The Ten-Year Nap (35 page)

Her eyes probably looked wild as she made her way over to Nadia’s first-grade teacher. But Mrs. Kelleher, a veteran teacher in her sixties, with hair like yellowed lamb’s wool, had seen everything. She knew the score, and, of course, like most teachers, she preferred the girls who shone with possibility. Jill could see this now, as Mrs. Kelleher, a wide, thick-built woman, stood chatting with several of the mothers.

Only in the enclosed universe of a grade school could such a homely and pursed woman be popular; only here could she be the one all the mothers tried to suck up to. Jill saw how readily seduced Mrs. Kelleher was by the mothers of the more precocious children, and she compared this response with the weary look that Mrs. Kelleher now gave Jill as she approached. No matter what Jill did, she would be unable to seduce Mrs. Kelleher into loving her daughter.

But she had to find out about Nadia, one way or another, and she was in a very rare mode of confrontation, so it might as well be now. Without Amy around to practice on and possibly temper her words, she proceeded. “Mrs. Kelleher,” she said, thrusting herself into the middle of the group of mothers. “Hi.”

Mrs. Kelleher’s eyes flickered back longingly to the other women. “Hello,” said the teacher, who was both an old pro and, Jill thought, kind of a cunt.

“I just wondered how Nadia was doing in class,” Jill said.

Mrs. Kelleher looked Jill right in the eye, then came close, moving them both away from everyone else, and said in a low, confidential voice, “Mrs. Hamlin, I was going to call you anyway. I have begun to have real concerns about Nadia. For a while I thought it was just the adjustment to a new school and a new environment, but it’s still going on. Have you thought of having her evaluated?”

So this was an afternoon of honesty, and it was breathtaking. Jill had asked for it, and there was even something relieving about it. The usual falseness and strain were gone. “Yes, I have,” Jill said.

“I can recommend someone in town, if you’d like,” said the teacher. “I’ll e-mail you tonight.”

With the briefest smile, Mrs. Kelleher turned back to the other mothers, and Jill heard her say something about how Liam Rostower knew all about the origins of Groundhog Day. “During Sharing Circle, Liam told the class that the tradition might have begun in the fifth century, with the European Celts believing that animals possessed supernatural powers. He was quite the expert.” All the mothers grinned and smiled and popped up and down like groundhogs around the teacher.

A while later, sitting at the kitchen table with Nadia, Jill watched as her daughter ate her snack and struggled over her homework. One hand held a pink cupcake, squeezing it a little too hard, and the other held a pencil in a forced grip. Jill glanced down at the workbook, noting the dense paragraph of text on the page and the various questions that were meant to be read and then answered at the end:

 

1. Why does the farmer want to sell the old nag Gypsy?
   
2. Do you think it’s fair?
   
3. What would
   you
   have done with Gypsy?
   

 

Jill knew that Nadia could barely read these words and would need her mother to hover above her and sound out each syllable in a way that would give both of them a reassuring but false sense that Nadia herself had been reading. She watched Nadia struggle for a while as the sky outside the kitchen window grew darker and the street lamp by the curb automatically popped on and the day shifted into evening, and soon Donald would come home on the train with the other men. They would hear his footsteps in the front hall and the rustle of paper as he thumbed through the day’s mail on the front hall table. Then, giving her father a few courteous seconds to acclimate himself, Nadia would spring up from whatever she was doing and fling herself against him with wanton abandon. Donald, smelling of office and train and newspaper print, would gratefully accept the tackle.

Until then, though, Jill and Nadia would sit together at the table, and the story of the farmer leading his nag across a grassy meadow would remain an abstraction. The cupcake detritus that dotted the surface of the text would prove more compelling than the text itself. Nadia would apply a damp index finger to each crumb, then put it into her mouth, wistfully recalling the lost pleasure of the snack. But the trail of crumbs would always lead back to the farmer and the nag, in whose company Nadia Hamlin would be forced to live, perhaps forever.

So the sky became dark, and the farmer and the nag waited in the field. Jill, watching her daughter’s baffled expression and tired eyes, finally said, “I think that’s more than enough, honey, don’t you? You’ve been working hard for a long time. Let’s just stop.”

