Days of Awe (22 page)

I opened the refrigerator and found a bottle of beer that he had left behind, one of the fussy little microbrews that he liked. I opened it and took one sip—
undertones of coffee!
—and then poured the rest down the sink.

I sat down on the floor and did a few stretches. I checked my phone, my e-mail. I spotted the kitchen scissors on the dining room table, left there by one of the guys probably, and I walked it into the bathroom and contemplated giving myself bangs. I snipped a few strands of hair. “No!” I said out loud. “No cutting your own hair.”

Hannah was at my mother's. She had been there since Friday night and was going to stay for the weekend, then return to the warm, sunny, rearranged bungalow her father had vacated. She was surly and angry, had barely spoken to me in a week. She understood, with all the merciless insight of a twelve-year-old, that this was my fault. I had no counter-argument for her.

“You and I will still be together all the time,” I had said to her. I was standing in her doorway as she packed for the weekend. “We'll spend as much time together as we do now. Probably more.”

She picked up two dirty T-shirts off the floor, jammed them into her overnight bag, and glared at me. “I don't want to see you
more
than I do now,” she said. I could tell that it took all of her self-control not to say something worse, and for this I felt perversely proud of her.

I would still throw myself in front of a train for this sullen, wounded girl. And she wouldn't even have to be in danger, necessarily. I'd probably do it if she just asked me politely.
Good job saying “Please,” Hannah! Thump.
“I know how hard this is, honey,” I said, fiddling with the hole in the sleeve of my sweatshirt. “I know.”

She squinted at me like she couldn't quite make me out, and I remembered that I'd been meaning to take her to the ophthalmologist. “Um?” she said sweetly. “You don't know anything, and could you please go away?”

After I rearranged the furniture and gave myself that tiny haircut, I decided to go to my mother's house, which had not been the plan. I was going to spend the evening alone, watch a movie, wallow in my sadness without having to put on a brave face for Hannah. I thought I would need the evening to pull myself together, to regroup, to get used to being alone. I imagined myself snuggled up on the couch under a warm blanket with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of wine and a box of Kleenex: not exactly enjoying my misery, but not exactly miserable, either.

What had I been thinking? Had my vision of heartbreak been so stupidly informed by sitcoms and romantic comedies? The silence in the house came alive, grew feral. It was Chris, it was Josie, it was my mother's three girl cousins. What were their names? One of them was Trude. I didn't know the other two. The winter wind through the rattly living room windows was a keening. The world had cracked open, but when I looked inside the broken shell, there was nothing.

I grabbed my down jacket from the hook, threw on my boots, my scarf and mittens. I pulled the door shut behind me.

When I was eleven, I got lost walking home from a tennis lesson. Our house was just three blocks from the tennis court, and I had made the journey a dozen times, but on that day I was distracted. My friend Cindy and I had begged to sign up for the summer class together, but after two weeks, because practically everything came easily to Cindy and when something didn't she'd become sulky, she dropped it.

But Helene said she'd paid for me, so I had to keep going. I didn't care about tennis, and I was terrible at it. After Cindy dropped, it was just me, a pair of seventh-grade twins named Chrissy and Missy who spoke only to each other, and two boys: Ethan Chase and Sam Ullrich. Ethan and Sam were not particularly mean, but they harbored what was clearly an unexamined resentment toward studious, nonblond girls. (Ironically, Ethan would marry an Italian biochemist. Less ironically, Sam would end up managing a small chain of strip clubs.) When it was my turn to hit the ball, they would call out the teacher's instructions—
Racket back, step, swing!
—but for me they changed it to, “Racket back, step, miss!”

I was so flustered by Ethan and Sam's relentless chanting that I headed home with elaborate revenge fantasies swirling in my brain. Thirty minutes later, I realized I had no idea where I was.

I stopped and surveyed the unfamiliar houses. I had walked thirty minutes in exactly the wrong direction. I took a deep breath. If I turned around and walked thirty minutes in exactly the other direction, I figured I would wind up back at the courts, and so I started unsteadily the other way.

Sure enough, after a tense twenty minutes, I began to recognize my neighborhood again. It was like waking from a dream. The short journey home from the courts should have taken me five minutes; I finally made it in just over an hour.

