Looking up, your reflection caught mine studying you. It smiled.
“I know you’re not sure about this,” you said.
“I’m sure about you.”
“It will all come right.”
“I trust you.”
You nodded, and I thought back to the weeks we spent discussing Knife, Knave before I sent it off to the Parisian editor your father introduced me to. How whenever you made a good point your cells would swell with certainty, a celestial sarcoma to which you are particularly inclined. The book made a small wave, as did the next one, and the next. My writing, but somehow also your brilliance. You knew which dotted lines to sign and which to notate for a new round of negotiations. Never take the first offer. Never let them see your fear. Good advice for a teacher, too, it turned out.
At the school we met George to sign the contracts, and then walked round the grounds, getting what he called the “five-dollar tour.” (“What about the ten-dollar tour?” you asked, and he laughed. Stick bug of a man with a bristle of a mustache. I should really be kinder to George.) It included, of course, a look at the underground steam tunnels where industrious girls brought their boyfriends to neck, in addition to the more broadly advertised clock tower and library. I also met my first-semester pupils, a hundred little Tabithas rasa peering up at me from their seats. Slender ankles, of course. Wrists switching back and forth, fingers pinching pencils. There, you see, I told myself. There may be some fun in this after all. But that day I mostly introduced you around, and shook hands with the fathers, nodding gravely at their schoolboy interest in Rilke and Freud. They all wanted their daughters to recite poetry because their mothers had recited poetry. No strange stirrings there.
By the afternoon you were at home again, and I was ruffled, taking a solo stroll to clear my head. Trees everywhere, and bright green lawns. A glint in the distance: light off the greenhouse. But let’s rewind for a moment. Back to that morning, before we opened the door. Your lips were plumped with conviction, and your hand lay so light on my arm that I could have forgotten it was there had you not given my elbow a squeeze. How much did you know? Enough, I suppose, to keep me from any distraction that might have compromised your plan, which was to give us some stability at last. The telephone rang as we walked out the door for our meeting with George, and you turned me away from the sound.
“Ignore it,” you said. “They’ll call again.”
So we carried on, me reluctant, you cocksure. I saw what I saw, I met who I met. And it wasn’t until after the sun had set that I learned Felice had gone into an unexpected second printing. Surprise bestseller. Five-star reviews. An instant classic. By then the contracts had been signed for the year, and it was too late for us to leave New Jersey—exactly as you intended, I suppose. You took the call. I came back to our house after my walk and slouched into a chair, where you ran a hand through my hair and—did I imagine it?—gave a quick tug. A shadow passed over your face when you told me the news, having first made sure I was equipped with a glass of scotch. Triumph, Vera, at steering me just as you’d planned? Or remorse? I never knew. Perhaps first one, and then—much later—the other.
Zoya
There is such a thing as too much foreplay. I learned that while waiting for the administration to decide about giving me a raise, early in my fourth year as a Donne School employee. I admit I didn’t need it—I had my house, some serviceable work clothes, and enough money to keep me in books and sardines. I usually cultivated a few extra plants to make sure I had fresh food all winter, a couple of tomatoes and a huge pot of basil, the exotic purple swell of an eggplant, which I liked to put in soup. Tweak free a lemon or two for tea, which I took with local honey that I got in trade from a nice older woman named Maureen Finnegan who lived on the edge of town and wore Wellington boots on every occasion that we met.
But my tastes had changed. After a few months of fixing scrambled eggs for every meal, I lost my appetite for them entirely. Sometimes I’d pick up an egg and start to cry: because of the blank slate of it, and because I was so very tired of cracking them, mixing them, eating them. On a budget, eggs are the perfect food, until they’re not.
I’d also become more selective about who I let John O’Brien fix me up with: now I made him run the boys past Siobhan, who picked slightly older fellows. There weren’t as many of them available, so I had maybe two or three dates a year, but they took me out in earnest. Movies, yes, but dinner too, and sometimes dancing. Instead of a diner or a small café, we went to proper restaurants with cloth napkins and dim lighting. Chandeliers. Like the men, there weren’t many such restaurants in town, and I quickly developed favorites. There was in particular a dish of stewed rabbit with mushrooms and wine that I sometimes dreamed about. That I dream about, even now. I thought it would’ve been nice to take myself there, without the feeling I was offering anything in exchange for the meal, and to go whenever I wanted instead of waiting to be asked.
Still, I would never have considered asking for more money if John hadn’t given me the idea. It happened one day while I was inspecting a tray of herbs that had been seeded by students the previous year, and the pot holding a sprig of parsley came apart in my hand. I cradled the small root ball and blew a lock of hair out of my eyes, biting back a yelp of frustration. John was with me, taking inventory as part of a larger effort to catalogue the current growth on campus, and he noticed.
“Penny for your thoughts?” he said.
“It’s just stupid.” More hair fell across my face, and I had to spit it out of my mouth as I spoke. “Those girls pay how much in tuition every year and the school can’t afford a few dollars for new pots and spades?”
“Not to mention, well, have you looked at your clothes lately?”
I glanced up. “What about my clothes?”
“Nothing! Nothing. Just,” he puffed his cheeks and shrugged, as if changing his mind. All the while staring pointedly at the tear in the knee of my pants, which I’d patched up years ago, after Kay tripped me.
“So nice that you noticed,” I said. “Girls like that sort of thing.”
“All I’m saying is, you deserve more for yourself, too. You’ve been here long enough. Proved yourself, so to speak.”
“That’s—true. I guess.” It was hard for me to place a particular value on myself, but he had a point. Above me stretched a canopy of greens, yellows, reds. Things were trimmed back at the moment, to encourage new growth for Welcome Day. But the greenhouse was thriving, and clearly so.
Later that afternoon I talked to Peggy in the Office of Human Resources, and she helped me submit a formal letter requesting a salary adjustment for cost of living and performance excellence. John had already walked me through the appeal for an increased project budget; that money, it turned out, was in the bag. He’d been planning to ask for it himself if I hadn’t brought it up, and the arbiter of the funds was a friend of his.
The raise, on the other hand, required a catalogue of all the tasks I performed on a regular basis, broken down by category and expertise. I had to show growth and improvement and flexibility. Too bad, I thought, that I can’t list my new talent at putting awful little girls in their places. Since Kay graduated, my relationship with the student body had improved, though each new generation seemed to inherit at least a modicum of her spunk and spite. The difference was that now, when I was taunted, I was able to pull a mask over my face, porcelain and still. When they pinched me, if there was no one around, I jabbed them with my finger and walked off looking innocent as a flower. Nothing that would impress the administration, unfortunately. But it made me feel better.