An Uncommon Education (5 page)

“But isn’t that what you want?” I asked. “For me to look ahead?”

“Not if it means you don’t see today! Today will get you there, Naomi. Being a doctor, going to one of the best schools in the country, a girl needs much more than hope to make these things happen. They take work. They take the kind of student who, by the time she gets to a place like Wellesley, already knows who she is. She’s already practiced in living.”

I nodded wisely, picking up a blue crayon to fill in Hope’s gown with my favorite color. I chose it for her skin, too, as well as her hair. My father watched me draw. “She’s pretty,” I told him. “You’ve made her pretty,” he said carefully. “Pretty blue.” He realized that I had mostly ignored his lesson about the dangers of only looking forward, and he was quieter now, considering.

I put down my crayon and riffled through the myths in front of me until I came to the Titans. “What about this one?” I asked, pointing. “Good or bad?”

“Mnemosyne,” he said, picking her up and studying her. “It’s rarely that simple, Naomi,” he added, smiling at me over his glasses. “I suppose she’s at the whim of each memory. We probably make her good or bad, depending on what we remember, or what we do with our memories.”

My stomach clenched. My father closed the book and held my coloring of Hope up to the light. He looked like he might try to convince me again of her darker side, but after a moment he sighed and set my work down. “What should a child care about hope,” he said to himself, “but that she’s a girl who might want a nice dress?” He patted me on the head, satisfied.

After he left, I turned back to Mnemosyne—goddess of memory and mother to the Muses
who gathered her nine daughters around her and told them wondrous tales
. Maybe if she’d spoken directly to me, instead of muttering constantly in my ear, I might have liked her better. Maybe if she didn’t help me do things that made others hate me, I wouldn’t have torn her image to shreds later that night. I wish I could have known that it would take much more than that to make peace with my memory, to realize that just because I remembered something, I didn’t have to hold on to it.

Four

S
hortly after my father was up and walking, Teddy moved in next door. Our home, at 42 Fuller, backed up to the Rosenthals’, at 54 Coolidge—Chava and Avraham Rosenthal and their son, Theodore Yehuda. A terrible name for a boy, my father would often say, and I had to agree with him. His very name was unsuited to him, an amalgamation of parts that didn’t quite fit.

Teddy had spent the first six years of his life happily ensconced in a Hasidic enclave of Ashfield, a rural area of western Massachusetts. My father told me the Rosenthals moved next door because they wanted to be close to the Boston hospitals, as Mr. Rosenthal’s health was failing. Teddy’s parents had waited forever to have a child, until Chava was well into her forties and Avraham even older. Perhaps they fancied themselves the first Avraham and Sarah, able to earn a pregnancy with enough patience and divine approval. But her womb provided no such grace. And so they accepted a stranger’s child, rather than the Orthodox-born Jew they had hoped for, and loved him well enough.

Because the Rosenthals moved to our neighborhood in the wake of my father’s heart attack, one would imagine that Mr. Rosenthal’s own cardiac problems would have created a bond between our two families immediately. But our parents guarded their particular troubles as privately as ever, as if embarrassed by the improbability of having so much darkness in common. Pain, I gathered, was not something to be shared with neighbors.

That summer was also an exceptionally rainy one, prompting my father to read and discuss the story of Noah and the ark. “For forty days and nights it rained, Naomi. But after, everything was better. Things grew that hadn’t grown before, and the old things stretched and grew bigger, knowing that they would never live through such hardship again.” We also took to watching
M*A*S*H
reruns because, my father claimed, Alan Alda looked like a good Jewish doctor. When we found out he was an Irish Italian, my father shook his head, “What does he know? He’s just an actor. Plenty of people are Jewish and don’t even know it. Can you imagine!” Once he was back to his old routines, he helped me scrub up before dinner just like Hawkeye and Hunnicut did before surgery: he held the clean towel as I soaped my hands until my wrists ached. I would then stand back, my arms bent up at the elbows as he handed me the towel and turned off the faucets. “Good,” he would say, inspecting my fingernails. “A surgeon must first learn the art of sterile hands.”

In the midst of one of the worst of those summer storms, a three-day deluge, my mother walked into my room smiling. Her face was flushed from laughing at something my father had said and it took my breath away—for a moment I was looking at a girl, a young woman, not my mother. “A new family’s moved into the house next door,” she told me. She’d come to deliver this news. “Daddy thinks there’s a boy about your age.”

