The Woman Upstairs

13





The second thing happened only three days after the first, at the beginning of the last week of school before vacation. I’d been anticipating it for so long by then that I’d forgotten to keep worrying, so was duly shocked, even frightened. It shows how long-lived anger is, the desire for vengeance: it has a nuclear half-life, and it teaches people patience in the most sinister way.

Reza was attacked again. This time more surreptitiously, more brutally. Under the lackadaisical eye of the after-school girls, Bethany, Margot and Sarah—feckless texters, busy planning dates on their cell phones—a massive snowball fight had been allowed to erupt among the children. There were two dozen kids or so in after-school, and all but the most timid were involved: they’d formed teams, and built a fort, and I, kept from my studio by an appointment with Chastity and Ebullience’s mother and Lisa, the reading specialist, to discuss strategies for dealing with Ebullience’s gloating about Chastity’s dyslexia, or rather, about her own ebullient lack thereof—anyway, I conducted my meeting with the shouts and laughter a joyful tympani through the windows, and it sounded like childhood should sound.

But in among them like an evil spore lurked Owen, the angry fifth grader who’d attacked Reza before, just smart enough and just dumb enough to think of packing his snowball with rocks; and the misfortune that he chose a sharp one, and the greater shame that his aim was good (hard for it not to be: he was, it was later established, only a few feet from his target), and the greatest shame that Reza didn’t see it coming.

Reza, one girl said, fell at once to his knees, and she could see blood through his fingers—his fists over his eyes—before she knew what it was. And she said she heard the fat boy mutter “Oh, shit,” before he turned and ran away.

Inside, we registered the blow as silence falling, as if outside the world in chorus took a breath, as if a curtain fell upon the scene. Then Bethany started to blow the whistle, three sharp toots, the emergency kids-line-up-NOW whistle, and I had to say “Excuse me” to the twins’ mother and step to the window. I remember the sky glowed that dull illuminated gray of incipient snow, and when I placed my fingertips upon the glass, it was cold. And looking down I could see first Bethany’s panic, her flailing pseudomilitary gestures as she herded everyone toward the big double doors. Only then did I glimpse Margot bundling someone to the side entrance, someone hunched, who’d dripped blood in a magic trail upon the battered snow—even in the gray light, or perhaps the more because of it, the blood gleamed scarlet—and I had only to look and not to think to know I knew that coat. I knew that hat—black and white with a pom-pom on the top—I knew it.

“Excuse me,” I shouted, “an accident!”—more loudly than was necessary, and was out of the classroom to the bafflement of the mother and my colleague Lisa.

I reached Shauna’s office at the same time as Margot and Reza. Velma Snively, Shauna’s secretary (and a veteran of thirty-seven years at Appleton—some people called her Shauna’s boss), had emerged from behind her desk and called for compresses: “Don’t stand there,” she snapped at Margot, who was crying, even as she drew Reza to her significant bosom. “Get the gauze from the first-aid cupboard. Get the sterile water. Over there! Over there!”

“It’s Miss Eldridge, Reza,” I announced, in case he couldn’t see me. “You’re going to be fine.” I tried to reach him, but Velma’s arm interceded. “Was it in the eye? Is it in the eye?” I tried to wiggle around her, but there was no “around.” Her flowery top emitted a snakey sound when touched.

“Don’t you think we’d better have a look at it, Velma?”

“I’m going to, Nora, if you’ll stop crowding the poor boy.” She reached out for the wad of gauze that Margot had found, and waved it in the air. “Cold sterile water! Cold water here! We need to clean this boy up!”

The gauze was removed, moistened, returned to her palm; she gave no quarter in the meantime and held him to her with her other arm. He was very still, but for the shudder of his sobs, like a stunned animal.

When Velma had daubed the blood away—and there was a goodly flow of it, although it had begun blackly to coagulate around the edges of the wound—it was clear that Reza’s eyeball itself had been spared, but that the gash, an inch long, was so close to the corner of his eye that it looked as though, like a late fruit, it might split the skin there and open the socket.

“A Band-Aid’s not going to patch this up,” Velma observed grimly. “The boy needs stitches.”

At this point, Reza whimpered slightly, his first sound, and looked at me in terror.

“Don’t be afraid, sweetie. I’ll take you.”

“Maman,” he said.

“I know. I’ll call her straight away. She can meet us at the hospital.” I could picture her, content in our studio in her not-knowing, carefully carving aspirin flowers with her hair falling in a net over her work; and I could picture her fumbling for the cell phone in her coat pocket with that faint click in her throat that she used, or I imagined she used, when she thought it might be Skandar.

“Have you got your stuff?” I asked, stupidly. “Margot, get his backpack for me? We’ll go in my car, right now.”

Velma stood back, releasing him, and cleared her throat. “I’m going to check the medical form, Nora. You can’t just take him anywhere.”