“But there’s more to do.”

“It’s okay,” Jill said.

Nadia asked, “Did you used to do your homework with your mom when you were little?”

“Sometimes.”

There was a pause, and then Nadia said, “Where
is
she again?”

“She died, remember?” Jill said, her throat sticking unexpectedly for her mother, even now, after all this time. The feeling just went into hiding and then reappeared at moments like this one, when you had to seem stoical and not full of sensation. “It was a long time ago,” Jill told her daughter. “We’ve talked about that.”

“Right,” said Nadia. Then she said, in a matter-of-fact voice, “I had another mom too, once. But she couldn’t take care of me, so you had to do it.”

“I wanted to do it. I’ll always want to.”

Nadia kept looking at Jill gravely, and after a moment she placed a hand on Jill’s hand, patting it. Then she said, “You’re sure we can stop working now?”

“Positive.”

Jill recognized her daughter’s bravery and knew that it wasn’t appropriate for her to have to be so brave—to need to suit up every day and face an army of children with manifesto-length novels about Moorchasers under their arms, and a teacher who didn’t draw enough gratification from teaching her, and nearly a full hour at lunch when Nadia would sit ignored at the end of a long table, chewing a soft sandwich. Her eyes would give her the appearance of being lost as she sat at lunch in the cafeteria by herself, and in her strangely beautiful little voice Nadia would sing her folk song about the saffron sister tree.

The following Monday, Jill had Nadia evaluated. She took her to a testing facility in a small office building in downtown Holly Hills, where Nadia sat in a room with an enthusiastic woman named Mrs. Jantzen. After a few hours Nadia emerged looking tired; even Mrs. Jantzen looked tired. The tests had been too much, and school was too much, and everything was too much. It was impossible to miss this.

Nadia’s test results were not surprising, though even so they provided a severe blow to the narcissism of a parent. Jill and Donald sat in a small room while Mrs. Jantzen explained the various areas in which Nadia had shown significant cognitive lags. She said the words without any blame or embarrassment; she was used to delivering news like this to parents. Nadia was not so unusual to her, nor was she “as bad as you think,” Mrs. Jantzen said.

Mrs. Jantzen handed Jill the box of tissues that sat on her desk beside a paperweight with the words “Children are like snowflakes,” and a pad of Post-its advertising a timed-release, pediatric-dose drug for hyperactivity. Jill blew her nose and let herself cry into a handful of tissues, and she tried to listen as the woman explained that Nadia might do better if she had a “shadow teacher,” someone who could help her through the day and give her the time and attention that Mrs. Kelleher apparently could not. “And the good part is that it can be paid for by the state,” said Mrs. Jantzen.

“That’s the good part?” said Donald. “Great. I was waiting for the good part.”

“You will have to petition for it,” Mrs. Jantzen went on, unperturbed, “and probably even sue, but you will get your way in the end. It’s a big pain in the ass, pardon me, but it’s just the way it is.”

“Are you saying we have to do this?” Donald asked. “That we are obligated to have her singled out in this way?”

Mrs. Jantzen shook her head. “No, Mr. Hamlin,” she said. “Some parents prefer to put their children in a special school. That’s a family decision, based on circumstances. But at any rate, you tell me she is struggling. And when I look at these results, I would have to agree. Why should Nadia have to struggle so much? It seems unkind to me.”

In the car on the way home they sat silently. Jill was reminded of their many visits to the fertility experts years earlier, and how they had left those offices with a similar sensation of heartbreak. There was heartbreak everywhere: in losing a mother, in missing your closest friend, in wanting a child, in raising a child. But off at work all day, Donald was cordoned off from his daughter’s limitations. When he returned home from the city at night, Nadia’s loving nature was so appealing to him that she probably seemed to be the most articulate and unusual child on earth. Maybe he had even been serious about the beauty of her bud vase. Maybe he was so much in love with her that she shimmered with greatness, blinding him. This was a good thing, Jill realized, but it did not help right now, in the car, as Donald slipped his hand briefly into his suit jacket, against his heart, as though he’d been shot.

