The Woman Upstairs (3 page)

Children. Me and children. Children and me. How did I, of all people, become the favorite teacher of the Appleton Elementary third-grade class? April Watts, who takes the other section, is like a teacher out of a Victorian novel: she has hair like brown cotton candy, whipped into a gauzy attenuated confection around her head, and bottle-bottom glasses through which she peers, vaguely, her blue eyes enlarged and distorted by the lenses like fishes in a tank. Although only in her early fifties, she wears support hose for her varicose veins and she has, poor ghastly thing, absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever. It’s not on
account of the hair or the glasses or the veins that I’m preferred, but on account of this last trait. I’ve been known—and I don’t say this pridefully—to laugh so hard that I fall off my chair, which seems to make up for the thunderous outbursts. My emotions, shall we say, are in their full gamut recognizable to the children, which seems to me pedagogically sound.

It was both a great compliment and a crushing blow to have a father say to me, a couple of years back, that I perfectly fulfilled his idea of a teacher. “You’re the Gerber baby of schoolteachers” is what he actually said. “You’re the exemplar.”

“What exactly does that mean, Ross?” I asked with a big, fake smile. It was at the end-of-year picnic, and three or four parents clustered around me in the playground’s fierce sunlight, clutching their miniature plastic lemonade bottles, daubing away at their chins or their children’s chins with ketchup-stained napkins. The hot dogs and tofu pups had already been consumed.

“Oh, I know what he means,” said Brianna’s mom, Jackie. “He means that when we were children, everyone wanted a teacher like you. Enthusiastic, but strict. Full of ideas. A teacher who
gets
kids.”

“Is that what you meant, Ross?”

“Probably not exactly,” he said, and I was surprised to recognize that he was flirting with me. Parents at Appleton rarely flirt. “But close enough. It was intended as a compliment.”

“Well then, thank you.”

I’m always looking for what people are really saying. When they tell me that I “get” kids, I’m worried that they’re saying I don’t seem quite adult. The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people’s. I see what he means, and because I’ve learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that’s always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained, I’ve come to understand that grown-ups, mad or sane, ought really to be accorded the same respect. In this sense, nobody is actually crazy, just not understood. When Brianna’s mom says that I
get
kids, part of me puffs up like a peacock, but another part thinks she is calling me crazy. Or that, at the very least, she’s separating me from the tribe of the
fully adult. And then this, in turn, will explain—if not to me then to someone who is, seerlike, in charge of explanations—why I don’t have children of my own.

If you’d asked me, upon my graduation from high school, where I’d be at forty—and surely someone must have asked? There must be a feature tucked away in the long-lost yearbook laying out our plans for later life—I would have painted a blissful picture of the smocked artist at work in her airy studio, the children—several of them, aged perhaps five, seven and nine—frolicking in the sun-dappled garden, doubtless with a dog or two, large ones. I wouldn’t have been able to describe for you the source of income for this vision, nor any father to account for the children: men seemed, at that juncture, incidental to the stuff of life. Nor did the children require a nanny of any kind: they played miraculously well, without bickering, without ever the desire to interrupt the artist, until she was ready; and then, the obligatory and delightful picnic beneath the trees. No money, no man, no help—but in the picture there were those necessary things: the light, the work, the garden and, crucially, the children. If you’d asked me then to winnow the fantasy, to excise all that was expendable, I would’ve taken out the picnic, and the dogs, and the garden, and, under duress, the studio. A kitchen table could suffice, for the art, if need be, or an attic, or a garage. But the art and the children—they were not negotiable.

I’m not exactly not an artist, and I don’t exactly not have children. I’ve just contrived to arrange things very poorly, or very well, depending how you look at it. I leave the kids when school gets out; I make my art—I don’t have to use the kitchen table, because I have a whole second bedroom, with two windows no less, for that purpose—evenings and weekends. It’s not much; but it’s better than nothing. And in the Sirena year, when I had my airy studio to share, when I couldn’t wait to get there, my veins fizzing at the prospect, it was perfect.

I always thought I’d get farther. I’d like to blame the world for what I’ve failed to do, but the failure—the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit—is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough—or I misunderstood what strength was. I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you’re taught to eat your greens before you have dessert. But it turns out that’s a rule for girls and sissies, because the mountain of greens is of Everest proportions, and the bowl of ice cream at the far end of the table is melting a little more with each passing second. There will be ants on it soon. And then they’ll come and clear it away altogether. The hubris of it, thinking I could be a decent human being and a valuable member of family and society, and still create! Absurd. How strong did I think I was?

No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say “Fuck off” to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all. Men have generations of practice at this. Men have figured out how to spawn children and leave them to others to raise, how to placate their mothers with a mere phone call from afar, how to insist, as calmly as if insisting that the sun is in the sky, as if any other possibility were madness, that their work, of all things, is what must—and must first—be done. Such a strength has, in its youthful vision, no dogs or gardens or picnics, no children, no sky: it is focused only on one thing, whether it’s on money, or on power, or on a paintbrush and a canvas. It’s a
failure
of vision, in fact, anyone with half a brain can see that. It’s myopia. But that’s what it takes. You need to see everything else—everyone else—as expendable, as less than yourself.

