Want

by Lynn Steger Strong

  * * *

  I mostly walk now. Week after week, I just keep leaving in the afternoon and no one seems to notice I’m not there. I go to the coffee shop and read. Dorothy West, The Living is Easy; Gerald Murnane, The Plains; Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter; Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time. I walk to the bookstore closest to the coffee shop, my favorite bookstore in the city, small with dark wood floors and two well-curated tables, chosen, specially, by the owner, who is a small, curly-haired man who is often behind the counter, who I see sometimes in other parts of the city and I smile at him, though I’m sure that he can never place my face. I linger, flipping through first pages, knowing that I can’t afford to buy another novel, that there is no extra twenty dollars in our account. I get books from the library, order used books online for work and charge it to the high school, but then I walk past this shop and find myself inside it, attracted to the thrill of passing the book across the counter. Books are my specific version of consumption; it’s the consumption that I walk inside this store to perform. I want to not be someone who says no all the time to every impulse. I want to not make every choice because it is my only choice. This is a stupid, wasteful way to do this, but I do it—the smell inside the store, the people lingering around me—to play briefly at not caring. I pass a book across the counter that I might not ever read: a biography of an artist I love that costs more than twenty dollars, a paperback of translated Scandinavian fiction that I’ve read bits of for a month. I leave the shop disgusted and embarrassed, stuff the book in my bag, crumple the receipt. I will dispose of it before I get home, evidence of all the ways I am still a spoiled rich kid, as if my husband will not also see the charge on our account and choose to quietly ignore it or to point to it at our monthly tracking of expenses and I will nod, hot-faced, and look down at my lap.

  As I walk, I go to neighborhoods I never go to any longer. I have ID cards from all the universities at which I’ve been an adjunct and, among them, I get into almost every museum in New York for free. I walk through shows in Chelsea, start reading Artforum. I look at massive canvases of black and white, all charcoal, bloodied heads and children hung from trees, close-up photographs of the ocean and the sky, small bits of vastness blown up, made big. I stand a long time in front of paintings I don’t wholly understand and try to let them work on me.

  * * *

  Kayla misses two days of school. I go to the office of the counselor with whom she’s close to find out if she knows where she’s been but I find out the counselor’s been transferred to a middle school. She was advocating for devoting more resources to kids with learning disabilities so she’s been sent to work under another, less opinionated counselor in an attempt to be retrained.

  Are they replacing her? I ask the twenty-three-year-old who was hired to do data entry but is now sitting at the desk where the counselor met with a full caseload of students every day. There are so few places in the building where it’s quiet, and this data-entry person appears to have been the first to learn this space was free.

  She says: Probably?

  * * *

  On the third day, I see on the live attendance tracker that Kayla’s at school and I go into the third-floor bathroom and see her shoes under the door of the extra-large handicap accessible stall and I knock and tell her that it’s me.

  Where were you? I say.

  My mom went on a trip with her new boyfriend.

  Did you go with her?

  It was supposed to be just for the weekend, so I was supposed to watch my brother, but then she didn’t get back until last night.

  Kayla’s little brother is her favorite person, ten years younger; when she talks about him she stops fidgeting and sits up straight.

  You guys were alone? I ask her.

  I think probably this is something I should tell the counselor except she doesn’t work here anymore.

  I’m grown enough, she says.

  You cook? I say.

  My boyfriend brought stuff, she says.

  I think about the bruise she showed me and she sees me looking. It was fine, she says.

  I look at her and shake my head and she smiles at me.

  She says: You miss me?

  * * *

  Four of my friends come over. They suggested that we go to dinner, but I can’t afford to go to dinner, so I invited them to our house and my husband cooks.

  We’ve all been friends for years; we met in grad school; none of them have children; we see each other much less often now. Most of them have money or have partners who make money. One bought a brownstone with her partner’s trust fund and spent a year doing it over; another took a year off of work to try to write a book, moving in with her corporate-lawyer boyfriend, spent three months with him abroad. When both my children were born these women were kind and generous in ways that continually shocked me. They brought us dinner, took our trash out. They sat with me in university offices as I pumped milk.

  They don’t know about the bankruptcy. I worry already that I exhaust them. There is no fixing the place that we’re in, no saying something that might make it better, so I don’t tell them, and, often, when they ask me how I am, I just say I’m tired and get quiet.

  One of my friends, the one who took the year off—who is lovely, younger than me, quadrilingual, who is planning a wedding and, when she talks about the wedding, turns away from me and addresses the other women in the room in a way that makes me think she doesn’t trust that I’d have much to say about dresses or floral arrangements or how she might do her hair—she brings an acquaintance of ours to this dinner, another woman who is very wealthy, whom our quadrilingual friend describes whenever she brings her up as elegant, just so elegant. She has some great job in which she works from home a couple hours a day and makes some absurd amount of money because she’s smarter than nearly every other person that she works with and they think the work she does should take all day.

  This place sounds awful, says this woman I know least well of all the women, speaking of my job.

  I nod, then shake my head, not sure what to say.

