After the first lecture, Marilyn goes to James’ office hours and kisses him. In Marilyn’s sophomore year, she enrolls in a new course called “The Cowboy in American Culture.” She is entranced by the instructor, James, a graduate student in the history department and the first “Oriental” (Asian-American) person Marilyn has ever seen. Marilyn’s mother Doris Walker is a highly traditional woman, a home economics teacher who has never left her hometown in Virginia. Marilyn is an excellent student who dreams of becoming a doctor, but faces sexist opposition from both her male peers and professors. The narrative jumps back to 1955, during Marilyn’s first year at Radcliffe, the women’s college within Harvard University. The police ask James if Lydia can swim and he tells them she can’t a day later, Lydia’s body is found in the water. The next day, a passerby notices that there is a rowboat floating in the middle of the lake at the end of the Lee’s street. Meanwhile, Hannah keeps quiet about the fact that at 2am the previous night, she’d seen Lydia walk across the front lawn away from the house. However, even as James and Marilyn call all the girls they believe to be Lydia’s friends, Nath doesn’t mention Jack. Nath says nothing, but knows that the girls on the list are not actually close to Lydia she doesn’t have any friends except the Lee’s neighbor, Jack Wolff, whom Nath strongly dislikes. Officer Fiske asks about an incident in which Marilyn went missing 11 years before, but James quickly dismisses this as a “miscommunication.” After the police leave, James and Marilyn write down a list of Lydia’s friends. Then Marilyn calls and asks James to come home.īack at the house, police officers tell Lydia’s family that teenagers often run away because they are angry with their parents, and that most come home within 24 hours. Their conversation is interrupted by Stanley Hewitt, who James finds irritating. James is a tenured professor of American History one of his graduate student teaching assistants, Louisa Chen, knocks on his door and the two discuss their students’ work. Meanwhile, Marilyn’s husband James is at his office in Middlewood College, unaware that anything is wrong. Lydia’s siblings Nath and Hannah leave for school, while Marilyn begins to fear that something terrible may have happened. Lydia’s mother Marilyn goes up to her room to look for her, and finds everything in its place but no sign of Lydia. Lydia Lee is dead, but all her family knows is that she hasn’t come down to breakfast.
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