“Everything is so short!” she repeats.
John Duffy approaches Rosalie with a strained smile. His cheerful summer attire is like a costume on him, she thinks. The pink polo shirt and shorts are unable to disguise his cold-weather disposition, best suited to Carhartts and work boots. He is a home inspector—the most stringent in the business, he claims—and insufferable in his arrogance. The constant reminders that he is an entrepreneur, a self-made man, reek of a sense of inferiority and resentment. It is too late to get away. Rosalie gives him her best summertime smile, praying he knows better than to talk board business now. The other guests pull away, and even Nayana takes the opportunity to escape.
John launches right into it. “The cuts aren’t even close to adequate.” He thrusts his hands into his shorts pockets. “You have to admit that the high school was a mistake.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Come on, Rosalie.” He laughs drily. “It’s bigger than some college campuses. Who are we trying to impress? With the economy the way it is? Come on. Would you have green-lighted it if you’d been on the board then?”
A chill shoots through Rosalie’s veins, as if John has insulted one of her children. The new high school is like a Renaissance cathedral compared to the former cinder block cloister with its dank cells. The children of Old Cranbury deserve their new building. They deserve light and space and air. They deserve the new indoor stadium, the undented gym lockers, the Olympic-sized pool.
Rosalie shows her teeth in a smile. “I think I would have, yes.”
“Well, we’ll have to pay for it now,” he snorts. “We’ll have to cut electives, like it or not. Music, art, languages. And even, God forbid, sports.”
“No.” Rosalie shakes her head calmly. This speech, she suspects, is one that she will have to repeat all year. “We’ll only need to cut some administrative and janitorial positions. And the busing will have to be doubled up. We’ll just have to tighten our belts a little bit, John, until we get back on our feet. Every school district is going through this right now.”
As she is cleaning up after the party, putting potato salad into Tupperware and throwing out broken tortilla chips, Rosalie feels unaccountably drained. She is not a person who naps, but she feels that if she were to lie down now, she would stay down for hours. The way to fight this drag, she knows, is to keep moving. She moves on to the buffet table and is rewarded with the gratifying vision of the empty cholar dal platter.
Early on the first morning of school, Rosalie prepares six lunches. She prints the name of each of her children on a brown paper bag and feels the usual sense of dislocation at seeing the names written out. The children will carry these names into the world, beyond the scope of her sight. There is a rush to the breakfast table, the plumage of self-selected fashions. Nayana sits quietly in her lilac tights and denim skirt, the battered satchel at her side full of crisp school supplies. At Rosalie’s request, she will share a homeroom with Noah, who has promised to escort her to all her classes.
After they are gone, the house falls into bittersweet silence. Rosalie does not pause, but packs the breakfast bowls into the dishwasher and sits back down at the table with a notebook to plan the family commemoration event for September 11. Each year—each additional year of mourning for innocent lives lost, of troops crushed overseas—this project holds more meaning for her. It has never seemed adequate to observe a moment of silence at 8:46 A.M., to privately replay the barbarity of that day. This energy should be directed outward, she believes, funneled into a constructive project. This year, she decides, the focus of the event will be assembling care packages for the troops. The fighting is necessary, she believes, and ultimately for a righteous purpose, the most Christian purpose of all: peace on earth. Rosalie is embarrassed by Americans who remain willfully ignorant of the sacrifices their soldiers make every day to defend them and to bring stability to others. No one ties a yellow ribbon around a tree anymore, but Rosalie still does this every September and leaves it up until someone or something pulls it down.
She purchases thick wool socks for the soldiers, bottles of sunscreen, Sudoku puzzles, powdered Gatorade, boxes of Nilla Wafers. Her children float in and out of the dining room, where she has set up the boxes, helping to pack them in shifts. Only Nayana stays all day, sitting beside Rosalie. As they fill the boxes with foam peanuts, Rosalie allows herself to ask cautious questions about the girl’s family.
“What does your father do for a living?”
“He was a construction worker,” the girl answers simply. “But he died in the floods.”