“Children’s. I’ll take him to Children’s: it’s the best, if they have to sew it up again. Let’s put a compress on for the trip. Do you think you can hold it, sweetie? Hold it there with your hand?”

Velma sighed, shook her head. “We should have the mother come here,” she said. “That’s the rule except in an emergency.”

“You don’t think this is an emergency? His mother is a friend of mine,” I said (and do you know, even in that crazy moment I was proud to say this, like turning a trump card, and proud to think that it was actually true). “And I know she wouldn’t want us wasting any time. I’ll call her on the way and she’ll meet us in the emergency room. Come on, Velma, you know it’s the right thing.”

Velma shook her head again, just slightly. “I know it’s what’s going to happen, Nora; but I need you to call this boy’s mother right here before you go. I can’t have you take him without her say-so.”

So I called Sirena from Velma’s office. I cannot convey the strangeness of that. I was self-conscious so many times over: to be the one to tell Sirena the news, as though Reza had been stricken on my watch (Margot was still in the room, her face fixed in a rictus of anxiety); to have them all hear me speak to her, since I didn’t know how to modulate my voice when I spoke to her any more than I did when I spoke of her; afraid to sound either too intimate or too formal, too loud or too soft; and in front of Reza, too, who surely had no clear sense of the extent to which his school and home lives were, almost behind his back, intertwined. He knew that his mother and I made our art in the same studio, but he had no idea what, practically, that might mean, and surely didn’t understand that when he was at after-school, or shunted into Maria’s care, his mother was, more often than not, nibbling biscuits with me, chattering, as his father had said, like a schoolgirl. Or rather, like a childless artist, than which there could surely be no greater betrayal.

But I made the call, stiff and stern and fake in my voice, the teacher’s voice Sirena hadn’t heard since the beginning, and still I was sure that Velma looked at me oddly. I told Sirena what had happened, and that his eye was okay but would need stitches—at which point I heard a muffled sound on the line and said, my tone all wrong for Velma’s office but I couldn’t help it, “Don’t cry, Sirena, don’t cry; it’s okay,” and she said, “I’m not crying. I’m putting on my coat”—and I told her we were going to the ER at Children’s and we’d meet her there.

“I don’t know the way,” she said.

“Take a cab—call one. I’ll bring you home again.”



Which, eventually, I did. But not before we were seven hours in the emergency room. (“They always do that at Children’s,” Esther explained later. “It is the best care, but it means they’ve got a reputation to uphold. They can’t afford to make mistakes.”) He was seen by a nurse; and then by a resident; and then by the attending doctor, who summoned the ophthalmologist to be sure; and finally by the plastic surgeon, who happened by good fortune to be checking on a patient elsewhere, and who sewed him up in tiny, tidy stitches. Between visitors to our clammy curtained booth—vaguely reminiscent of a fortuneteller’s at the fair, but strewn with medical posters and lit by a ghastly gray light—where we grew hungrier and more glazed by the hour, stretched vast swathes of useless waiting time. At first I offered to read to Reza and then I suggested that I fetch everyone something to eat, but I could tell that Sirena, still anxious, didn’t want me to go. Skandar was out of town, and she didn’t want to be alone if something was really wrong, more wrong than it seemed. So I said I’d stay until the doctor pronounced; and by then it was almost the end, because the stitches themselves, four of them, so near to the edge of his eye, were a matter of minutes, a neat pull of needle and thread, rather like my mother repairing my downed skirt hem between breakfast and school, except that the sandy-haired doctor didn’t bite the thread with her teeth when she was done, she snipped niftily with gleaming little scissors and ruffled Reza’s hair—he was so bleary he was almost asleep—and said, “Don’t worry. Nothing’s changed. You’re still going to break hearts with those eyes,” and she knew and we knew that this was true; and then she said he could go home at last.

I drove them down the alley off the riverbank to their town house. Reza had fallen asleep in the car.

“Do you want some help? I can carry him in.”

Sirena’s eyes were sunken hollows in the gloom. “Nora,” she said, “you are so very kind.”

“It’s not kindness,” I said. I picked him up in my arms as she worried the front door key, and I followed her into the darkened house bearing my warm burden (his breath tickled my neck), and I climbed the stairs behind her and laid him on his bed. Shoes off, coat off, trousers unbuttoned and off, covers up, and in all this he barely stirred, so deep was his exhaustion. I stood looking at him while she went to put on the kettle, the lights. He lay on his back with his arms on top of the blanket, his head upon the pillow, his cheeks flushed pink, and when he breathed out his lips pursed, slightly, in a little “o.” My God, he was beautiful, all perfect promise. And before I left him, I stroked his hair and bent to kiss his brow. He smelled of the hospital. He shivered a bit in his sleep.

