After lunch, she led us through a relaxation exercise: “Heads down, arms limp … let them go limp … cheeks right down on the desk.” Mrs. K. walked the rows in her wedgie heels—of course I peeked—and counted backward from one hundred. One day, when she had reached the single digits, she knelt beside me and lifted my wrist, taking from my damp fingers a small hair fastener. Then ever so gently she let go of my hand and watched to see if it would drop, if I had given up the last bit of muscle tension under the soothing patter of her voice. I tried to flatten my face to the desk with convincing torpor, but when she let go, my wrist floated down to the wood—a balletic gesture of lassitude—and gave me away.
“Really, honey, you can relax,” Mrs. Kelber whispered.
As it turned out, I would get only a small taste of Mrs. K.‘s gentling presence. A few months into the school year, I would move to Oregon. Gardening and substitute teaching had kept my mother occupied for a while, but she was only a few units shy of a teaching credential and itching for a classroom to call her own. The University of Oregon was the nearest school to offer the courses she needed. As it turned out, some old friends from Cambridge were living in Eugene, and offered to let us stay with them. We would be gone for six months, and though Mother tried to make this sound brief, I know it was hard for her to leave our sleepy town, and most of all to leave her husband. (Sometime thereabouts she and Jim went to the courthouse and made it official—no fanfare, no fuss, since they’d been calling themselves married since they arrived in the valley.) I don’t think my mother ever considered leaving me with Jim; the graft was too new. He stayed in the valley, tending ditch and patching up the apartments.
Joyce and Albert Curly, my mother’s friends, had moved from Boston to the outskirts of Eugene, part of the wave that had carried my parents west. Albert was an architect; each Christmas, in lieu of the typical foil card, he sent out an elaborate pen-and-ink rendering of the family dwelling, reproduced on stiff white paper. These cards had come to us at 12000 Spring Street, and for years I believed the Curlys lived in a castle—flying buttresses, a moat, stone parapets, the whole medieval works. On the cards, the Curly family would be marching across the drawbridge, knees lifted high, playing trumpet and flute, their faces thrown up toward the sun. Each year, a new banner unfurled from a turret, bearing a Christmas greeting along its length in Albert’s matchstick printing.
On the drive up to Eugene, Mother told me stories about the Curlys’ son, Ivan, whom I apparently adored in our days back in Boston. Soon I was convinced I remembered him, and imagined us cavorting around the castle grounds, fishing for trout in the moat.
When we rumbled into the Curlys’ driveway, my spirits sank. We crossed not a moat but a small creek, spanned by a split-log bridge. Up ahead was the house, an unassuming two-story wood-frame set back from the road. Joyce came out to embrace my mother, and Ivan followed, hanging back like a perfect stranger when we were introduced. Together, they showed us around the place. There would be no palace suite. The Curlys were already pressed for room. Mother and I would sleep in the mail truck at night and would use the house to cook and take showers. Mother tried to put a bright face on things, but I could tell she was worried we were straining her old friends’ hospitality.
Soon after we arrived, I was enrolled at Ivan’s school. Mother walked me to the doorway of my new classroom, and there, in the face of all those strange children, I took stock of myself. I was wearing a fringed poncho and saddle shoes; my hair hung rattily over my shoulders (I kicked up a fuss when anyone tried to brush it). My front teeth were gone. Under my arm I clutched a cigar box covered with red velvet, which held my folded store of writing paper.
Mrs. Rhone, the teacher, assigned me to sit next to a boy with fat cheeks and a bristle cut.
“Don’t you have a binder?” he asked as I sat down, pulling back at arm’s length as if the lack of one were contagious.
On the drive home from school, I asked Albert if he could get me a binder. He had a front pocket full of mechanical pencils, and I figured he was my best hope for office supplies. “Sure thing,” he promised, writing a note to himself on a sheaf of papers moldering on the dash. Albert had a halo of frizzy black hair and addressed himself to a patch of air above my head. Despite his drafting skills and his dream of living in a castle, he didn’t seem to spend much time improving on the real house—shoring up the sagging front porch, say, or doing a thorough cleaning. Albert, I would learn over the months of our stay, was good for highly specific tasks. He could dig a sliver out of your foot without letting you once feel the needle. He made excellent Halloween costumes. Other than that, he moved in a private fog.
