The Woman Upstairs

3





From the beginning, then, but briefly. I was born into an ordinary family in a town an hour up the coast from Boston, called Manchester-by-the-Sea. The sixties were barely a ripple there, at the end of the Boston commuter line. It must have been our perfect beach—called Singing Beach on account of its fine, pale, musical sand, but perhaps also because it is so widely and so long lauded—that afforded me my delusions of grandeur. It makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore, with a vista open to eternity, you’ll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city.

Or maybe, more likely, they came from my mother, fierce and strange and doomed. I had a mother and a father, a big brother—eight years bigger than me, though, so we hardly seemed of the same family: by the time I was nine, he was gone—and a tortoiseshell cat, Zipper, and a mangy, runty mutt from the shelter named Sputnik, who looked like a wig of rags on sticks: his legs were so scrawny, we marveled they didn’t snap. My father worked in insurance in Boston—he took the train each morning, the 7:52—and he proceeded very respectably but apparently not very successfully, because my parents never seemed to have money to spare.

My mother stayed at home and smoked cigarettes and hatched schemes. For a while she tested cookbook recipes for a publisher. She was paid for it, and for months she fed us elaborate three- and four-course meals that involved eggy sauces and frequently, as I recall, marsala wine. Briefly and humiliatingly for me, she fancied herself a clothes designer, and spent several months at the sewing machine in the spare room in a swoon of tobacco smoke (often she held the cigarette between her lips while running a seam; I always worried that ash would fall onto the fabric). Her output was at once unusual and not unusual enough: she made paisley jersey minidresses for girls of my size, not, at first glance, dissimilar to those off the rack (“Come here, sugarplum,” she’d call, and would hold up paper patterns against my prepubescent chest, trimming away carelessly at the paper with her enormous shears, a mere whisper from my waist, or my neck); but then you’d see she’d cut portholes around the midriff and edged them with rickrack, so that a girl’s white tummy would peer through; or that she’d made the sleeves so they attached not with seams but with a flurry of ribbons, a circle of multicolored bows, that would look bedraggled after a single washing. Cheerfully impractical, she ran up at least two dozen outfits, of various designs, the summer I was nine, and then took a booth from which to flog them at the fair in a neighboring town.

I refused to sit with her there, in full view, on a brilliant Saturday in July, and went instead with my father on a tedious round of errands—the cleaners, the liquor store, the hardware store—stifling in the car but immeasurably relieved not to risk being seen by my schoolmates under my mother’s hideous handmade sign. My mother was a beloved embarrassment.

She sold a few of the clothes, but clearly felt the experiment hadn’t sufficiently succeeded, and the suitcase was stowed, unemptied, in the attic. Before too long, the sewing machine also migrated upward, and my mother entered one of her darker phases, until the next eureka moment struck.

Certainly my mother, unlike my father, instilled in me the sense that unpredictability was essential—“Not to be like your neighbor: that’s everything,” she would say—and because of this, because of the bright flame of her, it took me a long time to realize that she, too, was cautious and bourgeois, frightened of the unknown and so uncertain of herself that she could hardly bear to make a mark. How else could she have stayed resolutely wedded to the ordinary, to my father, to the carefully ordained and unchanging routines of Manchester-by-the-Sea?

And it explains much about me, too, about the limits of my experience, about the fact that the person I am in my head is so far from the person I am in the world. Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have—that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It’s the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding. Maybe I’ve learned it’s a mistake to reveal her at all.

So, from our ordinary family in our ordinary house, a center-entrance colonial, with its potted geraniums on the stone porch and its charmingly untended yew hedges nibbling at the windows, I made my way out into the ordinary world, to the local elementary school, the local middle school, the local high school. I was popular enough, universally liked by the girls, even liked, when noticed, by the boys, though not in a romantic way. I was funny—ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

Education was different then, and I was good at it, and so I skipped grade nine, went straight from eight to ten, which was socially a little tough at first and sealed my fate as a disastrous math student—I never learned the quadratic formula, and other important tips from ninth-grade math; just like I missed the early dating essays and the classes in how to navigate a school dance. At the time, though, I wasn’t embarrassed about any of this: not embarrassed to be thrown, sink or swim, into the second year of high school, without so much as a map to the cafeteria or a primer on how cliques were lined up, or even a list of the names of my new classmates, all of whom knew one another, and some of whom knew me as their little sister’s friend. No, I was proud, because I knew my parents were proud, because it was an elevation, and a revelation of the fact that I was special. I’d long suspected it, and now I knew for sure: I was destined.

