The One I'm With

by Jamie Bennett

  “No need.” I took it back again. “I’ve got this.”

  Maisie, the little traitor of a dog that she was, woke up and ran over to Ava, huffing and puffing on her short legs. She threw herself down on top of Ava’s foot in its expensive high heel and looked up at Ava adoringly.

  “Maisie, come!” I called, and snapped my fingers. She was deaf to me now. Never mind all that crap I had thought about her lasting and genuine affection.

  “Lanie, could you…” Ava gestured at the lump of dog on her foot and I picked up my former best friend.

  “It’s bath time, Maisie,” I threatened the little turncoat, and she squirmed. “After I make the calls for my mom,” I continued in a louder voice to Ava, who smiled slightly. Pityingly.

  “So exciting. A big night for you,” she said flatly. “Your mom and I are going into the city to that thing at the museum.” She waved her hand dismissively, like the board meeting with the biggest power brokers in the San Francisco art scene followed by cocktails (when things really got done) was just same old, same old. “I’ll check in with you later, though, to make sure everything is going well,” she assured me. She would check in to make sure I wasn’t messing things up.

  “Lanie?”

  Oh, great. “We’re out back, Mom,” I called to her.

  My mother came through the guest house, dressed in her tennis clothes. I hadn’t heard her knock so she had entered uninvited, too. Well, technically, my house did belong to her, so she never thought she needed an invitation to drop in on me.

  “Oh, there you are,” my mom said, repeating her assistant’s words. Unlike Ava, she didn’t make it sound like an insult. But like almost everything she said to me, it came out sounding like she was disappointed. She was, I knew.

  “Hi,” I answered, and stood up straight. She hated it when I slouched.

  My mom squinted a little, then her hands moved around my head, doing something to my hair. “Ava gave you the to-do list? There are a lot of people to contact.” She liked calls rather than emails or texts; she thought the personal touch was the way to go. Personally not her, but still.

  “I gave it to her,” Ava put in. “She said she could handle it,” she told my mom, as if I wasn’t standing next to her.

  “Great!” My mom smiled at me, the same smile that had launched a thousand ad campaigns. She was still absolutely stunning. “How was your day today?”

  “Fine,” I said, deciding that I definitely would not mention the spider incident. “I got observed by the head of the lower school. The principal, Shirley.”

  My mom immediately looked worried. “Oh, no. What did she say? What problems did she notice?”

  I felt a glow of anger. “No problems at all. She said that I’m the strongest kindergarten teacher at the school,” I lied. Well, it wasn’t a lie, because I was the only kindergarten teacher at the school. Just Shirley hadn’t said that.

  “That’s wonderful!” my mom said, and smiled at me, and I felt at once proud and guilty for deceiving her. “I’m so glad you’ve found something you can do, Lanie. You were always good with children, babysitting and all that.”

  The pride vanished. “Being a teacher is not the same as when I used to babysit in high school, Mom. It’s a little more involved.”

  “I know that. I paid your college tuition, remember? Four years of private schooling to go back to singing the ABCs.” She played with my hair. “When was the last time you got this straightened?”

  “Juliette, we need to go over your notes for the board meeting tonight,” Ava broke in.

  “And I better change, so no one thinks all I do is play tennis all day!” she answered.

  “You could go just like that,” Ava assured her. “You look gorgeous.”

  My mother smiled again, this time at Ava, and gestured at her pristinely white outfit. She did look gorgeous in it, long, tan legs and a figure that was always toned to the nth degree. And like Ava, even after a tennis match, her hair still hung perfectly. How? “Thank you, Ava, but I don’t think the board would appreciate my casual look.” She brushed imaginary dirt from her skirt. “Lanie, I’ll check in with you later to see how things are going.” My mom pointed to the list in my hand and gave me a quick kiss on my forehead, looking at me eye to eye for a moment. The one thing I had gotten from my mom was her height. She and Ava hurried off, legs swishing in unison.

  I stared at Maisie, who had fallen asleep again, this time with her butt in a puddle of rainwater. “I really am giving you a bath,” I told her meanly, but she didn’t wake up, so I went in to review the spreadsheet that they expected me to have problems with, and started making calls.

