What Was Mine: & Other Stories (15 page)

“And that’s that?”

“What’s what? I thought you weren’t looking for a fight.”

“I’m not. I’m wondering what you felt, when you were so reluctant to marry me.”

“It might have been simple fear of something new, did you ever think of that? Look: I love you. You’re my husband. It would have been a tragedy if we hadn’t had that child. I was wrong and you were right.”

“Do you really mean that, or are you just saying that?”

“I mean it,” she says. “Do you believe
anything
I tell you? Sometimes it seems like you don’t, which doesn’t make answering your questions a particular pleasure.”

“I wasn’t disputing you,” he says. “I thought maybe we could have a discussion.”

“You thought I’d like to try to remember how I felt six years ago, when we didn’t have enough money between us for anything but a Saturday night pizza? When I woke up every morning with my head spinning? I thought it was a gas leak. A gas leak in that sad little apartment you had on Sixteenth Street. Remember the stewardesses coming in late at night, swallowing aspirin in the elevator, stepping out of their shoes, those baggage carts they were always pulling in and pulling out? It was like those people were damned souls in hell, Stefan. And they were all around us in that building, along with the jackhammer that started at the crack of dawn. I thought what was around me was making me sick. I never thought for a minute I was pregnant.”

He listens, absolutely stunned. Maybe she had mentioned the stewardesses once or twice, but he had no idea they had affected her that way. He could remember her crying on the mattress on the floor—that was what he had, instead of a bed—in fact, he could even remember exactly what she had said the night of the day she found out she was pregnant. He could not remember what he had said to her—something to try to convince her that this was not the end of the world, it was far from the end of the world—but he could remember her turning to him, see the lines mashed on her face by the sheets, her tearstained cheeks, what she said: “You’re right, I’m kind. I’m kind, but I’m not maternal. There’s all the difference in the world between being kind and being maternal.”

Now she was on her side, her face again turned away from him. Her hair had some curl in it, but it looked entirely different from the way it would look in the morning. He took a lax little curl in his hand and kissed the ends of her hair. She put her hand over his. She had told the truth: she was not maternal, but she was kind.

Because Francine is working late—the computers have been down half the morning, so she is working frantically in order to finish a presentation she must make the following day—Stefan goes alone to the meeting with Mrs. Angawa.

It is a cold January day, the sky as gray as cardboard. Big wet snowflakes float around the car, but turn to water the second they hit the windshield. The day before, he had almost kept Julie home, but at the last minute she decided she wanted to go to school because she missed the new bunny. He hopes this bunny has a long and happy life. All it has to do is live until Easter, and it will be given to children at the orphanage. Why is it his daughter’s days seem so tinged with sadness? Has he just forgotten? Was he also, at her age, aware of people dying, and animals dying? Has he just forgotten?

He parks in the plowed lot of the small grocery store on the corner just past the school. Better that than try to parallel park and get stuck in the ice. He ignores the sign that says parking is for customers only, plunges his hands in his pockets. As several fingers go through a tear in the bottom of one pocket, he is suddenly reminded of the straw finger-grips that were so popular when he was Julie’s age: you’d put one finger from each hand in opposite ends and pull, which would tighten the straw and make it impossible to withdraw either finger. You had to keep pulling, though, or the straw would go lax and your fingers would fall out. Such simple games then. A simpler time. No one would have thought to lock up his bike when he went into a store.

In October he and Francine went to Parents’ Night. He remembers the small corridor leading to Mrs. Angawa’s classroom, walks slowly to see if Julie’s name is signed to any of the crayoned pictures lining one wall.

“I’m very pleased to see you,” Mrs. Angawa says, springing up from her desk when he walks into the room. She walks toward him so quickly he fears they may collide. She takes his outstretched hand and shakes it. Since he stopped working, he rarely sees enthusiastic people.

She sits down, gesturing to the wooden chair beside her desk. There is a cushion on the chair. He settles himself on Mt. Fuji.

“I write you notes every month, but one-way communication is no good. If parents come to see me, many things may come up,” Mrs. Angawa says, cupping her hands over her knees.

