Laura & Emma

by Kate Greathead

  “That’s fine,” Laura said absently.

  “You know why, Mom?” Emma lingered in the doorway. Hands folded across her chest, she waited until she had her mother’s full concentration. “I want to read instead. Because I like books more than TV.”

  Emma’s tongue explored the interior of her cheek. She looked down, dragging her toe along a groove between the kitchen tiles.

  The declaration caught Laura by surprise, and something in her went slack with tenderness. A dish slipped from the rubbery grip of her yellow gloves, sliding back into the soapy water of the sink.

  * * *

  MARGARET AND LAURA WERE INVITED to a private salon held at the apartment of Winthrop parents.

  “He’s even more handsome in person,” Catherine Poe, a fellow Winthrop alum and the host of the event, whispered as she took their coats.

  The featured guest was an author who had recently published a bestselling novel, the kind of book everyone they knew was reading. Laura didn’t need to read it to know it was trash. She could tell from the cover: two pairs of feet and rumpled bedsheets. The author himself looked like he’d just emerged from an afternoon in a hotel room, with his tousled hair, slap-happy grin, and dress shirt unbuttoned one louche button too many. Laura guessed he was forty-five or fifty.

  As he read the first chapter—a handsome high school English teacher, trapped in a stale marriage, receives an anonymous love letter—Laura was reminded of someone, but she couldn’t think of who until Margaret leaned over to whisper, “He reminds me of Mr. Zinsser.”

  Mr. Zinsser—their tenth-grade English teacher, an anomaly on the Winthrop faculty. He’d had sideburns, wore tight-fitting black turtlenecks, and often ended class by reciting his own poetry. Everyone professed to be in love with Mr. Zinsser, and Laura spent class after class staring at him, trying to nurture the appropriate feelings.

  One afternoon she was gathering her books to leave when Mr. Zinsser asked her to stay behind. She assumed he wanted to discuss her marks (English had always been her strongest subject, but she’d been unfocused recently), but this wasn’t the case. He wanted to talk about the way Laura looked at him in class.

  “It’s not the way a student is supposed to look at a teacher,” were his exact words.

  Laura’s panic must have shown, because Mr. Zinsser immediately followed this with a confession: he didn’t think of her the way a teacher should think of a student, either. Laura didn’t know what to say to this. He proposed they continue their conversation that evening, outside of school, and wrote down an address on a note card.

  Laura knew she should be flattered, that this was validation of the highest order, but the prospect of meeting up with Mr. Zinsser, alone and outside of school, gave her a stomachache. She told her mother, in hopes that she might forbid her. But Bibs got very excited and insisted she wear lipstick and carry a comb in her pocketbook, as her hair sometimes looked limp.

  The address turned out to be Mr. Zinsser’s apartment. After taking Laura’s coat, he pointed to a couch and told her to make herself comfortable, then disappeared into the kitchen. The couch was leather and there wasn’t any friction between its slick surface and the seat of Laura’s skirt, and in the process of trying to make herself comfortable she kept sliding around, like she was in the back of a taxicab. Mr. Zinsser returned with two glasses of white wine. He handed one to Laura and sat down beside her.

  After a moment of not saying anything, Mr. Zinsser reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear and said, “Hi.” Laura said hi back, and took a long sip of wine. Mr. Zinsser did the same. Then he leaned over and kissed Laura on the lips, and while this had been the thing she was dreading, now that it was happening it was a relief, because she was no longer embarrassed or afraid; she wasn’t anything. She felt nothing.

  After a few minutes of kissing, Mr. Zinsser pulled back and asked if she wanted to go to his bedroom. Laura apologized and said no, thank you, she had to go home. To her relief, Mr. Zinsser didn’t protest, and he never asked her back again.

  The author was a teacher himself, a professor at Sarah Lawrence. He brought this up during the Q&A, by way of explaining why it would be a few years before his next book came out.

  “Sadly,” he said with a roguish smile, “even a bestseller does not preclude one from needing a day job.” The room laughed, and a moment later he added, “And of course I love teaching. I learn a lot from my students.”

