Stay Where I Can See You

by Katrina Onstad

  “Please, latecomer, join us at the Harkness table, won’t you?” said the teacher, crooking his finger. He was young. His beard was the only feature that set him apart from the students at the table, and his blazer covered the words on his T-shirt so that only a red “E” could be seen.

  Maddie took the one empty seat.

  “What, you may ask, oh new student, is a Harkness table. Anyone?”

  There were a few indulgent giggles.

  A boy said, “Big tables that cost the school thousands of dollars, so we can now put on the website: ‘Look, our school has Harkness tables.’”

  “Exactly,” said the teacher. “They’re also meant to facilitate debate and discussion, which are my two favourite D-words. You must be Madeline Kaplan.”

  Maddie nodded.

  “I know these clowns from yesteryear, but to you, a warm welcome, Ms. Madeline. I am Brian Goldberg, but convention dictates use of the honorific, which in my case is doctor, as in PhD, not MD. I can’t help you with your physical deficiencies, only your intellectual ones.” Maddie had met this kind of adult before. His neediness made her nervous.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “And let’s also extend a ‘hi’ to the curriculum.” He leaned back, hands behind his head. “What, oh children, is economic interdependence?”

  They took off immediately, each angling to be heard. Maddie listened, assessing. They spoke like news pundits. It was all familiar, really, even the binders and logos on the sweatshirts. The brands were better, more expensive: more Apple computers than Dells, more iPhones than Samsungs.

  “Are all economic decisions rational?” asked Dr. Goldberg.

  A boy answered slowly, in a quiet voice that Maddie couldn’t make out. The room dropped to the boy’s quiet, too, so there was just him murmuring and the rustle of traffic and trees through the open window, the soft clicking of laptops. Maddie turned her head to try to see him, but he was two bodies down, and difficult to find. She saw only long hands, and thought: He talks like music sounds.

  Across the Harkness table, a girl sat extremely still, her head bowed, hair draping her face, as if staring at her computer. It was a posture of great concentration, but Maddie recognized the delicate inflation and deflation of her chest: she was sleeping. Suddenly, she reared, hair falling back to reveal a long, pointed chin, narrow eyes snapped open.

  “Don’t kick me,” Maddie heard her hiss to the girl on her left, who was suppressing giggles. The boy cleared his throat, continued, but the spell was broken.

  “Very good, Joshua. You spent your summer reading,” said Dr. Goldberg. “Clara, try to keep awake. It’s only day one.”

  Maddie wanted to catch the boy’s eye, thinking she might offer a reassuring glance, but she still couldn’t see him clearly from her seat. When he leaned forward, she saw a shock of black hair, then he pulled back again and was gone.

  After class, Maddie found the two girls waiting in the hall.

  “How’s it going, newbie?” asked the sleepy girl. “I’m Clara. This is Sophie.” Sophie was smaller, with a soft, expansive face to contrast her friend’s knife-like expression.

  “We’re your unofficial ambassadors.”

  “Yes, unofficial. Officially, we represent nothing.”

  “Zero.”

  “But unofficially, we wanted to welcome you.”

  Maddie read the conversation, parsing the ratio of mockery to sincerity. She knew about Darwin, and adaptation, and that she’d need to learn the correct codes to survive.

  “Which way are you going?” Sophie asked.

  Maddie zipped her backpack, closed her locker. “Home, I guess. Subway.”

  “What are you signing up for?”

  “I do debate, UN, chess club and Free the Children,” said Sophie. “She does less because she’s all dance all the time.”

  Clara did a quick pirouette. “Royal Academy. Also, I don’t want to free the children. I want them caged, for profit. What’s your thing?”

  “Good afternoon, girls,” said a teacher walking by.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Frick,” they chimed, in perfect synchrony, voices softer and younger. Then they turned back to Maddie, heads tilted expectantly.

  “I did UN at my old school,” said Maddie. “We didn’t have a chess club. I like photography.” She didn’t, particularly.

  “Oh, you should sign up for the photography club. Last year James Chen got into Columbia based on his portfolio,” said Clara.

  “I still don’t get that,” said Sophie, rolling her eyes.

