An Uncommon Education (6 page)

Miss Rouselle pressed the papers to her chest as though a button had flown off her blouse. She blushed, as if we’d seen what she’d tried to cover too late. “Naomi?” she whispered, her voice as meek as a child’s. I only shook my head. “C’mon”—Anna finally turned to me. “You couldn’t have possibly known all those words.” I stared at her blankly, my ears buzzing with the watchfulness in the room. And then, finally, the bell rang.

Michael stood up first, shoving his things into his backpack. The movement broke the spell, and the other kids stood, too, the tension suddenly diffused by the chaos of packing up. Anna left my side and walked calmly to her backpack, placing things inside it without hurry. She worked comfortably in the eye of the storm.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Naomi,” Miss Rouselle said, squatting down to meet my eyes, “could you see my paper?” I shook my head. She frowned sadly; I thought she was waiting for me to say something else.

I took a stab at it. “I didn’t see it,” I said, trying to sound confident and not too much like I was pleading.

She looked up. “But Anna could,” she stated. I looked at her blankly. “I can’t quite let this pass,” she confided in me, gently, taking my hand and squeezing it. Her eyes weren’t completely brown; there were flakes of yellow in them. “I’ll have to send a note home. You understand?” I nodded. Her hand felt cool and thin over mine. “You’re better than that, Naomi,” she whispered. “We both know you’re better than this,” she repeated as she stood up, reassuring us both.

She didn’t send a note home. I thought she had changed her mind about telling my parents until the phone began to ring that night. It rang, was silent, then began to ring again. I looked up from my snack, guessing it was her. The ringing stopped. I wondered if my mother had finally answered it or if I had been granted some kind of miraculous, even if it had been desperately prayed for, reprieve. It was a Friday, and I stared at the unlit candles on the table in front of me, wondering if I could make them ignite with my mind. Somehow I had thought that sunset would bring not just the Sabbath but a sign that all had been forgiven.

My mother came into the kitchen a few minutes later. She didn’t pretend to be there for any other reason than to sit down across from me and discuss the phone call she’d just had with my teacher. I felt outclassed and betrayed by them both.

My mother sighed, stretching her neck from side to side. “I know you didn’t cheat,” she said, surprising me. “Naomi. Do you hear me?” I nodded my head, strangely frightened. Her eyes were filling as she looked away, then stood up and turned to leave the room. At the door she put one hand on the frame and spoke over her shoulder, “This isn’t the last time someone’s going to think you’re dishonest, for remembering things.” She became so quiet I didn’t think she would say anything else. Then, “There’s nothing you can do about it.” She was quiet again for another long while. “Just try not to apologize for it.” I stared at her back just before she moved away, knowing that the only way not to apologize for all that I remembered was to keep it to myself.

So for the rest of the year I did my best to fade back into anonymity at school. And then my father got sick and then Teddy arrived, and I disappeared into our friendship, never happier, despite the fact that both Anna Kim’s reign and her disgust with me only swelled with time. It seemed life was terribly simple; one was either hated or loved, one either hid or was revealed. Even when Teddy left when we were both thirteen, he was gone in a single afternoon. And when he stopped writing, at fifteen, it was a deafening silence. The kind that rushes through the ears, blocking everything else out.

A
t first, Teddy looked to be so unlike the nice boy my mother had hoped would be my friend that I resented him for it; my annoyance fueling a fascination greater than admiration ever could. It’s probably also true that when my father began to work from home and my mother’s door began to close more frequently again, I had nothing better to do than watch this strange boy wander around in his backyard, which is exactly what he did for hours at a time, always out in that constant, drizzling rain.

The only division between our yards was a drooping metal fence. The area between our two properties was overgrown and neglected, so that instead of two privately owned lots, it was easy to pretend that we lived at either ends of a long, dilapidated park. The longer the poor weather showed its persistence, the more genuinely interested I became in watching him from the back windows of our house, as if he were setting a record for being outdoors in a suburb during inclement weather.

