The Woman Upstairs (2 page)

Life is about deciding what matters. It’s about the fantasy that determines the reality. Have you ever asked yourself whether you’d rather fly or be invisible? I’ve asked people for years, always thinking their answer revealed who they were. I’m surrounded by a world of fliers. Children are almost always fliers. And the woman upstairs, she’s a flier too. Some greedy people ask if they couldn’t have both; and a certain number—I always thought they were the conniving bastards, the power-hungry, the control freaks—choose the vanishing act. But most of us want to fly.

Do you remember those dreams? I don’t have them anymore, but they were a joy of my youth. To confront despair—the dogs at my heels, or the angry man with a raised fist or a club—and have only to flap my arms, rising slowly, directly upward, like a helicopter or an apotheosis, and then soaring, free. I skimmed the rooftops, gulping the wind, rode the air currents like waves, over fields and fences, along the shore, out over the ruffled indigo of the sea. And the light of the sky, when you fly—do you remember that? The clouds like illuminated pillows, close and moist when you ventured into them, and ah! the revelation when you came out the other side. Flying was everything, once.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the wrong choice. Because you think the world is yours, but really you’re always flying away from
something; and the dogs at your heels and the man with the club—they don’t go away because you can’t see them anymore. They are reality.

As for being invisible, it makes things more real. You walk into a room where you are not, and you hear what people say, unguardedly; you watch how they move when they aren’t with you. You see them without their masks—or in their various masks, because suddenly you can see them anywhere. It may be painful to learn what happens when you’re behind the arras; but then, please God, you know.

All these years, I was wrong, you see. Most people around me, too. And especially now that I’ve learned that I really am invisible, I need to stop wanting to fly. I want to stop needing to fly. I want it all to do over again; but also I don’t. I want to make my nothingness count. Don’t think it’s impossible.

2

It all started with the boy. With Reza. Even when I saw him last—for the last time ever—this summer, when he was and had been for years no longer the same, almost a young man, with the illogical proportions, the long nose, the pimples and cracking voice of incipient adulthood, I still saw in him the perfection that was. He glows in my mind’s eye, eight years old and a canonical boy, a child from a fairy tale.

He walked into my classroom late, on the first day of school, grave and uncertain, his gray eyes wide, their millipedic lashes aflutter in spite of his visible effort to control them, not to blink, and above all not to cry. All the other children—most of whom I knew from the schoolyard the year before, knew by name even—had come early and prepared, with book bags and packed lunches and a parent waving from the doorway, some with their mother’s lipstick still pink upon their cheeks; and they’d found their desks and we’d introduced ourselves and announced a single salient fact about our summers (the twins Chastity and Ebullience had spent two months with their grandma in Jamaica; she kept chickens—this was one fact per child; Mark T. had built a go-kart and raced it at the park; Shi-shi’s family had adopted an eight-year-old beagle named Superior from the pound [“he’s the same age as me,” she said proudly]; and so on), and we were beginning to establish our classroom rules (“No farting,” shouted Noah from the
cluster of tables by the window, provoking universal hoots and giggles) when the door opened and Reza walked in.

I knew who he must be: everybody else on my roster was already there. He hesitated. He put his feet, in their prim closed-toed sandals, very carefully one in front of the other, as if he were walking on a balance beam. He didn’t look like the other children—not because of his olive skin, his fierce little eyebrows, the set of his lip, but because his clothes were so tidy, so formal and foreign. He wore a short-sleeved dress shirt with blue and white checks, and a pair of long navy linen Bermudas, pressed by an invisible hand. He wore socks with his sandals. He carried no bag.

“Reza Shahid, yes?”

“How do you know?”

“Everybody”—I spun him by the shoulders to face the class—“this is our last new student. Reza Shahid. Welcome.”

Everyone called “Welcome, Reza,” loudly, and even from behind I could see him trying not to flinch: his scalp retracted up his head and the tops of his ears wiggled. Already in that moment, I loved his nape, the carefully marshaled black curls lapping their uneven shoreline along the smooth, frail promontory of his neck.

Because I knew him, you see. I hadn’t known he was Reza, had never suspected he would be mine, a pupil in 3E; but the week before I’d seen him, had stared and been stared at, had even exchanged a laugh with him, in the supermarket. I’d been struggling with my bags at the checkout—the handle of one had broken, and I was trying to pick it up from beneath, while grasping the rest of my groceries in the other hand; and succeeded only in spilling my apples out across the floor. Bright red, they dispersed underfoot as far as the café area by the window. I scuttled after them, hunched to the ground, leaving my two bags and my purse sprawled in the middle of the aisle to the door. I was on my knees to retrieve the last stray from beneath a table, my left arm pressing four bruised apples clumsily to my breast, when a single, illuminating burst of laughter made me look up. Over the back
of the neighboring booth hung this beautiful child, his curls dancing unkempt, his T-shirt impastoed with the filth of a day’s play and the bloody-looking sauce of whatever he’d been eating.

“What exactly is so damn funny?” I couldn’t help the “damn.”