When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys, and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the history/biology/French test and say, “Oh my God, it’s going to be such a disaster! I’m so scared!” and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won’t feel threatened by you, so they’ll like you, because you wouldn’t want them to know that in your heart, you are proud, and maybe even haughty, and are riven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply Not Nice you are. You learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn’t see you clearly, and you know—you get told by others—that they think you’re really sweet, and you feel a thrill of triumph: “Yes, I’m good at history/biology/French, and I’m good at this, too.” It doesn’t ever occur to you, as you fashion your mask so carefully, that it will grow into your skin and graft itself, come to seem irremovable.

When you look at the boy, Josh, who skipped the grade alongside you, and you see him wiping his nose upon his sleeve, and note his physical scrawniness, his chin’s bloom of acne, next to the other tenth-grade boys with broader chests and clear, square jaws, when you observe that he still takes his lunch with his old ninth-grade friends—all of them boys in black T-shirts with glitter decals across the breast that say KISS or AC/DC, all of them with pimply chins and wet lips and hair as lank as seaweed—you cannot see any triumph in him at all. He seems clearly to have lost, to be lost, to be a loser; because anybody knows that in the challenge you were given when you skipped a grade, social success—modest social success, to be sure, but still—was half the battle. When Frederica Beattie invites you to join her birthday party—a sail on her father’s boat, with six other girls, two of whom are from the most popular set—you feel pity for Josh, who will never taste such nectar.

But wait: nobody ever pointed out that Josh, in his obliviousness, was utterly happy. He’d already taught himself the quadratic formula; he wouldn’t be stymied in any area of academic advancement. In fact, he would go on to MIT and eventually become a neurobiologist with a lab largely funded by the NIH and a vast budget at his disposal. He would marry a perfectly attractive, if rather knock-kneed, woman and spawn several knock-kneed, bespectacled nerds, replicas of himself. It will all work out more than fine for him, and he will never for a second suspect that it could have been otherwise. He will not know there was a social test; he will not know that he failed it. No, a sail on Frederica Beattie’s father’s boat was an honor that he dreamed not of; and his yen for society, such as it was, was perfectly satisfied by his old clan, now a year behind him. He could no more have fashioned a mask than flown to the moon; and so he remained who he was forevermore. Femininity as masquerade, indeed.



It was in high school that I decided—or, as I would have had it, that I realized—that I would become an artist. Having discovered a set of sympathetic friends who reveled, precisely, in our not-grown-up-ness, a handful of girls and boys who liked to jump in puddles during downpours, or gather on the playground at dusk, as much to swing on the swings as to smoke pot behind the cupola, I found that our group loitered increasingly in the art room after school, with the head art teacher’s tacit blessing. He was a stocky fellow in knee-high hunting boots and leather jerkins, with luxuriant shoulder-length locks and a pointy red goatee: he looked like a refugee from a community theater Shakespeare production, and his name, most wonderfully, was Dominic Crace.

Although the premises were officially closed, he left out supplies for us, cupboards unlocked, paints and brushes by the sink, and even, sometimes, on the worktable, the key for the darkroom. It was within its red gloom that, as an anxious junior, I suffered my first real kiss, a wet-tongued clinch with a senior named Alf, whose many-zippered leather jacket was the most splendid thing about him. I’d long thought him cool, but he proved—it was a surprise to realize this was possible—as awkward as I was, the upshot of which was that the kiss was neither repeated nor ever again mentioned. Our friendship, such as it was—something along the lines of extended family—remained unchanged; it was simply as if the kiss had never happened; and at times, afterward, I’d wonder whether it had.