The binder, of course, never materialized, and I suffered minor humiliations during any class exercise that required us to use lined paper. Sometime during that first week, Mrs. Rhone asked us each to write a paragraph describing our bedroom. I thought about the back of the mail truck: the fold-down bed where Mother and I slept, the ping of rain on the metal roof, the spidery lines of black caulking on the skylight, and the wink of stars beyond. There was much I loved about these familiars, but I was getting the idea it wasn’t wise to share them. Instead, I took a note from Albert and conjured myself a bedroom out of Sears, Roebuck: twin beds with ruffled shams, a two-story dollhouse, a chest of toys at the foot of the bed. When I’d imagined the room down to the style of night-light, I slid my hand into the desk and pulled a sheet from its velvety compartment, working under the lid to smooth the crease.
“Whatcha doing in there?” my seatmate asked, leaning his face close to mine. He flipped my desk open. “Look! Hippie girl keeps her paper in a box!” He turned to the kids beside us for appreciation.
My cheeks flushed hot. That box was a gift from my mother. She bought a cigar box from a tobacconist in Cambridge and covered it inside and out with old dress velvet. It had come west in the mail truck, gathering a pattern of watermarks and grease, the lid slowly sagging inward. Battered as it was, I loved that thing. Now it caused me a turmoil of loyalty. To join in the shrill laughter, to make a show of throwing the box out, would betray my mother’s thoughtfulness, and yet part of me blamed her for sending me into the world without the proper equipment.
In the end, I did nothing. I waited for the kids to shut up and never mentioned the teasing to my mother. She looked pale to me, and tired. Her days were spent under some old boor whose first concern was how to keep students tame and quiet. She wasn’t learning anything, I heard her tell Joyce; she was biding her time. If she could stand it, so could I.
I came out of the blocks badly at Twin Oaks, and I never recovered my stride. Mrs. Rhone moved me all over the room in search of a friendly zone, but the class had closed ranks. Finally, she gave up. “I don’t know where else to put you,” she told me, holding her palms up in front of her, as if to prove that she had nothing to offer. What bothered me, more than the knowledge that she couldn’t save me, was the note of reproach that crept into her voice. She hadn’t just given up; she held me responsible. I looked in her face and saw a shadow of the hardened fright I saw in my classmates.
In hindsight, I feel for Mrs. Rhone. In her very own classroom, her private domain, I made her feel powerless. She held the pointer and could glare us into silence, but over the deeper workings of the classroom she had no say. The more she favored me, the more it worked to my disadvantage, and once she saw this she withdrew behind tented eyebrows and a stiff smile. When Mrs. Rhone swiveled in front of the class, going on about Pilgrims or fractions or parts of speech, her eyes passed right over me. I kept my head down and my hand in my desk, smoothing it back and forth over the cool velvet.
By the end of the first week at Twin Oaks, I was overcome by fatigue. After school, I went into the Curlys’ house and climbed the ladder to the loft above the living room. Joyce had filled the room with oversize pillows, and I lay in their soothing jumble and stared out the round attic window at the crown of the plum tree outside.
Once, I had wandered out bar
efoot under the tree, thinking that I might climb up to the sweetest plums, which grew on the high limbs, out of arm’s reach. But when I neared the trunk, rotten fruit mashed up between my toes. I froze there, unwilling to take another step, and after a while I became absorbed in the view: the grassy slope from the house to the creek, where a serrated line of saplings clung to the bank, and the sheer face of the cliff on the far side, stiff as a cardboard cutout. The wind picked up and beat the grass into long silvery waves, and one minute it seemed to me that the grass was moving under invisible fingers, and then suddenly there seemed to be no wind, only the grass rippling of its own volition, a carpet of green cilia waving away.