Skandar wasn’t there, but in some way he was, and I felt a vague, lingering guilt at my dream, as though I’d done something wrong, had tried to steal Sirena’s child and husband both, as though she might look at me and know it.

So I found myself near midnight at Sirena’s dining table, drinking mint tea and eating toast with butter and plum jam. The place was oddly soulless—renovated in the eighties, rented furnished, with ugly, solid, institutional chairs and a tinted, speckled glass globe hanging from the ceiling. The walls were stuccoed, the floors beige wall-to-wall. The kitchen cabinets—visible behind the vintage pass-through from the dining area—reminded me of an old man’s Cadillac: antique but carefully preserved, at once touching and hideous. It shouldn’t have surprised me that the Shahids lived in such a place—they were passing through, after all—but it did. They were so special, and this place so nondescript.

Sirena and I hardly spoke, for a long stretch. I could hear her, and myself, chewing toast. She looked exhausted.

“He’s going to be fine, you know,” I offered at length. “The surgeon wasn’t kidding. Nothing’s changed.”

Sirena’s eyes were wet. “Nothing’s changed. You say this, but we know it isn’t true. Not about his face—his face will heal. But what have we done, to bring him here to this? What has Skandar done? Nobody wanted to come but him—but who can be the wife who says ‘No, we cannot go’?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that she disliked it here, disliked the very idea of here. “I thought Reza was liking it—school and everything?”

“What’s the point of not liking it? I tell him at bedtime stories about his friends at home. He knows we’ll go back, so it was okay. But now this?”

“The boy who did it will be properly punished this time. He might even be expelled.”

“And for Reza, does this make a difference? Not at all. Now Reza knows he lives in a world where people can throw rocks at you just because of who you are, just because they don’t like your name or your skin.”

“You do know it isn’t normal, right? That’s one unhinged kid, who’s got real problems. It has nothing to do with Reza personally; I think he can understand that.”

“When you’re an Arab or you have a Middle Eastern name, it’s never personal, but it’s always there. I was anxious about America, but then I thought, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of all places …” She trailed off, then began again: “Do you know what it’s like?” A tear had come out of her eye and was finding its way down her cheek. “Most of the time you don’t think about it, not consciously. But sooner or later, someone will make a comment that has to be explained away. You know, Skandar had cousins in refugee camps. His brother was killed in a bombing in Beirut—at twenty-three. Vanished into dust. Skandar grew up lucky, but he knows all too well what it’s like. I know it’s important for Reza to take all this in, to know about it—but later. I want—I wanted—for Reza to have a childhood like I did, where all you have to know is how to be a child. No rage, no hatred, no cry for vengeance. No stone-throwing. There’s time enough for all that—for history—later; and I thought with luck and enough time we could make him whole, round, not warped by this legacy. Of all my worries about coming here—not this. And now, this. You see? Everything’s changed because he can no longer be free of it. Because this, now, is the beginning.” She wasn’t really crying, but she put her head in her hands, and her hair fell over her face. When she looked up again, she was smiling. “You probably don’t even know what I’m talking about.”

“I think I do.”

“Never mind. It’s okay. As you say, his eye will be fine—that’s the most important thing.” She stood, piled the plates. “It’s late now. Not time for more melodrama. I don’t think Reza will be at school tomorrow, but you must be, so you must get home to sleep.”

At the door, like my mother, she turned on a new and brilliant smile. “Nora, my dear, I can’t ever say enough thank-yous for tonight. What would we have done without you? You’re a true friend.” She extended her arms, and I saw that she was offering me a hug. I’m not much of one for hugs—they make me uncomfortable—but I stepped into her embrace and hugged her back. She didn’t try to kiss my cheek, but instead clasped me tightly against her, long enough for me to unstiffen and properly hug her back. I could feel the lumpy hooks of her bra through her sweater. She smelled of perfume and the sharp sweat of fear. I don’t know where it came from, but I felt like crying. It had been such a long day.

“I don’t know if I’ll be at the studio tomorrow,” I said, pulling away at last.

“I don’t think I will be,” she said.

“When does Skandar come?”

“Maybe earlier, now. We’ll see. He doesn’t really believe in a crisis—he’s seen too many and he says they’re almost never really real.”

“Easy to say from the outside.”

“Always. Good night.”

“Call me if you need my help?”

From her mysterious smiling nod I knew she wouldn’t call me. And I was right.



Then there was the waiting. Reza didn’t come to school the next day, or the next. Or the next, Thursday, by which time I understood that we wouldn’t see him again before the holidays. On the Wednesday and again on the Thursday after school I went back to the studio and found it abandoned—the coffee cup she’d been drinking from when I called from school standing half full on the counter. On the Friday, on the Saturday, the Sunday, I couldn’t bear to go back alone.

