This Is Where We Live (16 page)

“Thoracic. Is that the—the throat?” They were all smiling at each other, but only Lucy’s grin seemed genuine.

“Actually, lungs and diaphragm …. You know, Lucy, I should probably get going,” Pete muttered, putting the beer bottle down on the counter.

“Oh!” Lucy popped up from her seat. “Don’t go yet! I’m sure Claudia doesn’t mind us being here, do you?”

“Of course not,” Claudia lied, eyeing the scratch paper under her hand, the clock ticking away the minutes until she had to leave.

But Pete was already out the door. Lucy sighed and rolled her eyes, as if he were a rogue child who must be humored. “Don’t mind him, he’s just tired,” she whispered. “Surgeons put in such long hours and the late nights really start to mess with your head after a while. Oh, by the way! They’re changing my schedule at the hospital. I’m back on day shift starting tomorrow, so, back to real life for me! Maybe we can all go to see a movie together this weekend?”

Claudia felt her smile ossifying across her face. Day shifts? Movies together? What happened to invisibility? “I’m not sure about our plans,” she said carefully. “But I’ll talk to Jeremy about it.”

“Fabulous.” Lucy turned to pursue Dr. Pete back to her bedroom. The dawn was starting to break outside, with gray morning light washing in from the east. Claudia rose from her chair and went to the sink to pour out the cold remains of her coffee, before heading down the hall to break the bad news to Jeremy.

Lisa Yang’s parents were the first of the afternoon—a brash movie publicist and her real estate magnate husband who peppered Claudia with concerns about their daughter’s GPA, argued that a B-plus on an essay should have been an A-minus, wondered aloud whether Lisa’s extensive extracurricular activities (soccer, debate, student council) merited more grading leniency, and generally made it clear that Claudia’s primary concern should be helping their daughter get into Yale. By the time Luz Hernandez marched through the classroom door, fifteen minutes late for her meeting, Claudia was already exhausted.

Luz was a stout woman in unfashionable high-waisted jeans and generic white basketball shoes, toting an overstuffed fake Chanel purse in one hand and the now-familiar Chicken Kitchen bag in the other. As the woman came closer, Claudia was shocked to realize that Mary’s mother was roughly her own age. Her brow was etched with exhaustion, but her black hair—braided, just like Mary’s—was still free of stray grays. Unlike Mrs. Yang, and most of the other Ennis Gates mothers, who painted their faces with an artful rainbow of age-defying concealers and neutral eyeshadows and smoothing creams and self-tanners, Luz Hernandez wore no makeup at all. Somehow this made her look even younger.
She must have been in high school when she had Mary
, Claudia realized.

“Quince pie, I assume?” Claudia said, masking her surprise by reaching out for the bag.

“Pastelitos de membrillo,”
Luz corrected her, rolling her
r
with pointed brio. “My mother’s recipe.”

“I always enjoy the treats Mary brings. It’s very generous of you.”

“Mary says all the students bring food,” Luz said flatly.

“Yes, but—” Claudia said, and stopped without finishing the rest of her sentence—
Yes, but most of them bring things their housekeepers bake—
as she recalled that Luz was, in fact, a single mother who made her living as a housekeeper and nanny to Hollywood-type families living up in the hills. Her quince pies were undoubtedly being delivered to other teachers at other private schools at that very moment. Although probably not in Chicken Kitchen takeout bags.

Claudia gestured toward the chairs that she’d set up in a triangle on the stage, and Luz settled uncomfortably in one of the plastic bucket seats across from her. She didn’t bother examining the room as the other parents did; it was as if the physical trappings of Ennis Gates were of no concern to her whatsoever. She wondered if Luz resented the very existence of Ennis Gates in all its sanctified bourgeois privilege, or whether she saw it as her daughter’s golden ticket out of an economic sinkhole.
Probably some combination of the two
, she thought.

“My daughter is a good student,” Luz announced, out of the blue.

“Yes,” Claudia agreed. “My top student.”

Luz smiled, revealing coffee-stained teeth. It wasn’t a smile of pleasure; it was the smile of a woman who already knew. “She’s going to go to UCLA”

“Yes, she mentioned that was her goal,” Claudia said, sensing that she was not the one running this meeting. She glanced at the clock—the allotted half hour was nearly gone already, and the Evanoviches would arrive in a few minutes. “With her grades she can go anywhere she wants. Ivy League, even.”

