An Uncommon Education (9 page)

The cold stung the tip of my nose and made my eyes water. Within minutes the dampness on my lashes had turned to frozen beads I had to wipe away with my arm. I could not remember ever being so cold, and I wanted, suddenly, to turn back. The neighborhood was too quiet, scary, like an imitation of the houses and streets I knew, not the real thing. I was suddenly terrified that I would get lost, too, because I sensed that although my mother had left willingly she was also without direction. The only explanation I wanted for her leaving the house in the middle of the night was that she had somehow lost her way.

It wasn’t long before I was no longer looking for her but needed to find her and have her bring me back home. Every new footprint I found filled me with hope and anxiety; I was closer to her, but we were that much farther away. I followed her tracks down another block and into the small park near our house, really just a field with a swing set and a sandbox. At night, empty and dark, it seemed much larger than it was. I spotted her standing near the swings, looking out toward the trees that fringed the edges of the small expanse. Her back was to me, and her figure in a light robe didn’t look quite substantial, quite human. I shivered, afraid again, not because I thought she might be a ghost, but because I knew she was real.

“Do you see it?” she asked, pointing to the trees as I crept up behind her. I looked out at the empty, white-crusted limbs. “Over there,” she said, continuing to point. I looked at her, wondering if I could see what she was seeing, afraid I couldn’t. She smiled. “Look, Naomi,” she said, pointing out, insisting. The sky was beginning to lighten, the moon to fade.

“Sit, sit,” she said, pointing to the cold ground. I moved closer to her. “Over there,” she whispered, pointing again as she dropped to her knees beside me and pulled me close with one arm. I strained and squinted, just able to make out the muted edges of trees. “Look!” she said, ordering me. I wanted to shout. I
was
looking. I was doing everything I could to see.

“There!” she cried, pointing up and out. A single cardinal, its red feathers just barely distinguishable in the newly pale sky, flew up from the edge of the park and into the air. I gasped, watching its sudden flight, as startled by its color and movement as by the fact that my mother had been looking at something that was actually there. She was smiling at me. She caressed my head with her hand. “Don’t cover your hair,” she said, frowning, “it’s too pretty.” She turned back to the trees, watching for the bird once more.

She pressed me closer to her. The pockets of her robe bulged with hidden items. The one nearest me was hard, resisting. I reached into it. Her stillness was expectant, like a wild mother allowing her child to take food from her mouth. I pulled out the bottle with its mysterious words. Only her name and the date were familiar. She’d been given whatever it was to take home with her from the hospital. I looked down, trying to understand the cryptic arrangement of letters and numbers on the bottle. I recognized them individually, but as a collection they became nonsense, and I was furious that I couldn’t understand, so angry that the tears began to sting my eyes again, warm and unwelcome.

My mother was watching me, smiling. It was as if someone friendlier and infinitely more relaxed had taken up residence in my mother’s body. In an instant, I decided that I didn’t trust or like her. I grasped the pill bottle tightly in my fist, then raised my arm and threw it as far as I could, twisting my arm and shoulder in the process. When it landed, the quiet park began shuddering in response—a chorus of birds now took flight from their branches, each new set of wings encouraging the ones that came after. There couldn’t have been more than a dozen, but I remember being amazed at seeing so many birds in winter, and then turning to see my mother crying.

I looked down and away from her, trying to swallow my own tears. I didn’t know exactly what I had done to upset her. “Naomi,” she said sternly, wiping her face with the sleeve of her robe, “you made them all fly away.” She was staring at my face. Then I noticed her feet, which were in slippers. “Oh!” I said out loud, pointing down to them. “Your toes!” I dropped to my knees, afraid to touch what I saw. Her toes peeked out from her wet slippers, dark and swollen. I placed my hand on them, just covering the exposed skin. She cried out in pain and looked down at me, her expression accusatory.

“We have to go home,” I said, suddenly understanding something I couldn’t explain. “Now,” I said and stood up.

She looked up at me, confused. “Why?” she asked. “We can wait a while. We’ll wait for them to come back.”

