The Woman Upstairs (32 page)

Reza and Noah and Aristide were all in my group first, along with three other boys and a gaggle of girls. Even though they were disappointed to have to wait for Wonderland, they were psyched by the idea that they could make masks and then play with them. I pointed out that the masks would need to dry, which made the boys feel they had to work fast. I helped all the kids shape their mask forms out of coat hanger wire: we measured their heads, and then bent the wire into noses and cheeks. Then, with relatively little acting out, the kids laid on the layers of gluey newsprint, molding the flesh devotedly around and around and around their metal bones.

Noah’s Jabberwocky came out looking like a cross between a bull and a horse, its long snout punctuated by gaping nostrils. Aristide made the Cheshire Cat, or said he had, although he hadn’t given it any ears, only an enormous smiling mouth, which was good enough. Reza chose the dormouse, a minor character, capably executed. Its nose was pointy, and he gave his mask prominent ears, but he was particularly proud of its whiskers, six dangling bits of string glued onto the end of its nose like a straggly mustache. The boys finished before the others in the group, and asked if they might cross over early into Wonderland.

They’d been so good, and it was almost time anyway, so I let them. I should have asked Sirena if it was okay with her; I hadn’t realized how involved she was with her cameras, up on ladders to adjust them so they’d track specific kids; and how little involved she was with keeping watch.

It all happened so fast. I was helping Sophia with her walrus mask—a bigger task than either of us was really fit for—when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that the boys’ play was turning rough. At first I didn’t do anything, because I figured Sirena was on top of it; but then I stepped down toward the middle of the L, and realized that her back was turned and she was focused on filming Ebullience and Chastity wrapping themselves up in the Alice fabric and twirling around. Meanwhile, behind her, Reza and Noah were scuffling, and Aristide was making breathless noises of alarm; and then I distinctly saw Reza punch Noah in the jaw.

“
STOP!
” I shouted—and when rarely Miss Eldridge of Appleton School shouts, the world knows about it. “
STOP
right now!” I thundered down to where they were, wiping my gluey hands on the seat of my pants. I grabbed both boys by their shirt collars—it’s something teachers used to do a lot, but aren’t supposed to anymore—and I lost it. I felt personally disappointed by Reza—I don’t know how else to put it. He’d let me down. “What in God’s name is going on here? Reza Shahid, you have some serious explaining to do. I
saw
what happened, with my own eyes. What has gotten into you?”

Reza glowered, shrugged.

“Noah: you tell me. I can’t believe Reza would hit you without being provoked.”

He, too, shrugged. Then I saw clasped in his fist several aspirin flowers, dangling on their wire stalks.

“You picked the flowers?”

“Nobody said we couldn’t.” This was true: nobody had said they couldn’t. Noah went on, “And then Reza jumped on me. Like some kind of crazy guy.”

“Is that what happened, Reza?”

Reza looked angrier than I’d ever seen him, but he didn’t say anything. He scuffed his feet against the Astroturf. I had the feeling that wasn’t the whole story.

“Did Noah say something that upset you?”

Reza looked up: he looked for his mother, and found her, and some wordless exchange passed between them, to which I was not privy. He still didn’t say anything.

It was only at this point that I realized everyone had gathered round in a circle, and that Sirena was standing behind the children, watching. It wasn’t clear what she was thinking. I hadn’t considered it in the heat of the moment, but now everything seemed hideously weird: I’d been extra-angry because I felt betrayed by my own kid, my special boy, the boy who wanted to make the world better; but here, like a slap, was the reminder that he wasn’t mine. Here was his mother, and the look on her face was the look not of
my friend
but of
his parent
, if you see what I mean: whatever she was thinking, it was a mother’s reaction to seeing her son disciplined by a teacher. I was his teacher, an outsider; that’s what I was.

It was one of those moments when life’s disguises are stripped away, when you see clearly what is real, and all you can say to yourself is “useful to get that learned.” The only thing I could think to do was fully to take on my teacher role, and play it to the hilt. I got bossy with the kids: “Don’t stand there staring,” I said to everyone else. “This doesn’t concern all of you. Go back to your games, or your masks. Noah and Reza, you’re both going to sit over there against the wall and I don’t want to hear anything more out of either of you.”

For a moment, nobody moved. I saw some of the kids, including Reza, look at Sirena. She closed her eyes and nodded slightly. And then he went, and Noah went after him, both of them hanging their heads like convicts.

I took Aristide aside and asked him what had actually occurred. He said that Noah had said mean things about Wonderland, had called it “crappy.” He’d said, “Your mom’s idea is really dumb. Does she think we’re, like, two years old?” And then he’d quoted something from television or somewhere: Noah, obsessed with flatulence, had said, “I fart in her general direction.” He was trying to be funny, Aristide explained, but Reza couldn’t see it.

Sirena didn’t come over to talk to me straight away. Maybe she didn’t want to seem to make a big deal of it. I never told her what Noah said to Reza. I don’t imagine her son did, either. She did go over
to speak to Reza for a second, as he huddled against the wall, and she looked stern, but mostly she was in a hurry to get back up her ladder and monkey with her cameras, to try to pull a decent video out of the fiasco. The kids weren’t playing so freely after that, though; it didn’t feel natural anymore. Even after their snack, after the groups switched over, there was a slight pall over the afternoon. It wasn’t the same.