“State school is cheaper than Ivy League,” Luz said. She scrutinized Claudia. “Better financial aid. And she can live at home. You’re writing her recommendation, right?”

Claudia’s chest lurched uncomfortably as she remembered this long-forgotten promise; she hadn’t even set up the meeting that Mary requested. Apparently Mary had been too shy to ask twice. “Soon,” she apologized.

“Well, she needs it next month for early admission, so don’t wait too long, OK?” Luz said, vague confrontation larding her words. “October thirty.”

“Of course.” Claudia scribbled this down in the margin of her notebook, page fifty-six of the must-remember items that had been conveyed to her over the last few days.

“You have anything bad to say about my daughter?” Luz continued.

“No,” Claudia said, truthfully. She didn’t have much to say about Mary that hadn’t just been acknowledged. Mary was a great student; she never missed class; she sat quietly in the front of the classroom and always raised her hand instead of blurting out the answer. She was sincere—annoyingly sincere, with her perpetual supply of quince pastries in Chicken Kitchen bags. Watching inoffensive little Mary sitting quietly on her own, earnestly scribbling down every word Claudia spoke—a clear outsider at Ennis Gates—Claudia occasionally glimpsed echoes of herself: the orthodontic headgear–wearing adolescent who, at five foot eight by her freshman year of high school, had been a gangling, shy Architeuthis doomed to attend the homecoming ball stag and dance only one slow song with a pitying member of the boy’s basketball team. For some reason, this didn’t endear Mary to her. Instead, she wanted to look quickly away, as if Mary represented a familiar overeagerness and yearning intention that Claudia had once shared but now wanted to shed entirely.
(Nice girls like you are devoured as an
amuse-bouche
before the main course
, she’d remember RC’s words, looking at her.) So she let her attention be dominated instead by the brattish Evanovich scion sitting behind her, the brutal
RST CLASS BITC
who knew how the game of life was played. Somehow, in that process, she’d managed to block Mary’s request from her mind entirely.
Write the recommendation
, she told herself.
She needs it more than anyone else here
.

“She works too hard,” Luz continued. “I don’t think it’s healthy. I thought she’d go to this fancy school and get more personal attention, but the teachers here only care about the rich kids whose parents are on the board. All they do for my daughter is assign homework.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Claudia said. “Anyway, I’ll write that recommendation. Promise.”

Luz stood. “Well, I’ll go now,” she said. “I’m supposed to be in Los Feliz by five.”

“Thanks for coming in,” Claudia said. From the hallway, she could hear heavy footsteps approaching, the lumber of a lazy self-satisfied bear. A woman murmured, and a man’s sonorous voice answered her, setting the windows vibrating in their sills.
The Evanoviches
, Claudia thought, and smoothed her hair instinctively.

Luz set her jaw with a forward thrust. “These things are a waste of time,” she complained. “No one ever says anything I don’t know.” She snatched up her purse and scurried out of the room, giving Claudia only a few seconds to mentally prepare for the grand finale of her afternoon. She tucked the Chicken Kitchen bag into her tote, shook out the wrinkles in her shirt, and raced toward the door, her palms sweating, just as Samuel Evanovich’s heavy tread came to a stop outside her classroom.

“You must be Mizz Munger?” Samuel Evanovich’s hand was enormous, a thick fleshy paw that swallowed Claudia’s hand, mangled it in a moist embrace, and then spat it out, flattened and sore. “We’ve been very curious to meet the new film teacher.”

Samuel looked just like Claudia remembered him from Sundance, an imposing wreck of a man. His rolled-up shirtsleeves strained against meaty forearms, and the waistband of his khaki pants strained against a formidable belly. The black hair of his chest grew straight up out of his collar to merge seamlessly with the beard that grew down from his chin. He stood in the doorway to the classroom, blotting out the late-afternoon sun.

Dwarfed by her husband, Bunny Evanovich looked like a surprised deer—a frail blonde with a shiny forehead that had been surgically pinned back toward her temples and an upper lip that looked like it had been inflated with a bicycle pump. She stood beside Samuel, flexing her wrists in small agitated circles. “Charmed,” Bunny offered blandly, but didn’t extend a hand.

