Too Jewish (28 page)

"That's what you're in this class for," Mrs. Walter said. She held out the chalk toward me. I tried to read her expression. Her mouth was so tiny, and her glasses had a line across the center. I didn't care about her approval; I was worried that everyone in the class would be furious if she was happy with me. But, hey, this was school.

I got up and walked toward the board. No one rustled behind me. That meant to me that no glances or notes were being exchanged, though it didn't rule out glares. I thought if anything bad was going on it was wishing I'd get it wrong. I couldn't blame them. I'd be wishing the same. It was such a competitive school. I'd learned the only way to win was for someone else to lose.

With the chalk I drew a line parallel to the bottom line of the triangle, balancing it on the triangle's apex so it made two angles underneath itself. I labeled those angles
d
and
e.

I turned around, and everyone was watching me. They looked genuinely interested. I pointed at my triangle while I talked, moving my fingers into all the spaces to show what matched and added up. "Okay, we know
d
plus
b
plus
e
equals 180, and we know
d
equals
a
and
e
equals
c
, so
a
plus
b
plus
c
equals 180."

Mrs. Walter took the chalk from me like it was an orchestra baton, and I'd just conducted a symphony. Her face was neutral like a conductor's, too. "Good, good," she said. "Did everyone follow that? Now we'll put it in the form of a proof."

I looked around the room. What I wanted most was to have been clear. I wanted everybody to have understood. I didn't care if they liked me. Though I figured they would like me a lot if I made geometry easier than Mrs. Walter was making it. Everyone was staring at me like I'd just spoken in a foreign language. I'd gone so slowly, too. Meryl, Linda, and Susan all were in that class. They were the most spoiled girls in the entire tenth grade. They all went to Sunday school together, and they were more attached in the hallways than Catherine and I ever had been. I would have thought somebody in the front office would never have put them together in a class. But maybe Mrs. Walter had made a special request. The three of them were looking back and forth at each other, like they didn't believe I was human or something.

"Can anybody tell me the first rule we obeyed when we drew the line?" Mrs. Walter said. She'd been at that school a long time. She was used to the kinds of looks she saw on those faces. She
lived
for the kinds of looks she saw on those faces.

I went back to my seat. The room was so quiet. I could hear my footsteps. I hoped nobody would look at my shoes.

Mrs. Walter let out a dramatic sigh through her nostrils. She put her left hand on her hip. She tapped her right foot. She was having fun, and she was the only one. Finally she said very dramatically, "All right, Darby, can you explain?"

"Well, it had to be parallel to the base," I said. That was something I'd kind of pointed out when I drew the line, but I hadn't said it was a rule. If anybody had been listening, it would have been possible to pick up on that, but maybe I hadn't made it clear. I hoped the way I answered made me sound a little guilty.

"Ah, class," Mrs. Walter said, "she drew the line straight for you. Couldn't you even guess?"

Everybody tittered nervously. I wasn't very popular at that exact second.

Mrs. Walter put both hands on her fat little hips and went up on tippy-toes. "This is not a playroom. Ask the eleventh graders. They'll give you the names of their friends who're in public school this year. I'll weed you right out of this school, and you know it."

Meryl was in the row to my left, one seat ahead of me. I could see what she was doing. She was scribbling on a slip of paper, large enough so Linda in front of me could read it. Which meant I could read it, too. "My dad gives $1000 every year. Fuck her. Fuck Darby too." Meryl was very busy making sure she caught Linda's attention. I didn't know why she'd forgotten where I was sitting, though for all I knew she wanted me to read it.

Mrs. Walter didn't know Meryl's name yet. "You," she said, pointing at Meryl. "Is that a proof you've written?"

Meryl turned red and started crumpling and ripping the sheet of paper. It looked to me like she had just doomed herself for the rest of the year. If I'd learned nothing else at Newman, I'd learned that teachers got an impression the first few weeks of school and didn't bother to change it for the rest of the year. I always came in September with everything organized and didn't sleep until I was perfect. I never coasted, but I could have.