They were returning to France for two weeks, but I didn’t know exactly when they were leaving. I kept waiting for Sirena to call—to tell me how Reza was faring, to report on his state of mind, for God’s sake even to ask whether there was any homework he ought to be doing. By Thursday, it occurred to me to call them—think of all the things that might have happened: Reza’s eye might have gotten infected, or he might have become hysterical or despondent, or Sirena and Skandar might have had an enormous argument about any of it—about Skandar being away, or about being in Cambridge in the first place, or even about the fact that I had taken the boy to the hospital—any of these might have happened. They might have decided to leave early for France. They might have decided to return home for good. The one thing I didn’t want to believe was that they were going about their days in that dingy town house in perfect and consoling uneventfulness, and simply not thinking of me at all.

Don’t think that I wasn’t aware the whole time of the tenuousness of my claim: she might have called me a true friend, but wasn’t I essentially just a common schoolteacher and a sometime co-tenant? There were, in my own life, people I’d treated as cavalierly: one was always aware of the hierarchy, however much one tried to pretend indifference to it.

And yes, in all this thinking, in the deafening silence, I started to be angry, a little. Who were they to ignore me? What sort of manners were these, not only in the broader, human sense but even professionally, even if there were no more intimate connection—perhaps all the more so in that case—didn’t you owe your son’s teacher a phone call, when she’d rushed him to the hospital and stayed there with you for hours, just to say that he’d be back and when, or wouldn’t be back, but that he was fine, or Christ, that he wasn’t really fine, but even then, to say one more time “thank you” because you know, in life, when people put themselves out for you it behooves you to express gratitude.

Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn’t that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying—valiantly, fruitlessly—to eradicate. And I was aware, in all this emotion, that as soon as she called—if she called—all would be forgiven. Every time my phone rang, my heart turned in vain hope. It was a reflex; I couldn’t control it.



Owen had been expelled by Shauna, efficiently, unceremoniously, before noon on Tuesday morning. The school was thick with the gossip of it, from smallest to largest, and Reza’s fall to the ground, dripping scarlet blood in the snow, became mythic, almost Homeric. There were whispers that he was brain-damaged, that he’d been blinded, that the Shahids were going to sue—all kinds of garbage, from the playground to the staffroom, and repeatedly colleagues would stop me in the hall or in the bathroom to check the veracity of one rumor or another. Somehow, this hubbub blew past me like a dream: I could hear only the wind in my head.

On Friday morning we had the holiday assembly, where my class performed The Fir Tree from the Hans Christian Andersen story—God, it felt apt to me that week. Luckily, Reza’s part as a woodcutter had involved only three lines, which young Noah cheerfully usurped and delivered with gusto. Then everybody did a dance to “I Have a Little Dreidel,” after which a Nigerian girl named Ethel, in the fifth grade, performed a soaring rendition of “Silent Night”: the remarkable voice emanating from her slight chest billowed vast around us all, rich and clear, like some extraordinary divine food. Then Shauna said a few upbeat and largely inane words about the season’s festivals of light and the new beginning to which we all were looking forward—with no mention at all of the incident at the beginning of the week—and then, suddenly, it was lunchtime, and vacation.

The children dispersed both swiftly and slowly, their lovely disharmonious babble overtaking the air all the way to the ceilings, as they stuffed their packs and donned their gear and hugged and patted one another, depositing cards and parcels on my desk like religious offerings, some of them discreetly, so I wouldn’t notice, others proudly, some of the girls clutching at me, hugging my hips, my tummy, my arm; the boys less forthcoming, almost shy in some cases, and each of them calling, on their way out the door, “Bye, Miss E! Happy holidays, Miss E! Have a good Christmas! See you next year—get it? Bye! Bye! Bye!”

And then there I was, alone in my classroom with the fluorescent lights, the pile of bright trophies on my desk, the noise fading down the hall, the stairwell, the midday winter sun at the windows, my life suddenly empty, gone. I put away books, dusted the blackboards, tidied my pens into the drawers. There was a teachers’ lunch in the staffroom, but I didn’t want to go—the pleasantries we exchanged were always the same, only this time, surely, there would also be gossip about Reza, about Owen, about Shauna’s decision not to mention them in the assembly. I put on my coat, hunted for a grocery bag in which to stow my booty. (How many cards had I accumulated, over my teaching years? But in the pile there was not one from Reza, so none that I wanted.)

It would have been the perfect day to go to the studio, where Emily D’s solitary bedroom awaited my solitary attentions. Instead, I slipped out of Appleton without saying good-bye, dropped my things at home and went to the matinee of Closer, a movie with Jude Law and Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts and Clive Owen that made me feel a hundred years old and completely alone in the universe.



