The Woman Upstairs (5 page)

I was going over the kids’ essays—well, that’s a big word for them, three paragraphs on “What I liked most about our apple-picking field trip”; but I was working at my desk in the classroom—when Bethany, one of the three girls barely out of college who are in charge of after-school free play, brought him in to me. She’d had the wit to slap an ice pack on his red and swelling ear, but Reza was blanched and trembling, his lashes clumped with tears. Bethany was too young or too timid to do what most obviously needed to be done, which was to sit him down and put an arm around him and breathe right along with him, to slow him down, and then without moving out of sight, to get the cell and his file and call his mother and tell her to come and pick him up.

I was irritated with Sirena at first, because in a slow, foreign, small voice, she suggested that Maria, his sitter, would be coming for him in forty-five minutes anyway. I took an audible breath—I wanted it to be—and I said, “Under the circumstances, Mrs. Shahid, I think it would be a good idea if you came yourself and if you came as soon as possible.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Fifteen at most.”

“We’ll be right here in the classroom,” I said. “Come as quickly as you can.”

And I went back to sit next to Reza and I put one arm on the back of his chair so he’d feel safe, and I said, “Do you want a lemonade? I’ve got one in my bag. And how about an Oreo?” And I plied him with sugar water and cookies, and I plied him for the story, and so had at least the bare and inexcusable bones of it before Sirena arrived. Reza, in spite of the tears caught in his lashes like raindrops on a spider’s web, did not cry, although he hiccoughed a bit, his breathing, like his small shoulders, shuddery.

I was furious—with the three bullies, with Bethany, Margot and Sarah, who somehow had contrived not to see a thing, and somehow furious also with Reza’s mother, whom I had yet to meet, for leaving
him unprotected in a strange land, for having entrusted him to a system and to people she knew nothing about. If he were mine, I would never have done such a thing: I would have cherished him, surrounded him, not even as a matter of principle (although there was that, too), but because he was Reza, this luminous boy, and so precious.

When, then, she peered through the glass with a tentative knock, and cracked the door open, I leaped up ready for the sternest of encounters; but was disarmed. The agony of her eyes—they were, after all,
his
eyes—and her little run across the room to embrace him—the presence of her, in short, was enough. I can only guess what they said. They spoke in French; her arms about him, he turned his face to her breast, as if breathing the scent of her were balm. He was a big boy for such a gesture—most of my third graders wouldn’t have wanted their teacher to see their emotions so exposed, and I admired them, son and mother, for their indifference to me. It took a full minute or even two before she lifted her face, disentangled an arm and extended it. “Miss Eldridge,” she said, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

“I’m sorry it’s not in better circumstances.”

She shrugged, faintly. “I’m glad I got your call.”

“There was an incident, on the playground.”

“So I gather.”

“I wasn’t present, but from what Reza says, it wasn’t at all his fault.”

She made a face as if to say, “How could it be?”

“Our school has zero tolerance for bullying, Mrs. Shahid—”

“I’m sure.”

“And we’ll find out exactly what went on, and the boys will be disciplined.”

“Of course.”

“I’m particularly sorry because it seems as though the boys said—as though they used hurtful and inappropriate words. I want you to know that at Appleton, we don’t have—We haven’t had—This isn’t at all usual. And we’ll make sure that it doesn’t—”

“I understand.” She stood up, and Reza with her, as if they were in fact joined at the hip. She smiled then—was it because it was
his
smile? Maybe, although in that moment that was not my thought. What went through my mind, as clearly as if I’d said it aloud, was this: “Oh, it’s
you
. Of course. I should have known.” And later, when I
reflected upon it, I thought again, in words, “I recognize you.” It was the strangest feeling, of relief and alarm at the same time. Like seeing a ghost, or having an epiphany—who is he who walks always beside you?—a feeling that you have no choice but to trust completely.

“… so grateful,” she was saying. “This move, so much change for Reza, it could have been … difficult. But he loves coming to your class.”

“We love having him.” I said this looking at Reza with a big smile, and he looked back at me with the same grave inscrutability of the first day in the supermarket. “And I really hope that what happened today, horrible as it was, doesn’t make you stop liking this school.”

