Days of Awe (6 page)

Cal, the recently divorced one, stands next to us, pondering the selections intensely. After a minute, he places two small squares of cream-cheese-frosted carrot cake on his plate and smiles at us. His hair is thick and threaded with gray, and there's an appraising, off-kilter sexiness about him, like he's done a thing or two in his life, but he'll just keep those stories to himself. “I believe if I choose carrot cake, I can justify having two pieces,” he says, making sure to look first at my mother, then at me.

Helene, her hand still on my shoulder, adds a bit of pressure to her grip. “Definitely true,” she says. “You're getting your vegetables.”

We introduce ourselves again, and if a person can die of awkwardness, I think I will, my internal organs about to seize up and grind to a halt as sexy, older Cal flirts with my mother. He even goes so far as to brush a crumb off of her sleeve. My mother, and this stud! Well, now I know why she wanted to come here.

I grab three chocolate-chip cookies, a cupcake, and an éclair and pile them on my plate. Carrot cake, my ass. “Mom,” I say, trying to pull her attention toward me like the needy nine-year-old I suddenly am. “Mom.
Mom.
Mom.
Doesn't this look like the dessert table at my wedding?”

But it's Cal who turns to me and chuckles. “Catherine and I got married at the courthouse,” he says. “There was a row of inmates in orange prison jumpsuits sitting on a bench in front of the judge's chambers. We used to say that they were her bridesmaids.” He smiles at me, and the weird, small, hibernating rodent of my soul opens one eye and looks around before falling back asleep.

I shove a huge bite of éclair in my mouth and feel the overwhelming need to make a run for it. I'm about to guide my mother to the door when Jillian claps her hands three times, loudly. “Can everybody come on back to the circle for a minute? Just for one more short minute?”

Cal looks at me. “She loves that circle,” he whispers. His smile is quick and generous, like he likes to appreciate things.

“Loves it,” I say, smiling back and hoping there's no chocolate on my face.

The air in the room has shifted again, or maybe it's my own lungs. As we head back to our chairs, Helene leans into me and whispers, “Is he the kind of person who would hide us in an attic?” which is her litmus test for every non-Jewish boyfriend I've ever had, which is all of them.

My mother and I sit back down, and I hand her a chocolate-chip cookie, which, with her good hand, she accepts.

Helene was four when she left Germany. In a shoebox in her closet, there's a soft, faded black-and-white photograph of her on the boat, sandwiched between her parents, holding their hands, crying. The railing is behind them and the ocean beyond, gray and menacing in the photograph. I can only imagine how tightly my grandparents must have been gripping Helene's little fingers.

“Oh, Mom,” I said when she first showed it to me. In the photo her dark blond hair is in pigtails, her eyes squinting into the sun, her mouth open in despair. “You look so sad. Like you knew what was going on. Like you knew what you had left behind.” For a moment I thought I felt that sadness. It moved through me, expanded and lifted me. It was the most I had ever felt.

She took the picture from my hands and shook her head. “Nah. I remember that day. There was a man on the deck who had become friendly with Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa had a”—she waved her hand, trying to pluck the word out of the air—“a whatchamacallit, a Leica. And this man offered to take our picture. I didn't want him to take my damn picture. I wasn't sad, I was mad.”

I was thirteen when we had this conversation. My mind had recently been blown by the revelations of history. I had decided that my mother's flight from Germany made me extremely special and precious. I would lie awake at night sometimes and think,
It's amazing I'm even here!
A miracle!
Like I was some kind of unusual, exotic bird.
Me!
I would think, and it was the beautiful bird's rare chirp.
Me, me, me!

It didn't help that my grandparents fussed and hovered over me, their only grandchild, flapping about, even more so after my parents' divorce, tending to me after school well beyond the age I needed tending, feeding me and telling me to be careful and calling me
schätze,
their treasure.

For a long time, I believed I was destined for something spectacular. I didn't know what, but I thought it would probably involve heroically preventing a genocide or possibly producing some kind of work of art, something of such astounding beauty that, upon viewing, no human being would ever again be capable of cruelty. My ambitions were lofty but extremely vague, which made them even loftier.

How can I explain it now, from the vantage point of forty-three?

