Schooled

by Anisha Lakhani

  “Perfect. I’m going to go outside and smoke a cigarette and wait for you. We can walk over to Fred’s,” Randi said brightly, smiling as she accepted a glossy black Chanel shopping bag from the saleslady. Randi smoked? I watched her from the corner of my eye as she stood outside the big glass doors, all legs and boots and leather.

  “Enjoy your bag, Ms. Taggert,” the saleslady said as brightly to me as she had to Randi, and I tried not to think about the price tag as I joined my colleague outside of the boutique.

  “Whew…eight hours of tutoring,” I ventured shyly as I approached her, placing the tutoring subject boldly between the perfect smoke rings Randi was exhaling.

  “You can’t think about it that way, Anna. Let’s get lunch. You have a lot to learn.” She smiled casually and nodded toward Madison Avenue. “Shall we?”

  “Let’s,” I agreed equally casually, walking alongside her. As we turned the corner, I caught a glimpse of us across the street in the Coach store windows. Two girls enjoying a cold November Sunday, shopping on Madison Avenue. Our twin Chanel shopping bags hung merrily from our shoulders. We could have easily passed as young versions of the Langdon mothers. Randi caught me looking.

  “Ugh. Coach is so public school.”

  It was?

  I decided to keep my mouth shut and my favorite Coach wallet out of sight. The only Barneys I had ever been to was at the Riverside Mall in Hackensack, and that was only a CO-OP. Nothing like this Madison Avenue shopping heaven. Randi led me expertly passed the Lanvin jewelry counter and headed straight for the elevators. Fred’s, on the top floor of Barneys, was Manhattan’s luncheon Mount Olympus.

  “I could live in this store,” she sighed happily as she pushed 9 and grinned wildly. Clearly she was in her natural habitat, and like an expert hunter, she had sniffed me out as prey.

  “I’ve never been here,” I admitted, and she only appeared more delighted.

  “We’re hitting every floor after lunch,” she declared, marching confidently out of the elevator and into the glass doors of the restaurant. A gray-haired man who appeared to be the restaurant’s host greeted her with a hug, and I noticed the aggravated looks on the people who were lined up at the door.

  “Randi!” he cried obsequiously. “Your usual table?”

  “Max, you’re a darling,” she breathed, suddenly sounding very British. “And this is my dear friend Anna. You have to be very nice to her.” She laughed hysterically as if she had said something very funny, and Max turned to kiss me on the right cheek. When I pulled back, he looked like he had been slapped.

  “We do both cheeks!” Randi trilled, walking ahead of us as I dutifully offered Max my left side. Randi’s usual table was near a window in the middle of the room. Though large enough for four people, it was only set for two.

  “Two glasses of Sancerre,” Randi told the waiter, who nodded as if she had just granted him the biggest favor in the world. I was finally face to face with Randi Abrahams.

  “So…” She smiled, leaning forward.

  “So…,” I echoed, crossing my arms and looking around the room.

  “Don’t you just love it here?” Randi was orgasmic.

  “It’s a far cry from the Langdon cafeteria, that’s for sure,” I smirked, attempting to adopt her obvious disdain for all things un-Barneys.

  “Ew, gross. I ate in that fucking cafeteria once, during my orientation, and I never returned. You actually go there?” she asked in disbelief. I had to laugh at Randi’s use of our seventh-graders’ vocabulary and her dismissal of a school cafeteria that I believed must rival some of the city’s top restaurants.

  “Sometimes,” I lied. The truth was that I actually couldn’t wait to go there every day. Even if I sat with a group of glassy-eyed teachers who refused to speak to me, I always enjoyed the spectacle. “Little Italy and Little Thailand are my favorites,” I admitted.

  “Gag me!” Randi laughed dramatically, and then sighed happily as our wines were brought to the table. “Oh, thank God, alcohol!” She took a long sip, closed her eyes, and sighed again. “Heaven.”

  “This is weird, being here with you,” I started, feeling my face flush. “You have to admit, we didn’t get off to the best start.”