“Please, sit.” Claudia gestured them toward the stage. She tried not to stare at Samuel as he settled down across from her, his bulk drooping over the edge of the diminutive chair. She smiled at him, hoping her idolization wasn’t as transparent as it felt. “So,” Samuel said. “Tell us about Penelope. Tell us everything we need to know.”

Claudia shuffled the papers on her lap. The paper containing her prewritten speech grew damp in her hands: Now that he was in front of her
—Samuel Evanovich
!—she’d completely forgotten the opening she’d memorized. “Well. It’s very clear that Penelope has a passion for film,” she began weakly, as she surreptitiously opened up the paper to remind herself of her lines.

“Of course.” Samuel grimaced impatiently. He fixed his gaze around the room, taking in the movie posters, the stacks of scripts, the banks of DVD players buzzing in the closet. “She’s been making her own movies since she was three.”

“She has?” Claudia had not expected that; it gave her a quick flush of admiration for the girl. Perhaps there was something still to be extracted from her; it would just take the right finessing touch to break through that prickly wall. “I’d love to see them. I’ll encourage her to bring them in and show me.”

“She’s very private,” Bunny offered, in a voice pulled as tight as her skin. “She only shows her daddy. Not even me.”

“Genius often expresses itself through introversion.” Samuel stood up and ambled over to the podium, where Claudia had lined up a stack of movies to screen for her students.

“Introversion,” she said, trying again. She glanced down at her notes, but couldn’t find her place. “Well, I’m not sure that that’s exactly the word I would use to describe Penelope’s—”

Samuel cut her off. “Altman was one of the shyest people I ever met. Except when you got some tequila in him. Christ, then he’d never shut up. You’d have to distract him with a hooker or something to get him to leave you alone.” He ran a finger along the spines of her DVDs. “Good grief, are you really going to show them
Star Wars?
Lucas is such a hack.”

Claudia nodded as neutrally as she could. She longed desperately to banish the distracting Bunny, put Penelope aside altogether, and engage Samuel in a spirited debate about the history of American cinema.
I’m one of you
, she wanted to tell him.
I’m not just a schoolteacher
. “Well, I do think that the film offers an interesting study of the dialectic between chance and order. By the way, Mr. Evanovich—”

“Samuel, please.”

“Samuel, yes. I should confess that I attended your lecture at this last Sundance and found it very inspiring. Really, I’m quite an admirer, having directed myself”—she hated herself for blathering on like a hormonal fanboy but she couldn’t quite stop herself; it took all the effort she could muster to reel the conversation back to the appropriate topic: Penelope—“so I can only imagine the influence that your knowledge must have on your own daughter. Maybe you might try to use some of that influence to encourage her to be more—how should I put this—” She stuttered to a stop here, because Samuel had wandered back over and was pushing a finger under her chin, directing her face up toward him. He stared down at her, examining her intently.

“You,” he said. “I know you.”

“You do?” She looked over at Bunny, hoping her smile might defuse the awkwardness of this intimacy. Bunny was rotating her hands again, apparently more fascinated by the inner workings of her wrists than her husband’s sudden interest in her daughter’s teacher.

“Yes.” He released her face and sat down heavily across from her. “You made that quirky little romantic comedy, am I right?”

Claudia felt her heart hiccup in surprise. “That’s right,” she said.
“Spare Parts.”

“I saw it at Sundance. You did a Q-and-A afterward. You were rather … passionate, I recall. Talked a lot about cinema-verité techniques, the credible narrative.” His gaze was intense. She noticed, for the first time, how piercingly black his eyes were, like obsidian caves. Her cheeks were warm—was she blushing? She hoped not.

“I’m flattered you stuck around,” she murmured. “I wish the rest of the moviegoing public had.”

“Didn’t perform well at the box office, eh?”

“That’s a bit of an understatement.”

He reached up and wove a finger into the tangle of his beard, tugging it down toward his paunch. “I could have told you that.”

“Oh.” Her stomach lurched unhappily. Was she the only person in the world who had been so blind to her own mistakes? “A few people liked it, at least. It got good reviews.”

“It’s not that it wasn’t good,” he said. “It had lots of promise. You’re clearly an actor’s director; you really got that TV actress to work hard. No, it’s that it had no marketing hook. I would’ve played up the lesbian angle, myself. Reedited it to focus on that: a new American love story. Homo marriage is very on trend right now.”