An Uncommon Education (44 page)

Authors: Elizabeth Percer

BOOK: An Uncommon Education

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I admitted I hadn’t known he was still in the area, and he said that the MBA program at Columbia was on break, that he had returned to New York in order to set up an Oko Industries base in Manhattan. Art told us both that he had stayed because he could never return to Indiana. “I’ve been singing at bar mitzvahs to pay the rent,” he confessed. Keigo and I laughed, and then Art did, too. The rabbi walked in and, seeing the remnants of the laughter, nodded his approval.

Art stayed long after Keigo left, but returned on his own the next day and the day after that. I stopped looking for Keigo to join him. I found myself sorry on the last day of
shivah
that we had no excuse to see him again anytime soon. But he began visiting my father every Sunday after that, soon confessing to him that he hoped I’d be there, too. Almost a year after my mother had died, I found myself in my parents’ kitchen with him, sharing a meal. Or at least I thought we were sharing a meal. I looked up to find him not eating.

“Do you mind,” he began, “that I fell for you the night I came to see you in the play with Keigo?” I swallowed. His mouth dropped into a frown.

“The one when you fawned over A.J.?” I asked. “When you were following Ann around like a puppy?”

He smiled and nodded. “Ann. Yes. She spent a lot of time around you.”

“But your crush on me didn’t keep you from sleeping with her, right?” I eyed him, challenging.

He stood up and put his arms around me. “I didn’t sleep with her.” He kissed me deeply. “She was my only offer that year, too. And I didn’t have a crush on you.” He kissed me again. “I really did fall for you. I couldn’t even figure out how to talk to you. You might remember I was a little awkward. A little effusive, maybe?”

I laughed, remembering, then kissed him back. When he sat down, I refilled his glass, bringing him a napkin, too. I was dumbfounded by the simplicity of our love, as it became that, and let it wash over me slowly, marveling at the ease of it, too. It had become clear to me how rare a gift ease was, and I was relearning to live around it, hoping that I could one day accept it, too.

A
few years out of graduate school, I took the weekend off to attend Dr. Orchuk’s retirement party in Connecticut. I was planning to take the train from South Station, and sat at a café until it was time to board. I hadn’t been there since I had gone to try to find Teddy years before, and it was changed: more people and more vendors. There were a few others sitting in the café, waiting in between their travels. A woman with slick reddish hair and an angular face caught my attention, and it took me a moment to place her as Phyllis. I got up and went over to her, standing at her table until she looked up.

“Naomi Feinstein.” Her smile was as broad as I’d remembered it, though there were sets of wrinkles at her eyes and on either side of her nose, the fine skin there already thinning.

She was still teaching classics, now at a private girls’ school. I told her that my husband was a music teacher, someone I had met in college. She asked if I had become a doctor, and I forgot that she knew that had been my intention. I told her I was a medical researcher, that we were seeking a cure for neurofibromatosis. That’s an odd thing to do, she said; she’d never heard of the disease. Yes, I said, and we’ll probably never find a cure for it, either.

“Well, it’s admirable, anyway,” she patched. “You’re a credit to the school. You should present at the alumnae research conference.”

“They ask for significant findings,” I told her.

“Right,” she said, then asked if Jun and I still kept in touch. I told her that we did, occasionally. She frowned into her coffee. “I heard about what happened,” she said. “With Jun and Tiney. Julie and I stayed in touch.” She shook her head. “It surprised even me,” she said softly, “that she offered up the stage.”

“Oh,” I said to my own surprise, dismissing her, “I don’t think anyone really knew it was there. Now at least it can be missed a little.” Phyllis stared at me, her face as quickly and startlingly blank as my mother’s had been that last year, as though she’d forgotten who I was. I reached forward and touched the side of her head. It was as smooth as I’d imagined it would be. I told her that I’d always thought she was beautiful. Then I told her goodbye.

I
have had some very late nights at work this year, when I’m puzzling over something and feel frustrated by what’s so near—feels so tangible, but I can’t reach it—and I have to force myself to go home when I simply cannot think any longer. I try to sneak into the kitchen to make tea, but Art usually wakes up and comes in after me, turning off the kettle if it hasn’t boiled yet and taking me to bed. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Naomi,” he likes to say, “than are dreamt of in neurofibromatosis research.” I hate the bad joke so much I laugh, as he knows I will.

On weekends I take long runs along the Charles, letting what comes to mind linger. Sometimes I find myself reliving the oddest of conversations with Jun, or my parents, or Teddy. Two years after my mother died, Art walked me around Lake Waban three times. The first time around I showed him where Ruth had walked on the ice, the second time I showed him where Jun and I had run the day I understood she was leaving. The third time around, we made a new important place together, building on a Wellesley tradition and consummating our engagement, forced to navigate a surprising number of thorns.

