My Education (6 page)

“Not with decaf, I'd guess,” she replied, so little ruffled by Dutra's manner that for a baffling moment I thought he must know her.

Dutra raised his eyebrows in mingled pity and disdain. “If it's decaf you want, I can't help you.”

“It's not what I want, but it's all I can have. The plight of the nursing mother.” She said this in a tone of mild reminder, as if she and Dutra had often in the past discussed her breasts and their uses.

Dutra lifted his palms in a broad show of helpless apology. “I'd like to say you metabolize all the caffeine before it reaches your milk, but I'd be talking out my ass.” He so determinedly hoarded her attention I felt sure she wouldn't notice as, concealed by his bluster, I scrutinized her restored, or redoubled, postpregnancy beauty. I had the idea of committing it to memory, so that I couldn't be surprised by it again. “I don't honestly know,” Dutra now surprisingly conceded of the science of metabolization. “I think that's true with booze, though.”

“I know it's true with booze,” she assured him.

“Nice. So your life isn't all deprivation.”

She began to move on. “Not at all. Very full of rewards.”

For a few moments we watched her recede, her narrow hips and mannish ass minimally betraying themselves in the loose pair of jeans. She moved along as if she were entirely alone, accompanied not even by the contents of the pram. She was like a farmer conducting some piece of equipment the length of a field.

“Single mothers are so sexy,” said Dutra appreciatively.

The market, I had more than once noticed, was not just an undying hippie performance with a bluegrass soundtrack, but a pageant of self-consciously picturesque parents and children. Here was everyone winsomely dressed for the weekend, in their house-painting clothes or their floral sack dresses or pulling their little red wagons, displaying their most heedless, natural selves as if still in the privacy of their own homes. But they weren't in the privacy of their own homes. They were out promenading, and seemed to make a point of it. It was to this intention that Martha seemed so indifferent. It hadn't even crossed Dutra's mind that she might have a husband, at the market or not. I meant to correct his assumption. When had I ever known more about something than Dutra? Yet even more satisfying than trumping his knowledge was keeping my own to myself. And so I kept my poker face and kept silent, and as Dutra did, kept watching her, until she'd passed out of sight.

•   •   •

“What day is this!” shrieked my mother ebulliently when I picked up the phone. Despite a lifetime of habituation and, more immediately, a morning's worth of expectation, I still winced at the sound of her voice. My mother's voice was known to interfere with radio broadcasts and to summon stray dogs; in her late girlhood, when her nuclear grin and her lightning-fast hands had landed her a job as a typist with the U.S. Armed Forces based in Manila, she'd been useful for mustering troops who could otherwise sleep through all bugles and bells. My docile American father, who was descended from speech-shunning Teutons, and so near-anemically pale he could only go out on the march thickly slathered with zinc, had already when he first met my mother been deaf in one ear from a tour in Korea, and in due time would have almost no hearing at all, and this must have enabled their lasting romance more than all other factors combined. Beaming, wordless, my long, pale father with his weak teeth and fine gingery hair married my short, dark mother with her hair like a black horse's mane and her blinding white teeth that could serve to cut gemstones, and brought her unparalleled decibels back to America. Throughout my childhood, my mother was the one-woman honeybee swarm to my father's inert, serene hive; all day long he sat in his little air-conditioned cube of an accountancy office enjoying his columns of numbers in miraculous silence, while my mother, at her receptionist's desk, shrieked at terrified clients all the better to shriek-translate their problems to him. Besides their surprisingly prosperous business, and me, they'd shared a beaming enjoyment of televised golf and stories of entrepreneurial moxie; and an untroubled indifference to literature and the arts. They'd been confused by my turning out bookish, but agreed it would burnish my small talk with customers, once I finally went into some kind of business—“some kind of business” having always been the broadly vague, prosperous future they envisaged for me. They had also shared, and I with them, a blissful absence of any suspicion that my father's extreme elongation might mean a congenital flaw in his heart, which took him from us, suddenly, in my last year of high school. Now my mother, in her well-funded bereaved widowhood, had become a fanatic for organized cruises and tours, though she still hadn't given up hope I would someday make use of my “good head for business” for which glorious turn of events she had promised to leave her retirement.

