Invasion of Privacy

the Sumner Tunnel, completed in 1934, under the harbor and past Logan Airport , or you took the Mystic River Bridge , completed in 1950 and renamed the Tobin Bridge in the mid-sixties. You could die from the fumes in the tunnel or the crosswinds on the bridge, but at least your choices were clear. Then in sixty-one, they opened a second tunnel, the Callahan, which seemed to multiply both the traffic and the fumes by a factor of four. Now, another aspect of the Big Dig is the revamping of all the ramps that lead onto and off the funneling highways, like the Central Artery, Storrow Drive, Route 1—enough. The point is, now the drive’s still not easy but no longer simple.
    I thought keeping the Prelude’s moonroof back and heater on might take my mind off both Nancy and the traffic. It didn’t, but it helped.
    Once into New Hampshire, the miles on interstates 93 and 89 rolled by, me keeping the speedometer between fifty-five and sixty without cruise control, the roadside foliage going from not-quite-peak to peak to past-peak. About a hundred miles northwest of Boston and through the second range of mountains, things went from past-peak to pretty bleak. The trees had lost most of their leaves, the varied colors now checkerboarding the ground like the French Quarter after Mardi Gras. It was depressing, and I found my finger on the button that closes the moonroof even though I didn’t think the air had turned that much colder.
    Crossing over into Vermont , I went another thirty miles before seeing the exit for the university. At the bottom of the ramp, I took a right, slowly climbing a switchback road up a mountain. Cresting it, I looked down into the valley and on alternate curves got better and better views of the town and campus, which seemed to join each other at the narrow point in a geographic hourglass.
    The town had a quaint main street, tall—if bare—oaks, maples, and poplars lining the curbs. Broad, clapboard houses, built at a time when ten kids in the family put you somewhere near the middle of the pack, stood a little too close to the road. The houses gave way to a small commercial center, with a postage-stamp movie theater, an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, and the Towne Restaurant, where the soup and half-sandwich special probably would go for half what the soup alone costs in Boston. Across the street was a small department store, a Chinese takeout place, and a photocopy closet that would be pleased to type any r6sum6 “professionally.” At the edge of town stood a flat-faced taphouse with a “C&W Dancing, Th-Sat” sign next to a video store next to a gunshop advertising “Re-load Ammo, Cheap.” One-stop shopping for all your weekend entertainment.
    I drove through a glade of evergreens that formed the waist of the hourglass I’d seen from the crest of the mountain, the gates of the University of Central Vermont just past it. Beyond the gates, I came onto a narrow macadam road with yellow speedbumps every two hundred feet. Around me spread a tree-and-lawn campus, the cement sidewalks narrow, the hedges near the Colonial-era buildings trimmed lovingly and blending into the ivy climbing the outside walls. I found myself thinking that Paulie Fog-erty, the superintendent at Plymouth Willows, would like this place.
    The combination football-soccer field appeared on my left, the portable goal nets pushed to the sides at the moment so the football team could ran no-pads drills. Off in the corner, the cheerleading squad—five females and one male—was practicing a gymnastics routine in shorts and sweatshirts. The grandstands were all steel-and-board bleachers, the capacity more befitting a high school than a college. Bordering the field was an elliptical gravel track, stringy men and women alternating in windsprints from a crouching start. A campus cop in blue shirt and slacks leaned against the front fender of a yellow Ford Explorer. His tires on the edge of the gravel, he watched all the activity around him, giving special attention to the cheerleaders.
    After a curve in the road, I found the Administration Building and a parking lot. Leaving my car in a VISITOR slot with a meter on it, I fed the meter two dimes before I realized the first had bought me an hour. I went up the sidewalk, taking in the scattered clatches of students. Almost all impossibly young, the hair styles ranging from New Wave butcherings to No Wave butch cuts, the clothes spandex or L.L. Bean or oversized flannel shirts