  When the questions ended, the waitstaff circulated among the guests with hors d’oeuvres. Catherine corralled Laura and Margaret into a conversation with the author, who was gushing about a novel that would be coming out next month, and which he predicted would be the next big thing, so much so that they might consider selecting it for their next salon.

  “The author is very modest,” he said, “so I better stop talking about it, as here she comes now.”

  A woman Laura had not noticed earlier insinuated herself into their circle. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or -six, tops. Her hair was an artificial shade of red and she wore too much eye makeup. In spite of this, she was strikingly beautiful.

  The author was quite taken with himself and emotionally immature. He didn’t interest or impress Laura in the slightest. But this woman he was with—there was something unusual and fascinating about her. Her name was Elise and she did not smile when he introduced her to the group, though she did repeat each person’s name after it was told to her, with a self-possessed confidence that was vaguely masculine. Laura couldn’t tell if she was British, or simply spoke with an affect. Beneath her black, formfitting dress she wore scuffed black boots. Men’s boots, the kind a soldier would wear.

  When the author excused himself to get a drink, he looped his arm around Elise’s lower back, taking her with him.

  Laura glanced at Margaret, but she was already exchanging a knowing look with Catherine. Laura’s gaze drifted back to the couple as they made their way to the bar, and focused on the author’s arm, just below which the shifting contours of the woman’s backside strained against its tight, silken container.

  * * *

  IN SECOND GRADE EMMA STILL requested the occasional picture book for bedtime reading, but for the most part they had graduated to chapter books. Laura was on the chapter in Little Women in which Jo meets a homely professor when Emma tapped her on the shoulder to deliver the following information: “In the olden days it was against the law to get pregnant unless you got married first.”

  “Was it,” Laura said, and went back to reading.

  A page later Emma interrupted again. “Are they going to do it?”

  “Do what?” Laura asked.

  “It.” Emma sniggered.

  “What is ‘it’?”

  Emma covered her mouth with her hand as she laughed again. “S-E-X,” she whispered.

  Laura rested the book on her lap. Dr. Brown’s book had highlighted the anatomical function of certain body parts without explicitly spelling out the mechanics. They had yet to have the traditional facts-of-life conversation.

  “Do you remember that book we used to read,” she asked, “A Very Special—”

  “I know this, Mom,” Emma cut her off. “I’m in second grade.”

  “You know what?”

  “What you’re going to tell me.” Emma tugged at a loose thread on her quilt. “A man sticks his ding-dong in a woman’s vagina, a seed comes out, and that’s how a woman gets pregnant.”

  “That’s the conventional way to get pregnant,” Laura said. “How most women do it. But there are some women—”

  “No duh, Mom,” Emma interrupted. “You would never let a man stick his sausage in your vagina.”

  “Sausage?” Laura repeated. She’d never heard it called that before and hated to think where Emma had picked it up.

  “I came from a seed you got from Sweden.” Emma spoke these words with casual indifference. “I’m Swedish, that’s why I have blond hair, no duh.”

  “Where did you hea
r that?” Laura asked. She was dumbfounded.

  Emma’s gaze briefly met Laura’s then returned to the loose thread, which she was coiling around the tip of her finger.

  “Bibs,” Laura said. “Bibs told you that.”

  Emma shrugged and puffed her cheeks out.

  “How old were you when she told you?”

  Another shrug.

  “I never told anyone,” Emma said in a baby voice. “She said it was a secret, that you’d get mad at her if you knew she told me.”

  “What else did Bibs tell you?” Laura asked, tucking a lock of hair behind Emma’s ear.

  “That Swedish is the best country in the world to be from.” Emma looked at Laura, her forehead lined in worry. “Mama, please don’t get mad at her.”

  “Have you ever seen me get mad at Bibs?” Laura asked.

  Emma thought for a moment and shook her head.

  “That’s because it doesn’t do anything. I know you love Bibs very much, and she loves you very much, but she doesn’t always think about how her behavior or decisions affect others.”