I’m like the children: my motivations and my reasons aren’t always clear. But if I can just explain, all will be elucidated; and maybe that elucidation alone will prove my greatness, however small. To tell what I know, and how it feels, if I can. You might see yourself, if I do.

3

From the beginning, then, but briefly. I was born into an ordinary family in a town an hour up the coast from Boston, called Manchester-by-the-Sea. The sixties were barely a ripple there, at the end of the Boston commuter line. It must have been our perfect beach—called Singing Beach on account of its fine, pale, musical sand, but perhaps also because it is so widely and so long lauded—that afforded me my delusions of grandeur. It makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore, with a vista open to eternity, you’ll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city.

Or maybe, more likely, they came from my mother, fierce and strange and doomed. I had a mother and a father, a big brother—eight years bigger than me, though, so we hardly seemed of the same family: by the time I was nine, he was gone—and a tortoiseshell cat, Zipper, and a mangy, runty mutt from the shelter named Sputnik, who looked like a wig of rags on sticks: his legs were so scrawny, we marveled they didn’t snap. My father worked in insurance in Boston—he took the train each morning, the 7:52—and he proceeded very respectably but apparently not very successfully, because my parents never seemed to have money to spare.

My mother stayed at home and smoked cigarettes and hatched schemes. For a while she tested cookbook recipes for a publisher.
She was paid for it, and for months she fed us elaborate three- and four-course meals that involved eggy sauces and frequently, as I recall, marsala wine. Briefly and humiliatingly for me, she fancied herself a clothes designer, and spent several months at the sewing machine in the spare room in a swoon of tobacco smoke (often she held the cigarette between her lips while running a seam; I always worried that ash would fall onto the fabric). Her output was at once unusual and not unusual enough: she made paisley jersey minidresses for girls of my size, not, at first glance, dissimilar to those off the rack (“Come here, sugarplum,” she’d call, and would hold up paper patterns against my prepubescent chest, trimming away carelessly at the paper with her enormous shears, a mere whisper from my waist, or my neck); but then you’d see she’d cut portholes around the midriff and edged them with rickrack, so that a girl’s white tummy would peer through; or that she’d made the sleeves so they attached not with seams but with a flurry of ribbons, a circle of multicolored bows, that would look bedraggled after a single washing. Cheerfully impractical, she ran up at least two dozen outfits, of various designs, the summer I was nine, and then took a booth from which to flog them at the fair in a neighboring town.

I refused to sit with her there, in full view, on a brilliant Saturday in July, and went instead with my father on a tedious round of errands—the cleaners, the liquor store, the hardware store—stifling in the car but immeasurably relieved not to risk being seen by my schoolmates under my mother’s hideous handmade sign. My mother was a beloved embarrassment.

She sold a few of the clothes, but clearly felt the experiment hadn’t sufficiently succeeded, and the suitcase was stowed, unemptied, in the attic. Before too long, the sewing machine also migrated upward, and my mother entered one of her darker phases, until the next eureka moment struck.

Certainly my mother, unlike my father, instilled in me the sense that unpredictability was essential—“Not to be like your neighbor: that’s everything,” she would say—and because of this, because of the bright flame of her, it took me a long time to realize that she, too, was cautious and bourgeois, frightened of the unknown and so uncertain of herself that she could hardly bear to make a mark. How else could
she have stayed resolutely wedded to the ordinary, to my father, to the carefully ordained and unchanging routines of Manchester-by-the-Sea?

And it explains much about me, too, about the limits of my experience, about the fact that the person I am in my head is so far from the person I am in the world.
Nobody would know me from my own description of myself;
which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have—that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point. But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It’s the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding. Maybe I’ve learned it’s a mistake to reveal her at all.

So, from our ordinary family in our ordinary house, a center-entrance colonial, with its potted geraniums on the stone porch and its charmingly untended yew hedges nibbling at the windows, I made my way out into the ordinary world, to the local elementary school, the local middle school, the local high school. I was popular enough, universally liked by the girls, even liked, when noticed, by the boys, though not in a romantic way. I was funny—ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

Education was different then, and I was good at it, and so I skipped grade nine, went straight from eight to ten, which was socially a little tough at first and sealed my fate as a disastrous math student—I never learned the quadratic formula, and other important tips from ninth-grade math; just like I missed the early dating essays and the classes in how to navigate a school dance. At the time, though, I wasn’t embarrassed about any of this: not embarrassed to be thrown, sink or swim, into the second year of high school, without so much as a map to the cafeteria or a primer on how cliques were lined up, or even a list of the names of my new classmates, all of whom knew one another, and some of whom knew me as their little sister’s friend. No, I was proud, because I knew my parents were proud, because it was an elevation, and a revelation of the fact that I was special. I’d long suspected it, and now I knew for sure: I was destined.