My mother and my grandparents sail on a boat from Germany, among the last allowed to leave. The rest of the family, a close-knit bunch of brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins, think that the little trio is being hasty. They recognize the danger, of course, but they figure that the trouble will resolve itself, as it always has. They stay behind, and then are gone.

Nobody tells me much. I figure it out slowly, and then suddenly it all pops into place. And that's when I see: it's there in my face, my lips the same shape as my grandmother's, my hair coarse and wiry as my grandfather's, sleepy eyelids like my mother's.

I'm living the life they dreamed of, the one they made possible, and so it turns out I'm just the kid I am, trying to memorize the periodic table, watching TV, eating lemon cake, lacing up ice skates, reading
A Separate Peace,
passing my Spanish test. As I get older, my life simultaneously shrinks and grows, shedding delusions as it picks up complications. One day becomes the next. Extraordinary circumstances have given me the gift of an ordinary life.

I had a boyfriend in college named Chad Hansen. He, like all Chads, was from a small town in Wisconsin—his, Waupakakee, was tiny and far north and best known for its native son, Reinhardt Pelican, who, in 1891, invented puffed rice and, subsequently, a sweet puffed rice cereal called Pelican Balls.

Chad wore a baseball cap nearly all the time. He wasn't a jerk, exactly, but he wasn't not a jerk. One morning, sitting cross-legged together on my thin futon on the floor of my bedroom, dust motes sparkling in the sunlight, I tried to explain it to him, this shimmering sense I had of being a child of history, of being destined for something important, and Chad laughed—a loud and genuine
hyuk!
—and he took off his cap and said, “And what, exactly, would that be?” Then he tapped me on the nose and kissed me and told me I was adorable and that he'd never met anyone like me before. We made out on my futon for a long time, and the next day I declared my major in primary education, which was something I'd been thinking about doing anyway.

When I recall that moment with Chad—and I do—I think that it's when I began to grow old and die. Which is, of course, ludicrous.

Everything adds up to where I am now: my mother and grandparents on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic; Chris, mine and then not mine; Hannah (tiny minnow, staying put where the others couldn't). And Josie, setting her sights on me at the faculty meeting, and then, thirteen years later, skidding across the highway on a rainy night. That, too.

Six years ago, Josie and I chaperoned the fifth graders on their Earth Science Weekend. It was an annual event at our school and a coveted volunteer opportunity for teachers, because you could pack most of your required extracurricular hours into one weekend. You could get almost all of them over with at once instead of having to coach eighth-grade soccer every Saturday for a whole season or head up the After-School Mathletes or the Kool Knitting Klub (yes, although no one ever said it out loud: the KKK) for an hour and a half every Wednesday at the end of an already exhausting day. These activities were informally known as Lobster Duty, as many of us felt that they were the equivalent of being dropped into a pot of water and being slowly boiled to death.

There would be some hiking on this trip—Josie and I accepted this unpleasant fact—and much of the weekend would be spent outdoors regardless of the unpredictable April weather, but these were ten-year-olds. The hikes would be easy. Activities would be short and punctuated by breaks. We would not be sleeping in tents but in fully equipped cabins (tents were for the seventh graders and their Outdoor Fitness Weekend in September), and the chaperones would dole out a constant supply of snacks so as to ward off cannibalism if things got dicey. Also, lights-out was at eight thirty, after which our time belonged to us—although in fact,
in actual fact,
as Chris always said—we would be sharing a cabin with two of the Andes, Andrea Brauer, the science teacher, and Kelly Anderson-Jensen, our fellow chaperone.

Andi Friedman had not made the cut. She'd expressed her interest just a few minutes after Josie and I had sent our e-mails, and the selection process was based only on time stamps. When they found out they wouldn't be together on this trip, the Andes had howled at the injustice of it. I saw them in the hallway, hugging and keening.
Oh, no, Andi! Oh, nooooo­ooooo­oo!
On the bus ride to the Lake Kass Wetlands Preserve, amid the hoots of jazzed-up fifth graders, I imagined Andi alone and angry in her dark apartment, drunkenly creating voodoo dolls of Josie and me out of twigs and cotton balls and old socks.

