underneath them.“Yeah, I think he’s going to stay for a little bit while he figures it out. They just haven’t seen each other in so long.”“That makes sense,” I said. I thought it did. I wondered how high we could build the wall before it would fall. I wanted to build something that would be here long after we’d moved into new dorms, or even after we’d left the school. The alarm stopped. The strange silence it left behind was broken only by the click of Santos placing one last stone on top, and then the clamor of everyone rushing back into their buildings to continue the day. In the year after I graduated from Sarah Lawrence, when I was still going back to visit, I chanced a walk down that path, and I saw the wall we built there, slumped into the cliff behind it. It had been picked apart, perhaps by other students, but it was undeniable evidence. We had been there. It had all really happened.