The Woman Upstairs (19 page)

“In English we have a word for it,” I said. “It’s ‘asshole.’ ”

“Don’t,” she said, “because it makes such seeping liquid only more upsetting.”

And we laughed so hard the tepid coffee splashed out of my cup and into my lap; and then somehow even that seemed related to the soup glob, and we laughed all over again. And only when we were catching our breath from laughing, both of us exhaling those strange almost sobbing breaths that accompany crazy mirth, did she say, very serious all of a sudden, “You know, I’ve been meaning to ask for your help with something. To do with Reza.”

“What’s wrong? Something at school I don’t know about?”

“No, no—you mustn’t worry so much. It’s more about home. With Skandar’s commitments, especially this term, we have to go out so much, you know. When Skandar isn’t traveling, then three, sometimes four times a week—it’s terrible. I hate it.” She sighed. “And Reza hates it most of all. He weeps, often. He clings to me—we have fights—can you believe it? Or worse, he sulks. He goes into his room and shuts the door and won’t come out to say good night, or let me in.”

“That doesn’t sound like him.” I heard my teacher voice come out of my mouth. “Have you tried talking to him about it? He’s old enough, really—he’s eight.”

“And seven, as they say, is the age of reason. I know. So yes, I’ve talked about it with him; and so now I ask your help.”

“Mine?”

“Because he says that it’s only bearable, these evenings, if
you
come.”

“If I come? Come with you to the events?”

“Come to him, of course! Not every time—that would be ridiculous …” She laughed, and it was not the same kind of laugh as before, and I knew that she knew that what she was asking wasn’t quite right. Even when it was couched as Reza’s request rather than her own, it was strange. It put us on a different footing, a different trajectory. I must have looked hurt.

“It isn’t a business proposal, my friend.” She had her hand on my arm and seemed even to stroke it, as if I were a cat. “It’s a family proposal … Oh dear, is it a cultural difference we’re having here?” Much eye movement. “In Italy, it’s only the closest people that you can ask in
this way, as if you were his
zia
, his auntie. You can picture him, can’t you? So solemn and furious, and I said, ‘What would make it okay for Mummy and Daddy to go out and leave you? What could possibly make it okay?’ And his face lit up, with the joy of asking an impossible dream; he said, ‘It would be all right if Miss E would come.’ Then, he said, it would be much better than all right—it would be better even than having
you
at home. And I looked sad, so then he said, ‘Well, it would be just as good.’ You know his face in such a moment—who can deny him? I promised him I’d ask you, because it would be his happiness … and you mustn’t feel you have to say yes—but the idea that you’re upset when I ask, this I can’t bear—my friend?” And as if the reach of her arm had been but an introductory tentacle, she rose and embraced me, one of her absolute, enveloping hugs that I found so unnerving.

“Of course,” she went on as she released me, “we will pay you. That goes without saying.”

This made things even worse. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I love Reza. I love you. I wouldn’t hear of it.”

“But Nora—I insist—think of it, the amount of time—”

“Are you joking? Either I’m family or I’m not family. You wouldn’t pay his auntie!”

“Ah, Nora.” Sirena shook her head. “You are an extraordinary woman. And yes, of course you are family. Give me another hug.”

By which time I felt a fool, an uptight fool, for my boundaries and my rules. She honestly made me feel that I was honored to be chosen; that I was, in this role, irreplaceable.

In those next couple of months, everything and nothing happened. You could say, from the outside, that Miss Eldridge, a third-grade teacher in her late thirties, broke one of her cardinal rules and babysat, not once but numerous times, for one of her pupils. So what? You could say that she made unexpected progress with her artwork, launching not one but two room-boxes at once, in a general spirit of expansion; and you could add, accurately, that she became actively involved also in the creation
of her friend Sirena’s installation—in all sorts of small, practical ways, from sewing to soldering assistance, to the wiring of tiny lights and the placement of video cameras. And third, you could mention that during this stretch of manic unfolding—of wanton disinhibition—this same Miss Eldridge experienced, in conversation with her friend Sirena’s husband, Skandar—or perhaps, more accurately, over time, with her own friend Skandar—a sort of awakening, a type of excitement about the wider world that she hadn’t thought, in midlife, still possible.

You know those moments, at school or college, when suddenly the cosmos seems like one vast plan after all, patterned in such a way that the novel you’re reading at bedtime connects to your astronomy lecture, connects to what you heard on NPR, connects to what your friend discusses in the cafeteria at lunch—and then briefly it’s as if the lid has come off the world, as if the world were a dollhouse, and you can glimpse what it would be like to see it whole, from above—a vertiginous magnificence. And then the lid falls and you fall and the reign of the ordinary resumes.