I was ten weeks pregnant then, and so far only Chris, Josie, and Mark knew. I hadn't even told my mother, although I'd wanted to. Helene would have combusted with joy at the thought of another grandchild, and I wanted to delight her, to add another X in the happiness column of her complicated life. But I had had two miscarriages before Hannah, and so I knew the flip side of that expectant joy for all of us. I carried it with me. I felt a little nauseated most of the time; it was just slight enough to be a comfort. I was beginning to entertain the hope that I might get to be the mother of two children. I imagined—I tried not to, but I couldn't help it—that this one was also a girl, but dark like me, round and playful and quick to laugh, where Hannah was sensitive and serious. I tried not to think about names.

“We can talk about names,” Chris had said just a few nights earlier, lying next to me in bed, his hand on my arm. “We can talk about painting the spare room yellow and buying a new crib, or what kind of a big sister Hannah will be….We can talk about anything we want.” He moved his hand down to my wrist, circled it with his fingers. “We can be hopeful,” he said, and I sucked in my breath with the certain feeling that whatever surprising, encouraging thing he would say next would lift me up. “Because being hopeful won't change anything.”

“Oh,” I said, deflated. “Right.” I marveled at how he could be so expansive and nihilistic at the same time, how his darkly rational mind freed him. And I squeezed my eyes shut and thought the only thought I let myself have about this pregnancy, which was,
Please.

The bus rolled into the gravel parking lot of the Lake Kass Wetlands Preserve Science Learning and Exploring Center, and our long-suffering driver tapped the horn. A park ranger leaped like a rabbit out of the visitors' center and jogged toward the bus, hoisting herself up the steps as soon as the door opened.

“Hi! My name is Margo! Welcome to NATURE!” she yelled, obviously knowing better than to feed a bunch of fifth graders the line
Welcome to Lake Kass.
The kids screamed and whooped with joy, and you couldn't help but let it seep into you, too. One of the Jakes (there were three of them) struck up a chant: “NaTURE! NaTURE! NaTURE!”

I leaned toward Josie. “Just across the highway is the Nurture Center.”

She nodded. “The two camps will duke it out in a series of competitions throughout the weekend.”

“Settle down, please,” Kelly Anderson-Jensen yelled, waving her hand in the air, and I had the uncomfortable feeling she was talking to Josie and me. “Close your
mouths
and open your
ears.
”

“Yes, friends,” Andrea Brauer piped in, the gentler of the two. “Let's show Miss Margo our best Rhodes Avenue manners!”

The Andes were good at this kind of energetic rallying, a skill set available to former high-school cheerleaders. They teased and cajoled and flirted, and then, the second they felt their control slipping, they would turn chilly and withholding. Their classrooms were a charged atmosphere of primal fear coupled with the children's heartbreaking, puppyish desire to please. They always did well on the classroom-management portions of their yearly reviews. Josie had a different kind of rapport with her students. She made them feel as if they would be letting themselves down if they didn't comport themselves with dignity. She was the tween whisperer. My strategy was to speak softly and hope for the best.

“Lake ASS!” Jake hollered, inevitably, and forty-two fifth graders went wild, as they'd been doing all week, because it never got less funny.

“Jake Byers!” Kelly called, her voice high and tinny above the roar. “Jake B, I'm WARNING YOU.”

Margo rattled off a loud list of park rules of the
take only pictures, leave only footprints
variety, plus a few more strict mandates about safety:
Never
wander off the path.
Always
stick with your assigned buddy. Just as I was contemplating the syntactic logic of the phrase “assigned buddy,” the kids began a massive lurch toward the exit.

“Isabel, come on,” Andrea said to me, grabbing my elbow. We were in charge of leading the pack. Kelly would bring up the rear. And Josie would be the sheepdog, herding the stragglers, as well as carrying the small black bag of medical necessities a few of the kids couldn't be more than ten feet from at all times: one asthma inhaler, three EpiPens, and a tube of eczema cream.

I was slow to rouse from my little reverie, stuck in the pregnancy fog I'd been unable to shake for the past few weeks, and Andrea looked at me, her expression a mixture of
What's wrong?
and
Shape up!
It occurred to me that soon I would be able to spill my secret, wouldn't be able to keep it, in fact, and the thought delighted and terrified me.

“Sorry,” I said. Andrea snaked through the aisle and managed to get off the bus before any of the more-squirrelly kids could bust loose and head for the woods. I climbed down the steps and scanned the crowd, beginning the first of the endless head counts we would tick off that weekend. You had to look at these events as prison outings, as chain gangs without the comforting security of the leg irons. I walked more slowly through the mob, patting heads, touching backs, whispering,
Hey, hey, this will be fun, hey, huh.
I was taking a page from Principal Bob Coffey's handbook of child-and-canine obedience, trying to bestow a calm authority.