My dad was feeling under the weather, and this helped me. He’s simultaneously stoical and hypochondriacal, my father: he’ll be trumpeting ostentatiously into his linen handkerchief while insisting that nothing’s the matter—his voice a croak, his eyes red-rimmed and filmy—and then suddenly he’ll wave his fork at you and confide, alongside the jiggling speared sausage or lettuce leaf, that he’s read in the Mayo Clinic newsletter about an underreported but devastating viral bronchitis, every symptom for which he seems to have; or about the warning signs for prostate cancer that have him worried about how often he urinates (he never says “pees”); or about adult-onset diabetes that could explain why he seems so often to take an afternoon nap. He doesn’t want you to feel concern about his symptoms but would like you to be aware, as he is aware, that at any and all times he is, or may be, stepping closer to death.

I went with him right after school ended to the old Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. We were supposed to attend a concert in their cavernous music room, a string quartet on a wooden dais in front of two hundred retirees and music nerds in rustling coats in the dark in the middle of the day; but he decided at the last minute that his cold symptoms—a vigorous postnasal drip that had him constantly clearing his throat, a stream of catarrh that required much nose blowing—would spoil the experience both for him and for the rest of the audience. So instead we wandered the galleries with their familiar contents, tiptoeing among the masterpieces that seemed still to have Isabella’s dominating fingerprints upon them, all the way up to the room at the top where she herself, immortalized by Sargent, proud and myopic, stood guard over her domain. Afterward, we scurried down to the tearoom to get a table ahead of the concertgoers. My father, who in age has developed a sweet tooth, ordered hot chocolate and a cake.

“Your mother loved this place,” he observed, as he always did, as though that were reason enough to come.

“The tearoom, you mean?”

“The whole thing. That courtyard. All those ferns. She loved that. Whenever we came, she’d say so.”

“Do you love it too?”

“Bit dark for me. Nice art, but it’s all jumbled up. Seems like it needs a good spring cleaning.”

“We didn’t have to come here, you know.”

He shook his head, even as he was blowing his nose. I could see a small crusty scab on his bald pate: another skin cancer that would have to be burned off. “It’s good for me. I know that.”

“What, culture?”

“It was your mother who loved these things. But it’s important to do them sometimes, even if you don’t love them. And it’s nice to be with you.”

“I don’t get it. Why’s it important? If you don’t enjoy it, then why, especially at your age …”

“At that point, why anything, Nora? Don’t be silly. You get dressed because you get dressed. You don’t ask if you enjoy it. You eat most meals because a body’s got to eat. And it’s the same with the museums: once in a while, you’ve got to do it.”

“Standards? You’re saying it’s about keeping up standards? That seems weird to me.”

“Is this interesting, Nora?”

“To me it is. You’re saying that you should do things as if you cared about them, even when you don’t?”

“Sometimes you might learn something.” He fumbled at a bit of cake that had fallen from his fork. “Life isn’t just about doing things you enjoy, you know.”

“God knows I know that. But the museum isn’t like, I don’t know, property taxes or anything. It’s supposed to be a pleasure.”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t pleasurable.”

“Yes you did. You implied it. I mean, we could go to the movies, or whatever, instead.”

“Nora, why are you doing this? Can’t we have our cocoa and talk about nice things? How was the Christmas assembly with the kids?”

“Holiday assembly. Nobody says ‘Christmas’ anymore, Dad. It was fine. I’ll leave it alone now, but I want to say that it seems important, you know—”

He put his hands up. “Nora. Please. Let’s say we’ve come here for your mother. It makes me remember how much your mother enjoyed it. Is that good enough?”

“Of course, Dad.” I sighed. I sipped my tea. “So the third-grade play this time was The Fir Tree. Do you know it? From the story by Hans Christian Andersen …”

From my father, then, I tried to take the WASP’s advice to live as if. As if the Fun House were real life. As if I enjoyed things I didn’t enjoy. As if I were happy, and as if I hadn’t been abandoned by the people I loved.

Didi wasn’t buying it. Three days before Christmas, at the busiest time of year, she left the shop in the hands of Jamie, her employee, for two hours, and took me to tramp through the snow around Jamaica Pond, smoking pot and sipping hot mulled wine from a thermos.

“What’s eating you, doodlebug?” Her cheeks were ruddy from the cold, her vivid hair blowing from beneath her cap. She has big feet and took big strides, planting herself with each step.

“What are you talking about?”

“Vegas, Vegas. What happens here, stays here. I won’t even spill to Esther, I promise.” She always said that and I never knew wholly whether to believe her. “You’re miserable about something.”

“How can you tell?”

“You’re wearing makeup. Sure sign. Spill it.”

“There’s nothing to spill.”

“Flirtation in the corridors? A tasty new science teacher? A fireman who waves when you pass the station each morning?”

“Ridiculous.”

“Somebody’s maligned you? School politics again? That Shauna bitch?”