  “Remember those pictures of the old people in the nursing home? They were really beautiful,” said Clara.

  “Oh, true.”

  “God, I was kidding. They were so cliché!”

  Sophie laughed tightly.

  The three walked through the hall, Sophie and Clara pouring information about where to eat at lunch, which teachers were the best, which bathrooms to be avoided. There wasn’t talk of boys. They were beyond boys, Maddie guessed. For these two, it would be men.

  “Get us on Snapchat,” said Clara.

  They left her at the front door of the school, scattering to their various activities. They were almost running, like they were being chased. Maddie was relieved. Now she knew what was required of her. It would be her usual balancing act, then: She would be likeable, and a little to the side. A hard worker. A good student. A decent friend. That should be enough to get through until June.

  Outside, in the warm September air, Maddie walked down the steps, and then exhaled, looking back at the building.

  A small woman rushed by, pulling a girl by the hand. She was calling rapidly in a language Maddie didn’t recognize. A boy rose from the steps. Maddie recognized him as the melodic boy from History class. He came toward the woman, speaking the same language. His pants were unusual, neither sweats nor jeans, and with a crease in the front. He didn’t look at Maddie, or at the other kids clouding the sidewalk. The woman kept talking in a steady current, loud and high-pitched, fluttering as if something terrible and unjust had passed. The boy stood, and the girl leaned into him; she looked to be about Eli’s age. Maddie guessed that the woman was his mother, but because he was taller, and so anchored while she flapped around him, he seemed older than her. He nodded sympathetically, looking her in the eye steadily until she had drained herself of words. Then, when her shoulders sagged and she was smaller still, silent at last, he laid a hand on her back.

  Maddie could see his face fully now, and it was beautiful. No one had lips as red. She felt a catch in her breath.

  She watched him guide his mother up the street, into the crowd. The girl, presumably his sister, took his other hand. His mother leaned into him, and Maddie saw that his pants were too short, so there was a small gap between the cuff and the shoe, like the gap at the joints of a marionette.

  Joshua. She remembered his name, and knew immediately that he would matter to her. Maddie kept close that certainty as she walked to the subway.

  Crossing the street, she felt eyes on her, the way she did when her mother was at school. She turned back slowly, but Joshua was gone. There was a man standing by the trees that flanked the school’s entrance. He might have been looking at her, or just at the sky. Still, a current rippled through her. He was too still, too directly in her line of vision, as if wanting to be seen. She sped up slightly, to the entrance of the subway, glancing behind her one last time before descending the stairs underground. The man was gone.

  GWEN

  After Maddie had entered the building that morning, Gwen settled on a public bench on the sidewalk next to the U and waited. She had Maddie’s schedule on her phone: Calculus. Ten minutes before Gym. Gwen let the waning sun—the last hot sun of the autumn, surely—settle on her skin.

  The bell rang. The doors flew open, and from her vantage point on the sidewalk, Gwen could see the kids in their gym clothes filing through the doors onto the field. A whistle blew and they began to run around the track. Clusters of g
irls with ponytails ran together, loud voices overlapping. The boys wore baggy shorts that moved like skirts in the breeze. Gwen craned for Maddie—oh, there she was! Another ponytail, running alone. Her legs looked strong in her shorts. Maddie had always been effortlessly athletic even though she had stopped playing sports.

  Gwen hung her head in hiding. She was embarrassed by this habit, which had proven unbreakable. She felt no need to do it with Eli. He was safe.

  What would she do with her day now, in the city? Gwen wondered. What would she do without the women of Shadow Pines? They had been on the Parent Council with her. Their children had slept on her sheets, wiped their hands on her towels, eaten her dinners. She and the women had come together in the aisles of supermarkets and the hallways of schools, scattering in the twilight with the arrival of the commuter trains.

  A month ago, Gwen had staged a ritual to formally end it. She put out a tray of fruit and a coffee cake, which she’d baked along with the offering of a dozen cranberry loaves. She wrapped each cranberry loaf in cellophane and pink twine, and stacked them in a pyramid on the console by the door, ready for when the women streamed in.