  Laura took Emma’s hand in her own. “I’m so sorry she told you all this, darling—and then asked you to keep it a secret. How unfair of her. It must have been so confusing.”

  “Nope.” Emma shook her head. “Ever since I got Kirsten . . .”

  She got out of bed and picked up one of her American Girl Dolls. Part of the brand’s appeal was that each doll represented a different era of American history and came with a unique backstory. Kirsten’s family had emigrated from Sweden, hence her brass-button cardigan sweater ($19.95).

  “Ever since I got Kirsten,” Emma continued, climbing back in, “I always had this feeling I was Swedish.”

  * * *

  AFTER A FEW WEEKS OF headaches and dizzy spells, Bibs had gone in to see her doctor. Some tests were run, and the results were not good. She was scheduled to have surgery with the top neurosurgeon at Beth Israel the following morning. Douglas reported all of this to Laura over the phone.

  “Where are you now?” Laura asked.

  “We just got home,” Douglas told her. “She’s upstairs resting. Maybe you could stop by after work.”

  Laura stood up and put on her coat. Then she sat back down and dialed Nicholas.

  “I won’t be able to leave the office until four,” he told her. “But I just talked to Stephanie and she’s on her way over.”

  Stephanie got there first. When Laura arrived, the baby was asleep in his stroller parked beside the umbrella stand. Nicholas Jr., not yet a year, was a large and indolent baby, much like Emma had been. Laura had yet to see him in the same outfit. Today he wore a smocked one-piece with a Peter Pan collar embroidered with sailboats, a matching blue cardigan, white kneesocks, and red sandals with brass buckles.

  As Laura gently removed a Cheerio stuck to his cheek, he stirred. Eyes barely open, he drowsily groped between his legs, where there were more Cheerios. After securing one, he brought it up to his mouth. Nostrils flared, he chewed it slowly with his front teeth, the only ones he had. After swallowing he reached for another, but his eyelids shuttered and his head went slack before he managed to retrieve it.

  Stephanie was sitting in the armchair beside her mother’s bed, sipping a Diet Coke and giggling.

  “You think I’m kidding,” Bibs was saying. “I’m not. One day I looked in the mirror and I saw the beginnings of a beard, and I thought, oh no, uh-uh, not this face. And so I covered my chin in cold cream, and I picked up Douglas’s razor, and I”—Bibs mimed the gesture. Spotting Laura, she smiled and patted the mattress.

  “I was just telling Stephanie that my biggest fear isn’t death, it’s what I’ll look like should I become a vegetable. I’m entrusting you two with my skin-care routine, which includes something I’ve never told anyone I do but is part of the reason my skin is so smooth for a woman my age.” She took Laura’s hand and pressed it to her cheek.

  “It’s very smooth,” Laura said.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Bibs said. “It’s because once a week I shave my face with your father’s razor. He doesn’t know.

  “It’s on the shelf in the medicine cabinet,” she said, pointing to the bathroom. “What do you think? Do you think you’d be able to do that for me?”

  Laura nodded.

  “It wouldn’t be a little weird for you, psychologically?”

  Laura smiled. “I think I can handle it.”

  “Excuse me while I go downstairs and make a phone call,” Stephanie said.

  “You can use that one,” Bibs said, pointing to her bedside table.

  Stephanie looked flustered. “I don’t want to disturb you. I should also throw this away.” She held up the empty can of Diet Coke.

  Stephanie left the room. She wanted to let the two of them be alone, Laura realized.

  “Look at the man dangling from a tree,” Bibs said, pointing to the garden. “What do you think he’s doing?”

  Laura got up and walked over to the window. In the garden behind their garden, a man was suspended in a harness attached to a tree. He was holding some kind of instrument that looked like a saw.

  “Tree maintenance,” Laura said.

  “What?”

  “He’s cutting a branch off.”

  The branch looked fine, though. She wondered if it was for aesthetic reasons.

  Laura watched the man saw through the branch until it gave.

  “Oh, darling, don’t cry,” Bibs said tenderly. “I don’t know what Daddy told you, but there’s nothing to worry about.”