  It wasn’t hard, but it was time consuming to wait on hold, to go through assistants and junior associates and other people who, like me, really didn’t care very much about my mom’s party. Everything was fine, until I got to one entry: Wolfe. “Check # of RSVPs w/ Pamela. B?” the note next to the phone number read. I recognized the number as Mrs. Wolfe’s, Pamela’s, cell phone. I had dialed it before to confirm lunch dates, school events, side-by-side manicures, and a million other things throughout the years for my mom.

  B? It could have meant anything. Banana, for example. Bacterium. Boarding pass, biodiversity.

  Brooks. Maybe it meant Brooks, as in Brooks Wolfe, Pamela’s son. I dialed the number.

  “Hi, Lanie,” Mrs. Wolfe answered. She was used to me calling her, too. “How are you, darling?”

  “I’m fine, thank you. How are you, Mrs. Wolfe?”

  “At this point in your life, I think calling me ‘Pamela’ would be appropriate.” She laughed. I had always liked her a lot. “Tell me what’s new in the classroom with the rug rats.”

  Prior to having three kids, Mrs. Wolfe had taught elementary school. She knew how it was, so I told her about the spider incident while I was getting observed.

  She nearly choked with laughter and I did too. It felt good that it was already funny. “What’s new with you?” I asked her.

  “Well, Verity is doing the revision.” She sighed.

  I knew what that meant. Once a year, every year, her mother-in-law, Verity Wolfe, revised her will. It meant that everyone involved—everyone who might benefit from it—came to Marin County, where we lived, and most of them stayed with Pamela. There was infighting, backstabbing, hysterics, and ass-kissing galore. We had heard a lot about it in the time we had known the Wolfes, which was for as long as my life, anyway. “I’m sorry,” I said sympathetically.

  “She only does this annually, but over all the years that I’ve been a part of this family, it has added up. And always at the holidays. Of course, we’re very grateful for everything she does for us.” Mrs. Wolfe, Pamela, sighed again. “Very grateful. But enough about my mother-in-law! I imagine you’re calling about the party this weekend. Yes, go ahead and tell your mother that Brooks will be there. All three of my children, in fact, and…” She kept talking, maybe about her oldest daughter Zara’s husband, maybe about her youngest daughter Scarlett’s busy schedule, maybe about something else. I had gotten stuck on the part that she said about her son: “Brooks will be there.”

  “What is he doing back home?” I blurted out, interrupting her mid-sentence.

  “Brooks, you mean?” she asked. “Well, he has an idea for starting a new company. Actually, he wanted his visit to coincide with his grandmother’s will revision drama so that he could talk to her while she’s thinking about her money and her estate. Everything depends on Verity.”

  I understood that comment, too. Pamela Wolfe’s husband had passed away right when Brooks had started high school. Mr. Wolfe had left money for her and more for their three kids, tied up in trusts, but Verity Wolfe, the mother-in-law, had always controlled the purse strings of their whole, extended family and all of them depended to some extent on her largesse. She had paid for the three kids’ private school and university tuitions, houses and apartments for Brooks’ sisters (and where we lived in California, that meant a gigantic chu
nk of change) and many, many other expenses. Sports, camps, vacations. They needed her to maintain their lifestyles, and since I got old enough to understand what was going on, I had thought that Verity liked it that way.

  “I’m hoping that Verity will help Brooks out and he’ll relocate back to California,” Pamela Wolfe told me. She started to talk more about what Brooks was missing by living on the east coast, namely, his niece and nephew growing up, but my mind had drifted again.

  Brooks hadn’t really been home since the summer after his senior year of high school. He had left a few days after a big party at his house, to go off to college and do a summer session and start practicing with his university water polo team. He’d been back for a few vacations, now and then, but not for any significant amount of time, and I had only seen him on a handful of occasions since that same party at his house my freshman year of high school, that night…I bit my lip. The night where I had begged him to pretend that we’d had sex, the night that had backfired pretty spectacularly for me.