“Happy birth-day to
queen
, happy birth-day to
queen
, happy birth-day Re-
gi-na
my
da-aa-aar-
ling!” By now I'd settled down at the kitchen table with a pot holder over the earpiece, a magazine to read while she talked, and a bowl of cereal, though even with the pot holder it seemed possible her voice through the line would wake Dutra, still sleeping upstairs at the opposite end of the house.

“Hi, Mommy. How's Helsinki? Is that where you are?”

“
Twenty-one!
” she was wailing. “My
baby
. I was twenty-one when I met your poor daddy. Oh, I miss him, Regina. He would have loved coming here. His homeland.”

“His parents were German. Aren't you in Finland?”

“It's all the same
thing
. Europe's all the same thing. Everybody here looks like Daddy.”

“Are you having a good time?”

“I sent you an article, Gina. Did you get it? About those Nantucket Juice Guys? They're the same age as you! They did IPO just this year, now they're both millionaires. You must drink that juice all the time, right? On the bottle it says, ‘We're Juice Guys!'”

“Are you having fun, Mommy? Are you meeting anybody?”

“You mean
men
.”

“I really just mean anybody. Nice people to talk to.”

“You're so grown-up! You used to hate it when I asked about your boyfriends. Now, listen to you. Mommy's best girlfriend.” From her voice's slight sag off the uppermost end of the scale I could hear she was moved. “I bet
you
must have someone special.”

“No, Mommy. I'm just taking classes. Working hard.”

“You must be getting tired of school,” she said hopefully.

“I like grad school. I've got a new job, working for a professor. He's very brilliant.”

“Is he single?” she pounced, her flagging optimism now restored. To my mother, a good marriage was, if not equivalent to going into business, a strong prognosis for doing so.

“No, Mommy, he's married,” I scolded, and then, as if I needed to hear this myself, “very happily married. He and his wife just had a baby.”

She had moved on already. “What do you want for Christmas, sweetie? This year all my shopping is From Catalog. I leave for my Holy Land tour on the tenth of December. Oh! There's the ship bell! I
love you
. Happy
birthday
my darling!” And whether to obey the bell's shrilling, or competitively out-shrill it herself, with a last fireworks of effusion she ended the call, and I was left with residual bells in my ears agitating the silence. I took three aspirin, as it was always wise to do after speaking with her, and uttered a prayer that she meet a kind, deaf widower on her travels, and later, when the mail was delivered, I found that for my present she'd mailed me a fortune in Finnish tinned fish and stale Danish butter cookies, which that night Dutra and I made the pretext for devoting our scant mingled funds to the purchase of imitation champagne.

Since my earliest career as a student, when I'd gone to preschool in a corduroy dress with a Snow White lunch box, I'd almost always been the youngest in my class, studiously assuming the manners and mores of the already-fives at age four, or the thirteen-year-olds at age twelve, or the legally drunken eighteens while still many months shy of the privilege myself, so that my birthdays persistently suffered from anticlimax. Twenty-one was the same, but somehow even more so: the superior maturity I'd expected that age to confer I now felt I'd acquired already. At least in part I owed the acquisition to my friendship with Laurence, a heterosexual male with whom the problem of sex would not ever arise. I'd never before now been friends with a man who was married, let alone comically happily married, to use his own words. The unself-consciousness and freedom of my relations with Laurence, in which flirting, or the absence of flirting, had no relevance, hearkened back to nonsexual, innocent childhood. And so, though it sounds paradoxical, to me it felt very adult. On the other hand, the particular ripeness of my recent maturity seemed owing as much to Brodeur, who had surprisingly made me his colleague, and transported me out of that world of insinuation of which the bathroom graffito about him had been the chief emblem. From my new elevation that world seemed transparent and silly, which a short time before, from the low rung of twenty, had seemed so esoteric and grave. So it was that my new age felt old, and my childlike, restored wholesomeness new, and despite such extreme inconsistency, which I would have refused to call youthful, an inaudible hum of expectancy seemed to sing up through the soles of my feet.

