Hold Still

by Lynn Steger Strong

  “I’m not going to pursue charges, Maya. I don’t want her to be locked up her whole life.” Maya’s knuckles ache, they hold so tightly to her phone. “She didn’t …” Annie says. “We’re all culpable, Maya, you and me much more than her.”

  Summer 2011

  Ellie’s last day in New York, she comes home to the sound of her mom in her office, rifling through papers, doing whatever it is she does with all her books. She thinks of listening to the lock turn when she and Ben were small. It’s an old door. There was no mistaking the sound of the large bolt creaking. And they all had to pretend their mom hadn’t done it on purpose, that she wasn’t terrified suddenly of her own kids. Sometimes, when their dad was home, when Ben and Ellie were upstairs and he didn’t think that they could hear him, he would yell straight through the door. He’d hiss awful things at her. “You pathetic child,” he’d say. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” They never heard the things their mom said back to him. Though Ellie guessed that she was silent. Whatever her mom felt or thought, she pulled it in, like Ellie, rather than throw it back out into the world.

  “El.”

  She jumps. They’ve hardly spoken since the trip was scheduled. Ellie has a plane ticket for the next morning. She still can’t believe how quickly her mom has managed to do away with her.

  “Come in here?” her mother says.

  Ellie stays still at the threshold of her mom’s office. She looks at all the shelves, full to overflowing, the papers a mess over her desk.

  Her mom turns her chair so that she’s facing Ellie. Ellie looks along the shelves, then briefly at her mom. She is only accidentally pretty, Ellie’s mother. She wears her hair pulled back most of the time and hardly any makeup. A lot of the time, she sort of looks just like a mom. She looks tired and her skin is worn from all that sun she got growing up in Florida, the hours she spends running almost every day all year. But then Ellie will catch her from a certain angle, she’ll be smiling just a little, or her nose will scrunch in approval, usually over something Benny says, and Ellie will think she has a very lovely mother, she’ll wish they were the sort of mom and daughter that she could tell her this.

  “When you were really little,” her mom says. She crosses her arms over her chest.

  Ellie wants to stop her. She doesn’t want some lesson or consolation. But when she turns to see her mom’s face, looking straight ahead and tight from jaw to temple, she stays quiet and lets her talk. “When you were just born,” her mom says. “You slept every night on my chest for months.” Her mom smiles, looking down into her shirt. “Just your skin and my skin and that tiny diaper. I thought everything good in the whole world had something to do with what it felt like to hold you like that.” Ellie’s not sure she wants to hear this. She’s not sure where to fit it in with all her other thoughts about her mom. “But then, you know, you got bigger and your dad was going a little crazy with you in the bed every night. I wasn’t really sleeping. And someone told us.” She feels her mom smile again. “It’s amazing how easily we took advice from almost anyone. It felt like the whole world must know more about how to parent than we did. But someone told us wherever you were at five to six months, wherever you were sleeping, was where you’d be your whole childhood, so I agreed to move you to the crib.” Her mom has a rounder nose and her eyes are smaller than Ellie’s. But they’re the exact same color, dark with tiny flecks of green around the edge. She shakes her head again, looks down. “The idea of being away from you, of not feeling you breathing every night, it scared me,” her mom says. Ellie doesn’t mean to, but she laughs and looks at her. Both of them smile shyly. Ellie looks back down at her boots. “I got up at night six or seven times. Sometimes I never slept. I must have, but I don’t remember any sleep. I’d just sit in your room on this little stool I brought from the kitchen and watch your chest move. You were so tiny still. Sometimes I’d place my hand on your chest just to be sure.” Her mom shakes her head. “Anyway.” She grabs a book off of her desk, then sets it down. “Your dad was worried that I wasn’t sleeping. You know, I wasn’t being productive at work, I’m sure.” She stops. Ellie watches as she turns from this thought of her dad back to her. “So, the next appointment with the doctor, he comes and tells him what I’m doing.” Her mom’s shoulders tense and she takes hold of both sides of her chair, leaning forward. She looks at her daughter. “I was so angry, you know? Like he’d betrayed me somehow. Like no one on earth could understand this need I felt to be sure every second that you stayed alive. And I’d been unsure of the doctor to begin with. I wanted a woman. I wanted only to be surrounded by women after you were born. But he was a good guy. He’d been dealing with new mothers for many, many years. I remember he touched me. It was somehow exactly as he should. He held my arm in this extremely paternal way. I was so young then.” Her mom’s shoulders curve so that her chin comes toward her chest, but she raises her eyes, still looking at her. “I was twenty-eight. Which must have felt old then. But with him holding my arm and me close to tears with fear, he said, very firmly, but very simply, ‘They want to live.’”

  Ellie’s mom stands up and walks toward her. Ellie holds tight to each of her elbows, her arms still crossed over her chest. Her mom stands close to her and grabs hold of her arm.

  “I want to trust you, Ellie,” she says. She smells like this room, dark and shut in. “I want to not feel like an idiot for trusting you.”

  Ellie leans closer to her mother. “I …” She feels like she might vomit. “I want that too,” she says.

  Winter 2013

  Maya gets to class early. She sits on the desk in the small old whitewashed room with the radiator clanking beside her, the barely used blackboard hanging anachronistically behind. She’s grateful for its sameness, how certainly it asserts itself as just like every other room in which she’s taught. She’s assigned “Cathedral” for this class. She’s been craving Carver as a sort of antidote to all the blur and complication of her life.