As we were lining the kids up to leave, Sirena appeared at my elbow.

“I’m sorry about that scene,” I said.

“Don’t feel bad,” she said. “You’ve got to run your class your way. You’ve got your rules.” She sighed. “It’s a shame because it wasn’t the same, after. Kids are so sensitive, they absorb everything.” And then, “Don’t worry about coming back to clean up. I’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks, Sirena.” I didn’t usually call her by name like that. It seemed almost to echo in my ear.

“I think we’re saying good-bye for the week? I go to Paris tomorrow.”

“I almost forgot.” I was about to say, “I’ll keep an eye on your boys for you,” and then thought better of it. “I hope it all goes well,” I said.

“Don’t worry. It will”—she lit up for a moment, seemed more normal—“because it has to.”

Things with Reza weren’t really changed. He was remorseful—he apologized to me the next day before school started—and besides, he didn’t see the complicated ironies of the day before. He wasn’t going to tell me what had actually happened, whether because he didn’t want to be a tattletale or because he didn’t want to repeat an insult to his mother; but he felt his punishment had befit his crime. It was all finished and forgotten, for him, at least—which was a relief.

Sirena did only a half-decent job of cleaning up the studio before she went away. She put all the kids’ detritus—cups, napkins—in a garbage bag, and she swept the floor for crumbs. She rearranged her Wonderland,
replanting the flowers and folding away the river of cloth; but she left all the kids’ unpainted masks higgledy-piggledy at my end of the room, and she let the papier-mâché glue harden in a bucket, which I then had to throw away. The studio was accumulating a lot of strange emotions, for me. It wasn’t so easy to be there.

I tried to tidy up some more, in anticipation of her return. I arranged things neatly but visibly, the way a cleaning lady might arrange your bureau. Once this was done, Sirena’s end of the L looked oddly forlorn, abortive, like a woman half dressed, and I had to turn my back on it. All that week I went only in the evenings, pretending to work, but really hoping to hear footsteps in the corridor, the secret knock.

He was busy, I knew. But surely also he wasn’t able to see me because of the force of his emotion. It was possible, I knew, that he didn’t want to deal with me; but I didn’t want to believe that. Better for us both to be noble, to suffer in withdrawal. I certainly wouldn’t telephone him. It continued to amaze me how the touch of skin on skin had altered things: curled in the crook of his arm, my head upon his breast, I’d sensed his heart beating and for a moment hadn’t been sure whether it was mine. My fingertips could still trace the distinct coarseness of the hairs on his chest, the softness of those along his forearm. My cheeks and chin had stung, the morning after, from the evening bristle of his. And his body, his hands, his tongue: if I closed my eyes, they were still on me, in me, with me. I was always remembering him, a physical memory, like an imprint in the earth. There is, I came to realize, what the mind wants and what the body wants. The mind can excite the body, but its desires can also be false; whereas the body, the animal, wants what it wants.

13

The next weekend I was going with my father to see Aunt Baby. I hadn’t seen her since Christmas, and I’d rashly promised that we’d spend the night on Saturday, in order to go to mass with her on Sunday morning. On Friday night, I stayed at the studio almost until midnight—not working on my rooms at all, reading the newspaper online and drinking red wine out of a teacup—but still there was no word from Skandar. On Saturday morning, after a run around the reservoir that failed to clear my head, I went to pick up my father, and some peonies (my mother’s favorite flower) and a Bundt cake (for most of my life, my mother baked cakes for Aunt Baby; but I went to the Coolidge Corner bakery she’d found when they moved to Brookline and she could no longer cook), and we headed north to Cape Ann.

“Did you speak to Matthew this week?” my father asked, looking out the windshield at I-95, and not at me.

“No. Should I have?”

“Tweety’s birthday.”

“I forgot.” I always forgot. Sometimes I thought I forgot on purpose. She never remembered my birthday, either. “Is everybody okay?”

“I guess so,” he said. And then nothing, for a few minutes, silence and the swish of passing cars, and then, “But I think something’s wrong.”

“How do you mean?”

“Something’s wrong. I don’t know exactly what. I didn’t like to ask.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Because. Because when I asked to speak to Tweety, to wish her happy birthday, he said she was out.”

“Is that weird? People go out.”

“But then later, I said when will she be home, so I could call again”—he’s very diligent, my father; he was, after all, in insurance all his life—“and he said, in a very strange way, that he didn’t know. That it was probably easier for her to call me.”

“What’s weird about that, then?”

“There was something peculiar in his voice. It was … gravelly.”

“I don’t know what that implies.”

“Rough. His voice was rough, like he was upset.” As far as I could tell—I was driving—my father hadn’t once turned his head to look at me, but he did so now, and he looked wary, his eyes narrow, and he said, “Besides, has Tweety ever called you?”

“Me? Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. Not in more than twenty years.”

“That’s my point. She’s never called me, either. Even when your mother was dying, she never called.”

“No, I remember.” I’d complained of it: “What kind of family is this?” I’d asked.

“So either he’s too upset to know what he’s saying; or he’s lying on purpose; or she’s gone through some radical change … I can’t make a story of it where there isn’t something wrong between them.”

This wasn’t like my father. It was more like me. “So what sorts of stories have you got?”

“She’s left him.”

“Of course!” I almost said, “You wish!”

“Or she’s sick.”

“Sick?”

“Any kind is possible—physical, mental, you know.”