I stood there for a long time with my arms outstretched before I realized what I was waiting for: someone to lift me up over those land mines in the grass and carry me to the porch. At seven, I still had the occasional faith that my wishes would go out into the world and summon aid. When I saw that no one was coming, I turned and picked my way back to the house, tiptoeing gingerly on the balls of my feet, wincing when I hit another windfall plum, my hands out and shoulders up like some ghoul in a cheap horror film.
My friend Ivan was an odd boy, skinny and gentle, with a narrow face and a high-pitched voice. Normally he was very calm and had his head bent over a Tintin comic, but certain things distressed him: cats dead by the side of the road, having his hair cut. When he cried, the tendons stood out in his neck like fiddle strings.
On the playground at Twin Oaks, he and I pretended not to recognize each other, but at home we were inseparable. We ducked into the woods behind the house, scanning nervously for the mountain lions that Ivan said roamed there in great packs. Or we played with his cast, the remnant of a broken arm he’d sustained the previous summer. He’d made the orthopedist glue the thing back together, named it Casty, and played medieval war games with it, smiting dragons and the like.
Once, Ivan and I made a bed-sheet and broomstick flag and marched back and forth across the bridge crying, “Ethiopia!” which roused our mothers to the porch. This was less a protest than a howl of delight. We had captured the passion but little of the meaning of the rallies we had been to back east. Ivan and I kept up our march for a good half-hour, kicking up a trail of dust along the driveway, chanting those strange and pleasing syllables, our voices echoing up the canyon.
It was in the same spirit of rebellion that one night, when the Curlys were having a party, Ivan and I gathered up all the cigarettes in the house and flushed them down the toilet. It took quite a few tanks to wash them down, and eventually someone knocked on the door and asked what we were up to. We were too proud of our efforts to lock anybody out. A few bloated cigarettes circled in the bowl. Our mothers appeared in the doorway, looking mortified. Ivan pointed to the pile of crumpled wrappers. “Cigarettes give you cancer,” he said.
We thought they would thank us. We thought they would gather around and applaud us for pointing out the error of their ways. Instead, our allowances were docked for a few months, and we had to go around and hand-deliver restitution to the guests.
I came to dread the school week, rising early in the dark mail truck and sprinting through the rain into the house, where Mother made me oatmeal. I watched her back as she filled the pan at the sink. The kitchen was quiet, Ivan and Joyce and Albert still asleep in their rooms. The burner made a low flap and lit my mother’s hands with a blue light. While she stirred, I willed her with every muscle and tendon to ask me how I was feeling. I tried to beg her with my face: ask me. She brought me a steaming bowl and sat down.
Suddenly, I see those months as my mother might have lived them. Twenty-eight years old, trying for my sake not to show her loneliness, waking on those rainy mornings in the mail truck and missing her husband’s bulk beside her. She would rise to pick out my clothes and make the oatmeal, to stir in someone else’s chilled kitchen, thinking of what?
I felt her moods the way you feel along a wall in the dark: all texture and no edges. She dropped me off at school in the morning and then she was gone—gone from the world—until she drove up again at the curb to meet me. And gone, too, when she turned over at night to sleep in the wrack of her own dreams.
But the past keeps changing, and over time something has shifted in that dawn-smudged kitchen of twenty years ago. I have made us companions in our solitude. When I think of us now, I imagine us sitting together over steaming bowls of oatmeal, both of us waiting for the light to rise.
I came home from Twin Oaks looking glum often enough that in the end my mother didn’t need to ask. She decided to try me out at the Montessori school across town. Ivan had gone there a few years before, but the fees had finally squeezed the Curlys’ slender budget too tightly, and he had returned to public school. Now Joyce decided that we might as well go together.
Our first day at Montessori, Ivan and I were assigned to the same class. I was grateful to have him near me as our mothers walked us to the classroom. He looked half terrified, and his weakness was a comfort; it meant I didn’t need to feign toughness.
The school building was shaped like a stop sign, with the rooms fanning off a central hub. The inside walls were glass, and through them I could see kids gathered around low tables, doing art projects. It seemed like a nice enough place. But when our mothers steered us through the classroom door, Ivan took one look at the teacher and began to cry.