Thinking ourselves subversive, pining for the decades of adventure that we had, in our belated births, so narrowly missed, we stayed in the room until nightfall and painted posters and slogans on large sheets of construction paper, and taped them up around the hallways. REVOLT, they read, in bursts of primary color, and SHUN COMPLACENCY, and DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR SOUL IS?, and FIGHT MONEY! KISS AN ANARCHIST!

If Dominic Crace was on our side, the janitors were, ironically, in a useful revolutionary lesson, the enemy: they roamed the halls at night charged with tearing down our unauthorized posters before the next morning’s assembly. Our game was to post the best ones in corners where the janitors wouldn’t find them, or not, at least, until they’d been widely appreciated. We thrilled to paint them, thrilled to hang them, thrilled, the next day, to scout for the survivors: LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF, with the cerulean blue outline of a couple embracing, lasted three days on the inside of the back door to the biology lab; THEY F—— YOU UP, YOUR MUM AND DAD, which was, as a quotation, a contribution from my mother, made it a whole week inside the cupboard door in the gym where the basketballs were kept. But the frankest—SATS, SCHOOL ACTIVITIES: WHAT’S IT ALL FOR?—was held up in assembly by a frowning Mr. Evers, the principal, who said that while we were all in favor of free speech, slogans of this kind were unhelpful to the fabric of our community and undermined morale. Moreover, he explained, they made a bad impression on any guests. This is not, he said, in the spirit of Manchester High School. He advised that there were many avenues for expression, and that those who needed to express confusion or discontent were welcome to submit articles to the school newspaper for publication. That, he hoped, would be an end to it.

Dominic Crace, who knew full well who we were, didn’t turn us in, nor did he lock up the supplies; and we, who sniggered at Mr. Evers’s pompous speech, were nevertheless like flies in a trap, lured by the delights of Crace’s art room. The following year, my last, all of us who were still at the school—Alf had graduated, along with a few others, leaving six of us seniors, three juniors and a sophomore—signed up for Studio Art.

Our first homework assignment was to draw a bee inside a violin inside a pear. Everybody else took Crace literally, and drew painstaking pencil renditions of these items, ever smaller, like Chinese boxes. Nobody was very good at perspective, but for some this worked out better than for others. I didn’t even try to draw. I went home and built a large hollow papier-mâché pear on a coat hanger form—in two pieces, initially, that eventually I sealed together—and I lined the inside with gold foil. I made a violin out of a matchbox and a picture of an instrument cut from a glossy magazine, and I caught a honeybee out among my mother’s lavender, using the old bug-catcher from the attic. I asphyxiated him in the jar.

Having painted him with shellac, pleasingly, so he glistened, I laid the sleeping bee in the half-open violin matchbox, glued it to the floor inside the pear, and then, with my big brother’s help (he must have been already living in Tucson and home for a visit with Tweety, who eventually became his wife), I rigged up a tiny bulb, like a nightlight, inside the pear before I sealed it, and ran the cord discreetly out the bottom. Crucially, I burrowed a peephole through the pear’s skin, through the papier-mâché flesh, so you could peer inside it; and even now I have to say, when the cord was plugged in and the wall of gold foil illuminated the pear’s hollow core, the glistening sleeping bee in his violin matchbox was oddly beautiful. I decided that it was a russet pear, and painted the outside in beautiful crimson reds, many layers of paint so it was thick and shiny. I worked very hard at it—I loved the pointlessness of the enterprise; it gave me such satisfaction, an answer to my earlier posters. This, Mr. Evers, I thought, this is what it’s all for—and when I took it into class and set it up alongside all the pencil drawings, I had the exhilaration of seeing Mr. Crace make a temple of his hands beneath his chin (a temple, mind you, that pulled discreetly at the ends of his devilish goatee) and chuckle aloud.