“She’s not a bitch. She and I don’t always agree, but she’s not a bitch.”

“Do you think the FBI has us bugged? What’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on.”

“So that’s the problem.” She stopped marching and looked straight at me, straight through me. “It’s the studio, isn’t it?”

“What about it?”

“It’s that woman, and the studio. It’s your work. It’s about your art. I can tell.”

“What can you tell?”

We walked on a stretch in silence. She knew when to wait. It was like shucking oysters: a skill.

“I’m not working,” I said. “Not at all.”

“But that’s crazy—it’s vacation week. You don’t have the brats, you don’t have to travel. What’s going on?”

“I can’t bring myself to go there.”

“Is it a process problem? Are you stuck?”

“No.”

“It’s a personal problem. It’s the Siren. Let me guess: She takes up too much space? She doesn’t stop talking? She smells bad!” Didi giggled a dopey giggle, and then caught herself. “Are you crying?”

“No,” I said, but there were tears behind my eyes and even as I blinked I saw her see them. “It’s nothing.”

And then, I tried to explain. I explained about the weeks of work and conversation, the autumn in which I’d come somehow to feel that Sirena and Reza were mine, were my family almost, my secret; and then the strangeness of meeting Skandar, and the greater strangeness of my dream, that it made me self-conscious even to recall; and I told the story of the attack, the hospital, being in their house; and then the silence afterward.

I kept thinking, as I was telling Didi, that somehow what was in my head—in my memory, in my thoughts—was not being translated fully into the world. I felt as though three-dimensional people and events were becoming two-dimensional in the telling, and as though they were smaller as well as flatter, that they were just less for being spoken. What was missing was the intense emotion that I felt, which, like water or youth itself, buoyed these small insignificant encounters into all that they meant to me. There they were, shrinking before my eyes; shrinking into my words. Anything that can be said, can be said clearly. Anything that cannot be said clearly, cannot be said.

By the time I finished the telling, I was desolate. The cold of the wind and the snow on the path, the rimed, graded ice of the pond, it was all inside me, and my heart, small and shrunken, was without.

“Don’t you feel better for talking about it?” Didi said, her giant’s hand gently on my shoulder.

“Not really,” I said. “I think I feel worse.”

“So you’re in love with Sirena, and you want to f*ck her husband and steal her child. Have I got it right?”

“Not one bit.”

“You summarize, then, in twenty words or less. How would you account for it all?”

“It’s like waking up, you know? At school, each year, I take out this coffee-table book about the wonders of the world, both natural and man-made, and it’s full of the most incredible photographs—of Ayers Rock, the Great Wall of China, Angkor Wat, Petra, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids—”

“I get it.”

“And the point is that whenever I lose faith in my life, I look at those pictures and I think, ‘You haven’t been here’ and ‘You haven’t seen that,’ and I’m suddenly filled with wonder, like the sky opening, you know, to think that all this exists, and hope, because I might someday experience some of it—the smells, the sounds, what the light is like.”

“So, okay?”

“So this fall, them, it’s been a bit like that: the sky opening; hope. A feeling of possibility. Yes, hope. Like maybe it isn’t all over yet.”

“Why would it all be over?”

“Because I’m thirty-seven and single and I teach elementary school and wear clogs every day.”

“I’m thirty-nine next month. Almost forty. I like to think of it as a whole new decade beginning. It’s gonna be great. I know it—Esther is forty-two, after all, and she just gets hotter by the minute.”

“By the minute?”

“To me, yeah. But that’s not the point. What’s got you so downcast, then? They’ve given you hope, and now they’ve gone away for the holidays. I don’t get the big downer. They wouldn’t have invited you over for Christmas dinner even if they’d been here, would they? Or would you have invited them to join you and your dad at Aunt Baby’s place in Rockport?”

I was laughing in spite of myself. We’d circled the pond and were almost back where we’d started, close to the Jamaicaway and the roar of the traffic. An old lady was walking her old dog along the footpath toward us, a gray-muzzled black Lab that picked through the snow as though it pained his paws; but she, the old lady, was muttering to herself, shaking her head in its woolly cap and laughing, like me.

“Come on, it’s got to be hormonal. You don’t have any actual reason to feel sorry for yourself.”

“I took Reza to the hospital. I stayed with them half the night. And then they don’t even call to say he’s okay?”

“So they’re bush pigs. Raised by wolves. No big deal. That describes half of America and probably more than half of the world at large. A handwritten note on personalized stationery would’ve been ideal, but hey, you can’t have everything.”

“But they might not even come back.”

“Why wouldn’t they come back?”

“She hates it here, she told me; and now that Reza’s been attacked twice … it seems possible they’d stay in Paris.”

“Then you’ll get the whole studio all for yourself. Come on, Nora, you’re being ridiculous.”