  “Oh, let’s not talk about that,” Randi dismissed with a laugh. “You can’t be negative at Fred’s. It’s, like, a rule. Let’s just be happy that we met at Chanel and ended up here drinking wine!”

  I was so happy I took an unnecessarily huge gulp of the Sancerre. It went straight to my head. Randi was lonely, too! Of course! I had just misunderstood her! Maybe we could help each other in this crazy world. Maybe we could get those margaritas after work! Part of me wanted to delve deeper into the Benjamin Kensington episode at Starbucks, but things were going so well and I didn’t want to risk losing this new and friendly version of Randi, who, I had to admit, I was already loving.

  “Call me superficial,” she went on, “I like nice things. I’m not about to spend the rest of my life in that building walking up and down the halls in some Ann Taylor suit and dorky Nine West pumps. What is there, like some unwritten code that teachers have to know their place and adhere to some dowdy uniform?”

  “I know what you mean,” I replied quickly, trying not to wince at her spot-on description of my teaching uniform for most of September and October. Pretutoring days, of course. I took another large gulp of wine for confidence and asked her the question I had been dying to ask from day one.

  “Why did you become a teacher?”

  All of a sudden a shadow crossed her face and her eyes narrowed. I immediately regretted the question. What was it about me that couldn’t let go and have fun? Why did I have to be so intense?

  “You don’t have to answ—”

  “No, no!” Randi waved her hand again, her face brightening. “Totally fair question. I was just thinking. I haven’t been asked that in a long, long time. Let me see…” She paused dramatically, turning her eyes up toward the ceiling. “Why did I want to become a teacher?”

  Did she want me to answer?

  “I was a really awkward kid in middle school, you know?” I nodded sympathetically as she leaned over on the table and propped her chin on her elbows.

  “Me, too,” I admitted, thinking back to the slightly plump, pimply teenager I had been. “Who wasn’t?”

  “Yeah, but I was a serious nerd,” Randi confided, her eyes widening. We both laughed at her use of the word, which seemed somehow taboo to come out of the mouth of a teacher. “Totally not popular.”

  “So you didn’t sit at the cool table at lunch?” I shot back, warming up.

  “Are you fucking kidding me? I was in social Siberia!”

  A waiter came by and Randi gestured for him to refill our wineglasses, nodding impatiently when he asked if we were ready to order. I was so riveted that I hadn’t even glanced at the menu.

  “So you’re trying to be cool now?” I asked in disbelief. It was like a pin had just pricked my Randi bubble and I was watching it deflate before my disappointed eyes. She couldn’t be that pathetic…could she?

  “God, NO!” she cried, picking up her wineglass and reading my mind. “How pathetic would that be!”

  The bubble started to mend.

  “My parents always told me that schoolwork was the most important thing,” she went on, breaking a small piece of bread and swirling it in olive oil. “So that’s all I did. Worry about homework and grades. They told me that all the other things—you know, like friends, clothes, and having fun—was for later. So I just buried my head for the first thirteen years of my life and worked my ass off. I was absolutely miserable.”

  I noticed that Randi was still swirling the piece of bread but had yet to put it in her mouth.

  “My parents were like that, too,” I confided. “I was told in no uncertain terms that getting into a good college was my number one priority.”

  “Yeah, me too, until I realized that was a miserable way to go through school.” Randi laughed, p
utting down the bread and looking at me. “I snapped out of that mind-set pretty fast and it was because of a teacher.”

  I gave up trying to find a connection. Randi was too full of surprises, and I just wasn’t fast enough.

  “You lost me,” I grinned, putting up both my hands in mock surrender. The waiter approached again and I hurriedly looked at the menu.

  “We’ll both have the Gotham salad,” Randi said curtly, then turned back to me. “Trust me, it’s amazing.”

  “Sounds go—”

  “Anyway, so this teacher,” Randi went on, warming up to her story, “taught eighth-grade math at my school. Ms. Lavery. I still remember her name. I’ll never forget how she walked into class that first day, dressed in tight jeans and the most amazing cropped jacket you have ever seen.”

  Randi was looking at me, but her eyes seemed far away and I could tell she was back in that eighth-grade math class, transfixed by the sight of this amazing Ms. Lavery. I tried to imagine her as well, and an image of Randi on that first day I had seen her in the faculty lounge came to mind.

