My Education (24 page)

Everything in the kitchen interested her—the marble mortar and pestle, the heavy glass blender, the cast-iron Japanese teapot, the elaborate French press coffeemaker like a piece of equipment from chemistry lab, the dishwasher with its drenched racks of freshly bathed mugs, the double-door refrigerator stuffed with fresh berries, heavy cream, bundled members of the onion family dangling gobbets of dirt from the bountiful garden. This was going to be her coffee cup, that her vase for fresh flowers. I could have thought she was casing the room like a professional thief had she not been just the opposite of furtive. She was plump with self-regard and entitlement, and she asked me for a butter knife, a small plate, a teaspoon, and some sort of fruit jam as if I were working for her.

“What sorts of bad surprises?” I asked in spite of myself. She'd continued to pay no attention to Joachim whatsoever and I'd finally installed him in his high chair with a pile of board books and a bowl of cut grapes which he was throwing alternately to the floor, first a book, then a grape, then a book.

“Don't,” she interrupted as I stooped to retrieve his projectiles. “You're only teaching him to throw it again. I can tell you about my bad surprises if you're interested, but then you must do the same thing for me. Tell me what I need to know about them. What time do they get here?”

I realized she assumed I was a fellow babysitter: who else would I be? “Noon,” I said. “He'll go down for a nap before then.”

“Are you a student at the school here?”

“Until recently.”

“I miss my student life. With little kids there's never any peace. You saw all my books in the boxes outside. When I was in school, almost each day I read a new book. Now, since I'm doing this work, it's a book in a month, reading little by little, so my thinking is all broken up. When I get to the end I've forgotten the start. It makes everything pointless.”

With this preamble she related the list of her bad surprises, which was much the same thing as her résumé. She'd had two prior jobs in the States, the first in Los Angeles, the second in New York. The Los Angeles family had been a television writer (the father), a talent agent (the mother), and three children ages three, eight, and ten. The father drank and had affairs. The mother shopped and disappeared to desert spas. Worst of all were the children, so insecure that they required almost constant attention and misbehaved almost all of the time. The parents provided no values and no discipline, and it being Anya's job to uphold such a structure, not create it herself, she quit after a year and moved on to New York, where she encountered a contrasting problem. In New York she worked for a hedge-fund manager (the father) and a textile designer (the mother) with two children, seven and five. These children were so venerated by both of the parents their every utterance and whim was celebrated. If the boy mentioned rockets he was taken to NASA and given a professional-size telescope. If the girl mentioned flute or piano she received flute and flute lessons, a piano and piano lessons, trying everything, sticking with nothing. The children had French instructors and cooking instructors and soccer and ballet and juggling instructors and only God knew what other kinds of instructors. If they wanted to mold clay then fresh clay must be found. If they wanted to repaint their rooms, paint must be acquired and assistance provided and plastic sheets over all of their things. “These parents worshipped their children, but it's just the same thing. There's no structure at all. It was very bizarre.” This time Anya was fired, for not being “the right fit,” her employers had said. Nevertheless they'd written her a glowing referral, practically an encomium. “Guilt,” she concluded, confirming her assumption of our sisterhood by this final disclosure, for not even the agency knew she'd been fired.

“And what about them?” she now asked. “I've been interested to meet them. Professor Brodeur, I ordered his book. Of course I had no time to read it, but it looked very good.”

“They're great. Of course you know they're separated. But they've been great about it. It's for everyone's good.”

“So their relationship is amiable?”

She was probably thinking of “amicable” but her choice was far better: more sun-splashed and bouncy, without the trace of discord that “amicable,” in its exclusion of discord, retains. “Very much so.”

“It is a shame, though. When a child is so young. I wonder what's made them do a divorce?”

She was determined to root out a scandal, but if the scandal itself blocked her way, she would never succeed. “They just grew apart,” I said tersely. “It's time for his nap.” Perhaps now she might notice the sticky-bibbed, slump-lidded child in his seat. “If you bring him upstairs I can show you his bedroom and stuff.”

“I hate her,” I greeted Martha in the driveway a few minutes later.

“Good thing her job isn't to take care of you! Joachim go to sleep?”

“After I fed him and washed him and changed him while the brand-new au pair helped herself to your bookshelves.”

“If the job opens again shall I tell you?”

“Fuck you, Hallett,” I said to her back, for she was already striding inside. But as always the very rare times I was rough and profane, because really furious with her, she turned magically soft and coquettish.

