“What age?”
“Two.”
So Stephanie’s biological father was dead, but she wasn’t exactly fatherless. For all intents and purposes, Mike was her father. She even called him “Dad.” To make a fuss about Father’s Day seemed a little emotionally immature.
“You should leave,” Laura told Nicholas. “Go be with her.”
“I’ll stay a little longer.”
“No, really, it’s okay. Leave. I insist.”
“I’ll stay for another inning,” he said with conviction.
The inning ended, but Nicholas did not leave. He stayed for the remainder of the game, and then stuck around after, to participate in the father–daughter group photo.
* * *
SUMMER AGAIN.
Their first morning in Ashaunt, Emma disappeared after breakfast, declaring beforehand that she was allowed to explore on her own now that she was six. Laura consented so long as she didn’t set foot in the ocean.
An hour passed and Laura was still reading the paper when she came back in.
“Mom, when you’re done with the newspaper, you better come outside. There’s a mystery I have to show you.”
“A mystery,” Laura repeated with halfhearted inflection.
“Not the good kind,” Emma said cryptically.
Laura followed Emma down a path that led to a little inlet by the shore.
“You’re not gonna believe it,” Emma said as they arrived at the end of the path. Hands on hips, she shook her head and surveyed the premises. It took Laura a moment to realize what she was supposed to be reacting to: the absence of a small body of water that used to be there.
“Your pond,” Laura said. “Emma’s Pond is gone.”
“Is it because of acid rain?” Emma wanted to know.
“No, it’s a natural thing,” Laura reassured her. “Some years it’s here, some years it isn’t.”
“But what happened to it?”
“The shoreline shifted and now it’s an inlet.”
“What’s an inlet?” Emma asked.
“It’s what it is now. A private spot where you can go to read a book or watch the sunset. I know you’re sad about the pond, but to tell you the truth, I think this is even better—Emma’s Inlet, you can call it.”
“But why did it happen?” Emma looked skeptical, mildly suspicious.
“The word for it is erosion,” Laura explained as they walked back to the house. “That means very small changes over time. It has to do with the tides and currents. Storms and winds and waves. You’ll learn about it in science class.” But Emma wasn’t listening.
“Emma’s Inlet,” she was saying. “Emma’s Inlet.”
* * *
EMMA AND CHARLOTTE HAD BEEN playmates since they were little, and as first graders at Winthrop they announced they were best friends.
The elevation of their self-declared friendship status was something in which Emma took great pride: “Teachers are always trying to break us apart, other girls are always trying to join in, but it doesn’t work—we’re best friends.”
The friendship had its volatile moments. There were fights, which led to accusations, which became character-assassination campaigns in which their classmates took sides. Though the two girls were thrilled to see each other upon arriving at school each morning, it was not uncommon that Laura and Margaret would arrive at pickup to find the union bitterly dissolved.
Laura and Margaret refused to get involved, but this didn’t stop the girls from trying to solicit their support.
“I wish Charlotte would stop lying and bragging,” Emma said when Laura picked her up from school one day. A few feet away, Charlotte greeted Margaret: “The thing about Emma is that she has to be the center of everything and she’s a liar!”
As the girls carried on the mutual recriminations, their classmates rallied around them and chimed in, echoing the sentiments of whichever girl they’d decided to ally themselves with.
It was painfully obvious to Laura that these girls wanted to be Emma and Charlotte’s friends, but that the duo had no interest in them except as pawns in situations like this. Tomorrow morning Emma and Charlotte would be exclusive again, the classmates cast aside until the next conflict arose.
How Emma and Charlotte had come to occupy the top rung on the social ladder of their first-grade class was a mystery to Laura. Was it a fluke, or an indication of some kind of innate social fitness that would ultimately prove to be a Darwinian asset? In either case, Laura was not proud. Far from it. She didn’t like how Emma and Charlotte conducted themselves; it wasn’t a good way to treat people or operate in the world.