  “So we’ll see you on Saturday?” Pamela asked me, and I snapped back to the present again. “You’ll be there, Lanie?”

  I hadn’t been planning on going to this party. “Yes, absolutely,” I answered.

  “Wonderful. I’m looking forward to talking to you in person! It does feel like it’s been a while.”

  We hung up, and I took a break from my calls and drifted around the guest house, thinking. I thought about Brooks in high school, the golden boy that he had been. I’d heard a lot about what he was doing from his mom in the years since, and he always seemed to be thriving post-high school, too. I thought back to me in high school, and what an awful, wretched mess I had been. Ugh, I needed to get out. I pulled on some old tennis shoes and woke Maisie up to bring her with me on a hike.

  I felt a lot happier after an hour or so on the trails in the hills surrounding my house, even though they were wet with winter rain and full of mud puddles. Maisie quit after the first 10 minutes and stopped dead in the middle of the track, sitting on her little butt and refusing to move. I stuck her in the backpack I carried and she fell asleep again, the lazy little pig dog. She stayed asleep even when I ran some too—she just snorted louder with every step I took that bumped her around, making me smile, and then laugh, even though it was hard work running in the mud in that terrain. Maybe, if I ran every day that week, by Saturday night at the party, I would look like a different woman. Maybe…

  Because Brooks would be there. I slowed to a walk as I came back down the hill, so I wouldn’t fall backwards and crush Maisie, and because I got a little lost in thought. First, I thought about Brooks when I had known him when we were kids. Our fathers had been friends in college, members of the crew team, and our moms had become friends through them, even though they were very different. I didn’t really remember not knowing the whole Wolfe family, but most of my memories were full of Brooks.

  Brooks as a kid, swimming in Lake Tahoe when we all went up there for the summer. He had always been on swim teams and cut through the water just like an arrow. Brooks turning into a teenager, getting invited to be in someone’s quinceañera court and learning dances, laughing the whole time as he showed them to us with his younger sister as his partner. He really could dance. Then Brooks practically grown up, owning our school, really, but still saying hi to me, the girl he had called Peanut for a long time because I had been a little kid always trailing after him and his sisters. I felt like a lot of my youth was filled with memories of him.

  In the time since, in our limited interactions, things had been strange. I had tried to act like the sophisticated woman that I now was (or anyway, tried to be), and not the ridiculous child he had known. He, however, still seemed to want to treat me like the ridiculous child, the one with bad skin, worse hair, glasses that slid down my greasy nose, and wearing the school uniform with the striped skirt that made me look like the pole in front of a barber shop.

  I wasn’t that girl anymore. On Saturday at my mom’s party, he would see an extended version of the new and improved Lanie March. I nodded to myself and jumped over a branch, and Maisie made an annoyed noise in her sleep because I had jolted her. I got to the bottom of the hill without slipping, and slowly walked the rest of the way back to my house. I looked at my phone as did and found several messages from Ava and from my mom, just “checking in” to make sure that everything was going well. My mom’s I answered, but Ava’s, I just ignored.

  ∞

  The meeting with Shirley, the head of the lower school, was going well. Not wonderfully, but well. She’d given me my formal, written evaluation and it had several good points, general ideas about classroom management, and also specific suggestions for a few kids, like Felix. He’d had another rough day on Thursday after his mom, Coco, had dropped him off, and things had gotten bad enough that Mrs. Rosse, my aide, had told me that if I didn’t get him under control, she was going to call to get backup for me from our principal or the counselor, Jacqui.

  “I can handle this, Mrs. Rosse!” I had hissed at her, hoping that the kids couldn’t hear us argue. Probably they couldn’t have over Felix screaming.

  “No, you obviously can’t,” she had shot back. But eventually, with a lot of work, I had gotten Felix to stop yelling and throwing things and focus on the uppercase letter writing we were supposed to be doing. When he wasn’t behaving so abominably, he did have some very sweet moments, like when he did his L and told me it was for Love, and that he loved me. Moments like that were unfortunately spaced pretty far apart.