  I keep looking at my friends, wondering if they feel equally annoyed by nearly everything this woman’s saying. She also has a baby, the only one besides me, except she has a full-time nanny. Except, she says, she sends her husband to their country cottage with the baby every weekend so that she can get a break.

  You should leave, this woman says about my job. It sounds so awful.

  She wears tight, high-waisted jeans and a tucked-in black T-shirt. She has a shock of white-blond hair and she’s lined her eyes on top.

  I can’t leave, I say.

  She thinks I mean because I can’t leave the students, which is not untrue, but mostly, I can’t leave because we wouldn’t be able to pay our rent.

  This woman sighs this big, long sigh that I think is supposed to be a sort of compliment-slash-show-of-solidarity between us. I know that if I were to sit with her by ourselves and talk a long time I’d probably like her. My quadrilingual friend is kind and brilliant and exacting and I trust she likes this woman because she is too. But I don’t have the space to sit and talk with her, to listen to and try to like her, so I sit and I allow myself to hate her, because I’m tired and it’s easy. I look at my friends around the table and wonder what they’d do if I stood up and I hit her.

  You’re a hero, she says.

  No I’m not.

  * * *

  Why do you stay, though? asks the Chilean writer a day later; her questions I don’t mind because I’ve decided that I like her. It can’t be only the money.

  I love them, I say. I can’t say it without feeling like some bullshit movie that’s supposed to make you feel good, some bullshit movie that perpetuates the narrative that black and brown kids need earnest white people to rescue them.

  The Chilean writer smirks at me.

  I’m good at it, I say.

  The kids are smart and, maybe more importantly, they’re children. They’re teenagers, eager, ma
lleable, and thoughtful. I get to ask them questions, talk to them, I get to make them think. It’s thrilling in all the minutes that it’s going well and I think maybe, every third or eighteenth minute, that they’re learning something. It’s thrilling when they listen, thrilling when they argue and they think. It’s thrilling, but also, I’m embarrassed by how much I love them, by how little it is they’re getting from me, how whatever I give them isn’t anywhere close to what they need. I hate every time that someone says how good it is, my teaching these kids, because I’m embarrassed that I thought it might be too at first. That after years of fighting to get to be a college teacher, I was still so often shocked by how little my students needed or even wanted what I had to give. That I came to this school partially because I thought helping would feel good, because I thought I had something to offer, here. That I should have known better, that intellectually, I did. That what my students do need—an obliteration of the same systems I grew up in, a burning down and re-creation of the spaces that I relied on all these years to keep me safe—I can’t do and don’t know how to.

  * * *

  We go on a field trip to the New York Botanical Garden train show on the Metro-North and we corral the kids onto one train and then another.

  Why are we doing this shit? one of my kids asks me as we walk on a wooded, tree-lined path. It’s warmer than it’s been the past few weeks and sunny.

  It’s a gorgeous day, I say.

  I know, she says.

  This lady makes us do this shit because it’s for rich white people, says another student.

  “This lady” is the CEO of this school where I teach. I shrug and do not talk because I do not think that they are wrong.

  We watch a video about the making of the train show.

  All I fucking do is ride the train, says one of my students.

  When we get inside it’s warm and there are plants all around us. The trains are small and made of sticks and twigs and pieces of plants. They’re beautiful though strangely alienating. We’re a pack of people. My other coteachers are both black women. None of our kids are white. No one else besides our group is black or under fifty and they gawk at us.

  What are they doing here? one woman says as she walks past us.

  I’m so angry I can’t see and almost grab hold of her arm to scold her; one girl turns to another girl, laughing, pointing at me; Miz is going to hit a bitch, she says.

  On the train ride home, we let the kids get off as we pass close to their apartments, and my coteachers get off farther downtown.

  I sit alone another forty minutes to the train I’ll have to transfer to to get to Brooklyn. I read Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist. I scroll through Instagram and realize I haven’t searched for Sasha there. I pretend she won’t notice that I follow her as I follow her, and then I follow him because neither of them is locked and he’s right there. I watch a video of a cliff on the coast somewhere in California, then Hawaii. There is a dog, a beach, more cliffs. Pictures of Paris, Vienna, Barcelona. No baby, no bump. Only one picture, the two of them, just their faces, twenty-seven weeks before this; he kisses her cheek, both of them looking toward the camera, smiling, sunglasses on their heads.

  * * *

  At my night class, I teach Magda Szabó’s The Door, a book about a woman, a writer, and her relationship with her domestic worker. I’m not sure “domestic worker” is the word, nor is “maid.” It’s her relationship with a woman who cleans her house and cooks for her and her husband, but also, is perhaps her closest, dearest friend. They are not friends, though, because of class; they are not friends because in the domestic worker’s moment of desperate need, the main character betrays her violently. This is, at least, how I read the book. There is a moment when the main character could help her friend, her domestic worker, who has no one else, who has loved her intensely over many years, but instead, she calls in strangers, instead, she gives those strangers access to her friend—her friend’s greatest nightmare is being vulnerable to strangers—and she drives off in a car to work. I find this book so horrifying, the impact and the power of passivity, the way in which this woman can both love her friend and not ever recognize her humanity, not realize the violence she’s enacting, even as she spends days planning how she’ll do it, even as she lies about it later on. I cannot breathe when I finish reading. I go into class ecstatic, wore out, scared.