I pushed open the back door, sweaty and annoyed with myself, and let my racquet and backpack drop to the floor. I hadn't given one thought to Helene on my long march. I had been concerned only about finding my way home. But there she was, standing in the kitchen, wound up in the phone cord. “She's here, Jack,” she said into the phone, her voice high and quavery and urgent. “It's all right. She's here!” She was talking to my father. Even at eleven, I understood that that phone call bore the expensive price tag of her desperation.

She hung up the phone and turned to me and found that she was tangled in the cord. She had to do a little rotation to get out of it, a twirl and a dip, and we both laughed, and then she stopped laughing and broke down sobbing, and I stood there, and I was still smiling and my heart thudded with sudden quick terror and my brain was swiped clean by my mother's weeping. I didn't get it. I was here. I was fine.

“I'm fine, Mom,” I said. “I'm fine, I'm fine. I got lost. I'm sorry. I'm fine.” And she nodded and raced over to me and hugged me, and her arms around me, her body enveloping me, the smell of her citrusy perfume mixed with a sour whiff of fear: the force of it suffocated me. I hugged her back, but I wanted to run. It was all I could do not to run. And when my heart finally slowed and my mind began to work again, I eased myself out of that embrace as gently as I could, as if I were her mother and she were my child.

She was so relieved, she said. She couldn't stop crying because she had been so worried and she was so, so relieved that I was safe. She made me toast with honey, although I hadn't asked for it, and she sat with me at the kitchen table and watched me eat it.

Years later I would understand that relief was only part of the story, of course, and that what I saw that day was the wrenching collision of things unfathomable and inevitable, past and foretold.

I think about that day often, and I was thinking about it as I made my way over to Helene's, huddled against the cold. We bring it up once in a while. It's a story we tell each other, an incantation: Do you remember when I got lost? Remember that day?

I trudged the familiar blocks to Helene's duplex through the freezing February wind, climbed the wooden steps to her front porch, and let myself in with my key. I could conjure the feelings of that afternoon, even more than thirty years later, how the disorientation of an unfamiliar neighborhood rushed at me all at once, the way the sun felt like it was cooking my scalp, my single-minded determination to turn it all around and get home; and then how my own thoughts were peeled away, in the kitchen of my mother's house, in the face of her distress, and revealed to me as selfish—at least in the regular way of a child, where “selfish” is another word for “unburdened.”

I peered into the hallway and tiptoed through the kitchen. “Hello,” I said, not too loudly. “Anybody home?” The apartment smelled like chicken soup, my mother's famous Campbell's low-sodium. There was music coming from the living room, the 1950s swanky Frank Sinatra that always made me feel like I was about to be murdered by a saxophonist.

Hannah and my mother were sitting on the living room couch, their heads bent together—my mother's smooth, coiffed hair and Hannah's long dark-blond messy waves, almost the same shade, my mother's a little lighter and, of course, chemically enhanced.

If they heard me come in and call for them, they were ignoring me, but the music was loud and so they may not have; I couldn't be sure and didn't really want to know. Helene whispered something to Hannah, who nodded, and I saw that they were crocheting, or rather that my mother, through compensatory use of her left hand and verbal instruction, was teaching Hannah to crochet. Hannah had the hook, and Helene held a large ball of blue yarn. She nodded as Hannah completed a stitch. It looked like she was making a very long, thin scarf, or a charming baby-blue noose. Hannah laughed at something my mother said.

I had come expecting sadness, but I could tell, even in my own state of it, that it wasn't here. They were so happy together, my mother and my daughter, as they always were, and I felt the familiar twinge of jealousy followed by an equally familiar twinge of relief. “Ladies,” I said. “I'm here!”

They looked up at me in unison. “We thought you might show up,” Helene said.

“Grandma's teaching me how to crochet,” Hannah said. “I'm making you a hat.”

“I love it,” I said, moved.

“
This
isn't the hat,” Hannah said, disgusted. “I'm just learning. This is just practice. When I get good at it, I'm going to make you a hat. Although I might keep it for myself. What did you do to your hair?” She bent back toward the yarn, concentrating.