I formed ideas about him as I watched. At first I guessed the adoption was a ruse and that he was actually both parentless and friendless; he was never with anyone else and he went inside only to eat. He even relieved himself outside, using an enormous rhododendron between the fence and one side of his house to do so. Only someone very slender could fit in there, and the plant flowered prematurely. Then, after seeing Mrs. Rosenthal come out and yell at him between a few breaks in the rain, I imagined he was a naturalist, collecting data; then he was half boy, half wild dog; and then, finally, he had simply been forgotten. Sometimes it was raining so hard I would lose sight of him; other days I could watch him through a light shower, like watching someone through a cloud. He always had something in his hands and I eventually concluded, out of frustration at watching and not meeting him, that he was able to spend so many hours outside alone and entertained, using a bush as his toilet, because he was not all that smart.

Sometime toward the end of the summer, the sun broke through for a few days, but I kept to my posts, more curious than ever before to see what the little
shtumie
, as my father had affably named him, would do on a sunny day. Sure enough, and as usual, he came outside and began to play. After a few minutes he stood and looked up at me in my bedroom window. I suspect he knew I would be there. He caught my eye immediately, then smiled and waved. I frowned, feeling suddenly exposed. For the first time since my father fell ill, I felt like a child again.

He raised his arm higher, just in case I hadn’t seen him, and I lifted my hand in response. He dropped his arm and grinned. Then he began to wave me over. I slid off my seat with a put-upon groan and went to join him, pretending we did this all the time and there was no fuss to be made. By the end of the week we were playing doctor.

It wasn’t a covert, behind-some-couch activity. Neither one of us knew a great deal about subversion. We just dragged an old picnic bench from the side of his house into the middle of his backyard and I lay down on it. We hadn’t thought about costumes until the last minute, so Teddy had to run back inside to get one of his father’s white shirts, but he took a while, and I spent the time staring up and studying the small, thin clouds, wondering how it could have been so gray for so many days before.

When Teddy eventually came back he was wearing a blue one.

“No white,” he said, worried he had disappointed me.

I shrugged, touched that he’d wanted it to be just right, that he’d taken our game so seriously.

“So, lady,” he began, “what hurts?”

I looked at him quizzically.

“What is it?”

“I’m not a lady,” I said.

“What should I call you, then? ‘Girl’? ”

I didn’t particularly like that, either.

“How about ‘miss’?”

“Fine,” I said. “Or just call me kid. Miss sounds like sis, or sissy.” What I really wanted was for it to be my turn to be the doctor, but we’d agreed he could go first. I got the sense he was looking to play a different game than the one I had imagined. He probably wasn’t expecting me to check his pulse for irregularities and listen to his heart for signs of a murmur. And I wasn’t thinking that he would think to take off any clothes.

He had a string wrapped around his neck with a plastic ring around it. “Let’s have a listen to your heart, first,” he began, tugging the bottom of my shirt up past my waist.

I pulled it back down instantly. “My heart’s up here, Teddy,” I interrupted, glaring at him and pointing to my chest. He looked surprised, and then hurt.

“Mr. Rosenthal,” he corrected me. “Dr. Rosenthal.”

“Sorry. Dr. Rosenthal.”

He moved his stethoscope up to my chest, sliding it against my thin, yellow T-shirt, the most intimate thing anyone had ever done to me. The game had started with me being in control—it was my idea, my obsession—but then it changed on us both, became something more shared and less defined. I realized I’d been holding my breath and let it out in a whumpf.

“Does that hurt?” he asked, Teddy again. I shook my head.

He re-fixed his face into Dr. Rosenthal’s. I gave my eyes a break and turned them toward the shade of the tree that spread itself over the back of his house. The sky filtered through the leaves so that everything was blue and green and white like a blurred, joyous painting of summer.

“I think it’s your appendix, ma’am,” he said. I squinted up at him again. “Kid,” he added solemnly.

“I don’t think my appendix is in my neck,” I said, pulling the chest piece from his hand. “I think it’s here.” I moved it down lower, back down to my hip.

“You said I couldn’t listen there,” he protested.

“Well, you can’t hear my heart down here, and you can only hear my heart with that thing.”

The plastic ring swung loose. He put his hand on my belly, as though listening with it. I barely felt the weight of his palm. “I don’t know what to look for,” he admitted after a moment. His voice sounded far away.

