She was out of breath and jittery. My son was working late at the newspaper.
“I’d rather not have this conversation in my bedroom if that’s okay, and anyhow I thought you said you deserved an A?”
“I deserved an A minus,” she said. “I only want what I deserve.”
“You’re getting an A.”
“There were no comments on it.”
I noticed that one of her bottom teeth was chipped, her eyes moist and reddened. I wondered about her mental health.
“Your grade was my comment,” I said.
She shook her head in disgust.
“That’s so typical of you.”
“What do you know about me? How do you know what’s typical?” I tried to relax my face; to understand that the world didn’t need to fall apart, but it felt like it was, all my rage and sadness surrounding the divorce, and my problems at the college, and the neighbors had converged within me. “None of this is typical.”
She was too close to me right then. I wanted her to leave. I wanted my son to get back home.
“I bet I remind you of her,” she said.
“Who?”
“Why did she leave you anyhow?”
“What are you talking about?”
She smiled cruelly. “I bet I know.”
“I’d rather not hear your theories, Ms. Weisman. They’re not original enough, and in fact I’d rather if you didn’t continue to live here with us. This isn’t how I’d like to live.”
“Such passion. Such unbridled warmth.”
“I’ve got a lot of warmth for those in my life who merit it, but I’ve really had enough of this if that’s okay with you.”
She looked angry, and then sad.
“You know, Mr. Singh… I really don’t like it when you ignore me in class. It’s very cruel. And it’s really not fair. I’m a good student, one of your best. I tried for two years to get into your course, you know. It isn’t fair to ignore me.”
“Did you write it?” I asked. “Tell me the truth.”
“Who cares?”
“I do for one. The university does for another. You know you can get kicked out for something like this.”
She shook her head in exasperation.
“Of course I wrote it. He never even read it. He just made a big deal about it because he wanted you to take an interest.”
We didn’t see Rachel for two weeks after that, not at home anyhow. She sat in the back of class and never raised her hand. She did all the work, and she left immediately afterward. She and Rajiv were in a holding pattern for now, trying to figure out what was next.
He didn’t hold me responsible, he said. They had their own issues. I felt as though I’d destroyed something, but at the same time I felt as though a burden had been lifted.
A week before the end of school the dean — the one I’d imagined Rachel speaking to — stopped into my office to say that Rachel Weisman was going back to California. She wanted to send her final paper in from there. And she would do any homework I requested but her father had died, and she wanted to be with her mother, the dean said. Her father’s health had been deteriorating for a long time. He’d had two strokes, the last one incapacitating. He’d been a sculptor and photographer, and they’d had a rocky relationship. This last part Rajiv told me.
“She will have the whole summer as her deadline,” I said, and the dean nodded grimly, and somewhat paternally. I wondered if he had more to say, but he didn’t and without further incident took his leave.
That night as I parked my car and sat outside my house, I thought about how distant Rajiv and I had become. How much I’d wanted everything to be different. He was a gifted boy. Bold in ways I once was. I was immensely proud of him, so much that I imagined he’d written something he might not yet be capable of. Perhaps it was my vanity that screwed all of this up. It would be untrue to say that I never looked at Rachel in the wrong way. And even now a part of me hopes that I’ll see her in her towel leaving the shower, her damp hair falling lushly down her back. It reminds me of a period in my life in which I wouldn’t have cared what my own father said or thought. I would have done what I wanted in the name of love.
Howling at the Moon
We sat on the screened-in porch of my new family’s summerhouse, passing bottles of red wine and telling death stories. I was twelve and wasn’t drinking.
Charles had a friend whose cousin lost his ear to a wolf, then froze in a blizzard. He’d been spring camping on Mount Hood in Oregon and hadn’t planned for snow.
“He was iced solid… curled up like a fetus,” Charles said. “Took them four days to find him. He bandaged that poor ear to his head with a handkerchief and duct tape.”
“I know that mountain. You can’t trust it,” Walt said. He was puffy and pale in the candlelight and expertly rolled his own cigarette as he spoke. Behind him a hundred yards away, I saw a single lit window in the house’s back wing where I guessed my mother and their father, Norman, were having a late supper alone, away from us.
Deborah said when she was ten, she watched camp counselors pull a drowned girl from a lake in Switzerland. The girl had slipped out of sight, away from the roped-in swimming area, and she’d hit her head against a rock.
“They gave her mouth-to-mouth, but looking at her you can tell she was gone,” Deborah said. She dipped her finger into a pool of wax at the candle’s base and then let the hot liquid slide across her palm before hardening.
“That was the only dead body I ever saw,” she said, and she spoke toward me. Everyone else, I guessed, had heard this before. “I kept thinking ‘That could have been me.’ Absolutely.”
Walt said he saw a football player sever his spine during a game; the boy never heard the linebacker behind him. And on Nan’s way onto a train in Calcutta, she said, she nearly tripped over a corpse before realizing what it was.
At my turn, I told them about watching my brother die in a car accident. He was thirteen years old at the time and I was nine.
“My mother was driving home from the lake and I kicked a pile of tennis balls around her seat to the front,” I said. “They rolled beneath her feet and she smashed the car.”
I told them more, about the ride to the hospital, and the waiting: the dismal yellow waiting room, my mother on a separate bench, rubbing her hands over her pant legs rocking forward and back, lips moving, blaming me, I thought. She’s never stated this, but even now, twenty-two years later, I can’t see how she wouldn’t want to shift the burden. How she wouldn’t tell herself she was driving safely and nothing would have happened had I followed the car rules. I would understand that.
“Shit, Lou,” Walt said. “No one told us. No one said a thing.”
They stared over as if a person had taken my place on the porch. Nan reached her arm around me and held me tight. No one asked me anything else.
That was the summer Mother and Norman had decided to test us all as a family: four weeks in Norman’s summer home off the coast of Maine. He and my mother weren’t officially engaged, but the subject was in the air.
My new brothers and sisters were in college or older; I didn’t know their ages exactly, but again and again I’d heard about their lives. In the stories my mother told, they soared untethered, like people in magazines or movies. They weren’t like anyone I knew. They’d driven motorcycles in foreign countries, won grants and awards, performed onstage or in the living rooms of glamorous apartments. My mother saved newspaper clippings about them. “They’re all creative,” she said on the trip from Auburn, New York, to Maine. She spoke as though they were already hers.