“You are,” he replied, after a moment’s silence, his mouth in a serious line but his eyes mirthful. He had a strong accent. “You are very funny, in your apples.”

Something about his face, the matte smoothness of his cheeks with their faint rosy tinge, the wildness of his black hair and eyebrows and lashes, the amused intensity of those mottled gray eyes—I smiled in spite of myself, glanced back at my piles of food near the checkout, pictured my Baba Yaga–like dance across the floor, saw myself as he must have seen me. “I guess you’re right.” I stood up. “Want one?” I offered him the last apple, salvaged from the dust. He wrinkled his nose, barked his short laugh once more.

“Not good now.”

“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”

As I made my way to the exit, I looked over again at his table. He was not with his mother or father. His babysitter, young, with enormous breasts, had draped a tattooed arm—the design something Celtic—across the back of the banquette. Her hair was crimson, and what looked like a safety pin glinted in the skin of her lower lip. She plucked idly at her lettuce, leaf by leaf, and watched the shop as if it were television. The boy stopped his fidgeting and stared at me, brazen and long, but without expression, and when I smiled at him, he looked away. This, then, was Reza.

It quickly became clear that his English was cripplingly poor, but I wasn’t worried for him. That first night after school, I checked his file and could see that his home address was one of the fanciest university housing blocks in a cul-de-sac down near the river. That meant his parents were not even graduate students but visiting faculty, or important fellows of some kind. They, or at least one of them, would have English, would be able to help him; and they would care about it, being academics themselves, which was half the battle. Also, he himself wanted to learn. Even the first day I could see: with the other children, when he didn’t know a word he’d point, say “What is?” and repeat their
answers in his funny foreign voice, slightly raspy, several times over. If it was an abstraction, he’d try to act it out, which made the others laugh, but he remained utterly sober and undeterred. Thanks to Noah, he learned the words “fart” and “butt” by lunchtime. I intervened only to clarify that “bottom” and “rear end” were considered more polite, but he had trouble enunciating “rear end.” It came out as “weah wend,” and to me even this seemed moving, because his efforts were so serious.

That was the third reason to know he’d succeed: his charm. I wasn’t the only one felled by it: I could see the little girls gaping and whispering, could divine the boys’ wariness melting as Reza proved such a sport, intrepid at games and cheerfully competitive, exactly the sort of kid you want on your team. And the teachers, even: Estelle Garcia, who teaches science, commented about him at our first teachers’ meeting, “Sometimes, you know, the grasp of English itself doesn’t seem so important. If a kid is passionate enough, you can transcend that.”

I demurred, reminded her of Ilya, the Russian boy, and Duong, from Vietnam, and half a dozen kids we’d seen splutter and almost drown un-Englished in elementary school, so that you sent them only trepidatiously on to middle school, fearing they’d come back thugs, or dropouts, or worse. Sometimes, inevitably, it happened.

“You’re not worrying like this in the first week? That boy picks it all up like a sponge.”

“I’m not worried about that boy at all,” I said. “But he’s an exception.”

Exceptional. Adaptable. Compassionate. Generous. So intelligent. So quick. So sweet. With such a sense of humor. What did any of our praise mean, but that we’d all fallen in love with him, a bit, and were dazzled? He was eight, just a child of eight like any other, but we all wanted to lay claim to him. We didn’t say these kind things about Eric P., or Darren, or moon-faced Miles, whose dark circles beneath his eyes emanated gloom like some form of permanent mourning. Each child is strong in a different way, we always told them. We all have different gifts. We can all make good choices if we try. But Reza gave the lie to this, bound in his charm and beauty as if in a net.

When, in the first week, he knocked Françoise down on the playground, by accident, in the exuberant throes of an impromptu soccer
match, he put his arm around her trembling shoulder and sat out with her on the curb until she felt ready to sally forth again. He had tears in his eyes: I saw them. When he discovered that Aristide, whose parents came from Haiti, could speak French, his face opened in delight and the pair gabbled through the lunch hour, until Mark T. and Eli complained that they felt excluded; whereupon he nodded dutifully, shut his eyes for a moment and reverted to broken English, his imperfect medium. I didn’t have to tell him to do it; and from then on he and Aristide spoke French only after school was over, on their way out the door. When, also early on, the children suffered a particularly rambunctious afternoon—it was pouring; they’d been cooped up all day, the sky outside so dark that we bathed for hours in aggravating fluorescence—and in art hour—supposedly my favorite, as I am, or am supposed to be, an artist—the boys had the bright idea of squirting tempera paints from their plastic bottles, first at their papers but then, by the time I noticed, at the furniture, and the floor, and each other—when, in spite of my considerable, vaunted self-control, I raised my voice and thunderously proclaimed myself sorely disappointed—that day, at school’s end, a full hour afterward, Reza stopped at my desk and placed a small hand upon my forearm, delicate as a leaf.

“I’m sorry, Miss Eldridge,” he said. “I’m sorry we made a mess. Sorry you’re angry.”

His sitter hovered in the doorway, her lip glinting. Otherwise I might have hugged him: he seemed, for a moment, so much like my own child.