Brodeur had promised to teach me to speed-grade, and a week or so after my birthday, amid the dread avalanche of the end-of-term papers, he summoned Laurence and me to dispatch them all in one marathon session. “He's exceptionally organized,” explained Laurence to me as we drove. “He's already going to have alphabetized all the papers and broken them up in three piles. We'll each get a pile and a roster, with annotations: what each student received on the midterm, their semester's attendance, and, if applicable, naughty behavior, primarily grade grubbing. Just from your glance at the roster you'll know what the paper grade is within four or five points. From there, lavish check marks and question marks, underline, and if you're extremely moved, scrawl ‘yes!' or
‘why?
.
'
The main task is find one thing to praise and one thing to rebut, and no more than five minutes per paper. That's his ironclad rule.”

Brodeur was hosting our so-called grading party in his actual home, and as we approached this unimaginable place, fortressed somewhere in the heart of the faculty Arcadia north of the campus, I repeatedly noticed the hour, which was bracingly early, and told myself Mrs. Brodeur—or it must be Ms. Hallett—would be sitting in the kitchen in her robe, or her drab weekend clothes, with ungoverned hair and a large mug of coffee, if she wasn't still upstairs asleep. I was strangely impatient to see her there, wherever she would turn out to be, whether withdrawn behind a laden breakfast table, or greeting Laurence and me at the door, as if the early-morning domestic tableau would resolve for me some long-standing point of contention. Since the day I'd seen her at the market my scant hoard of knowledge about her had grown, for with the end of her natal seclusion, she seemed to have returned to very limited yet conspicuous circulation—or perhaps it was only my listening for mention of her that made me think she was mentioned more often. If one believed ambient gossip, before her pregnancy she had been known as the sort of professor who, perhaps from a dislike of artifice, continually muddles the distinction between students and self by dressing as they do, in snug jeans and T-shirts and Doc Martens boots; by drinking in their bars; by attending their parties and smoking their dope, or, more often, inviting the chosen of them to smoke hers. For a time she'd been seen a great deal in the company of another enemy of artifice among her colleagues, a junior professor of French history named Denis (silent
s
) Pelletier with whom she was rumored to be having an affair despite the fact he was gay. She'd been known to affect the distinctly student manner of wearing a messenger bag slung across her thin shoulders, out of which was made to visibly protrude, for example,
The Sublime Object of Ideology
by aid of which, she might inform listeners, she was reinterpreting the works of Melville via psychoanalysis—of course her “realness” was the true artifice. She was no slouching, impoverished grad student with a cigarette dangling prelit from her lips and a pool cue momentarily inactive in her hands. She was thirty-three years old, Yale B.A., Berkeley Ph.D., two years in her job and two more until tenure review; she had made a conspicuous marriage and now borne a child, and she apparently lived, as faculty did in this town, like a titan of industry—the limbs of great trees locked their arms overhead of the lane down which Laurence had turned. Our destination was not the largest house within view, but it was equally far from the smallest. As Laurence carefully parked at the outermost edge of the drive I took in with what I hoped appeared drowsy noninterest, and not avid shock, the faux-Tudor mansion, and its complicated multiplicity of fitted gray stones and diamond-shaped panes of stained glass through which, on this heavy gray morning, the interior lamplight just barely escaped, as if guttering weakly toward us from the wastes of deep space. A pair of lanterns denoted a grim obstacle of thick planks and wrought-iron hardware, like something to repulse an invasion, but Laurence led me away from the apparent front door, up the drive to the side of the house. “No one uses the front,” he explained, “everybody goes in and out through the solarium,” and so we were going, through a wide room of flagstones and glass, and through a door that was already being pulled open.

“I heard that spirited Italian engine of yours coming into the drive. Laurence. Regina,” Brodeur greeted us, double-kissing our cheeks, as if we had not seen each other in months.