“I don’t want to be in his class,” he wailed, trying to scoot past Joyce toward the door. He must have recognized the teacher from his previous stint at the school.
“This is your class, Ive. You’ve got to settle down,” Joyce said. Joyce was always reasonable. She had long, tapered fingers and never raised her voice. But Ivan was beyond reason; he was hysterical. He pushed against his mother’s stomach, crying, “No, no, no!” He lost traction on the floor and slid to his knees, curled over like a supplicant. The teacher stood perfectly still, watching this display.
At last Joyce relented, shrugging an apology at the class. Ivan was led out, sniffling, and taken to another classroom. No one offered to rescue me, and I didn’t have the nerve to pitch a fit myself. I took my seat and faced my new teacher, a dour man with muttonchops and slicked-back hair, who inspired fits of terror on sight.
From then on, I would see Ivan only in the lunchroom. We ate at long tables covered with waxed Formica, which caught the foggy light slipping in through the dormer windows. Montessori was supposed to be gentler than public school, but the teachers kept a strict discipline during mealtime. We bent our heads quietly, and my teacher, Mr. Frick, who I soon learned was also the school principal, walked along the center aisle with a ruler to slap the hands of chatterers. After lunch, foodservice workers passed out dishes of sliced carrots. This was dessert. In time, I came to appreciate the carrot’s humble sweetness. I pressed my sliver against the roof of my mouth, savoring it, trying to see how long it would last.
In the afternoons, we studied science. Mr. Frick held up a cotton plant. “Who can tell me about the boll weevil?” he asked the class. “Lisa?”
I had never seen a cotton plant, but at this point I was becoming familiar with bewilderment—that feeling that I’d been dropped into a conversation midstream. Life seemed to be always in media res. If I was to catch up, I figured I had better start bluffing.
“The ball weaver makes the cotton into yam,” I said, trying for a note of confidence.
Mr. Frick looked like he’d been slapped. He knew I was a mediocre student, but it hadn’t occurred to him that I might be a smart aleck. When I saw him give me that shrewd, appraising look, I knew I had gotten it wrong, badly wrong. So much for pluck. Mr. Frick took a deep breath and assumed an expression I would come to know well: with patience and strength I will suffer the little idiots. He never called on me again.
Once I was pegged as a slow learner, my fortunes improved. I was sent to work with Shelly, the tutor, who became a beacon of light in my day. Shelly spoke gently, the way people talk to horses, and she put her hand
on my back sometimes when I asked a question. For the hour that she went over borrowing and long division, my shoulders would slowly come down from around my ears.
One morning, when the autumn cloud cover broke unexpectedly, Mr. Frick told us we would hold P.E. outside. “You’re all looking a touch pale,” he said. It took me a moment to recognize the rictus that split his face. Mr. Frick was smiling. “How about we jump rope?”
A cheer went up in the classroom.
When the bell rang, we filed out to the damp parking lot. Mr. Frick followed, lugging a canvas sack, which he untied, pulling out a long rope. “Chuck, Peter, why don’t you each take an end?”
I waited for the shorter, individual ropes to emerge from the sack, but they never appeared. The boys got the long rope swinging, and the rest of the class made a line, waiting to jump in. I had no intention of trying this game for the first time, but I got jostled into place, and the line forced me forward. The rope made a vehement thwack on the wet asphalt, which got louder and louder, and then the girl in front of me peeled off, and I was up.
“Go!” said the girl behind me. I held my hands out, mimicking the approach and retreat of the rope, while the kids behind me shouted, “Now! Now!” I was paralyzed, rooted to the spot.
“You can go ahead,” I said to the girl behind me. I melted back into the line, farther and farther, and then slipped between two parked cars and squatted down, hoping Mr. Frick had missed my exit. I would have found it pleasant to daydream back there if I hadn’t been worried that I’d be discovered and hauled out. For most of the hour I played with my hair in the shine of a hubcap, prepared to say, if anyone found me, that I was looking for something I’d lost.
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