And if this happens, in youth, slightly more often than the passage of a comet, then in age it seems to happen not at all, or not at all to ordinary people like me. So that if I tell you that over the months from February to May of that year, 2005, it was as if a series of little explosions were being detonated in my brain—if I tell you that I had this lid-lifting experience of the world not once but more times than I can properly count, like some extraordinary prolonged cranial multiple orgasm, an endless opening and titillation of my soul—then you will perhaps understand why, for years afterward, I thought that saying “yes” to the babysitting had without question been the right thing to do.

It became a ritual. And again, as my time with Sirena was kept almost a secret from Reza (in that it was never spelled out to him that we were together), those afternoons when I’d slip away in double time from Appleton to Somerville, to the studio in winter, blanched and window-steamed against the darkening light outdoors, a newborn-ness
in its bright light—so too were my evenings with Reza a secret, and part of their wonder was their secrecy, as of a strange sort of almost affair, if that analogy can be imagined uncorrupted by the flesh. I mean that on those days when I’d be going in the evening to their town house by the river, Reza would know it, and knew also, from his parents, that he shouldn’t make public reference to it. We played a dance of glances, of surreptitious significant smiles, that might have perturbed anyone who saw them, exchanged as they were between a boy of eight and a woman who might have been, but wasn’t, his mother. Probably on average twice a week, I’d go from school to the studio, and from the studio home to drop my car, and then would walk—sometimes almost run—directly to the Shahids’ house; and in this way, in the course of a single day, would enjoy each of the flavors after which I pined: Sirena-time, Reza-time and then—because he always saw me home to my door—Skandar-time.

My job, which for some years had loomed so large in my life, shrank, in my mind, to a shadow of itself, as these other employments took its place. You might have thought, talking to me, that I was barely teaching at all, a morning or two a week—but the truth is that my kids somehow made room for my need to let go: they made no trouble, or almost none, that winter and spring. The remedials struggled valiantly, and didn’t lapse into truancy. The families, like dormant volcanoes, shed no molten rock upon their young: no breakups, no violence, no disappearing parents, no catastrophic illnesses. The boy in the second grade—not strictly my purview, but still—who was diagnosed with a brain tumor had the infinite luck for it to be benign. The gods were smiling.

You’re thinking, “But this poor woman, this middle-aged spinster, from where could she have conjured the idea that she had
a family;
or rather, that she had any family besides her father languishing in his ointment-pink apartment, and her Aunt Baby encrusted in her Rockport condo among the memorabilia, and, like a remote galaxy, Matt and Tweety and their kid out in Arizona?” But families have always
been strange and elastic entities. Didi is much more my family than Matt could ever be. And I knew it, with each of the three Shahids, intuitively. I needed them, sure, and we can all argue about the moment when the balance tipped and I needed them so much that
I would be hurt
. But you can’t pretend they didn’t need me too, each in his or her way. They wouldn’t necessarily have admitted it—except Reza—but you can’t tell me that they didn’t love me. The heart knows. The body knows. When I was with Sirena, or Reza, or Skandar, the air moved differently between us; time passed differently; words or gestures meant more than themselves. If you’ve never had this experience—but who has not been visited by love, laughing?—then you can’t understand. And if you have, you don’t need me to say another word.

4

In late January, or perhaps early February, Sirena began to build her world in earnest: Wonderland. She’d spent the fall making the smaller bits—the soap and aspirin flowers in all sizes and in a rainbow of colors, the rainstorm of slivered mirror shards that would hang from the ceiling on near-invisible wires, stored in bags and boxes in her end of the L.

Now what had looked like an artist’s equivalent of doodling was revealed to be purposeful: she unfolded for me, one early evening when we both stayed late, her blueprint. Like being shown the inside of her head, it made those little currents, those jolts, tickle all down my spine. This was surely an intimacy greater than any nakedness: to see this page spread out upon the worktable, with its erasures and its smudges and, given that it was Sirena’s, a coffee ring or two, and all of it overlaid by her notes to herself, tiny, tiny insect-writing possible with only the sharpest of pencils and legible only, by anyone other than herself, with a magnifying glass.

She was building a Wonderland for everyone. Each of us would be Alice. And while it was, in part, about the mysteries of the imagination, it was also about a spiritual discovery of the existing world: Sirena was mixing together Lewis Carroll and the vision of a twelfth-century Muslim named Ibn Tufail, who wrote a story about a boy growing up alone on a desert island, discovering everything—including himself, and God—for the first time.

Sirena wasn’t, like me, constrained by reality, by what actually
was
or
had been
. She took on storybook worlds, plundering other people’s imaginations but not their histories. Maybe it’s what made her—what makes her—a real artist in the eyes of the world, whereas I count as a spinster with a hobby, the sort of person about whom appalling words like “zany” are used. But there’s nothing zany about it. My Emily Dickinson room is exactly that: Emily Dickinson’s room, constructed to replicate as precisely as possible the room as historians have determined it actually was, but in miniature. Always, I have an engagement with Death—because my art isn’t, after all, about what is or what might be, but about what
was
. You could call each of my boxes a shrine.