  “I mean, a cropped jacket!” Randi emphasized, breaking another small piece of bread. “And she had this amazing hair that looked like it was professionally blown out, and the highest heels I had ever seen a teacher wear.”

  “Sounds like you,” I laughed.

  Randi wasn’t laughing.

  “So here was this gorgeous woman who defied every stereotype of how a teacher was supposed to look. Kids in my class were starting to exchange glances and we were all waiting for her to be a total ditz. But she wasn’t! Ms. Lavery turned out to be the hardest and,” Randi paused for effect, “smartest teacher we had ever had.”

  “Wow,” I responded unnecessarily. Randi wasn’t finished.

  “I mean, she just had this way about her. Like she was someone you wanted to impress in class but also talk to about personal things. The popular kids loved her because she knew all about the songs and TV shows they obsessed over, and kids like me respected her because she thought being in the math league was the coolest thing in the world. Ms. Lavery just…leveled us. We all loved her. Here was a teacher, for the first time, we could actually imagine having a life outside of her job.” Randi’s voice had become positively reverent, but I was now a little unconvinced that this Ms. Lavery was worthy of such worship.

  “All because she dressed well?”

  “Yes and no.” Randi raised one manicured finger. “If she had just dressed well but done a lousy job in the classroom we wouldn’t have all been so into her. It was just that she was…the whole package. For me, it was the first time I had a teacher who defied the expectations of what a teacher should be. She was good at math. But she also liked fashion and music and all things pop culture. It didn’t have to be one or the other, you know?”

  I was beginning to catch on.

  “I could care about school and things like math class, but it was okay to concentrate on my appearance. I could be in the math league, but I could also listen to Poison and sneak out to a party. It seems simplistic now, but to an eighth-grader whose parents had always led her to believe that it was one way or the other, I swear to God Ms. Lavery was a fucking liberator!”

  Randi’s face was flushed, and I wasn’t sure if it was from the wine or the speech. Before I could respond, two enormous bowls of salad arrived and neither of us objected when the waiter refilled the wineglasses. Again.

  I was getting a little tipsy. But my understanding of Randi was clearer by the minute.

  “You want to be Ms. Lavery,” I said simply.

  “You got it,” Randi responded equally simply, stabbing a piece of lettuce with her fork and then waving it triumphantly. “I love history. I loved it in college, and I love it now. But I love all of this—” She gestured around the room. “And what I fucking hate about our profession is that we’re somehow not allowed to.”

  I took a bite of the salad and chewed thoughtfully. It was delicious.

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “Anna,” Randi began to play with her lettuce, “don’t you get it? That’s why Ms. Lavery was such a Lone Ranger and took us by such surprise. When you pay teachers just enough to, well…breathe, any of them who look like they have means to an alternate life become the enemy.”

  “Is that where the tutoring comes in?” I asked, understanding. Means to an alternate life.

  Randi didn’t answer directly.

  “Look, the only friend I had at Langdon was the teacher you replaced,” she replied.

  “Who was she?” I was curious. I hadn’t heard much about her. Nothing, in fact.

  “Her name was Jenny Rivers. She was my absolute best friend in that place, but then she quit in the middle of the summer. She was married and had one little girl, and then she got pregnant.”

  “So she wanted to spend more time with her kids?”

  “She couldn’t afford day care so she quit to tutor full-time,” Randi replied flatly. “Anna, c’mon. Don’t be naïve. You know what the salary is like. Jenny’s husband was also a teacher at a private school in Manhattan, and even between the two of them they couldn’t pay for day care. It’s too bad, because I have to admit she was an incredibly talented teacher.”

  “But how can she tutor full-time? Kids don’t get out of school until three in the afternoon at the earliest!”

  “Please.” Randi grinned again, signaling the waiter for another glass of wine. “Don’t forget the high school kids throughout the city. They have so many free periods that half of them are running around the city taking long lunches at Bilboquet and shopping on Madison Avenue. Or getting high in one of their apartments. If they have a paper due, though, they’re willing to meet at anytime throughout the day.”