Returning she gave me her deep, searching kiss, as a promise or bribe, if these aren't the same thing. Either way I accepted.

•   •   •

My new apartment was the second floor of a blue wood-frame house with a steeply pitched roof that sat just against, was in fact almost part of, the base of the hill. Climbing University Ave. one could actually pass, at foot level, the house's rear-facing second-floor windows. This was how I had found it, spotting the small
FOR RENT
sign almost obscured behind the veil of roadside goldenrod and fleabane. The sign was repeated again in the front, where the little house sat blue against the green of the hill at its back, behind a wall of hydrangea whose blooms were blue against the green of their leaves. I didn't yet know the name for hydrangea; this would be a late bequeathal of Martha's, along with the name of the tree whose boughs scraped on the second-floor window: redbud. But even without this botanical knowledge I felt proprietary. I knew I'd live in that house before stepping inside.

There were two free apartments, the top rear, with its view of the steep wall of weeds, and the top front, with its view of the redbud. I took the front although its monthly rent was eighty dollars more than the back. So far I had one very part-time and poorly paid job, doing research for a leprechaun-like retired professor of English named Angus McCann who had a rosy chapped face and abundant white hair. He was completing a treatise on longing. “Bring me all sorts of quotes about
longing
,” he'd exhorted me, with such energy he was practically pogoing out of his chair. “All those folks who are
craving
and
hankerin' after
and suffer from
yens.
” Whether he would pay me by the quote or the hour had not been made clear. “And I'll be getting some writing assignments,” I supplementarily lied to the taciturn landlord, who stood impassively in a mud-stiffened Carhartt barn jacket and mud-spattered boots, holding the signed lease and awaiting my check. When I handed it over he quartered them together as he might have a grocery list and shoved them into a pocket.

The landlord's name was Tim and he lived not in the house but somewhere outside town. This was all that I would ever learn about him. But he was clearly no absentee landlord; he kept the house freshly painted, the hydrangea beds weeded, the redbud boughs pruned, the porch floorboards nailed down, and the gutters devoid of dead leaves. He was tall, with a wedge-shaped upper body and big, callused hands, and the sort of rough-hewn, brooding face that does well in the movies—perhaps a movie about a solitary rancher with an unknown tragic past who elicits gasps, onscreen and in the audience alike, when some twist of narration requires him to shave, trim his hair, and put on a tuxedo. Something about Tim kept ringing a bell for me, as he almost wordlessly led me on a perfunctory tour of the building, showing me, as if he already ascribed to me the Martha-like sophisticated expertise I expected this home to bestow, not only the fixtures within the apartment but the hot water heater and circuit breakers in the basement. The basement also held untold years' worth of items abandoned, presumably by previous, prodigal tenants, all stacked in an orderly way by someone, presumably Tim, who could not abide waste and hoped to see it all returned to use. He noticed me looking and nodded. “Up for grabs. Anything you can use, feel free.” I realized then who it was Tim reminded me of. He was the double of every other terse and wounded and good-looking and rarely washed man of a particular mold, after whom I had
hankered
, for whom I had suffered a
yen
, whom I'd
craved
, starting with Han Solo when I was ten. Was a time, and not long before, when this mumbled exchange in the basement, witnessed only by the noiselessly revolving electric and gas meters, might have gone in a different direction, and ended with my mouth and the upper insides of my thighs stained raw red from protracted abrasion. Now I only looked on Tim with remote curiosity, as if at a photo of some dead ancestor. I understood that we shared a connection but no part of me felt it.

“There's a whole box of stuff to go with that,” he spoke up, when after choosing a rattling futon frame and gray lumpy futon, and a rust-pimpled chrome-legged table and chairs, and a threadbare armchair with scratched carved wooden things at the ends of the armrests like knuckles, I paused with frivolous greed at an empty fish tank, slightly clouded with limey deposit but otherwise clean. I'd always hankered after a fish tank the way some have a yen for, or crave, a fireplace. It seemed to me that with fishes to gaze on, I'd be safe and serene. Tim went on, “It's all stuff that's been used but I boiled it in bleach. The filters and air pump and heat element, even some of the gravel. It would save you a fortune.”

“I'll take a look,” I agreed with pretended reluctance. “Are you sure you don't need it?”

“You can see it's just sitting here taking up space.”