  What did you guys think, though? I say after we briefly discuss the book’s context.

  We discuss the strange space that Hungary inhabited during the Second World War—aligned with Hitler early as well as later occupied, complicit in the crimes committed and later victims of them, yoking themselves tightly with the Allied forces in so many of the later narratives. In 1949, I tell my students, Szabó was awarded one of Hungary’s most prestigious literary awards, except the prize was rescinded on the same day. She’d been named an “enemy of the people” by the Communist Party, which had recently come to power, and would not be allowed to publish for years after that. The book, in fact, opens with the writer character having finally been set free to work again, to be published, the impetus for the hiring of the domestic worker being that she’s been allowed to be a writer again after all those years. In a review I read of the novel in preparation, the reviewer says that the book creates the feeling of both being run over by a car and being the driver of the car at the same time. This time, even more than the time before, as I reread, instead of sleeping, every night this week, I felt this in the novel, the specific horror of deep and certain concrete culpability combined with helplessness.

  So, I say, what did you guys think?

  They look at me, wary.

  You think it was violent? asks a boy in the back who always talks.

  You didn’t? I say.

  Maybe? he says.

  She leaves her, I say. She could help, and she just goes.

  She sends doctors, they say. She brings help.

  But she’s not there, I say, worked up all of a sudden and cognizant that I should stop this, that this is not the behavior of a grown-up university professor but, maybe, of a frantic, wore-out child.

  She doesn’t stay, I say. She says she loves her and she lays her bare for strangers in her most vulnerable state.

  A girl who sits next to me and hardly ever speaks but always takes notes diligently while other students speak, whispers, so I and maybe the three or four people closest to her hear her, she says, She kills her, basically.

  * * *

  My husband works on weekends so we don’t have to pay for childcare. During the week, while I work, he takes care of our girls. We have an extra thousand dollars in our bank account because he just got paid for a job, so I call the sitter and she comes over and I run fifteen miles and take a thirty-minute shower.

  Once the sitter’s left, I set up paints on the floor atop a pile of old issues of the New York Review of Books and set out paper and old wood from various of my husband’s jobs and let the girls make things. The baby nurses and I get light-headed from the running and her eating. They paint the paper and the wood and then their hands and feet and I wonder briefly if I should tell them not to paint their bodies, but it’s only watercolors, so then they start painting my face.

  I get a news alert on my phone, an hour into painting: a ballistic missile alarm went off in Hawaii, the alert says, but officials say it was a false alarm.

  I’m quiet a minute, looking at my phone, then back and forth between paint-covered children.

  Can I paint your eyes? the four-year-old says, coming at me with a fine brush covered in purple. I throw the phone up onto the couch, smiling at our daughters. I lie back on the floor with my eyes closed, my hand resting on the baby’s calves as she moves around me.

  I say: Only the lids.

  * * *

  At 2:00 am on Tuesday, the baby starts to cry and I go into her room and her forehead and her cheeks are hot and sweating. When I come back from the bathroom where we keep the baby Motrin, she’s thr
own up on her sheets. I pick her up and take her clothes off and run a warm bath but she vomits three more times, so I rub her down with a warm cloth, standing her up naked in the bathtub, as she keeps vomiting. She vomits on my clothes too and I take them off and rinse myself and both of us sit in the hallway of the apartment, her hot skin splayed across my legs, in T-shirts but no pants. She’s crying off and on and there’s nothing left for her to vomit but her fever hasn’t broken and I don’t want to leave her and she curls up on my lap and falls asleep. At 5:00 am, my husband throws up in the bathroom sink. At 6:00, I email work and tell them that I’m going to be late. I take the four-year-old to school and my husband’s emptied out enough, so he stays with the baby so I don’t have to miss the day. At 1:00, the school calls to say the four-year-old has gotten sick, and when I pick her up she’s crying and I carry her the mile home because she’s too sick to walk and she’s vomiting too often to get in a car or ride the train. At home, the baby and my husband are asleep and I wash the four-year-old with another warm cloth and sit with her with an empty plastic mixing bowl until she’s also emptied out. I give her tiny sips of water and when my husband and the baby wake up both of their fevers have broken and they go outside for a short walk. I stay with the four-year-old and we watch five hours of Paw Patrol and Dora and Friends and she falls in and out of sleep. That night, I put everyone to bed and order myself a five-dollar pad thai and sit alone and read.

  * * *

  The next day, I have a fever, but no puking, so I take three Advil, stashing the bottle in my backpack, and I go into work because I only have three remaining sick days and I have to teach my night class anyway. I split my high school students into groups and ask them to close read different parts of the text I assigned the night before and present them, but at my night class, there is no group work, so I lead a three-hour conversation on Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, in which the narrator, a suddenly wealthy man without a memory, doubting the solidity of his status as a person, seeks to construct a perfectly controlled representation of what he thinks might be authentic in order to feel real.