“Uh,” I mumbled, “just, um, maybe bangs, I thought? But then, no.”

“Good girl,” my mother said to Hannah, ignoring me. “You are a quick study.”

I started peeling off layers, already sweating in my mother's warm rooms. “Can I turn the music down?” I asked. Hannah generally preferred the music of baby-faced man-boys singing about how they were the only ones who understood how beautiful you were inside. But for my mother she made an exception.

Helene smiled at me without answering and then turned back to Hannah and gestured toward the yarn. “These need to be a bit more even,” she murmured, and Hannah carefully pulled a stitch out.

“All righty, then!” I said. I picked up my jacket and walked back to the hallway to hang it up, wandered into the kitchen and closed a cabinet door, lifted the lid on what was, as I'd guessed, a pot of chicken soup. I caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror and noted that I had, in fact, chopped off slightly more hair than I'd thought. I drifted through the apartment and into the spare room where Hannah was staying. Clucky the rubber chicken was tucked in carefully. The novel she was reading, about a pack of attractive, angst-ridden teenage werewolves, was open on the night table. I lay down on the twin bed, moved Clucky. A painful tiredness swept over me immediately. When she was little, Hannah would lie in her bed at night and cry with exhaustion, “I'm so tired!” as if the solution weren't right there, immediately accessible behind her eyelids.

It wasn't better than being home, exactly; I was still me. Now that the music in the living room was quiet, I could hear Hannah and my mother talking to each other, not the words but the tones of it, the rising and falling, Hannah's raspy laugh, Helene's higher one.

My eyes were closing, images popping through my brain: a tennis ball, the front lawn of a yellow house, a carton of milk, a large dog.
You fall asleep,
Hannah had said,
and where do you go? You're gone. It's like you're practicing to die!

“Hannah!” my mother exclaimed from the other room. “Look at that! You got it!”

I had given Hannah and Helene to each other: my lonely mother, adrift, and my sad, snarling wolf cub of a girl. I had given them to each other. I had done that.

The morning it happened, I noticed a bottle of Diet Pepsi in the refrigerator in the staff lounge as I was making room for my peanut butter sandwich. Josie's initials were scrawled across the label in thick black marker. And I thought, with a twinge, about her Diet Pepsi addiction, about the cans and bottles she'd toss into our recycling bin after we'd spent a weekend together, how they clanked and plonked around in the backseat of her car like a broken xylophone. I saw that Diet Pepsi and I wished for a second that she'd brought one for me, the way she used to. But by then we weren't sharing as much with each other, not beverages, not secrets.

By then I also knew for sure that she was having an affair with Alex Cortez—and not just the emotional dalliance she'd admitted to, not just a titillating but still relatively safe distraction from her marriage, but something real and threatening, something she wouldn't come back from easily. I didn't know when it had started—whether it was before she'd even told me about it,
Nothing happened…If we lived in the same city…If we let it,
or after that, after she'd absolved herself to me. I suppose it didn't matter.

Mark had called me three weeks earlier, on a Saturday afternoon. Josie was in Chicago at a two-day sculpting workshop. I saw his name on my caller ID and figured he wanted company, the way he sometimes did when Josie was gone for the weekend.

“We're about to go out for breakfast,” I said, instead of hello. Chris and Hannah were already in the car. “Would you care to join us?” I was in a sunny mood, attentive to the smallest pleasures of my life, suffused with gratitude. These sudden spells of happiness sometimes came over me during the dull weeks of mourning a miscarriage—an airplane briefly soaring above the clouds. At first I doubted the inexplicable elation, mistrusted the happiness until it skulked away, defeated. But after a time, I learned to enjoy these lighthearted hours, because it turned out the happiness left anyway—whether I chased it off or not. “We'll come get you,” I said to Mark. “We'll be there in fifteen minutes!”

“Hang on,” Mark said. “Wait. I can't reach Josie. Do you know where she is?” She had told us she was staying with their friends Lydia and Paul in downtown Chicago for the weekend. But suddenly I knew she wasn't.

I had been tearing through the house doing a little last-second cleaning, which meant that I was picking objects up and putting them down in other places, and also straightening the edges of piles of papers. I looked at my right hand, which held Hannah's clarinet case; she had left it, for some reason, in the bathroom. I looked at the suitcase-like black box of it and said, “Don't
you
know where she is?”