“This,” he announced, looking around at us one after the other with a flicker of glee that suddenly brought to mind Willy Wonka rather than Petruchio, “now this is a work of art.” He paused, bent at the waist and peered in at my bee in his chamber, then straightened and whirled around. “Whose is this? Whose is it? It’s yours? I knew it. Well done, Nora Eldridge,” he said. “Well done, you.”





4





Sirena was an artist—is an artist. A real one, whatever that means. Now she’s even well known, in certain important circles. Even though she lives in Paris, Sirena isn’t French; she’s Italian. This isn’t obvious because her last name is Shahid and her husband’s first name is Skandar, and her son has the same name as the last shah of Iran—not that any of them is remotely Persian. They simply liked the name. Skandar is from Lebanon, from Beirut. Okay, someone in his family was from Palestine before that, but that’s a long time ago now; and at least some part of it, on his father’s side, I think, was from Beirut all along. One part of him is Christian and another part is Muslim, which surely explains a lot about all of it to someone, though not especially to me. Besides which, I wasn’t talking about Skandar, who doesn’t come into the story until much later, but about Sirena, to whom he was—and is—married, who is Italian and an artist.

You’d be forgiven for thinking Sirena was herself from the Middle East, on account of her skin, that fine olive skin, which on her son looked as though he’d been dusted with powder, glaucous almost, but on her elegant bones appeared at once old and young, young because her cheeks were so smooth and full, like fruit. She didn’t have any wrinkles except at the corners of her eyes, and there, spectacular crow’s-feet as if she’d spent her life grinning or squinting into the sun. And she had grooves from the edges of her nose to the corners of her mouth, but these weren’t wrinkles, exactly, they were expression. Her nose was avian, strong, Italian, I suppose, and the fine skin was pulled tight across it, a little shiny sometimes. There, on its bridge, were dotted a few freckles, like a small spray of sand. She had the eyes, Reza’s eyes, and the fierce black brows, and straight glossy black hair streaked with silver. She wasn’t young—even when I met her, when Reza was eight, she must have been around forty-five; but you wouldn’t have put her age so high. It was in the eyes—the life in the eyes—and the crow’s-feet. Ironically, they made her seem younger.

I should have met her at the Back to School Night at the end of September—the evening on which the parents come to the classroom at dinnertime, having mysteriously disposed of their offspring, and cram themselves into their children’s tiny desks and listen to the teacher expound with infectious enthusiasm on the joys of multiplication tables and the mysterious importance of learning cursive. This presentation is followed by a speech from the principal, Shauna McPhee, in the auditorium, and the requisite tepid, gelatinous pizza and warm soda afterward that we, the beleaguered and by now exhausted teachers, must stay behind to clean up.

If I’d met Sirena then, I would have made the effort to approach her, I know that; but as it was, I met her before, because Reza got beaten up. Not quite true: I’ve always been prone to exaggeration. But he did get attacked, and he did get hurt.

In the third week of school, on the playground after classes on Wednesday, the first truly crisp and autumnal day of the season, three fifth-grade boys ganged up on Reza while he was playing on the climbing structure by himself—or “by his own,” as the children sometimes charmingly put it. First they threw balls at him—not small balls, big ones, basketballs, and not in fun but hard, with vicious aim. “I thought they were playing dodgeball,” said another kid who’d been nearby; but unfortunately nobody proposed the game to Reza, who wouldn’t have known what it was anyway—and then, somehow, things deteriorated further, and one of them, Owen, a large boy and a stupid one, I have to say, having taught him for a year and struggled mightily to be able to promote him at the end of it, grabbed Reza by the collar, hauled him up against a metal pillar and punched him in the ear. He called Reza “a terrorist” and told him the playground was for Americans. It took a while to get the story clear, and somewhere it involved Owen’s uncle suffering from PTSD following a tour in Iraq; but nothing, frankly, could excuse or explain the whole appalling fiasco.