  So Shirley had heard about the behavior of the prior morning from Mrs. Rosse, and in our meeting, she wanted me to understand that if I needed it, I should get help from her in the office. “Gretchen expressed that she was afraid that he was going to hurt one of the other students,” Shirley said to me. “Was it as bad as that?”

  “I would never, never let him hurt another student!” I exclaimed. And that Mrs. Rosse was a tale-telling bitch. Hurt me, yes—Felix had kicked me hard in the shin, but I wouldn’t let him near another kid when he was in that state. “His behavior is, um, disruptive at times. But not beyond my capabilities.” I glanced over at Shirley’s desk as I spoke, trying to read from the papers she had spread out there. I definitely recognized a note in Mrs. Rosse’s old-school cursive and I was practically dying to read what she had written about me.

  “Still, if he’s out of control to the level that Gretchen is that upset, then I think we need some additional intervention,” Shirley explained. “I’ve scheduled a conference with his parents for next week.”

  “Oh, a conference with you and his mom and dad?” I was ever hopeful.

  Her eyebrows went up. “No, I meant the two of us meeting with them.” She looked at her computer screen for a moment. “What do you know about the parents?” she asked me, and I shrugged.

  So, one thing I hadn’t been aware of before I started working as a teacher was the level of gossip. We, the staff, knew everything about the parents of our students, way more than we should have. Way more than I wanted to, in most cases. Most kids were giant blabbermouths, for one thing, and they leaked all kinds of sensitive information about their families, from things about their parents’ jobs and incomes (“We aren’t supposed to talk about our new house in Tahoe because my mom says that the school will take back my scholarship,”) to relationships (“Why does my dad always sleep in the pool house?”), to clandestine plastic surgery (“My mom went to Brazil and she said her face will look different when she comes back but she’ll still be my same mom.”) Also, Starhurst Academy was very small—most of us knew each other outside of the school, as well. Marin County, north of San Francisco where we lived, was a lot like a fishbowl, sometimes. It was hard to keep secrets.

  “Felix’s mother attended Starhurst,” Shirley said, still staring at her screen. “Hadley was her maiden name. Did you know her? It seems like you would have been here at the same time.”

  I nodded. Better to leave things unsaid
.

  “Colette,” Shirley read. “Preferred name is Coco. If that birthdate is correct, then she had Felix very young. Her husband is significantly older. His other children attended Starhurst as well, years before you were here.” So his other kids were older than his wife. My face must have shown how I felt about that, because Shirley nodded. “Yes, well, every family is different. I think there are some health problems with the father as well. What did you think of Coco when you were both here?”

  “We weren’t friends,” I said carefully. “We knew some of the same people.” Like Brooks, who had been her boyfriend. “She was very popular.” I switched courses. “She and Felix don’t seem to have a great relationship, but I see very little of them together. His nanny, Marilyn, is really wonderful with him. They have a great bond.”

  “He’s fortunate to have her to care for him,” Shirley said.

  It made me feel pretty depressed. “He has me, too,” I said, and she smiled at me slightly and said she was happy that was the case. The meeting ended on that good note.

  I walked down to the parking lot carrying a big bag over my shoulder of kids’ work to organize, and a few books that Shirley had given me about classroom management, and more from Jacqui, the school counselor, that she thought would help me work out some new strategies to deal with Felix. I had taken everything they had offered, because the longer I was in the classroom, the more I came to realize that all the courses I had taken in preparation for this job didn’t add up to jack squat. I had learned more in my first week of being on my own in a classroom than in all the teacher prep classes I’d had in college. It was a school of hard knocks, though.

  I threw the bag in the back seat and drove home to take out my lazy dog on another walk/run, to figure out what I was going to wear to the party the next night, and to think more. Mostly I thought about Brooks, and how he was going to deal with the grown-up, adult Lanie that he was about to encounter. I thought he was in for a big surprise. I considered what I would wear and my entrance. I would walk down the stairs, slowly, wiggling my ass like Coco did in her exercise pants. But I would wear a…I pondered. A slinky black dress, kind of slutty, even, that showed off all my curves. The ones I had in this particular daydream.