“She forgot her charger,” Mark said. “She's always forgetting it. I figured her phone would run out of juice, so I wanted to tell her, just keep it off when you're not using it, or borrow Lydia's. Whatever. But I couldn't reach her, so I called Lyd, and she just…Lydia thought I was crazy. She had no idea what I was talking about. Josie's not staying with them, and she was never planning to. Shit, I feel like I'm in a bad movie. I'm really worried. Do you know anything?”

I had integrated the knowledge of Josie's betrayal, delivered to me on that warm night on the beach just a few weeks earlier. I had allowed myself to walk a fine line, to offer a jagged kind of loyalty to both of my friends, to the generous idea, I thought, that we are all fallible—that some mistakes are worse than others, and Josie's, more of a loss of focus than a broken promise, was forgivable. But now it seemed that maybe it wasn't.

I sat down on the couch. Morning light angled in through the living room windows and made delicate shadows on the wall, a lacy latticework from the leaves of the hibiscus in the corner. “I'm sure it's nothing,” I said, and then I said it again. “Maybe you got the details wrong. You probably misheard, and she's just staying with someone else.”
Well,
I thought,
of course she is.

“You're right,” he said, without the slightest relief. “Can you think of who else she knows in Chicago? Friends from school or, you know, a friend of a friend or something? I guess she could even be at a hotel.”

“Mark, take it easy,” I said. “She'll be home tomorrow, and she'll explain it. Her phone is dead, and she's just gotten engrossed in the work. You know how she is.”

“Izzy,” he said, and he sounded, in that second, like the Mark I met in grade school, and all the versions of Mark I had known since then; there are moments when it all collides like that, when everything is pressed down, condensed as powder, fine as dust. “I just need to know.”

I thought about Chris and Hannah, waiting for me in the car. I wanted Josie to be elbow deep in a wet mound of clay, visualizing famous sculptures she could turn into Hello Kitties. I wanted her not to be having an affair with Alex Cortez. I wanted Mark not to ask me any more questions. I wanted to sit with my little family in a booth at Desi's and order pancakes. I wanted to be blameless. But there was no such thing.

“Call me when you hear from her,” I said.

Two days later, Josie came into my classroom early, before the students arrived, as I knew she would. I was reading last week's homework assignments: write an ode to your favorite dessert.

“I'm sorry I put you in that position,” Josie said. Her face looked pale and drained. Even her hair looked faded, and it struck me that it was color that made her beautiful. Without it she was just another tired, middle-aged schoolteacher. There were pronounced dark circles under her eyes, as if someone from her fake clay workshop had dipped a finger into the loamy slime and daubed it onto that delicate skin.

I looked up from my papers, one finger on the line where I'd stopped (
Ode to a cupcake: Thou tasty pastry, frosted extra sweet!
) so she'd know I wanted to get right back to work. She hovered nervously, a few feet from my desk. Normally she'd pull a chair up next to me and prop her feet up, or rifle through my top desk drawer for my hidden stash of chocolate.

I met her eyes.
I have no idea what you're talking about,
I wanted to say. Or,
Don't apologize. You didn't put me in a position. I'm not in a position.
I wasn't about to be her confidante. We just stared at each other. She shoved her hands into pockets.

Transgression doesn't suddenly appear on a person's face like sunburn. It doesn't alter the bone structure, change the shape of the eyelids, the curve of the mouth. Josie was just herself. She looked like she had been crying, though, or would start soon.

She shrugged one shoulder, a tiny surrender. I could see her collarbone jutting sharp and birdlike through her shirt. We used to joke that she didn't have enough fat on her body to see her through a long morning. “Oh, Jose,” I said.

She took a step toward me, and then the bell rang, and children started pouring into the building. It was my favorite part of the day—the breath between stillness and chaos. Once the phalanx began its invasion, there was no more time to chat.

“I guess we'll talk later,” Josie said, over the roar. “Okay?”