“They’re not coming back,” I told her. “They’re afraid of us. They won’t come back.” She put a finger to her lips. I grabbed her wrist but she didn’t move. I pulled at her.

“Stop it, Naomi,” she argued with me. “Stop,” she insisted, struggling and twisting.

My face was suddenly warm again with tears. I pulled her, finally, toward me, and as she stumbled forward in the snow she cried out in surprise. Her eyes flew open, wide and curious. “My feet,” she said, “they feel too heavy.”

We walked home, her gait stiff like a soldier’s. As we moved through the front door, my father stood waiting with the phone receiver in his hand, his hair a shock of sleeplessness and guilt. He went to me first, but I yanked my arm away when he clutched it. “We need a hot water bottle,” I told him, pointing to my mother’s feet. It was something I had heard on television once, on a pioneer show where the man had lost his fingers. I frowned. “Not too hot.” My father was staring at us, openmouthed. “Where is it?” I demanded, hearing the whine of my own voice echo in the hall. He began muttering, mumbling, and for a moment I worried I had lost them both. He wanted to know what and how this had happened. I went to the phone and placed it back on the receiver. My father found the hot water bottle and I fetched blankets and wrapped her feet as he filled it. As they warmed she began to cry out in pain. My father rocked her back and forth, talking to me as she cried, silently now.

“She took too much, or it wasn’t what she should have taken,” he said. “It’s a damn shame, Naomi. A damn shame. You shouldn’t hear me use that word, but the truth, for such a child, should be told. How can those doctors make such a mistake?” I had been wondering the same thing.

She insisted on being treated at home that night. I slept on the couch opposite her, my father too tired to persuade me to go upstairs. But in the morning he insisted that I go to school, and by the time I came home she was in their bedroom upstairs. “Fine,” he told me. I knew better, but they wouldn’t let me say I knew, wouldn’t let me see her when she was recovering then, or anytime later when she was at her worst. I wanted to attack what was wrong, to storm it with affection, or knowledge, and the more they kept it from me the more I became like a pet challenging an unwanted barrier. I tried to get to her, but my father usually found me and sent me away, or she did. Leaving made me nervous and angry. I was cruel to him, reminding him that he had been sleeping and I was the one who saw her leaving and brought her back, but he met my cruelty with disproportionate generosity.

“You saved her life, Naomi,” he agreed solemnly, shaking his head. “There’s no doubt about that.
And
her toes.” He rumpled my hair. “An incredible child.” I nearly spat my frustration. Instead, I went outside, slamming an unremarkable blue ball again and again against the side of the house, my palms soon stinging and stinking of rubber. When I came back in, I told my father I had decided I wanted to be a doctor, that I wouldn’t make those kinds of mistakes. I told him for his attention, and I got it. “A wonderful idea, my girl,” he said, pulling me onto his knee so he could look me in the eye. “Those doctors could use someone like you.” I had no idea then what he or I really meant, but I had, for the moment, what I came for: my father’s undivided love.

I woke up suddenly, disoriented. I threw off the covers and ran to the window, peering into the dark at the Rosenthals’ house. It was completely silent. I sat back against the glass, wondering if I should go back to sleep or wait up.

A
fter the sun was fully risen I went outside. Teddy wasn’t there. He wasn’t there when my father came to call me in for breakfast, and didn’t come out until the afternoon, after I’d been shopping with my father at the hardware store for the longest hour of my life. A new screwdriver, the right screws, some twist-ties; a relic of a cash register that had to be punched with a finger.

When we got back home Teddy was waiting for me. I walked outside casually, fearing I might disturb him if I ran too quickly, that he might startle like a bird. I wondered how his mother had learned to give the evil eye, if her mother had taught her. Teddy beckoned me to him with just the tips of his fingers. When I reached him his freckled face was red from another recent scrubbing, his hair flying away from a recent wash. I had to stop myself from leaning forward just to smell it. He smiled expansively, as though he’d been preparing for several days to tell me his news. “It’s working,” he whispered, taking my elbow in his palm.

“What?” I asked.

“Your medicine,” he said.

For a moment I recalled how I’d first thought he was not so bright, how watching him he’d seemed too innocent and wild to understand anything of importance.