  They seemed to all arrive together, with kisses and hugs at the door, purses deposited next to the loaves. Because the house was littered with the chaos of moving, they gathered in Gwen’s kitchen, which was the same as their kitchens, and stood eating off the china that Seth’s parents had given them at their wedding.

  One by one, they leaned in.

  “I’ll miss our coffees,” said Liza, laying a hand on Gwen’s bicep.

  “Who will run the art table at the Fall Fair?” moaned Jimin. “No one mans the sponge painting station like you, Gwen.”

  True. Gwen remembered that at Liza’s craft table, the scissors were too dull to cut the egg cartons, and the kindergarteners wept over their failed spiders.

  “One good thing about you leaving is that I won’t feel so bad about my own crappy birthday present wrapping,” said Rachel.

  Josie laughed. Zoe raised her eyebrows: Rachel’s voice always slithered. When Gwen had a party to celebrate week-old Eli’s arrival from the hospital, Rachel—mother of three girls—said: “Boys are never born cute, isn’t that what they say? Give him time.”

  Gwen was going to miss Zoe most of all. They had been friends since Eli was a baby rolling on a blanket next to Evelyn, Zoe’s daughter. Zoe, her husband, John, and Evelyn lived several blocks over in a house that was nearly identical to Gwen and Seth’s. But their block was one of the last to be built in Shadow Pines, and gave the impression of an afterthought, as if the developer had run out of time and materials. If seen from above, one block would appear photoshopped to perfection; the other a warped mirror image, details slightly askew. The latches on the windows of Zoe’s house were plastic instead of metal. The cement in Zoe’s driveway lacked Gwen’s groomed edges. Gwen’s street was lit at night by retro copper gas lamps. Bulbous green onion-like lamps scarred Zoe’s boulevard—wobbly, easily cracked.

  Zoe joked about it: “Look at our trees. They’re skinnier and less leafy. Even the kids on our block are lousy students.” This was a joke, but it was true that Evelyn struggled with reading and had an explosive temper.

  When Gwen sent Zoe photos of the new house (tentatively: Was this bragging?), Zoe emailed back: “So now do I get the same house on a shittier block? :)”

  This bluntness was the attribute that separated Zoe from the other mothers—Shadow Pines mothers tended toward tidy and contained, irony-free—and drew Gwen to her. Zoe distinguished herself also by running a bookkeeping company out of her garage (where the remote control door opener never worked) and loudly proclaiming her need for copious doses of antidepressants. Gwen loved to visit Zoe among the papers and spin in her office chair, offering comfort as Zoe paced, complaining about her clients and her fears for her difficult daughter.

  One muddy spring, Zoe discovered that John was having an affair with a woman he’d met online. It turned out that the chest-thumping certainty that had drawn her to him and was now an irritant still had currency away from Shadow Pines. In that garage, over many weeks, Gwen watched as her friend survived this earthquake in her home, raging and weeping and settling, finally, on the dark truth of male entitlement. Zoe came out exhausted but accepting; this was the price of a husband who required a steady stream of victory. She couldn’t change it, she had said, no longer crying, and Gwen nodded, while clinging to a secret smugness, knowing she’d chosen a different kind of man, rare and loyal.

  For eleven years, this had been the shape of her life. Gwen was a good listener among the women. She said little of her own past. At first, this was because of the deliberate tight buttoning required to hold it in. But over time, in the course of many long afternoons listening and nodding, she came to wonder why no one seemed to want to know her. Lately, she had resented them for not asking, even though this wasn’t fair. So she let go of the rope she was tugging, the one that held at its distant end the possibility that these women were awful. It was easier not to hate them, and what choice did she have? She would stay in Shadow Pines. There was nothing waiting for her anywhere.

  Instead, she provided comfort when heartbreak happened behind doors in Shadow Pines. And there was suffering: parents with dementia, and kids with learning disabilities. The recession took jobs. Todd Branson, Else Branson’s husband, used to amuse the kids by swinging his briefcase in full circles like his arm was a propeller. He got laid off, and the Bransons sold their house and moved away.