That evening she called Margaret to discuss the matter. Growing up, the two of them had not been part of the in-crowd, and she was sure Margaret would share her concerns.
She did not. “Girls will be girls. You can’t play God in these situations.”
The next morning—as was always the case—all ill feelings were forgotten when the girls encountered each other outside the entrance to school.
“Charlotte!”
“Emma!”
An urgent, hysterical embrace morphed into a do-si-do. Giddy laughter ensued.
Laura and Margaret stood off to the side, watching the dramatic reunion.
“It’s like they hadn’t expected to see each other,” Laura remarked with amusement. “As though this were some kind of miraculous coincidence.”
Margaret started to say something in response to this, then fell silent. Her chin dimpled and rose. A single tear fell down her left cheek.
“Mags,” Laura said, resting a hand on her arm. “Is something wrong?”
Margaret shook her head and smiled. “I’m fine.” She wiped her eyes and blinked. Composed, she waved goodbye to Charlotte and headed down the block.
Laura walked after her. “Please tell me what’s upsetting you,” she said when they’d turned the corner. “You know you can tell me anything.”
“What you said about the girls, how it’s like they hadn’t expected to see each other, as though it were a coincidence . . .” Margaret’s eyes welled up with fresh tears. She pulled a Kleenex from her purse. “It reminded me of this feeling I get when I go check on Charlotte in the middle of the night. I sit on the edge of her bed, watching her sleeping, just thinking how random it is, of all the babies up for adoption in America . . . that I got her.”
“And she got you,” Laura added.
“To think,” Margaret continued, “we could have been strangers living in the same city. Even if Staten Island is a world apart.”
Laura tried to imagine this other version of Charlotte. There were certain fundamental characteristics one was born with, Charlotte would still be Charlotte, but she would dress and speak differently. Her favorite food wouldn’t be smoked salmon. She would grow up with different expectations of life.
But here she was now, perfectly at home. An Upper East Sider to the bone.
* * *
EMMA’S CLASS WAS INSTRUCTED TO bring a paper bag lunch to school that day, as they would be going on a field trip over the lunch hour. Their destination was a short walk down Fifth Avenue: St. Christopher’s School for Boys. After filing into the lobby, Miss Russell led the girls down a flight of stairs and into a gymnasium. Dressed in khakis, blazers, and ties, the boys stood in a single-file line on the other side of the room.
Normally, when they spotted each other in the park or crossed paths on the street, there were whispers and snickers and maybe a taunt. Today was a new and different kind of occasion, and the dread and embarrassment it generated was palpable. As the two groups of first-graders shuffled across the rubber floor to meet in the middle, the buzz of the fluorescent lights grew louder.
Each Winthrop girl was to be paired with a St. Christopher’s boy. Students were called up one at a time, and after being assigned to each other, they had to shake hands and introduce themselves. Miss Russell and the boys’ teacher demonstrated how this was done.
Emma�
�s lunch date introduced himself as Teddy. He came up to her chin.
“Where do you wanna sit?” Teddy asked, eyes darting around the room.
“You can pick,” Emma told him.
After a moment of puffing his cheeks out and tapping a finger on his upper lip in theatrical deliberation, Teddy swaggered off. Emma followed as he lapped the room, his hair swinging behind him like a bowl that was about to fall off his head. Eventually everyone was sitting but them.
“Teddy!” his teacher called as he continued to walk around the room. “Is there a problem?”
“Looking for a place to sit,” he shouted.
“What’s wrong with where you are?”
Teddy shrugged and plopped on the floor. As Emma took a seat across from him, he made a face and covered his eyes.
“Your underpants are showing,” he said.
“That’s not my underwear,” Emma clarified. “That’s my bloomers—it’s part of our uniform.” She wanted to smooth the skirt of her tunic down so that it covered her crotch, but feared doing so might counter the impression of what she’d just told him.
“What the heck.” Teddy’s shoulders drooped in disappointment as he pulled a sandwich out of his bag. “She knows I hate brown bread.”