I can't say it started on that awful day at Lake Kass, or that night at the beach when she told me about Alex Cortez, or the morning in my classroom when we didn't finish talking, or at some other crucial moment that passed me by as unimportant. Anyway, I don't think it was a free fall. It was more of an untethering: not a terrifying death spiral, but a slow loosening of the safety ropes.

There were those things she had been saying to her students:
Don't always listen to your parents; learn it for the test and then forget it; sometimes you have to lie to protect the ones you love.
Oh, yes, she said that, too.

There was the Lily Barrett cell-phone debacle, of course; the stolen coat incident.

There was, maybe worst of all, Josie's confrontation with Principal Coffey—because although she may have been right, or at least right enough to be steamed, miffed, and/or definitely disgruntled, everyone knows you don't pick a fight with Principal Coffey. Well, you don't win a fight with Principal Coffey. And even if you win a fight with Principal Coffey, you don't win.

Josie had put in a request for funds from the school's discretionary account, which we all did once in a while, when our classroom materials proved insufficient or outdated: $300 to upgrade a microscope, $325 for a grand, all-school papier-mâché Day of the Dead project, $250 to bring in Global Warning, a local group of middle-aged scientists who performed rap songs about climate change. (
Polar bear nowhere, penguins gettin' hot./It won't be cathartic if we lose the Arctic!
) By unspoken agreement, these funds were judiciously requested and therefore almost always approved.

Josie had asked for two hundred dollars for a subscription to an online, interactive women's history database and was already filling out the purchase form when Principal Coffey turned her down. The math teachers had gotten together (
What could I do?
Josie said later.
They had the numbers.
) and put in a request for a pricey new software program for a small group of advanced sixth graders—Principal Coffey's pride and joy. “I'm sorry, Ms. Abrams. But of course we'll consider your request next year.” He gave her one of his patented sympathetic smile-frowns and, resigned to the disappointment, she was about to leave his office, when he chuckled to himself. “Or maybe you'll have changed your mind by then,” he said. “Ha-ha! A woman's prerogative!”

And that, she said, was what flipped her lid, was why she spun around to face him in the open doorway, crossed her arms over her chest, and said to the esteemed principal of Rhodes Avenue, “You, sir, are a sexist ass!”

“I said it in an English accent,” she whispered to me later that day, in the front seat of my car. “An English accent! Where did that come from?” She laughed and laughed when she told me this story, loudly enough to compensate for my silence. She couldn't see that her own judgment had tacked off course. It was as if she had been lit by the spark of something wild and wrong.

And so. The day after that outburst, but based on the totality of her recent questionable judgments and behaviors, Josie had been reprimanded, had been given a quiet in-school suspension, where her teaching was to come under direct scrutiny until such time as Principal Coffey no longer deemed it necessary.

But who was to say this wasn't all just part of the glorious roller coaster that was Josie? If you loved the rush, you had to accept the nausea. Her heart was fierce, and she told a good story.

I had first lunch period that day, eleven thirty, which was always annoying, because I was never hungry that early, but if I didn't eat, I'd be shaking by two. When I went to grab my peanut butter sandwich from the refrigerator, I didn't notice that Josie's Diet Pepsi was gone.

I was heading to my classroom when I passed Webber Gale in the hallway. He was spiky haired and small for his age, a snarky little whippet of a fourth grader. He was known among his peers for his outlandish behavior, and he had quite a following at Rhodes Avenue, a cadre of kids who delighted in his transgressions. We had all seen it before, of course; every few years there was a Webber Gale. The most poignant thing about them was that each thought he was a gloriously misbehaving original, the only one of his kind.

They elicited a kind of mass psychological transference: Webb's followers egged him on so that he would do the risky thing—sneak into the girls' bathroom, steal a stack of lunch trays and chuck them into the bushes outside the cafeteria, leap from the top of the monkey bars—and get in trouble for it, and they would get to experience the vicarious thrill of it all from the safety of their desks, or the lunchroom, or the ground.

I liked Webber. Once, when the other kids were out at recess and he was sitting alone on a bench in the office (because it is not okay, Webber, to run through the hallway yelling, “MONSTERS ARE ATTACKING!”), he told me: he didn't always want to be bad, but he had his reputation to consider. He was just a skinny kid, overcompensating.