"You ladies need to grow up right here in this room if you know what's good for you," Mrs. Walter said. She pointed at poor Linda. "Now, you, what do you say, you go to the board."

Linda shot daggers at Meryl the whole time she was getting out of her seat, but Meryl just shrugged with relief that she wasn't going to the board. I sat back for the rest of the period. They'd forgotten about me. Mrs. Walter was some kind of genius.

* * *

I had to give Linda Hirsch credit. She didn't try to pretend anything at first. It would have been really easy to act like she wanted to be my friend because I was walking around all by myself lately, and she could have talked about the football team or something boring, and then she could have kind of eased onto classes, and, oh, gee, aren't we in the same math class, and, hey, maybe we could do our homework together sometime. No, Linda came up to me at my locker at lunch and came right out and said, "Hey, Darby, listen, I'm scared to death of Mrs. Walter. Could you maybe come over one afternoon and do the homework with me?"

I was so surprised by her sounding like a regular person that I said, "Sure," and the next day I was supposed to be at her house at four. Which was an unfortunate plan, because that was the day my mother brought me to visit Grammy and keep her from having complaints, and I'd have preferred to go home on the way to Linda's and get organized.

I decided I'd have to sit in a corner and do my homework while my mother talked to my grandmother. I probably could even do a run-through of geometry before I went to Linda's house. I wanted to be able to show it to her really smoothly, and it was easy to trip all over myself and go in circles if I hadn't looked at it first. That didn't mean I wasn't going to listen to whatever conversation was going on. After all, I was of the generation who did its homework in front of the television. Admittedly, I did most of it during commercials, but I was pretty good at doing two things at once.

"I have to drop Darby off at a friend's house on the way home," my mother said.

"I thought her friend went away to boarding school," Grammy said.

"She has more than one friend," my mother said, defending me, even though it wasn't true. "This is Linda Hirsch. They're going to study together."

"Hirsch? Darby, who are her parents?"

I took a second to answer, like she was interrupting my train of thought. "Uh, I have no earthly idea."

"Well, where does she live?" Grammy said.

"On Octavia, where they all live," I said.

"Oh, my goodness," Grammy said. She was all excited. "That's
the
Hirsches. How did you become friends with her? Have you started going to Sunday school? Letty, is she getting confirmed after all?"

"She's in my stupid math class," I said. "We're doing our homework together."

"So, Letty, I'm glad you honored my advice to put her in Newman," Grammy said.

I had to look up from my book. My mother's mouth was wide open. Mentally I arranged my books in case I had to make a fast getaway. I expected her to say,
Let's get out of here.
But she let herself calm down. "Mother, having Darby in Newman means she's learning geometry. Period. If she associates with little Jewish snobs, it is not an asset."

"I swear, you're becoming as anti-Semitic as that husband of yours," Grammy said.

At that I sat up straight. "Daddy is a real Jew. You're not supposed to talk about him."

Grammy gave me a look that was nothing near as good as Mrs. Walter's. "Your mother started this whole discussion." She turned to Mama. "So, does this girl know who your family is?"

I jumped in. "If you mean, does she know who you are, no. My name's Darby Cooper." I stood up, hoping my mother would, too, but she didn't, so I just stood there.

"Listen," she said to me. "It's probably just as well that those girls not know who you are. All their families know my son-in-law turned my husband in to the Mississippi authorities. Two can play his game."

"If you accused my husband of something he didn't do," Mama said, "you took food out of your own grandchild's mouth."

"He should have thought about the consequences before he turned your father in."

"Goddammit, he didn't do it!" my mother said.

Grammy kept her voice even because my mother was so upset. "Dear, when you're ready to face the truth about that man, you know your father will support you. By support, I mean literally support. You'd be living a lot better than you do now."

My mother was red in the face, but not in a way that I could figure out. She had her coffee cup in her hand, and either she was going to throw it full of coffee, or she was going to drink so she wouldn't start crying. I had a feeling she'd lived in that house too long to let coffee get on that rug, and I was right. She drank down that hot coffee nonstop, then slammed the empty cup on the table and folded her arms across her chest. "I love my husband," she said

"That's a lot of foolishness," Grammy said.