  Laura continued to stand by the window, facing the other way.

  “Nothing, nothing, nothing, and I absolutely mean it. I’ve got the best doctor in all of New York City—he performs this sort of procedure all the time.”

  Laura nodded.

  “You should see his hands—he’s got the fingers of a penis!”

  “A what?” Laura knew her mother had deliberately misspoken, but feigned amused dismay as she turned to look at her.

  “A pianist.” Bibs smiled her mischievous smile. “What did you think I said?”

  * * *

  LAURA COULDN’T REMEMBER HER GREAT-GRANDFATHER Hendon, but she would never forget his funeral. At six, she was old enough to recognize the solemnity of the occasion and was thus understandably embarrassed when, in the middle of the service, something had struck her mother as amusing and she began to giggle. Unable to compose herself, Bibs had gotten on all fours and crawled out of the pew and down the aisle.

  “Suffice it to say,” Laura told the congregation, “if you feel the urge to laugh at any point during this service, please go ahead—my mother would have loved it.”

  A polite echo of titters was pierced by a shrill sob in the first pew. It came from Emma, whose periodic fits of audible grief were amplified by the acoustics of the church.

  Douglas, on the other hand, seemed to be taking everything in from a lighthearted remove. When Laura and Emma had shown up at 136 that morning to accompany him to the funeral, he’d looked at his watch and said, “I suppose we shouldn’t wait any longer for your mother,” and laughed to himself. At the conclusion of the service, he turned around to survey the crowd and chuckled, “We should’ve booked Madison Square Garden.” There were indeed a lot of people in attendance. As they processed down the aisle, Laura looked up and saw that the balcony was full, too.

  Emma’s tears abated when she laid eyes on the vehicle Stephanie had ordered to take them to the Library, where the reception would take place.

  “Is this a stretch limo?” she sniffled as they climbed in.

  After taking a seat, Emma smoothed the skirt of her black velvet dress, one of several outrageously priced dresses she’d brought home after spending an afternoon with Bibs the previous winter. Laura had told Emma she could keep one, but Emma had bargained her up to two. The rest went in the children’s bin of a local donation center. Laura felt a little guilty about this now.

  “Are we in a stretch
limo?” Emma asked again when the question went ignored.

  “I guess it is,” Laura said. She reached out to squeeze the plump kneecap of Nicholas Jr., who sat in his father’s lap. When he smiled she did it again.

  “That was quite the turnout,” Stephanie remarked as they cruised down Fifth.

  “The minister told me it was the largest one he’d ever seen,” Nicholas said.

  “I feel bad for baby Nick,” Emma said, looking forlornly at her cousin. “When he grows up, he won’t even remember Bibs.”

  As they pulled up to the Library, Stephanie let out a gasp. “We forgot your father!”

  “He wanted to walk,” Laura and Nicholas said in unison.

  “Walk?” Stephanie repeated, perplexed. “But that’s a long walk—the reception might be over by the time he gets here!”

  “I think that’s the point,” Laura told her.

  They’d reserved the East Hall, the largest room in the Library, and within minutes of their arrival it was packed. Only a fraction of the guests were people Laura recognized, but they all wanted to talk to her. They hovered about waiting for an opportunity to jump in and introduce themselves, compliment her eulogy, share their Bibs anecdote, and then utter the embarrassing phrase: So sorry for your loss. That Bibs had scores of fans was no surprise, but Laura was struck by how many claimed Bibs was their best friend—their primary confidante.

  They weren’t all Upper East Side socialites, either. A handful of her mother’s doctors were in attendance, along with Frank, her florist; several store clerks; Bill, her favorite London Towncar driver; a pair of waiters from Claude’s; and of course, Jean-Paul, who had refused payment for his final, unscheduled bedside visits to touch up her roots. Several nurses she’d only met in her final month were also there—people with hourly wages who had taken off work to attend.

  Though her mother had been socially promiscuous, this didn’t delegitimize the love others had for her. For the most part Laura was touched and proud. But there was also the occasional spasm of a painful thought: If a life is measured by the affection one earned, where would that leave her?