“Naomi,” he brought me back. “He’s getting better. He sat up yesterday and asked to go to the window. Then he sat outside in our front yard for, like, ten minutes. He laughed, Naomi.” It was the first and second time he’d said my name. “How did you know it was his heart?”

“His heart?” I repeated. He took my hand, laughing at my startled face. My breath was leaving me in surprise. “They worked?” My hand went to my throat as if something had flown there.

He nodded eagerly. “They’re working!” His hair stood tall on his head and his eyes were filled with a moving light.

I had no idea what to say. I sat down, hard, on the ground.

Teddy squatted down with me. “Are you okay?” he asked. His pupils up close were small and focused. I stared at them, thinking of the small bugs that get trapped in amber, that die and are preserved forever there. “Naomi?”

The back door of his house slammed. His mother was standing there, her arms across her chest. I braced myself for whatever was coming.

“Tee-o-door,” she called, frowning. “Does your little friend want to join you for a snack?” I couldn’t see his face as he nodded quickly. We stood up together, not daring to look at one another, and went inside and into her kitchen, which was fragrant with yeast and soup. She gave us wedges of canned oranges and cheese in a red casing to share. Her back was to us.

“Tee-o-door’s father is looking better,” she said to whatever she was preparing for dinner. She turned around and stared hard at me, fixing me to the chair. “He is glad the boy has a friend.” She had a glass in each hand and placed them before us. “He want to take you to the park when he can walk.” At this she nodded and frowned once more.

L
ater that week my father presented me with my very own copy of
Gray’s Anatomy
. I think my heart pills and the shamanistic line of thinking they suggested had alarmed him. “It’s time you began looking at the pictures, at least,” he told me, handing the tall white book over to me and my waiting hands. “So you’re a little more familiar maybe with what you’ll need to know.” There was a man on its front, his skin pulled back, the red muscles striated and exposed, the bones with their scribbled, scripted names in red, too. Fortunately, maybe having learned his lesson from
D’Aulaires’ Myths
, my father also presented me with the corresponding coloring book, the cover of which showed the same drawing in entirely different shades: a rainbow of color at the top with white spaces underneath, as if to say,
This one can be pretty!

“Get a head start,” my father said, tapping the book. “Most of those girls at Wellesley will probably have their fancy private educations to help them. Luckily, you’re a Jew, and we Jews have always done our best learning at home.” I was clutching the book to me, trying not to look like it was too heavy for me.

He continued. “Did you know Einstein mostly taught himself physics?” I frowned skeptically but he wouldn’t relent. “You think the Sagans had money for private school? And Freud. Do you think he figured all that out in a classroom? Geniuses, all of them. And they read their books at home.” He tapped
Gray’s
again. “Let’s get started.”

Six

T
eddy and I both started fourth grade that fall. He attended Maimonides, the Modern Orthodox private school a few minutes from our home that was bordered on all sides by a ten-foot stone wall. I returned to Robert Kennedy Elementary. We were both home by three, with plenty of time to play outside before homework and dinner. Teddy had to wear long pants, a white shirt, a vest, his
tzitzit
, his
keepah
, and a coat to school, but he would change out of these into dark jeans and a T-shirt, leaving only the
tzitzit
and the
keepah
on before coming outside to play. I had to wait on my back steps fussing and counting until he was ready.

Neither one of us had many toys. My parents believed in creativity, and Teddy’s mother believed in austerity. So between the two of us we had some sidewalk chalk Teddy had found, scrap paper, a handful of dolls neither of us cared for, three horses only I cared for, some jacks, my historically significant coloring books, and marbles. Having so little we felt we needed nothing, and usually spent our days climbing trees or digging or, in the winter, making things from snow that would melt before a week passed. The only thing we used regularly was the sidewalk chalk, which Teddy carried in his front pockets. He could draw, as my father would say, like nobody’s business. I came home from school one time and he’d sketched three huge horses on the sidewalk in front of our house—my horses, with me in different gear, riding each one. I cried when the rain washed them into a silvery mess early the next morning, standing outside to watch the colors running into the gutter like melted fish.