I was going over the kids’ essays—well, that’s a big word for them, three paragraphs on “What I liked most about our apple-picking field trip”; but I was working at my desk in the classroom—when Bethany, one of the three girls barely out of college who are in charge of after-school free play, brought him in to me. She’d had the wit to slap an ice pack on his red and swelling ear, but Reza was blanched and trembling, his lashes clumped with tears. Bethany was too young or too timid to do what most obviously needed to be done, which was to sit him down and put an arm around him and breathe right along with him, to slow him down, and then without moving out of sight, to get the cell and his file and call his mother and tell her to come and pick him up.

I was irritated with Sirena at first, because in a slow, foreign, small voice, she suggested that Maria, his sitter, would be coming for him in forty-five minutes anyway. I took an audible breath—I wanted it to be—and I said, “Under the circumstances, Mrs. Shahid, I think it would be a good idea if you came yourself and if you came as soon as possible.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Fifteen at most.”

“We’ll be right here in the classroom,” I said. “Come as quickly as you can.”

And I went back to sit next to Reza and I put one arm on the back of his chair so he’d feel safe, and I said, “Do you want a lemonade? I’ve got one in my bag. And how about an Oreo?” And I plied him with sugar water and cookies, and I plied him for the story, and so had at least the bare and inexcusable bones of it before Sirena arrived. Reza, in spite of the tears caught in his lashes like raindrops on a spider’s web, did not cry, although he hiccoughed a bit, his breathing, like his small shoulders, shuddery.

I was furious—with the three bullies, with Bethany, Margot and Sarah, who somehow had contrived not to see a thing, and somehow furious also with Reza’s mother, whom I had yet to meet, for leaving him unprotected in a strange land, for having entrusted him to a system and to people she knew nothing about. If he were mine, I would never have done such a thing: I would have cherished him, surrounded him, not even as a matter of principle (although there was that, too), but because he was Reza, this luminous boy, and so precious.

When, then, she peered through the glass with a tentative knock, and cracked the door open, I leaped up ready for the sternest of encounters; but was disarmed. The agony of her eyes—they were, after all, his eyes—and her little run across the room to embrace him—the presence of her, in short, was enough. I can only guess what they said. They spoke in French; her arms about him, he turned his face to her breast, as if breathing the scent of her were balm. He was a big boy for such a gesture—most of my third graders wouldn’t have wanted their teacher to see their emotions so exposed, and I admired them, son and mother, for their indifference to me. It took a full minute or even two before she lifted her face, disentangled an arm and extended it. “Miss Eldridge,” she said, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

“I’m sorry it’s not in better circumstances.”

She shrugged, faintly. “I’m glad I got your call.”

“There was an incident, on the playground.”

“So I gather.”

“I wasn’t present, but from what Reza says, it wasn’t at all his fault.”

She made a face as if to say, “How could it be?”

“Our school has zero tolerance for bullying, Mrs. Shahid—”

“I’m sure.”

“And we’ll find out exactly what went on, and the boys will be disciplined.”

“Of course.”

“I’m particularly sorry because it seems as though the boys said—as though they used hurtful and inappropriate words. I want you to know that at Appleton, we don’t have—We haven’t had—This isn’t at all usual. And we’ll make sure that it doesn’t—”

“I understand.” She stood up, and Reza with her, as if they were in fact joined at the hip. She smiled then—was it because it was his smile? Maybe, although in that moment that was not my thought. What went through my mind, as clearly as if I’d said it aloud, was this: “Oh, it’s you. Of course. I should have known.” And later, when I reflected upon it, I thought again, in words, “I recognize you.” It was the strangest feeling, of relief and alarm at the same time. Like seeing a ghost, or having an epiphany—who is he who walks always beside you?—a feeling that you have no choice but to trust completely.

“… so grateful,” she was saying. “This move, so much change for Reza, it could have been … difficult. But he loves coming to your class.”

“We love having him.” I said this looking at Reza with a big smile, and he looked back at me with the same grave inscrutability of the first day in the supermarket. “And I really hope that what happened today, horrible as it was, doesn’t make you stop liking this school.”

He shook his head slightly: hard to know whether he meant that it would or it wouldn’t.