“Of course,” he says. He can hardly argue with the logic of this. When Mrs. Angawa says nothing, but searches his face, Stefan says, “Every day I hear what Mrs. Angawa thinks. You’ve really impressed Julie. We’re very happy with her progress with reading and spelling, too.”

“Well, sure, she’s a very good speller.” Mrs. Angawa moves her chair back from her desk and crosses her legs.

“Everything is fine as far as we’re concerned. I suppose that since you haven’t said anything in your notes that concerns us, we might not have much to go over,” Stefan says.

“I don’t write everything in my notes,” Mrs. Angawa says. “For instance, we never grade children your daughter’s age. We’re just supposed to make remarks. Well, there are not too many remarks to make when a child is as good a student as your daughter, which is why I have said in my notes that maybe she seems just a little shy.”

“I think she is shy. She’s a very serious child. Also, she’s an only child. I think she’s used to … quiet.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Angawa says. “It’s not so noisy in here. I tell them to pipe down if there’s any unnecessary noise. I’m not a softie.”

“No, of course not,” he says. “I wasn’t being critical, at all. I just wanted to make the point that Julie may be quiet because she’s used to quite a bit of quiet at home.” He uncrosses his legs, shifts in the chair again. “I don’t mean that we don’t talk,” he says. “In fact, the other day in the store she had such a monologue going she could have been on stage.”

“She doesn’t say anything, and then it all comes out in a rush!” Mrs. Angawa says.

“You mean it’s that way in school? Is that a problem?”

“As long as someone says what she has to say, it’s not a problem as far as I’m concerned.”

“But as far as others are concerned?”

“Maybe she bores the boys a bit when she talks for a long time.”

He laughs uncomfortably. “Are you telling me something about her behavior, or—”

“Or something about boys? I can certainly tell you that boys at this age are not developmentally equal to the girls. And my personal belief? That there must be tolerance for the way people choose to express themselves.”

“Then she doesn’t go on too much? You’re not saying that she, you know, sounds like she’s giving a monologue?”

“You used that word before,” Mrs. Angawa says. “I don’t think of it as a monologue, I just think her thoughts are kept silent longer than most people would keep their thoughts to themselves, and they all come tumbling out.”

“This isn’t the way any other child expresses herself?”

“No,” she says.

“But aside from—aside from boring some of the boys when she speaks, do you consider it a problem that …”

“Sure, maybe for her.”

“Do people tell her to shut up, or something?”

“In my classroom? I teach them all to be polite. No one in this classroom would tell anyone else in this classroom to shut up. Please don’t worry about that. This is a small matter. I only bring it up because you may want to think about what causes Julie’s way of speaking.”

“Sometimes my wife speaks at great length,” he says. “The other night she wouldn’t really converse with me, even though I kept trying. She wasn’t refusing to answer, but we weren’t on the same wavelength. I—this doesn’t seem to the point. What I started to say is that often my wife comes out with something that’s quite long in the telling. Maybe Julie gets it from her.”

“There! Now we know what that’s about!” Mrs. Angawa says.

“But my wife—my wife isn’t there that much. I don’t mean that she’s never home, but my wife works, and I stay with Julie, and I’m not entirely sure …”

“They’re all great mimics,” Mrs. Angawa says. “Julie sees her mother doing that, she mimics her.” Mrs. Angawa opens a small notebook on her desk and flips a few pages. “Julie is very interested in good spelling. She is eager to learn new words. It is very good that she likes writing very much.” She closes the book. “What would we do if she wanted to talk, but she
didn’t
want to write? This is a problem I have with two of the students at the present moment.”

“Bobby Tompkins?” he says, hoping to change the subject for a moment. “I understand he’s something of a problem.”

“To your daughter?”

“No. To the class in general. I gather he Magic Markered his forehead to perform brain surgery recently.”

