“Will didn’t mention you were coming back today!”
I confessed that I hadn’t told him.
She wagged her finger at me. “My dear, he’s going to be absolutely outraged!” All of Mrs. Landsman’s sentences were whispery confessions ending in exclamation points. “He stayed home sick today—his stomach again—poor boy, he works too hard, but I have half a mind to call him right now!”
Mrs. Landsman embraced me again before directing me to a seat near the front of the classroom. “Please do let me know if I can help you with anything. Anything at all!”
Mrs. Landsman had begun the year with a drama unit, and the class was in the middle of reading Waiting for Godot aloud. All the parts had been divvied up during my absence, so I only had to listen to the other people read. The role of Estragon was read by a long-legged blond girl named Yvette Schumacher who was wearing maroon platform Mary Janes with kneesocks that had embroidered red hearts on them—in a school with uniforms, you spend a lot of time looking at the footwear for clues. I knew Yvette because she had also been in my sixth-grade class, along with Alice from the hallway. The role of Vladimir was played by Patten comma Roger from my precalc class.
Maybe if I had started the play from the beginning it would have been more interesting or made more sense. But without context or knowing the story, it was difficult even to know what the play was about. Were the main characters in love or just friends? It was hard to tell.
I tried to concentrate, but even when I was a little kid I hadn’t particularly liked being read to. As soon as I learned how, I always preferred to do it myself. Plus, the language in the play was so circular that I found it extraordinarily difficult to follow out loud.
The next thing I knew, Mrs. Landsman was gently shaking me.
“Naomi, poor darling, wake up!”
The classroom was empty, and for a moment I forgot where I was. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, dear. You can read the play later. It’s fifty-something years old and will certainly keep until tomorrow. You looked so peaceful. I was considering letting you sleep even longer. Would you like to go to the infirmary for a quick rest?”
I really was exhausted, but I knew I’d better keep plowing through my schedule. It wasn’t going to get any easier. “That’s a really nice offer, but I should go,” I said reluctantly.
“If you’re sure…” Mrs. Landsman studied me with concern. “I think of you like one of my own, dear,” she said. “I’ll write you a note. What’s your next class?”
I checked my hand. “Physics with Dr. Pillar.”
“He’s a lovely gentleman. One of my favorites!” As I was six inches taller than her, Mrs. Landsman had to reach up to put her arm around my shoulders. My dad and I weren’t much in the way of huggers, but it felt nice to be touched by someone who wasn’t either a doctor or trying to get in my pants. It felt nice to be mothered.
“You may want to stop in the washroom. A little bit of your schedule seems to have transferred to your face,” she said.
In the girls’ bathroom, I examined myself in the mirror. The backward stamp of my schedule was indeed on my right cheek. The soap was the rough, powdery kind you only ever find in schools. It was crap for cleaning. I had to basically rub my face raw to remove my schedule, and in the process of doing that, I smudged the part that was written on my hand.
When I finally got to physics the lights were off because the class was in the midst of watching a DVD: an introduction to subatomic particles and string theory. I handed Dr. Pillar my note, and he smiled and pointed me to a desk.
I took off my sunglasses and watched the movie. It was actually very relaxing. The narrator had one of those silky PBS type voices, and there was quite a bit of New Age and Philip Glass-y music to accompany the images, which were a combination of talking-head interviews featuring very nerdy adults in lab coats and short-sleeved polyester dress shirts, and computer simulations of stars and planets, forming and breaking apart and forming again. It was sort of beautiful. All those stars and planets, they reminded me of something…
Of being in an air-conditioned planetarium.
The air was stale like a library, but also sweaty like the sea…
Me in a flimsy white tank top.
With goose bumps on my arm.
Seventies rock.
A boy with sweaty hands.
This feeling…
Like anything might happen.
I wondered if this might be an actual memory, and if it was an actual memory, was it mine? Or was it something from a book I might have read or a movie I might have seen? Even when my brain had been perfectly functional, I had done that. Taken stories from books and sort of conflated them with actual events. Not lying exactly, though some might call it that. More like borrowing. It is hard to explain just what I mean unless you’re the type of person who does it, too.
I turned my attention back to the program. One of the physicists in the program was saying something about how when scientists first started studying the universe, it was like being in a room in the dark. But now with the new theories, they realized it wasn’t a room, but a house. Not any old house either, but a mansion with an infinite number of rooms to stumble through. I was imagining these scientists groping around in this darkened mansion. I don’t know why but I pictured the scientists as a group of drunken women, like they’d just come from a frat party. “Oh hey,” one would say to the other, “does anyone remember how in the hell we got in here in the first place?” They were still trying to get out when I fell asleep for the second time that morning.
Luckily, I woke up on my own this time, which was good. I didn’t want to be known as “that chick who’s always falling asleep in class.” (There’s always one; you know who you are.)
The doctors had said that head traumas can cause exhaustion for “a while.”
“How long is a while?” I asked.
“Ballpark?”
“Ballpark.”
They nodded and whispered to each other. “Indefinitely” was their very helpful reply.
“Miss Porter.” Dr. Pillar stopped me on the way out. He had a perfectly round face and was bald with a woolly strip of jet black hair above his ears and neck, like a pair of headphones that had slipped off his head. “Your papa. He calls to say that your math and science skills are hunky-dory, yes?” He had a strange, stilted way of forming sentences and an equally strange accent that I couldn’t quite place, but had a hint of Dracula in it.
“You are one year ahead in math and science, so this is very good, yes? But I prepare for you a dossier with chemistry and mathematics necessary for mastery of physics.” He handed me a large heavy envelope, crammed with papers.
In other words, a review. I thanked him. It was nice to know that the school was not peopled entirely with Mrs. Tarkingtons.
“It is interesting, this. Why you have lost some things and not others…” He studied me, much like you would expect a lab technician to watch an ape. “Maybe it is because you place different things in different areas of brain? We know nothing about brain, yes?”
It had certainly seemed that this was the case.
“And four years, is it? This is very odd. Maybe it is puberty onset that alters the place in which you are storing long-term memories? So you have everything before puberty, but nothing after?”