“My little prince is very strong,” his mother said. “He’ll be okay.” She smiled again, looked at me, really looked at me—I felt she saw me—again. I wanted to say, “Do you know me too, then?” to make sure it wasn’t just me. But who could say such a thing?

“Good to meet you, Mrs. Shahid”—and we shook hands again, at her instigation, and her hand was smallish, but strong and warm and dry—“and I’ll be sure to let you know at once how things unfold as we look into this. I’ll call you. Here’s my home number in case you need it. And I’ll look forward to seeing you and your husband at Back to School Night next week.”

“Next week. Of course,” she said, demure and amused and reserved all at once. “Of course. Good-bye.”

Of course. Of course. It felt inevitable, this meeting, like a chance, like a door opening. I didn’t know yet that she was an artist, an installation artist, bereft without her Paris studio. After they’d left, I sat back down at my desk, my eyes not on the apple-picking paragraphs but on the branches, turning, outside the classroom window, the Norwegian maple in its crimson-tinged ball gown, ruffled against the spotless 9/11 sky. How could the leaves stand out so distinctly? Why was the sky such an impeccable blue? How could this ordinary afternoon suddenly fill me, not with the indignation I’d felt earlier, but with elation—yes, elation. Sitting at my desk, pencil in hand in the dimming light, in the long angles of the afternoon sun, I had butterflies, like a child. Nothing moved in the room but the inside of my stomach.





5





Shauna McPhee sat down with the three bullies the next morning to discuss sharing, tolerance and the importance of words. I’m sure she spoke to them about making good choices, about their own safety, and then she called in Reza and had the boys apologize one by one, and shake his hand in front of her, and only after he’d gone away again did she tell them that they wouldn’t be allowed on the playground, either at recess or after school, for a week. Their parents were also informed of this, and Shauna rang Sirena to reassure her that the incident had been, as she put it, “resolved.”

Don’t get me wrong, I admire Shauna, who is five years younger than I am, also single and childless, but unlike me a star of the city’s public school system. She’d already been the principal for three years then—she’d been running Appleton before she was thirty. But I do think that the only way you get on as an administrator is by understanding grown-ups better than you do children. You make a show of understanding children, but it’s a show for the grown-ups. If Shauna actually got kids, she would have known that the three bullies weren’t smart enough to appreciate the good sense of rules of tolerance and acceptance, they were smart enough only to grasp that these were, it seemed, the rules. And everybody knows that the point about rules—if you’re a dull, naughty boy, with a sly glimmer of animal nous that is your greatest pride—is not to obey them but to avoid getting caught breaking them. And if Shauna understood, she’d have seen that the boys saw those ritual handshakes in her office as their humiliation, which only made them despise Reza the more. By ostensibly “resolving” the issue, Shauna was encouraging guerilla warfare, and I knew to be on watch.

Sirena, no fool, knew too, and she called me that night at home. I had that strange high-voltage thrill when I realized who it was.

“Miss Eldridge, I’m sorry—”

“Nora, please.”

She paused on the line. A wonderful, mysterious thing, a pause on the line. Who knew what it signified? “Nora. Yes. I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I wanted your opinion.”

“About the boys?”

“Yes, the boys.” She had a habit of repeating the last words you said to her before going on, as if a conversation were a relay race. I could never decide whether this was cultural—an Italian thing—or to do with living in translation, making sure she’d gotten it right, or just a Sirenian idiosyncrasy. “I wanted to know if you think the boys”—she said “boy-se,” in a lovely, slightly comical Italian way—“will be okay now?”

“Because you don’t?”

“Because I don’t? I don’t know. Sometimes, it looks all okay, but the children, they’re angry. They don’t like to get into trouble, and it makes them more angry.”

“Definitely true, Mrs. Shahid.”

“Sirena, please. Or I can’t call you Nora.”

“Sirena.” I tried to say it the way she did, but it didn’t sound the same. “All we can do is be vigilant, at this point. Unless there’s another incident, which I very much hope there won’t be …”

“Perhaps we can have coffee?” The voltage struck again. It was extraordinary what the body was capable of, for no reason at all. Except if she had recognized me too. And then I felt the other had been an excuse—not only an excuse, but still.