He shook his head slightly: hard to know whether he meant that it would or it wouldn’t.

“My little prince is very strong,” his mother said. “He’ll be okay.” She smiled again, looked at me, really looked at me—I felt she
saw
me—again. I wanted to say, “Do you know me too, then?” to make sure it wasn’t just me. But who could say such a thing?

“Good to meet you, Mrs. Shahid”—and we shook hands again, at her instigation, and her hand was smallish, but strong and warm and dry—“and I’ll be sure to let you know at once how things unfold as we look into this. I’ll call you. Here’s my home number in case you need it. And I’ll look forward to seeing you and your husband at Back to School Night next week.”

“Next week. Of course,” she said, demure and amused and reserved all at once. “Of course. Good-bye.”

Of course. Of course. It felt inevitable, this meeting, like a chance, like a door opening. I didn’t know yet that she was an artist, an installation artist, bereft without her Paris studio. After they’d left, I sat back down at my desk, my eyes not on the apple-picking paragraphs but on the branches, turning, outside the classroom window, the Norwegian maple in its crimson-tinged ball gown, ruffled against the spotless 9/11 sky. How could the leaves stand out so distinctly? Why was the sky such an impeccable blue? How could this ordinary afternoon suddenly fill me, not with the indignation I’d felt earlier, but with elation—yes, elation. Sitting at my desk, pencil in hand in the dimming light, in the long angles of the afternoon sun, I had butterflies, like a child. Nothing moved in the room but the inside of my stomach.

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Shauna McPhee sat down with the three bullies the next morning to discuss sharing, tolerance and the importance of words. I’m sure she spoke to them about making good choices, about their own safety, and then she called in Reza and had the boys apologize one by one, and shake his hand in front of her, and only after he’d gone away again did she tell them that they wouldn’t be allowed on the playground, either at recess or after school, for a week. Their parents were also informed of this, and Shauna rang Sirena to reassure her that the incident had been, as she put it, “resolved.”

Don’t get me wrong, I admire Shauna, who is five years younger than I am, also single and childless, but unlike me a star of the city’s public school system. She’d already been the principal for three years then—she’d been running Appleton before she was thirty. But I do think that the only way you get on as an administrator is by understanding grown-ups better than you do children. You make a show of understanding children, but it’s a show for the grown-ups. If Shauna actually
got
kids, she would have known that the three bullies weren’t smart enough to appreciate the good sense of rules of tolerance and acceptance, they were smart enough only to grasp that these were, it seemed, the rules. And everybody knows that the point about rules—if you’re a dull, naughty boy, with a sly glimmer of animal nous that is your greatest pride—is not to obey them but to avoid getting caught breaking
them. And if Shauna understood, she’d have seen that the boys saw those ritual handshakes in her office as their humiliation, which only made them despise Reza the more. By ostensibly “resolving” the issue, Shauna was encouraging guerilla warfare, and I knew to be on watch.

Sirena, no fool, knew too, and she called me that night at home. I had that strange high-voltage thrill when I realized who it was.

“Miss Eldridge, I’m sorry—”

“Nora, please.”

She paused on the line. A wonderful, mysterious thing, a pause on the line. Who knew what it signified? “Nora. Yes. I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I wanted your opinion.”

“About the boys?”

“Yes, the boys.” She had a habit of repeating the last words you said to her before going on, as if a conversation were a relay race. I could never decide whether this was cultural—an Italian thing—or to do with living in translation, making sure she’d gotten it right, or just a Sirenian idiosyncrasy. “I wanted to know if you think the boys”—she said “boy-se,” in a lovely, slightly comical Italian way—“will be okay now?”

“Because you don’t?”

“Because I don’t? I don’t know. Sometimes, it looks all okay, but the children, they’re angry. They don’t like to get into trouble, and it makes them more angry.”

“Definitely true, Mrs. Shahid.”

“Sirena, please. Or I can’t call you Nora.”