“I think you can only tell with an operation,” I said, sounding more informed than I was.

Teddy took the string and pulled it over his head. “Maybe you should be the doctor,” he said, handing it to me. His expression was grave, unreadable. I sat up, feeling dizzy, and we switched places.

Lying down, Teddy looked even thinner and taller than he did standing up. He folded his hands across his middle, like the submissive or the dead. I put the ring to his heart.

“My dad’s sick,” he whispered, sending the words by me and into the tree above. Everything around us was suddenly quiet, holding a collective breath. I had known his father was sick. The ambulance had come for him a week earlier, during the rain. And now there was a nurse who came every day.

“What seems to be the trouble?” I asked, not meeting his eye.

It was his turn to squint up at me. I took his hand to feel for his pulse, then held it, my fingers interlacing with his.

“I don’t know,” he said. He sat up, looking at me. “My mom won’t say.”

I reached forward and touched the lock on the left side of his face, the
peyes
he hadn’t yet learned to tuck behind his ears. It was soft and insubstantial, the round curl it formed empty inside. “I’m so sorry,” I said, meaning it as deeply as I knew how to mean anything.

“Can I show you something?” His eyes were flat and dark, the question urgent.

I nodded. Of course.

He ran back to the house, stopping at the bottom of the steps to turn around and say, “If I don’t come back, my mom found me and I got in trouble. Go home. Don’t let her find you.” He frowned, then turned and ran back into the house, determination propelling his body through the door. It slammed behind him.

He was by my side again in ten minutes. “Got it,” he said, breathing heavily as he sat down. “Here.”

“Where did you get this?” I asked. He shook his head, riffling through the papers he’d thrust into my hands until he came to what he wanted me to see. The very top of the page was stamped with his name and the name of his parents. Just below, an ADOPTION DATE: July 3, 1974. “What is this?” I asked him, afraid to make sense of it on my own. He shook his head, frowning, his eyes and finger on the spot he wanted me to read.

Discharge Summary. Unknown 34 y/o female adm. 3/22/74. Escorted by police re: c/o public disturbance. On admission to ED patient found to be mildly obtunded and in early labor. Initial examination revealed track marks BUE, BAC of 0.18%, and 3rd trimester pregnancy est. 34 wks. gestational age.

My heart dropped into my stomach. “Teddy, I don’t know . . .”

“Keep reading,” he insisted, frowning at the paper.

Admitted to ICU. Treatment initiated for substance abuse and withdrawal. 3/28/74 PROM. 3/31/74 delivered of 4 lb 2 oz (SFA) boy. 4/6/74 further obtunded. 4/7/74 manifested right hemiplegia. Expired 4/9/74. PM revealed ruptured left cerebral aneurysm in the distribution of the left middle cerebral artery. Massive intracranial hemorrhage. Also fibrosis of the liver; portal hypertension; mild early ascites.

“It’s about my real mom, isn’t it?”

I looked up at him, his eyes were open, so wide they made mine ache. “I don’t know,” I said, “I wish I did but I don’t,” wanting desperately to touch him instead of speaking. “When’s your birthday?” I asked, looking away.

“End of March.” Then, “What does it mean?” more insistently this time.

I looked back at him, desperately wanting to understand more than either of us could. “I just don’t know,” I whispered. I didn’t tell him I would remember the words on the page anyway, that I would gladly store them until I could make sense of their meaning. I didn’t realize that to give shape to the broken woman he had come from might reveal the soon-to-be-altered curve of his life, too.

None of us said anything for a while, both of us staring down at the impenetrable letters. “Hold on,” I said. This time it was me who stood up and ran into my house. I was in my bedroom and emptying my desk a moment later, then back out to him after clattering down the stairs, afraid he might not wait long for me to return.

When I dropped down beside him I took his papers in my hand and put them on top of Rosemary’s letters. I didn’t give him a chance to see what I had added to the collection, I just pointed to the top, where his records were. “These are yours,” I told him, stabbing the paper again with my finger as I had seen teachers do. “They’re yours and not your mom’s.” I looked up to see if he was with me. His eyes were still wide, processing the information he needed to judge both what I was doing and me.