Miss Russell and the other teacher circulated around the gym. Sensing his teacher’s proximity, Teddy reached into the pocket of his blazer and removed a flash card, which he proceeded to read from as he chewed: “If you could be an animal, any animal, what kind of animal would you be?”
“A person,” Emma said, and before Teddy could reject this answer she added, “A person is an animal.”
Teddy didn’t say anything, but his face turned pink and he started blinking a lot. When this continued, Emma got nervous and raised her hand to summon a teacher’s attention.
“I think he’s choking,” she told Miss Russell.
Teddy shook his head no and held up a finger.
“A little bit of spit went down the wrong pipe,” he explained in a slow, whispery gasp, wiping away tears.
Having fully recovered, Teddy answered his own question. “I’d be a Vampyroteuthis infernalis. You probably don’t even know what that is. It’s a vampire squid. It can make itself invisible. It can turn its body into a light that confuses its enemy.”
Done with their sandwiches, it was time to exchange desserts. Emma pushed a Saran-wrapped brownie across the floor toward Teddy, who tossed a small red box in her direction. It landed near her foot with a rattle. On the front of the box was a drawing of a woman in a bonnet holding a basketful of grapes. Emma took pride in being a child who would try anything and eat everything, but there was one exception: raisins, which had the leathery skin of a cockroach and were also the same color. As she pondered her predicament, there was a piercing scream at the other end of the gym. Charlotte lay on her back, kicking her legs up in the air like she was riding an upside-down bicycle.
“Yes! Yes! Oh, my God, yeeeeesssss!”
As the screaming and scissor kicking continued, Miss Russell walked very fast in her direction. Before she could get to her, Charlotte popped back up into sitting position and thrust her hand in the air to show everyone the reason for her excitement: sour straws that her lunch date had brought. Charlotte loved sour straws; they all did. Standing up to get a better look over the other children who were now standing, too, Emma saw that it was the big kind of bag—the one that cost two dollars at Million Dollar Deli.
The disparity of their desserts was beyond anything Emma could have imagined. Blinking back tears, she put a raisin in her mouth, chewed, and swallowed—repeating the process until the gross, sticky box was empty, her disgust rendered bearable by the feeling that struck in situations of unfairness: a feeling that her life was a movie and the audience was God, and a faith in knowing her grace and fortitude in this moment would not go unnoticed.
* * *
AT WINTHROP, PARENTS—SPECIFICALLY MOTHERS—WERE expected to volunteer at various school functions, something that never would have happened during Laura’s era. She signed up for the book fair. The day of the event Emma woke up with a fever, and Laura wondered if this meant she could get out of it. As a single parent it seemed like a valid excuse—but would it mean she’d be reassigned to the Strawberry Shortcake Festival, in which volunteers were expected to wear festive hats and aprons? It wasn’t worth the risk. She bundled Emma up and delivered her to 136 so Sandra could watch her and then headed back uptown to report for her shift.
Stepping into the gymnasium, Laura was relieved the event fell on a day Emma was absent. She was appalled to discover that, in addition to books, the fair included tables full of the kind of junk that was marketed to young children: Disney coloring books, Care Bear placemats, stickers featuring meaninglessly extravagant positive affirmations: SPECIAL KID, A NUMBER ONE, THE SKY IS THE LIMIT, YOU ARE THE BEST. Most upsetting were the dolls and stuffed animals whose cartoonish likenesses to various beloved characters from children’s literature—Curious George, Winnie-the-Pooh, dear old Eloise—struck Laura as sacrilegious.
She had promised to buy Emma a new book at the fair, but she couldn’t bring herself to support this kind of shameless marketing event. On her way to 136 to retrieve Emma, she stopped at the Corner Bookstore, where she’d been a loyal customer for years and was friendly with the staff. As Laura opened the front door, she looked forward to telling whoever was on duty about the table full of junk at the book fair (they would surely share her opinion), but the man who greeted her wasn’t a face she knew.
“Welcome,” he said from behind the counter. “Can I help you find something?”