“If it seems ridiculous to you, it’s because I haven’t properly explained to you what it feels like.”

Didi tossed a stick out onto the ice, where it skittered and slid, and made the black Lab, now far away, bark. “You’ve told me all right. I get it. But you have to stop thinking that what you’re feeling isn’t in your control.”

“It isn’t. You can’t help how you feel.”

“Says who?”

I shrugged. “It’s cold. Can we go back now?”

“Okay. But you know, you don’t even have to feel the cold if you choose not to.”

“Right. Really.”

“You’re making up stories in your head. There’s nothing real in them. You don’t have any idea what those people are doing, or thinking, or why your Siren didn’t call. You’re just making stuff up.”

“I’m not a fool, you know.”

Didi put her arm around my shoulder. She emanated heat, even in the frigid air. “Nobody’s calling you a fool. Just a pessimist. If all you know is that you don’t know, can’t you let go a bit? Or at least make up a good story?”

“My OCD gets in the way.”

“So put your OCD to work for you. Get back to that studio and sit down and finish Emily’s room. So that whatever happens when they come back, or even if they don’t come back—which I seriously doubt—you’ll have the satisfaction of having used the time. My mother always said there’s no sense worrying about things you can’t do anything about.”

“A cliché for every occasion.”

“That’s my mom. But she’s no fool, either, you know.”



So I tried to take Didi’s advice, too. Christmas itself was spent in Aunt Baby’s condo by the sea in Rockport with her—my mother’s sister—and my father, two lonely and mild septuagenarians not even given to sentimental reminiscence, stultifyingly locked in their present, their small ailments, the weather, the television news, which news was full of nothing—although only a day later, when the tsunami struck in Asia, it would be full of death. We labored jauntily through an enormous meal—the dry turkey I was involved in overcooking, the vast tray of candied yams, the bready stuffing and roast potatoes and the limp green beans—serenaded by the tinkling loop of Christmas carols from the Vienna Boys’ Choir that Aunt Baby had loved all my life.

Heavily jowled and powdered, physically so different from her birdlike sister, my mother, Aunt Baby, arthritic, limped in such a way that every step put me in mind of her unoiled bones grinding in their sockets. Even with, or perhaps because of, her carefully outlined crimson mouth, she looked like my dead grandfather in drag, had sparse white hair voluminously flossed to mask her scalp, and a scratchy deep voice. She smelled strongly of Yardley English Lavender, difficult, in the twenty-first century, to procure on the open market.

She’d never married, was devoutly Catholic, and what I most feared becoming: doughty, self-sufficient and utterly without issue. I sat on her pristine sky-blue couch and tried not to see, on every flat surface, the rows of framed family photos of my brother and me growing up, of my parents and grandparents, of my second cousins in Atlanta, her cousin June’s three kids, similarly recorded from layettes to graduations to weddings, and even the newest additions, my niece, my cousins’ kids, in frames as carefully dusted and apparently antique as the rest. It had always been faintly effronting to me, the way Aunt Baby claimed our family lives as if they were her own, as if Matt and I were her offspring instead of her sister’s. “Get your own life,” I’d wanted to say, “you can’t have mine!” But how could she have gotten her own life when she’d given it over to the care of others—her parents, her relatives, fellow parishioners. She’d always been the sidekick. Even in dying, my mother got to play the starring role. Now I would want to ask her where she stowed her fury and how she managed always to appear so calm, so humbly thrilled by the smallest attentions (I gave her an espresso machine that Christmas, and although I later discovered she never used it, she grew wavery and emotional when she opened the package: that I’d thought this much of her! That she’d been so valued!), but she is a casualty of these last five years, blessed, as she would have seen it, to suffer an aneurysm in the parish office and never to regain consciousness, a sweet death in repayment for her life of devotion, and a burden, mercifully, to no one.

I can imagine, now, what it cost her, to be our Aunt Baby, an over-aged infant to the last, instead of the grown-up named Cecily Mallon that she might have become. Knowing my own life and how little of what most matters in it is seen on the outside, how remotely my own outline resembles my reflection, I’m sorry to think that the real Aunt Baby is now lost forever. I, who so feared resembling her, couldn’t ask, and know that nobody else thought to, so brave Aunt Baby lived “as if” until the end. Although then again, maybe she followed my father’s precepts so assiduously that her soul and her self in the world became one.



At least Christmas in Rockport was quick. We went before noon, we helped to cook, we took a drive along the shore to watch the waves bash whitely on the rocks in their eternal rhythm; we ate, cleaned, left. By nine thirty on Christmas night I was back at my apartment, having dropped my father in Brookline on the way home. I’d done all of the dishes for Baby before we left, leaving her to sit in the overheated living room with her swollen feet up on an ottoman, gossiping languidly with my father about the ailments of their generation.