That night, he was as playful with Nadia as ever. He danced her around the living room and sat with her on her bed before sleep, and together they read a pile of picture books. Jill peered into the room and saw them going over some of the books they had read when she was three and that most of the other children had long ago discarded. For Nadia, these books were more than nostalgic; they were like life itself.

Jill went to call Amy. “It’s me,” said Jill.

“What’s up?”

She paused. “Nothing,” she finally said. If she began to talk about Nadia now, over the phone, she would become upset. So she would talk to Amy in person, not that it would do any good, for Amy knew only what it was like to raise a boy whose mind was capacious and honeycombed, filled with everything imaginable. “Nadia and I are coming into the city one day after school this week,” Jill said. “I have to get her a spring coat. Can I see you then?” Amy said that she was still feeling bad, and that though it had been a week already, she hadn’t said anything to Leo about his fake receipts. She was reluctant to make a date with Jill. “I’m not feeling very social,” she said. “Oh, come on, Amy, it’s just
me,”
Jill said, and Amy relented.

The women arranged to meet on Thursday afternoon; Mason had a piano lesson then, and Amy said that if Jill wanted to, she could come sit with her during it, and they could talk. So Jill took Nadia with her on the train into the city, and bought her the spring coat she needed, and they met up with Amy at a music school in the East Nineties where children had been learning piano and flute and voice for over a hundred years.

The two women and the little girl sat together in the drafty anteroom, and around them swept shuddering scales, and the opening gambit of “Für Elise,” and the theme from “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” all of it seeming to represent childhood itself, so familiar was it and so frequently the province of a parent’s desires rather than a child’s passion. It would probably not have occurred to Amy that Mason didn’t need to study piano. Did she think this solid, fact-gathering boy would grow up and become Noël Coward, with a crowd of good-looking young people gathered around him at a party, everyone singing old favorites? Many of the boys and girls of America were now as oversubscribed and overextended as executives. Their mothers were their secretaries, keeping track of the children’s calendars, running slightly behind them as they went from piano lesson to fencing to papermaking to martial arts to the homes of other children and then back out into the world. Jill would not keep such a schedule with Nadia. She would not be part of this particularly American obsession, and she knew this now.

“We had Nadia tested,” she began, and soon the spell of Amy’s unhappiness and self-absorption seemed to lift temporarily as she listened to Jill’s story. Nadia sat off to the side, her schoolbooks unopened on her lap. Instead of doing work, she was brushing the hair of one of her homely little doll horses that had—in addition to four legs, a mane, and a tail—long, blonde woman’s hair and false eyelashes. Jill imagined a line from a commercial for the toy:
Does your little girl dream about riding horses but also about being a slut?

“This must be really hard on you and Donald,” Amy said. “I wish you’d told me about some of this, about the extent of all your worries.”

The two women sat together with the music playing all around them. Nadia, Jill noticed, was now crouching on the floor, brushing the hair of her horse/woman, and as she did, she sang to herself. At first, she sang a song about “lucky landlubbers” from the children’s TV show
Ahoy, Mateys,
and then something about the seasons changing that she’d learned at school, and then, finally, she sang her usual song: “
Rise, sorrow, ’neath the saffron sister tree
…”

Later, when Jill tried to re-create the moment for Donald, she was unable to tell it in a way that gave it the real resonance it had possessed at the time. Nadia was playing with her doll and singing to herself, and the music that had been rising and falling from the practice rooms suddenly stopped, as the teachers in those different cubicles coincidentally seemed to want their students to take a break at virtually the same moment. A lone harp was plinked for a few cocky extra notes, then it paused. The hallway of the music school was silent, except for Nadia’s folk song. As Nadia sang, and as Amy and Jill sat there, a tall woman with black hair in a topknot walked by. She was a well-respected voice teacher named Anna Milofsky, a fifty-two-year-old Russian émigrée who taught here one afternoon a week as a favor to the school. On all other days she taught classes at Juilliard.

But Jill knew none of this yet. That information would come later. Now, Anna Milofsky went slowly down the narrow hall, carrying a libretto in her hand, and in the middle of the respite from sound coming from the practice rooms, she stopped.