Come to the Edge: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

buses, double-parked and yellow, or were met by mothers and nannies gathered on the sidewalk for pickup.
    The formal entrance was on Ninety-first Street through a recessed half-circular drive, once a carriageway, that led to two sets of dark double doors. The covered drive, where we sometimes lined up for fire drills and class pictures, was a well of coolness, a cavern of stone. At either end of the drive, flung wide in the day and locked by the nuns at night, were fifteen-foot arched dungeon doors. This was the grown-ups’ entrance. We were allowed to use it only at special times, like First Communion and the Christmas concert, when the front lobby was home to a massive tree and a terrifying oversize crèche.
    I don’t remember whether, on that day, I went there because it was spring, or because it was off-limits, or because I simply wanted to stand by myself in the cool between the doors. Nor do I recall how, before that, I found myself, between lunch and gym, alone on the first-floor landing.
    I stood on the landing (where I was allowed) looking at the lobby (where I was not), and instead of turning left up the steps by the courtyard, I lingered. Except for Miss Doran, the receptionist, the large hall was empty. No one on the heavy benches that looked like church pews. No one at the ancient creaky elevator with the brass grate (also off-limits). It was a window that wouldn’t last.
    My waist rooted to the handrail, I inched down a step. Miss Doran turned in my direction. She was chinless, and her head ended in a topknot. I watched as it bobbed. She was on the phone, a private call I could tell, and with her thumb, she kept tapping on the bridge of her cat-eye glasses. She saw me and she didn’t. When she swiveled her chair away from me, I began to walk—the polished doors just feet away—not fast, not slow, but as though I belonged, as though I were an upper school girl instead of a lowly third grader.
    I made it through the first set of doors into the tight alcove with the lantern above. My heart raced. Realizing that no one had followed me—no nun, no Miss Doran, no handyman—I pushed open the second set of doors. Triumphant, I stood alone on the top step, looking at the tight-budded trees on the street outside.
    But there was someone there. A woman backlit by the sun had just stepped through the arch onto the cobblestone drive, her face obscured by shadow. Behind her, a photographer was taking pictures. He looked curious to me, like a monkey bending in all sorts of ways, but oh so careful not to drop his camera or cross the line that divided the sidewalk from school property. Even through the flashes, I recognized the long neck, the dark glasses, and her hair just like my mother’s when she went to a fancy party. Tall, like an empress from a storybook, she glided toward me, without interest in the man who continued to take pictures of her back. Her face was calm, as if by paying no attention, she could will him from being.
    When she was close, I saw her face, that her lips were curved. She took one step up, placed a gloved hand on the heavy doors, and was gone.
    Years later, when we met, I remembered who it was she had reminded me of that day. It was the painting of the Lady with the Lily, with the same inscrutable smile.
    The uniform we wore was nothing like the ones at the other girls’ schools nearby. Not for us the blue pinstripe or the muted plaid. We wore a gray wool jumper, a boxy jacket to match, either a white shirt with a Peter Pan collar or a red turtleneck jersey, gray kneesocks with a flat braid up the side, and brown oxfords bought at Indian Walk the week before school started. The shoes were hateful—like the ones nurses wore, with pink lumps of rubber welling from the sides. The only consolation was that everyone had to wear them. My mother made me polish mine once a week with a Kiwi kit (also from Indian Walk), and as I sat on the white-tiled bathroom floor inevitably scuffed with brown, it