“Sirena.” I tried to say it the way she did, but it didn’t sound the same. “All we can do is be vigilant, at this point. Unless there’s another incident, which I very much hope there won’t be …”

“Perhaps we can have coffee?” The voltage struck again. It was extraordinary what the body was capable of, for no reason at all. Except if she had recognized me too. And then I felt the other had been an excuse—not only an excuse, but still.

“Coffee? Sure.”

“To explain. If I can speak to you about Reza: he’s coming from such a different world. It’s important to me that this year in America be a good one for him. He didn’t want so much to come, so …”

So, not an excuse. An actual reason. A chance to be a better teacher. “Of course. When would be convenient for you?”

We fixed our date for two days after the Back to School Night. We planned to meet at Burdick’s café in Harvard Square, which is strange because I don’t care for it, and I don’t think she suggested it. I must have proposed it as a highlight of local life; but it always feels stuffy to me, and the windows get steamed up, and it’s hard to get a place to sit, and their cakes are too rich and very expensive, but it always feels wasteful, if you’ve gone to the trouble of going to Burdick’s, not to have one. I prefer Starbucks, where the food is frankly bad and there’s no awkwardness about avoiding it. It’s difficult, though, to suggest Starbucks to someone from Paris.

I’ve often wondered how much of the Shahids’ appeal stemmed from their foreignness. I’ve always been attracted to foreignness. In my junior year of high school, we had an exchange student from London named Hattie, and I decided before she ever came that I’d befriend her. Ethereally pale, moon-faced with big blue eyes, she had a bleached bob that fell glamorously over half her face, and a retro black mac with a bull’s-eye printed on the back. She was sturdy not in a fat way but in a strong way, and she wore black lace-up DM boots and she listened to Joy Division and the Clash. And she came from London, England. There wasn’t anyone at the high school who could hold a candle to her, and I served as both her guide and her amanuensis for the year. It made me much cooler, in the eyes of my classmates. It was only halfway through her time there that she revealed that she was as young as I was, or almost, and I was both awed and dismayed, the latter because it seemed, then, that my one claim to specialness was suddenly nothing, a single arrow in her ample quiver.

But foreignness: there was nothing foreign about my father, with his unconsidered Brooks Brothers wardrobe and his upbringing in Wenham, Massachusetts. Nothing foreign about my mother but an Italian grandmother, of whom she possessed a single photograph, the ancestor having died when my mother was two; and a deeply Catholic sister who had contemplated taking orders, which seemed fairly foreign to us. As a boy, my brother Matt was so American he hated vegetables and all kinds of ethnic food—Indian, Chinese, Thai, he’d spurn it all,
claiming it was horsemeat slathered in brown sauce. I’m not sure how different he is even now. No, my yearning was all my own.

“There have been Eldridges here since almost the beginning,” my father was known to say, smugly, while opening a bottle of wine or doling out mashed potatoes. “We’re old stock.” And in Manchester-by-the-Sea, a short bike ride from the grand seaside houses of the gentry, I’d think how telling was my father’s “almost,” how that “almost” led, grimly, to our humble front door.

I always thought I’d live in Paris, Rome, Madrid—at least for a while. It strikes me now that I didn’t dream of Zanzibar or Papeete or Tashkent: even my fantasy was cautious, a good girl’s fantasy, a blanched almond of a fantasy. Today, even that is enough to clench my fists and curl my toes.

In the past few years, I’ve often thought of the Marianne Faithfull song “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”—“At the age of thirty-seven, she realized she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair …”—and I’ve felt little pricks behind my eyes. Not because I thought I wouldn’t get my Parisian sports car moment—insanely, and quite erroneously, I was sure at thirty-seven, and thirty-eight, and even thirty-nine, that that moment was imminent—but because Marianne is right that the age of thirty-seven—the first of my Reza years—is a time of reckoning, the time at which you have to acknowledge once and for all that your life has a shape and a horizon, and that you’ll probably never be president, or a millionaire, and that if you’re a childless woman, you will quite possibly remain that way. Then there’s a period of accommodation before you are formally and officially old, except that I didn’t use it for that purpose. I used those years another way, or thought I did. I thought I was using them to make my life real—wasn’t that what they said in the sixties? To “realize” myself?—but it turns out I’m still in the Fun House to this day.

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