Art now visits Teddy with me every other Sunday, sometimes even goes on his own when I’m feeling too discouraged to see how far he’s deteriorated. If Teddy’s alert, they play Go Fish. He’s only remembered my name once or twice in the past ten years, but I think he recognizes me otherwise. Art and I live in a different part of Brookline from where I grew up, a busier part closer to Boston. But it doesn’t feel that different at night. I think once you spend a certain amount of time ending your day in a particular corner of the world, it becomes difficult to turn the lights off anywhere else. And my father lives in an apartment nearby, with a few pictures of my mother on the walls. He’s hung my Wellesley diploma there, too, and we like to joke that he earned it as much as I did. I once asked if he wanted me to build a little shrine to Rose beneath it, and he told me I was “very funny.” His heroic crushes have mostly lapsed in the face of my easing away from blind ambition, and he asks me now about my “noble and impossible problems,” seeming to find it agreeable that I have found solace in the unknown. I hope that some of my solace has drifted his way, and sometimes, when he laughs at the worst of Art’s jokes, I think it has.

I also removed my mother’s urn from his mantel, explaining that it was morbid, and placed it in the cedar box I dug up with my father before he moved, now polished and beautiful again, though it still smells like fermented medicines. The other things Teddy and I once hid are in there, too, as is my mother’s scarf. I wear her bracelet, though. Sometimes, even, in the lab.

I have often thought of how angry she was with me that night I insisted it was my right to know her better, how her face had shown as much fear as fury. I have wondered why it took me so long to see how frightened she was, how we all lived so full of fear, and why I needed to see that to release both her and myself. Maybe her fear was too close for recognition, too deeply ingrained. Or maybe I felt I would betray both of us by separating from it enough to allow it out into the open. I think those ties must begin at birth, when each of us is born into the same shared tragedy, the preternatural knowledge that we are, from then on, at one irretrievable remove even from those dearest to us. The first touch so many of us feel is the doctor’s, pulling us from our mother into ourselves. And so we cry, grieving. And so we breathe.

Acknowledgments

This book would never have come to be without the support and talent of countless individuals.

Thanks to everyone at Harper, especially my brilliant editor and friend, the extremely talented and wonderful Maya Ziv, whose passion and vision for Naomi sustained me through the considerable challenges of publishing a debut novel. Thanks also to Jonathan Burnham and Kathy Schneider for their early support, endless patience, and gracious attentions. Thanks to Ed Cohen for his meticulous and fearless copyediting; John Jusino for his eagle editorial eye and patience; Nicole Judge for her inspired marketing direction; Mark Ferguson for his patient guidance through the virtual unknown; Tina Andreadis and Katherine Beitner for their wonderful publicity work; Fritz Metsch for his beautiful pages; and Archie Ferguson for his gorgeous cover design.

Thanks to my extraordinary agent, Lisa Grubka, whose integrity and wisdom have guided me steadily through the glories and pitfalls of publishing, as well as everything in between. Thanks also to Stéphanie Abou, who believed in this novel’s legs abroad and would have made a great college roommate. Thanks, too, to Michelle Wiener at CAA for her early visions of Naomi in film.

Many thanks to the countless friends and family members who served as early readers and critics of the novel, as well as essential sources of inspiration and support. Special thanks to my father, who not only answered every last medical question I had while I was writing this novel, but taught me how to listen for what people don’t say; my mother, who taught me the importance of courage in writing and is never shy with criticism or praise; my sister Shayna for insisting on my best work; my sister Rachel for listening to far more bellyaching than any good friend should; and my brother, Gabriel, who refused to read quickly. Thanks also to Judy Percer for her willing and able surrogate parenting, Elizabeth Percer for the loan of her name, and Tom Percer for having such great taste in women.

I am also deeply indebted to Aurora Serna and Diane and Dick Sands, who didn’t just watch my children while I wrote, but loved them, too; Dawn Wells Nadeau for teaching me about the depths of friendship; Malena Watrous for her caustic humor and keen literary insights; Susan Terris for mentoring me in many ways and going to bat to help me learn about “Fundies”; Jacqueline Higgins-Woo for being one of my earliest, bravest readers; Shana Kelly for believing in me from the first; Curtis Sittenfeld for leading me to Shana and so many others; Jim Roberts for his beautiful photos and thorough description of the Kennedy National Historic Site; all the past, current, and future members of the “real” Shakespeare Society, for being the best players I’ve ever known; and to Wellesley College, for inspiring women to make a difference in the world.

Finally, thanks to my husband and three children, who showed me how to love life more than art.

About the Author

ELIZABETH PERCER
is a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and has twice been honored by the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She received a BA in English from Wellesley and a PhD in arts education from Stanford University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship for the National Writing Project at UC Berkeley. She lives in California with her family. This is her first novel.

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Credits

Cover illustrations (Shakespeare and bird) © Getty Images

Cover design by Archie Ferguson

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

AN UNCOMMON EDUCATION. Copyright © 2012 by Elizabeth Percer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Quotations from Albert Einstein’s “The World As I See It” courtesy of the Philosophical Library.

Mrs. Kennedy’s audio recording courtesy of the National Park Service, John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site.

Excerpt from
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
by Ingri & Edgar Parin D’Aulaire, copyright © 1962 by Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN: 978-0-06-211096-1 (Hardcover)

EPub Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780062110985

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