Mrs. Angawa looks surprised. “Is that why he did it?” she says. “I thought it might have been an accident. You don’t know the number of times each day someone stabs himself with a pencil, purely by accident. I didn’t know that he was performing brain surgery. I know that he whispered to your daughter, though. He seems to rely on your daughter. He is a little dependent. He does things to get attention, and I don’t think it’s so bad that sometimes he manages to get that attention.”

“And what about—what about the movie about a kidney transplant, or whatever it was?”

“He brings up inappropriate things at Show and Tell. He watched an adult movie,
Steel Magnolias
, and it upset him very much. He needed to talk about it the next day, and several children, including your daughter, became fascinated. I had to take several minutes to talk about organ transplants, to expand the topic a little and try to dispel their fears.” Mrs. Angawa opens her desk drawer. “By the way,” she says, “your daughter did not want her picture hung in the hallway, because she is shy, but I want to show it to you, because it is quite good. The students who feel they do not want their work displayed, for whatever reason, are never subjected to embarrassment.” She flips through several drawings before carefully extracting Julie’s.

It is a scene of mountains and a lake. Not until he breathes a sigh of relief does he realize that he had braced himself to see something disturbing.

On the way out, after shaking Mrs. Angawa’s hand, he turns suddenly, much to his own surprise, and asks where the rabbit is. “Julie talks about the rabbit so much, I feel it’s a member of the family,” he says.

“Oh, yes, bunny has really captured her imagination,” Mrs. Angawa says. “Now promise me you will believe me. The streetlights disturb bunny at night, so the janitor advised me to put the cage in the coat closet. I don’t want you to think I’m cruel to a bunny! First thing in the morning, I come in and take him out and put his cage in the nice sunshine. These days, everybody is always on the lookout for cruelty. As every child can tell you, I cried and cried when the previous bunny died. What they don’t know is that I’ve had nightmares that the same thing may happen to this one. Every morning I hurry in, praying that bunny is fine.”

She opens the door. The rabbit is in a large cage, stretched out by a water dish.

“Pretty bunny, we will all see you tomorrow,” Mrs. Angawa says, making kissing noises. She closes the closet again. “One night after the first bunny died I was so upset I had a premonition of this bunny’s death. My husband and I had been to the movies, and we ran into the school janitor there. I told him how worried I was, and all three of us went to the school then and there—I was so
sure
there was trouble with bunny. There the three of us were, ten-thirty
P.M
., looking at a sleeping bunny. My husband was in an internment camp during the Second World War. He thinks that everything you count on is sure to go wrong, but he has found his opposite in me, because I believe things will often change for the better. This bunny is going to be all right. The other one must have had a mysterious illness.”

He looks behind him, at the closed closet door.

“Mr. McKee, the janitor, lives in the apartment building next to ours,” she says. “He was also in the Second World War, stationed in the Philippines. All he talks about are the misadventures on the boat taking the men to the Philippines. Once there, they liked to give the monkeys cans of beer so they would swing drunk through the trees.”

He frowns, wondering what she could be getting at.

“Usually the people who make you stop and listen to a story are the ones who deliver their story with a little humor. That’s all right, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the real story being told. With Mr. McKee, I have been waiting the ten-plus years I’ve known him to hear the real story of what he did and what he saw during the war.”

“I see,” Stefan says. Every time the minute hand moves, the clock ticks loudly. The odor of chalk clings to the building like cigarette smoke in a bar.

“I believe that sometimes you have to be patient and listen for a long time before you hear the true story,” Mrs. Angawa says. “People talk quite a lot, but you often have to wait for their true stories. To be more specific, I think that it is all right to let Julie go on a bit. Eventually we will hear stories beneath those stories.”

When he met Francine, it was spring. She was taking acting classes at night and selling ladies’ nightwear at Lord & Taylor during the day. One of the stockbrokers at the company where Stefan worked was married to a dancer. The man, Bryant Heppelson, insisted that the one thing Stefan must absolutely take his word on was that he had met the most amazingly talented, beautiful woman he had encountered since he fell in love with Melly when they were both fourteen. Not only must he take his word, but he must experience her—at dinner at their apartment. Stefan had nothing better to do on Saturday night, so he went.