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From the top of the escalator, all of Filene’s was spread out below you, like some historical tapestry. Then you were in it. As far as the eye could see, shoppers were fighting over cashmere sweater sets, infants’ party dresses, and pleated chinos, with a primal hostility that seemed to threaten th…

After a while I felt worried about leaving Svetlana alone, so I let Ralph walk ahead. “I definitely see what you mean, about how he might be gay,” Svetlana said. Dread shot through my chest. The feeling of having betrayed someone was just as bad as the feeling of being betrayed. It was worse.

“S…

Never in my life had I seen such a boring movie. I chewed nine consecutive sticks of gum, to remind myself I was still alive. The boy in front of me fell asleep and started to snore. The professor didn’t notice because he himself had left after the first half hour. “I’ve already seen this film seve…

Russian met every day, and quickly started to feel internalized and routine and serious, even though what we were learning were things that tiny children knew if they had been born in Russia. Once a week, we had a conversation class with an actual Russian person, Irina Nikolaevna, who had been a dr…

I ended up taking a literature class, too, about the nineteenth-century novel and the city in Russia, England, and France. The professor often talked about the inadequacy of published translations, reading us passages from novels in French and Russian, to show how bad the translations were. I didn’…