“You heard about Ruby Howard? Bernie’s wife? It’s not Alzheimer’s—it’s the worse one, the Parkinson’s one. Lewy Body? You know what that is? Terrible.” A long silence, during which time they might both have been napping, and then Aunt Baby again: “And then Pete Runyon—you remember him from your church? They moved up here when he retired, and his wife, Beth, developed emphysema—she’s home, mostly, now, with her oxygen tank on wheels. I’ve been round to see her a few times lately, cheer her up. But now Pete’s got a cancer diagnosis. The bladder, I think. Or maybe the prostate—but not the easy kind, if it is. Beth’s very discreet, and it’s clearly something with his waterworks, something private. She didn’t want to say, exactly. It looks bad, though.” She sighed. “Don’t you think it’s worst when both people in a couple are sick? I always do. It’s different when you’re on your own—you’re both more of a burden and less of a burden. I mean, you’ve got to get into a home, no question about it, and that’s that. No gray areas. Take Alice and Robin Meynell, for example—do you see who they are? Well, she had a stroke last spring and …”

And on. I cleaned pots, Baby cleaned out the medical closets of all her acquaintances, and my father, phlegmatic, digested. At the door, between warm and cold, I kissed her soft, grainy cheek, I held her clawlike hand in mine, I took my father’s arm, shepherded him across the residual ice—a black swoop here and there along Baby’s tarmac walk—and settled him in his seat. At the other end, I pulled the car under the porte cochère—his building, concierged, had salted assiduously—and accompanied him all the way up to his apartment door, carrying for him his Trader Joe’s grocery bag modestly half full of presents (a new electric razor; a biography of Hamilton; a pair of cashmere-lined gloves) with a Tupperware container of mushy yams on top.

I was, by then, burning, not sleeping. Who would do the same for me, in my dotage? Who would be my good girl? Would it be Matt and Tweety’s precious Charlotte? I couldn’t see it. No: I derived a certain bitter thrill in thinking that I’d manage to the end on my own, a thrill of denial and austerity, a thrill not unlike a dieter’s pleasure at her gnawing stomach. I will be continent. I will continue. I will not spill into the lives of others, greedily sucking and wanting and needing. I will not. I will ask nothing, of anyone; I’ll just burn, from the inside out, self-immolating like those monks doused in gasoline. Spontaneous combustion, almost. Almost. Merry F*cking Christmas to You.

In my fury, I did the strangest, most unlike-me thing: at ten o’clock on Christmas night I drove myself through the slick and empty streets, festooned with pagan lights, to Somerville, to the deathly quiet of the warehouse, where I scuttled nimbly up the sagging stairs, my keys between my fingers like a weapon (even in my fury I had room around the edges to be afraid), and I let myself into the studio and locked the door behind me.

It was freezing—the heat had obviously been turned down for days—and at that I hesitated, wondering if I’d made a mistake. But I fixed some coffee, and I turned the music on, and I rifled among Sirena’s things and found a pair of fingerless gloves made of soft black wool. When I put them on I felt like a character in a Masterpiece Theatre production (“Please, sir, can I have some more?”), but they did the trick; I could wiggle all digits without stiffness. I sat down at my table, not in my pool of light but with every f*cking overhead light and standing lamp and desk lamp in the entire studio on full blast, as much light as I could get, a Ralph Ellison ocean of light, and I got to work, at long last, with Emily D.

Every time I thought I heard a noise, I’d listen harder to the music, or sing along with it, or stomp my feet. It was Christmas night: there wasn’t anyone in the building. There wasn’t anyone in the street. I was all by my own, as the children say, and I would stay that way till the end. F*ck them all, and if anyone tried to break in or scare me or rape me, I’d give them a piece of my rage.

I worked without moving for four hours, and then, too chicken to go to the bathroom down the hall, I peed in a bucket in the corner of the room and washed it out in the sink and sat down again to work for another four hours, only I got very tired, a blind sort of tired, the sort where your eyes can’t see anymore and go all blurry as though you were having a stroke, to the point where I couldn’t trust what I was making and had to stop awhile. So I put my tools down and I wrapped myself in all her scarves and shawls—they smelled of her perfume, of lemons—and I put a couple of her cushions down on the little rug and the least dusty bit of the floor, near the chairs, and I lay down with my coat over my feet, and right there in the bright light, with the music still playing (it was a five-disc boom box, with a loop: Annie Lennox, Joan Armatrading, Joni Mitchell—old stuff, girl stuff, my reliable musical mates seeing me into slumber), and knowing that I would live with Emily into the new year, and that I would finish Emily’s room—maybe even finish the electrics that would allow Emily’s visions—before I had to go back to school—knowing, that is, that I was on fire and where I wanted to be and angry enough, for once, to be my own self, I closed my eyes, ran my tongue across my mossy teeth and went immediately to sleep.