"I hate you," I said. I didn't care what Grammy thought about me.

* * *

I had just about enough energy left in me to do geometry proofs when I got to Linda's house. But Linda basically was embarrassed to be doing homework. There she was, in the privacy of her own house, with nobody as a witness except me, and she couldn't work on the math for more than a minute before saying, "We can stop if you want. You want to stop? How about a Coke. I could use a Coke." I was trying to explain complementary, which was pretty easy, and she said, "Yeah, you can tell just by looking at the picture. Hey, how come Catherine left school?" I looked at her funny, then realized she was trying to change the subject from math. She misunderstood my expression as protection of my friend. "So, you know Becca at all?" she tried next.

I was starting to understand why Mrs. Walter was so amused by the kids who paraded through her classroom every year. I also was starting to think I needed to talk to Becca if I was going to survive tenth grade. But right then I wanted to figure out a way to survive the next two hours. "Look," I said, "let's pretend we're in geometry class." Linda brightened up. She wasn't all that far removed from sixth grade, really. I put on my fireplug-teacher voice and fussed at her and kept the pencil in her hand, and when her mother came into the room, I didn't drop out of character, and it seemed her mother was still pretty much stuck in sixth grade, too, because she ate it up, even though it looked like she was dying to know if Grammy was my grandmother, with all the details I could bring with that. She was going to let me get away with torturing her darling Linda if it meant I'd come back and spill my family secrets. There was also a small chance Linda might learn geometry. Linda got all her homework right before I let her close her book, but I had a sickening feeling that she was going to show up in class the next day and not be able to do the odd-numbered questions after we'd solved the even-numbered ones.

* * *

After dinner I looked up Becca in the school directory. She had two listings, which was kind of mean of the school, because it announced to everybody that her parents had two different addresses. One of them was uptown, and the other was in the French Quarter, so I figured her regular house was uptown with her mother, and her father had an apartment downtown where she could go and be a little out of control on weekends. It was a little backwards because everybody knew that it was her mother who was supposed to be the one who was badly behaved. I dialed the number. Her mother answered with a three-syllable "hello-o-o," like I was interrupting something, but also this was the way she probably always answered. "May I speak to Becca, please?" I said.

"Who's this?"

I told her it was Darby Cooper. I didn't think I needed to explain myself. I sounded fifteen, and that should have been enough. But she didn't say anything, so I said, "I'm in her class at school." I wondered if I needed to say what school.

"Becca's out with Ethan," she said, like of course everybody knew who Ethan was. There was no Ethan at Newman. "But she'll be in before ten, right?" she said. "It's a Wednesday, right?" That much I knew, the day of the week. Her mother said she would have Becca call me, and she asked for my phone number. I had a feeling that Becca was the kind of girl who threw away her school directory the first day of class.

I stayed close to the phone for the rest of the evening. Ten o'clock was pushing the limits around my house. I didn't have a set bedtime, even though I was expected in bed at ten. If I wanted to stay up until midnight doing homework, my parents trusted me to deal with the consequences of being sleepy. They just wanted me to sort of disappear at ten so they could consider the day over. The phone rang at quarter til.

"Hey, you called," Becca said. She packed a lot into those three syllables. It wasn't a question or an accusation exactly, but I knew I needed to justify myself pretty quickly. She made me nervous.

"Yeh," I said. "I was wondering if you'd want to maybe come over some afternoon."

"Why?"

As "why"s go, it was a pretty nice why. She was genuinely curious.

"No reason," I said. I was giving it right back to her. If I was going to be friends with Becca, I'd have to be a lot like her.

"Good answer," she said. "But I'm not as ingenuous as you think."

I knew what ingenuous meant. She wasn't playing with the dumb girls.

"Hey," I said, "I really just thought this was a good idea. What do you think is going on?"