She walked through my room and lifted the window shade, revealing the landscape, gray in the rain, that separated our house from the neighbors behind us. “Maybe he can be a friend.” We peered out together, even though there was nothing to see. “Well,” she said, looking down at me, “when the weather improves we’re sure to see him.” She stroked my hair. “Maybe he’ll be nice. Wouldn’t it be nice for you to have a friend right next door?” She kissed me lightly on the top of the head before leaving her scent behind her.

I
agreed with her. It would be nice to have a friend next door. Neither one of us liked to acknowledge the fact that I had none elsewhere. Even if I had been the sort of child who easily made friends at school, I would have hesitated to bring them home. My mother didn’t like having visitors, children or otherwise. She never told me I couldn’t have someone over, but the way she lied to her few acquaintances on the phone made me know not to ask. It didn’t bother me too much, since I had never enjoyed any kind of popularity. I “knew too much,” as Anna Kim, a popular girl in my class, was fond of telling everyone else. She had also told everyone who would listen to her, which was just about the whole school, that I was a liar and a cheat. Though I didn’t agree with her interpretation of the incident that had led her to first form this opinion—a disastrous spelling bee—to be honest, I wasn’t sure she was too far off the mark. I didn’t like what I knew, either, and sometimes it did feel like cheating, the way I would remember things that other people could just let slip through their fingers. In some ways I think I might have been looking for an Anna when she asserted herself into my life as she did, someone to confirm my worst suspicions about my stranger capabilities. Someone to help me turn doubt into certainty.

Anna and I had been in school together since kindergarten, but she was as outgoing and well liked as I was shy and ignored. Our paths hadn’t really crossed until earlier that year in school, when we both had Miss Rouselle for third grade. Miss Rouselle was pretty and smooth-skinned with brown wavy hair, and she smelled like pink erasers and Jean Naté (in her purse she kept a small yellow bottle of the fragrance, and took it out every afternoon after the bell rang to deliver one spritz, just above the collarbone). It was a pleasure to do as she asked, and I often did, busying myself contentedly around her classroom, putting my markers away, keeping my cubby tidy, looking up right away when she asked for our attention.

Miss Rouselle believed in children and their abilities. She told us this frequently, and liked to back up the statement with activities like the spelling bee she had scheduled for that afternoon. She had given us a list of thirty words, but she had also attached a spelling list of twenty words for fourth-graders, twenty for fifth-graders, and so on, ending with a few eighth-grade words. My father had told me not to worry about those, that she wouldn’t get to them. But I was curious, and looked at them anyway, mouthing them as I did: “separate,” “descendant,” “digestion,” “thicken,” and, at the bottom of the last page, at the end of the list, beyond even eighth grade: “oxymoron,” “torque,” and “tintinnabulation,” like a beautiful, mysterious finale, a triangle to close the symphony with its fine, bell-like call.

By the end of the bee, there were only three of us left standing: Michael Mauzy, a blue-eyed, wild-haired boy who never spoke to me; Anna Kim; and me. The three of us were frequently at the top of the class—I had begun to realize what I could remember and, with the nameless instincts of self-preservation, had already taught myself to show that I remembered just enough—and it was a familiar and pleasant place to be. I looked at the two of them with a sort of benevolent solidarity in mind, though we were not friends. In fact, I was feeling a little bit high from the excitement around me, a little bit reckless. Miss Rouselle was rummaging through her desk drawer, talking to us with a smile on her face; I assumed she was searching for two more first-prize blue ribbons to match the one she had already on her desk. But instead she pulled out more papers.

“Now,” she said, “since you all have done so very well, I’m forced to go into a tie-breaker.” She looked up at the class, beaming. “I’m so proud of all of you! You have gone far beyond my expectations. What a special group.” She walked around to the front of her desk and perched on the edge of it, lifting her reading glasses, which she wore on a chain of rainbow beads around her neck, and placing them back on her lightly freckled nose.

“Fourth-grade words,” she announced, with no preamble or further explanation. The effect was as dramatic as she’d hoped. Anna Kim fixed her with a steely glare, and Michael Mauzy stopped fidgeting.