  But those heightened moments were spikes in the long flat line of Gwen’s life; most days were quiet. Gwen volunteered at the kids’ schools because she read that kids whose parents were involved got better grades and had “better outcomes.” And it turned out that somehow her own mother had rubbed off on her: Gwen was good with crafts and baking. She kept an eye on grocery store sales, and the fridge was stocked with healthy snacks. But since the kids had become older, and she often didn’t need to be anywhere at 3:30 p.m., Gwen had been growing restless. There was weightlessness to her time, thin as the air in an airplane cabin. The days were so long now. She had started watching Coronation Street at noon, something she had never done before. When she cleaved away her fear, she saw, clear and shining as a desert watering-hole, her desire for the city. She never said it out loud, not to herself, not to Seth. And certainly not to the women.

  The mugs were emptied, and eyes turned to the kitchen clock above the door. A few of the moms had younger children, and needed to be home to make lunch. The fluttering of excuses drifted around the room: there were errands, always errands, and playdates approaching, and homes to tend.

  At the doorway, the hugs came with promises to keep in touch, which they would, though it might not be the same, everyone agreed (could never be the same, thought Gwen). Zoe was the last to leave, plucking her cranberry loaf from the table in the foyer. She turned to her friend: “John keeps talking about moving back to the city,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be nice? We’d be neighbours again.” Gwen nodded.

  Zoe clutched the loaf and sniffed: “Who’s going to take care of us?”

  Gwen reached for her friend. She hugged her and felt tears welling up.

  When they had gone, Gwen set the dishwasher and swept the floor. She looked out the window. Two o’clock. She didn’t have to pick up Eli at the pool for three hours, and Maddie was babysitting Grace Cho.

  She looked down at a lone cranberry loaf in its plastic sheath; someone had forgotten to take hers, perhaps pointedly. Gwen considered the loaf. She took an armful of items from the craft cupboard, dumped them on the table. Then she stuck googly eyes on the top of the plastic-wrapped cake. She glue-gunned yarn along its sides. She sprinkled sticky pink glitter all over the body. She looked at it, picked up a kitchen knife and stuck it in its back. Then she shook her head, looking at the sparkling, murdered thing: What was that?

  The stereo was still hooked up, waiting to be packed. Seth had wondered if they even needed t
o take it, now that everything was digital. He had always been indifferent to music. But Gwen had loved music once, been rescued by it, had been the girl in the bar listening too closely to bother dancing. The CDs at the bottom of the buffet that held their china were coming with them, even if CDs were obsolete.

  In the bathroom, Gwen rifled through the medicine cabinet. Between medicines and Band-Aids, she found Maddie’s black eyeliner. She smudged it around her eyes until they were black sockets, a death mask.

  She drew the blinds. Gwen had chosen a CD of girls whom she’d seen live twenty years ago, girls with guitars and SLUT written across their bellies. She hit Play. The clamour filled the house; drums forward, bass drowning out the lyrics. Young, young girls, Gwen thought, and their wailing filled every corner of the house, past the framed pictures of the family at the beach, and gathered around the Christmas tree and the menorah, past bags of linens and boxes of cutlery.

  Gwen felt herself peering over an edge, down into darkness, leaning and curious. For so long, she had felt unfinished; she was a box with the flaps open. The smallness of her life surprised her. It’s not that she had expected greatness. When she was the age at which children form their expectations for themselves (Maddie’s age; Eli’s age), she had expected exactly nothing. And in adulthood, she had worked only toward stability, striving each and every day to simply hold it together, to provide, to be substantial enough that her children could dream and wonder and be happy on the stage of her bowed, strong back.

  But now—now there was this money.

  The money meant that she and Seth wouldn’t have to work as hard to ensure the kids’ safe passage into adulthood. The kids were getting so old, anyway. Maddie was done, really, and Gwen had given her a good childhood, she was certain. There had been no major bumps—no rehab, no academic implosions, like the children of other mothers. Maddie had always been a good kid, with good grades and polite friends. Even her crop tops weren’t all that cropped, her choices mature. If she often seemed contained and furtive about her inner life, that was just adolescence running down the clock. Maddie had not been in trouble, and this gave Gwen a surge of pride, and made it bearable that she would be leaving soon.