  “So that’s where you disappear during our free periods?” I was beginning to understand.

  “No, I go to the cafeteria for Little Thailand’s pad Thai noodles,” Randi responded sarcastically. “If I have an hour, better I earn two hundred and fifty dollars than sit on my ass listening to Harold Warner or Blumenfeld or some other douche bag hold court at a lunch table and go on and on about progressive education.”

  I was open-mouthed. Two hundred and fifty! Maybe it was time for a raise….

  “Listen,” she said, her voice softening, “I’ve seen the change in you. I know you know what I’m talking about. Getting to that place all starry-eyed and ‘I’m going to mold the minds of the future’ happy. I get that. But I also get standing in front of a roomful of students knowing that their individual tuition is more than you get paid in a year. It’s fucking degrading and nobody has the balls to say it. And the more you put into your lessons, the more pissed off the faculty gets, the more unhappy and nervous the mothers get. Nobody wins. And this goes on for years until you wake up and you’re sixty and the same kids you thought you molded don’t even remember your name. All the while you have no other memory or experience of anything outside of the four walls of your classroom.”

  I gulped. Here I was, listening to another teacher voicing my greatest insecurities. I was Odysseus lost at sea, and Randi’s voice was like the Sirens. Her reasoning was irresistible.

  “Oh, I think the kids are a riot, don’t get me wrong,” she said cheerfully, picking at the side of lettuce next to the chicken. “Sometimes I teach great lessons. But everything in moderation. I’m not going to put my twenties on a shelf just to stay up till two in the morning grading papers and planning lessons. I make sure I have a fabulous life outside of school. It’s good for me, and it’s also healthy for the kids.”

  “Why the kids?” I challenged.

  “Oh, Anna, c’mon. These kids are literally taught to view their teachers as part of their staffs. You know. Nanny, therapist, driver…teacher? We’re all on the payroll and we do as we’re told. It does them a little good to see a teacher dressed better than their mothers. Shakes them up. Makes them nervous.”

  “I did notice that Charlotte started paying me a lot more respect
once my wardrobe got a tutoring-salary boost,” I admitted.

  “Yeah, the blow job queen!” Randi hooted, throwing her head back and laughing. I noticed two men at a table next to us look at her admiringly. She looked like a supermodel with her long hair and even longer eyelashes. I allowed myself to laugh with her, relieved to be able to finally talk about the students we had in common.

  “But,” Randi said, leaning closer and lowering her voice, “the tutoring allows you to have a life. Get real. All these kids are getting tutored. And if you’re not going to do it, someone else will. So you have a choice. You can teach and live in some miserable walk-up, or you can find a healthy balance and have a little fun on your own. Besides, I think what I earn in tutoring is what I deserve as a teacher, so it’s a nice little payback for me.”

  Randi was unapologetic. I wondered if I could hire her for the weekend to take on my parents. Why hadn’t I thought of all these points? A part of me knew that Randi’s reasoning was utterly self-serving, but the other part of me that was relishing my Gotham salad and Chanel bag agreed wholeheartedly. Why not have some fun and take care of number one? Moi!

  “You have to meet my friend Bridgette.” I smiled sweetly, finishing my wine. Randi smiled back and nodded happily.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening hitting every floor of Barneys. On the Co-op floors we ran into Jessica Landau shopping with her cousin who went to Spence.

  “Ohmigod! Ms. Abrahams! Ms. Taggert!” she had squealed delightedly, and then proudly introduced us to her cousin as “the coolest teachers ever.” Randi then proceeded to instruct me on her picks for the fall season—Marni, Zac Posen YES, Pucci and Versace NO. The latter, she explained, were too “Long Island mother trying too hard.” I had followed in wonder as we tried on seven-hundred-dollar shoes and slipped on twenty-thousand-dollar chinchilla vests. The second floor was having a resort trunk show, and the saleslady, obviously egged on by our Chanel shopping bags, handed us glass after glass of wine. I had never drunk alcohol and shopped before, but Randi informed me that in-store parties were quite common at Barneys and easily downed three more glasses of wine before we left.