“Naomi,” she said. “Let’s start with you. ‘Playground.’
I played kickball with my friends on the playground
. ‘Playground.’ ”

The room was filled with the scent of close air, warm milk, wilting orange peels. “ ‘Playground,’ ” I repeated, the word and its letters appearing immediately in my mind, waiting for me there. “P-l-a-y-g-r-o-u-n-d.”

“Very good.” She smiled confidently at me. I felt, not for the first time, that I had pleased her unexpectedly. “Michael”—she scanned the page—“ ‘spelling.’
I did very well at my school spelling bee.
” A ripple of benevolent laughter scattered through the class. “ ‘Spelling.’ ”

Michael spelled the word.

“Anna,” Miss Rouselle said after we’d finished the fourth-grade words, her face growing serious to match the girl’s. “ ‘Mistaken.’
I thought my pencil was lost, but when I found it in my backpack, I realized I had been mistaken.
” Anna stood straighter, the only sign she ever gave of strain. Then she tapped out the word like a typewriter, a rattle of correct letters.

Michael had to sit once we got to the sixth-grade words and “honorable.” He had ended the word by reversing the final “l” and “e.” Already, Anna looked triumphant. She spelled right into the beginning of seventh grade, with “mileage” and “flammable.” It was “embarrassed” that got her in the end, a spelling even adults found difficult, Miss Rouselle told us. It was her way to remind us that the things we struggled with were even poorly understood by those whose age lent them an otherwise rightful superiority.

“Naomi,” she said gamely, “you want to try one more?” I nodded. “Okay. Let’s see.”

“Give her a hard one,” Anna muttered, though Miss Rouselle heard her. She put a finger to her lips in response. “ ‘Intermediate,’ ” she announced. She smiled the sentence to me: “
I was an intermediate swimmer, only able to hold my breath underwater for twenty seconds.
‘Intermediate.’ ”

I tried to take my time but rushed ahead, the letters spilling from my mouth like unwanted laughter. There was a murmur of appreciation from my peers. Anna frowned.

Miss Rouselle had taken off her glasses and made a show of putting them back on, her face in an impressed frown. “Excellent, Naomi,” she said, “let’s give you another. ‘Situation.’
A competitive spelling bee can be a tough situation
.” She was winging it, I could tell. “ ‘Situation.’ ”

I responded correctly. There was a hush in the classroom now. “Told you she was a genius,” Justin Little whispered to Micah Higginbotham. I flushed with pride. Justin had a secret crush on me, and he was getting bolder as the year went on. “Okay, Naomi”—Miss Rouselle was standing now. “ ‘Professor.’
My uncle is a professor of mathematics at Boston College
. ‘Professor.’ ”

“Professor” was followed by “invitation,” which was followed by “merchandise,” which was followed by “symphony,” which was followed by “dialogue.” I was looking at the back of Anna Kim’s head. Her hair was as straight as mine, but glossy, as black as a ripple of movement in the dark. Sensing my stare, she turned around, her face stony with anger.

“ ‘Tintinnabulation,’ Naomi.” Miss Rouselle’s voice came in from far away. “
I heard the tintinnabulation of the bells from the Custom House Tower.
‘Tintinnabulation.’ ”

I looked away from Anna Kim, into the middle distance, seeing the word. “T-i-n-t-i-n-n”—I loved that second, silent “n” in there, an anchor from which the bell could swing—“-a-b-u-l-a-t-i-o-n.”

The first face that came back into view was Justin’s, his forehead scrunched. I thought he might cry. We could tell from Miss Rouselle’s silence that I had gotten it right.

“She’s cheating.” Anna Kim was at her feet, her shoulders set. “She”—she pointed her finger at me to make the distance between us clear—“cheated.”

“Anna,” Miss Rouselle said softly, but she was looking at me, not at her.

“She can see your paper from where she is,” Anna announced. “Look at how tall she is.” I was in the second row from the front, last chair on the right.

“I don’t think she can, Anna,” Miss Rouselle said softly.

Anna huffed her irritation. She marched over to my desk and stood next to me, ignoring me. “Tintinnabulation,” she barked. Then she squinted, lifted herself onto her toes and leaned slightly forward, reading from the papers in Miss Rouselle’s hands, “t-i-n-t-i-n-n-a-b-u-l-a-t-i-o-n.”