“Mrs. Moore!” Dylan Nuñez nudged up against me. He tugged on my shirt. They did that, all of them, all the time, yanked and pulled on me, no matter how often I reminded them,
Respect personal space, people!
“Mrs. Moore, look! I found a grasshopper!” He cradled the insect tenderly in his cupped palm and stared at it.

“Wow,” I said, leaning down. “That's—” but before I could finish my sentence, he popped it into his mouth.

“Dylan! No! Ew!
Dylan!
” I spun him away from the other children and clamped my mouth shut to keep from screaming.

“Just kidding, Mrs. Moore!” He opened his mouth to reveal a green gummy bear and then began chewing it up with disgusting glee.

“I'm going to sneak up behind you at dinnertime, Dylan,” I said, “and I'm going to slip a real grasshopper into your hot-dog bun.” He laughed and bumped into me with his shoulder in what I had come to understand was a boy hug, then dodged back into the group.

This was what I loved about being a teacher, back then, when I loved it: that every child was some family's most precious gem, the joy of their hearts, and I could see that, even sometimes when their own parents probably couldn't; I could see that spark of perfection in every kid, in whatever form it took, a devious sense of humor or a disheveled sweetness, and I loved them all for it. They were grubby and loud and chaotic, and occasionally mean-spirited and dim-witted, sometimes feral and once in a while borderline psychotic. But they had beauty in them.

Josie smiled at me over the children's heads—which were, I had noticed on the bus, frankly dirty, along with the rest of them. It was as if their parents had collectively given up on them this week, in preparation for this field trip. They were on the brink of adolescence, these rangy fifth graders, and before the hormone artillery advanced, their bodies were sending out early warning shots. They were greasy haired, gamy little things. As much as I loved them, I also couldn't ignore their collective resemblance to chimps.

I thought about Hannah and felt a sharp pang of longing, almost physical, even though I'd only been away from her for a few hours. She would turn into this species of primate soon enough, but she was six then, still a sweet monkey, just a tall baby who liked to follow me around the house, kissing and petting me. Her body was a satellite to mine. Sometimes at night I would lie in bed and revel in the space between Chris and me, the way my skin touched only my own T-shirt and the sheets. It would be the blink of an eye before Hannah turned into the girl she is now, the one who disdains my affection and cringes from my touch. If I'd known then, I would have…well, what would I have done? Recorded a caress? Taken notes on a hug? You can't preserve anything; every happy moment is already on its way to becoming nostalgia. That's the problem.

Margo quickly organized the children into a red and a green team for the treasure hunt. We decided to leave their bags on the bus, give them a chance to run around, and then come back later and get them settled in the cabins.

Audrey Franklin and Zoe Meckleheim-Wald rushed over to me as Kelly and Andrea handed out color-coded name tags. Audrey was guiding Zoe, her hands on her friend's bony shoulders, and Zoe, I noticed with alarm, was sobbing.

Mrs. Moore, I! She forgot! Mrs. Moore! Glasses my glasses! Zoe at home forgot!
They spoke over each other in a rush to impart this exciting news. Zoe sobbed and wiped her eyes. Audrey smiled at me, expectantly. Audrey was a lightning rod, a heat-seeking drama missile. She was one of those girls who tried to help everybody, especially when they didn't need it.

“What will I do?”

Zoe. It was one of the names on the list I wasn't letting myself make. Also Iris. Phoebe. Louisa. It was so hard to keep this baby an abstraction when every thump of my heart brought her closer.

I bent down close to Zoe, my hands on my knees. “How many fingers am I holding up?” I wasn't holding up any. She tilted her head at me, tears still wet on her flushed cheeks. “How many?” I repeated.

“None!” she said, and started to laugh.

“How well can you see without your glasses?” I asked.

“Mrs. Moore,” Audrey said. “She
needs
them!”

“I mostly wear them for watching TV at home.” Zoe shrugged.

“I think you'll be okay,” I said. “There's no TV here. And it's only two days. Be careful, and don't mistake any of the coyotes for your friends.”