“Coffee? Sure.”

“To explain. If I can speak to you about Reza: he’s coming from such a different world. It’s important to me that this year in America be a good one for him. He didn’t want so much to come, so …”

So, not an excuse. An actual reason. A chance to be a better teacher. “Of course. When would be convenient for you?”

We fixed our date for two days after the Back to School Night. We planned to meet at Burdick’s café in Harvard Square, which is strange because I don’t care for it, and I don’t think she suggested it. I must have proposed it as a highlight of local life; but it always feels stuffy to me, and the windows get steamed up, and it’s hard to get a place to sit, and their cakes are too rich and very expensive, but it always feels wasteful, if you’ve gone to the trouble of going to Burdick’s, not to have one. I prefer Starbucks, where the food is frankly bad and there’s no awkwardness about avoiding it. It’s difficult, though, to suggest Starbucks to someone from Paris.

I’ve often wondered how much of the Shahids’ appeal stemmed from their foreignness. I’ve always been attracted to foreignness. In my junior year of high school, we had an exchange student from London named Hattie, and I decided before she ever came that I’d befriend her. Ethereally pale, moon-faced with big blue eyes, she had a bleached bob that fell glamorously over half her face, and a retro black mac with a bull’s-eye printed on the back. She was sturdy not in a fat way but in a strong way, and she wore black lace-up DM boots and she listened to Joy Division and the Clash. And she came from London, England. There wasn’t anyone at the high school who could hold a candle to her, and I served as both her guide and her amanuensis for the year. It made me much cooler, in the eyes of my classmates. It was only halfway through her time there that she revealed that she was as young as I was, or almost, and I was both awed and dismayed, the latter because it seemed, then, that my one claim to specialness was suddenly nothing, a single arrow in her ample quiver.

But foreignness: there was nothing foreign about my father, with his unconsidered Brooks Brothers wardrobe and his upbringing in Wenham, Massachusetts. Nothing foreign about my mother but an Italian grandmother, of whom she possessed a single photograph, the ancestor having died when my mother was two; and a deeply Catholic sister who had contemplated taking orders, which seemed fairly foreign to us. As a boy, my brother Matt was so American he hated vegetables and all kinds of ethnic food—Indian, Chinese, Thai, he’d spurn it all, claiming it was horsemeat slathered in brown sauce. I’m not sure how different he is even now. No, my yearning was all my own.

“There have been Eldridges here since almost the beginning,” my father was known to say, smugly, while opening a bottle of wine or doling out mashed potatoes. “We’re old stock.” And in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a short bike ride from the grand seaside houses of the gentry, I’d think how telling was my father’s “almost,” how that “almost” led, grimly, to our humble front door.

I always thought I’d live in Paris, Rome, Madrid—at least for a while. It strikes me now that I didn’t dream of Zanzibar or Papeete or Tashkent: even my fantasy was cautious, a good girl’s fantasy, a blanched almond of a fantasy. Today, even that is enough to clench my fists and curl my toes.

In the past few years, I’ve often thought of the Marianne Faithfull song “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”—“At the age of thirty-seven, she realized she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair …”—and I’ve felt little pricks behind my eyes. Not because I thought I wouldn’t get my Parisian sports car moment—insanely, and quite erroneously, I was sure at thirty-seven, and thirty-eight, and even thirty-nine, that that moment was imminent—but because Marianne is right that the age of thirty-seven—the first of my Reza years—is a time of reckoning, the time at which you have to acknowledge once and for all that your life has a shape and a horizon, and that you’ll probably never be president, or a millionaire, and that if you’re a childless woman, you will quite possibly remain that way. Then there’s a period of accommodation before you are formally and officially old, except that I didn’t use it for that purpose. I used those years another way, or thought I did. I thought I was using them to make my life real—wasn’t that what they said in the sixties? To “realize” myself?—but it turns out I’m still in the Fun House to this day.