“Oh, no,” Laura told him. “I know where everything is, I’ve been coming here for years.”
The attendant clearly hadn’t been trained in the ways of the Corner Bookstore, which was to leave customers alone.
“Are you looking for anything particular today?” he asked, hovering by Laura in the kids’ section.
“Just a book for my six-year-old.”
“These are very popular.” He gestured to a display table featuring a collection of books about professionally talented children, with real photographs: A Very Young Rider, A Very Young Dancer, A Very Young Gymnast, A Very Young Circus Flyer, and A Very Young Actress.
After picking one of the books up, Laura promptly put it back down. Emma needed no help when it came to nursing grandiose visions of her future, which already included the Olympics and The Nutcracker.
Laura continued to survey her options, but the man’s solicitous, shadowy presence made it impossible for her to concentrate on finding something for Emma. Eventually she gave up and bought The Little House. They already owned a copy, but she would give it to Stephanie, who’d just announced she was pregnant.
* * *
LAURA HADN’T KNOWN HER GREAT-UNCLE Bert in a personal way. His service was dry and impersonal, and when she’d asked her parents about him as they drove to the cemetery, Bibs had summed him up as “a jerk and an anti-Semite,” and Douglas had affirmed this with his silence.
The cemetery was adjacent to a golf course in the Connecticut suburb where Bert had moved with his third and final wife, who’d ended up leaving him for a local politician.
About two dozen relatives had now been gathered for nearly forty minutes around the plot of earth where Bert was to be buried. It was only one o’clock, but the late October light cast a brassy glaze over everything, and this made it seem more like three or four. They were cold and hungry, restless and bored, but there was no going anywhere until the hearse arrived. That it was late made no sense—it had been the first vehicle to pull out of the church parking lot, then raced ahead to make a yellow light, losing the rest of the procession. Where it was now was anyone’s guess.
Emma kept herself entertained by crawling around digging in the dirt. Her dress would have permanent grass stains, but that was a small price to pay for the miracle of her not complaining or creating a scene.
When a full hou
r had passed Douglas tapped Laura on the shoulder. “We’re going to quietly take off,” he whispered. “Your mother is feeling faint with hunger and fatigue.”
“I think that would be a little selfish of us,” Laura whispered back, “considering no one wants to be here.”
Douglas didn’t dispute this, but discreetly gestured toward Bibs, who was walking with strident conviction toward the car.
“I’ll try to reason with her,” Laura said.
By the time she caught up to her mother, Bibs was opening the passenger-side door.
“We’re leaving,” she said, climbing in. “That’s that, end of story, and don’t try to talk him out of it.”
“I think it’s a little rude for the four of us to bow out now,” Laura said, holding the door ajar.
Bibs rubbed her pearls between her fingers. “That’s why we decided you and Emma will stay on,” she said, putting on her dark glasses. “You can take the train home.”
“I see,” Laura said.
“Dickie will drop you off at the station,” Douglas said as he approached. “The train comes twenty-four minutes after the hour, every hour. Let me give you some cash for the tickets.”
“I have cash,” Laura said meekly as Douglas pulled out his wallet. She did, enough for two train tickets, though not enough—she realized—to stop for dinner at Jackson Hole on the way home, as she’d promised Emma as part of a deal they’d struck the night before in exchange for her coming to Connecticut.
Douglas held out a hundred-dollar bill. When Laura looked reluctant to take it, he licked his finger and procured another.
“Oh, don’t be such a Puritan,” Bibs said when Laura shook her head and slid her hands into her pockets.
“I insist you take this,” Douglas said, looking genuinely cross when Laura continued to hold her ground.
“Darling.” Bibs tried softening her tone. “It’s not fair to make us abandon you up here with no money.”
Laura’s instinct to defuse, appease, indulge, and absolve did not kick in. Her resolve only hardened. To refuse the money was to withhold what her parents expected in exchange—something Laura so readily and routinely provided that she was unaware it had any currency. But in this moment it felt like the most valuable thing she had. The only thing she had.
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