Without the bed, everything I was bringing from Dutra's could be moved in one trip in the Volvo. “There's a futon already,” I told him as we packed up the car. “I'll leave my bed here for Ross.” Ross, who had fallen in love with a waitress from Thailand he'd met at a Japanese restaurant, had given up his room in a group house to move in with her, which arrangement had ended when her husband returned from a tour in the army. “I scored so much nice stuff in this house. Everything I need, I got out of the basement. Even a fish tank.”

“No shit? How many gallons?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, how big is it, Ginny?”

“I don't know. Big.” I framed air with my hands. “Like this. Taller than wide.”

“Pretty, but less practical.” I should have known Dutra would claim expertise about fish tanks. “What kind of tank are you going to set up?” he demanded. “Freshwater or salt?”

“What's the difference?”

“What's the difference! Freshwater: our lakes, ponds, and rivers. Saltwater: the ocean. Jesus, Ginny.”

“I didn't mean, what's the difference between fresh- and saltwater! I meant what's the difference in terms of a tank.”

“I'm having second thoughts about letting you live on your own. I'm not sure you're ready.”

“Shut the fuck up, Dutra.”

“Has anyone shown you the pilot light yet? It's supposed to stay on.”

“Shut up, Dutra.”

“Don't stick your finger in sockets. Do you know about sockets? Where you plug in the lamp?”

“Shut up, Dutra.”

“And saltwater's not good for drinking. Make ouchie in tummy.”

“Just fucking shut up.”

Our landlocked northern hamlet turned out to be served by two tropical fish stores, as far apart from each other, one southward, one north, as if a noncompete pact had dictated the sites. Back and forth Dutra drove me, first to one, then the other, always in search of some new crucial thing, as we puzzled out nitrogen levels and argued about the decor, Dutra so bent on a hinged treasure chest that it might have been his fish tank we were outfitting. Dutra now highlighting passages from my
Saltwater Tank Manual
, a joint pinched in his lips; myself now mislaying the water-test tablets amid the tofu and rice for our dinner, and ransacking my three little rooms in despair—for a couple of days we could almost believe we still lived with each other. I knew that Dutra was apprehensive about Ross moving in, as Ross had no money, and was unlikely to ever pay rent. But more than that, Ross presumed a certain Dutra to be the sole Dutra, just as easily as he'd presumed, when he'd learned I was leaving, that Dutra would be eager for him to move in. Almost no one who orbited Dutra—neither Ross nor Lucinda nor Alyssa, nor any other of the town's becalmed flotsam, Birkenstocked and fogged in by pot smoke, with whom Dutra sedated himself—would have ever suspected that Dutra was dead serious. He was even more serious than the standard correction for standard underestimation of him would suggest. He'd done absurdly well in his classes, and had been singled out for the most prestigious of the second-year fellowships; he was now broadly viewed in the world of his school as the person to beat. But he kept that world carefully far from the world of his friends. Among his friends, Dutra's smart-ass posturing was a typical symptom of having no prospects. It allowed him to hide in plain sight his true secrets—his brilliance, and his equally outsize ambition, and the certainty, almost like doom, that he'd be a success. But I knew, and he knew that I did, and that meant something to him.

I kept putting off Martha's first viewing of my apartment, until without having meant to I'd provoked her real curiosity and equal frustration. Then I kept tweaking her to buy time, because the apartment kept falling so far short of what I'd envisioned. “Is it on the hill or off?” she might wonder. “A little of both.” “In a house or a building?” “A house
is
a building.” “No more sophistic bullshit. Housemates or alone?” “Wouldn't you like to know.” “Now I'll have to assume it's a commune devoted to orgies.” “Aren't you petulant!” “In fact, I'm annoyed, Regina, that you won't show it to me—” “All I said is I wanted to clean it. You're the one having sinister thoughts.” The apartment was far from the Shangri-la that inflamed expectation had made it. My first poststudent, adult apartment, it was, to the very last detail, a student apartment. It was uncomfortable and homely and bare. It was furnished with cast-offs and a half-dead houseplant and a shimmering cube of saltwater enclosing one fish half the size of my thumb. I was almost flat broke; I had paid a month's rent and discovered no pithy expressions of longing. There were only my own, like an ocean tide forcing its way up my channels and rills, swelling me into regions of rash exaltation; and then washing out all at once. Subsidence and collapse.
Longing
. “It's just an apartment,” I told Martha crossly when I called her, my line newly set up, on my cheap plastic phone from Woolworth's. It would only, I knew, collect fingertip grime and require yearly cleanings with Windex. It disclosed only absences: absence of money and absence of taste.