  She watches all the girls carefully: the hopeful ponytails, the defiant extra bits of weight spread through their bellies and their hips. She wants to take them each aside and place her hand up on their arms and tell them to cherish this time, their freedom. They will squander it, she knows, mostly. They will be silly, worry too much, sleep with the wrong boys. At least they’re trying, though. At least they’re not locked up already, trapped inside a consequence from which there might not be escape.

  She opens her book and reads the first few pages. She has made a class packet, all the stories, poems, and essays bound together in a red construction-paper-covered book, but she brings her own copies when she teaches. She likes looking at all the different notes and comments she’s made to herself over the years.

  Charles comes in just after her. He carries a big coffee and a handful of books, a WNYC tote bag. He wears his thick round glasses, a long unbuttoned wool black coat. His beige shirt is covered in lines of pink and blue paisley. He does this often, shirts like this that make no sense.

  “Morning,” says Charles. She brightens at the sight of him, at the idea of being the one who knows what to do.

  She wants to be able to just listen to him, to sit back and maybe learn. She has sent along her own notes on Carver, notes she put together mostly straight from the text she now holds in her hand. He emailed a long outline of plans for every minute of the seventy-minute period, some of which was scripted. Maya’d skimmed it, smiling, sure he’d end up using very little of what he’d written down.

  “Good morning,” Maya says. She straightens her legs and hops slowly from the desk. “You ready?”

  He nods. “I think I am.”

  “The plans look great.” She has them printed out and holds them now to show him. Five pages single-spaced. He’s broken the time up into painstaking ten-minute increments.

  His nose scrunches and his ears redden. “I thought I’d go off-script a bit,” he says. “Maybe just discuss the story and then I’d assign a sort of reader’s response.�
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  “Sounds good,” says Maya. Her book’s still open and she runs her thumbs along the pages, dropping his script back onto her desk.

  “I love this story,” he says, taking off his glasses. He lifts his shirt to rub his lenses. He always wears the glasses and she likes the look of him without them. His abdomen—the bottom part, just above his jeans—appears from underneath his shirt as he wipes carefully. His skin is taut along his hip, darker than she’d figured, firm.

  Maya fixes her eyes on the snow that comes down in tiny flakes outside and holds her hands firmly on either side of the open book.

  Two girls come tittering through the hallway, peacoats, soft black stretch pants. They come into the classroom; Jackie is the chubbier, the more self-conscious, and the smarter, and Chloe—the smaller girl, the one who wears a bright splash of sometimes pink and sometimes red lipstick, even with her T-shirt and sweatpants and artfully messed-up hair, who raises her hand before thinking of what she’ll say—Maya has ignored her hand a few times, looking out the window as she lectures, waiting for the other, more insightful kids to speak.

  More kids shuffle in over the next few minutes. There are the few who are two and then five minutes late and they avert their eyes from Maya, who makes a big speech at the beginning of each semester about her strict lateness policy and then is terrible about docking or scolding them as the semester proceeds. Their coats and hair and shoes all have tiny snow splotches. Their faces are all flushed and damp.

  Charles is patient. He looks down at his notes, then over at Maya once they’re seated, still shuffling, murmuring to one another, zipping and unzipping bags.

  He welcomes them, stumbling a little, mumbling. His book is open on the desk and he lifts it as he dives into discussion. He looks up at them, makes eye contact with Chloe, then a couple of kids near the back. His is the same copy, Where I’m Calling From, that Maya has. Maya sits at one of the desks in the front of the classroom. She pulls her feet up on the chair, then places them back on the floor. She watches Charles carefully, feels the students’ attentions wander at first, then grow steady on him. He’s careful, speaks slowly, makes a point to look up from the text and around the room as he speaks. He brings his palms together and holds his index fingers firm against his chin.

  He’s delicate with the final pieces of the story, the nuances of the main character’s ambivalence, that moment Maya’s always loved or hated depending on the men in her life—the point at which the man’s wife falls asleep and then her robe falls open. And he goes to close it, before realizing the other man is blind, and just leaves the robe as it is.

  “Charl—” Jackie says, and then stops herself. “Professor Megalos.” He’s red, a little on the tops of his cheeks and ears, and Maya wonders if they’ve had a dalliance, if maybe they’ve been together, if maybe things unbecoming to their student-teacher interaction have taken place. Briefly, she feels something she doesn’t recognize at first, but then sees and is amused and then uncertain: jealousy.

  “Do you think we’re supposed to like the narrator?” Jackie asks him.

  Charles smirks and his shoulders square. He’s prepared for this. Perhaps he will not blunder; perhaps one day he’ll find and do all that he meant. She hopes this for him as he bounds through the answer. She hopes this in a way that’s overwhelming and complete.

  “I’m not sure it matters,” finishes Charles, “though, especially with Carver, I’ve thought a lot about this.” He turns toward the class, addressing all of them, bringing them in. “Do you guys like him?” He’ll be a good teacher, she thinks. He will find his way.

  A couple of the girls shake their heads; one nods. Jackie watches, interested but not willing to decide. A couple boys in back, who have hardly spoken all semester, shrug and look back into their books.

  “Do you think you’d be more engaged with the story if you liked him? Would you be more likely to return to it?”

  “I think it’s more interesting,” says Jackie, “him being kind of an ass.”

  Charles is silent when Maya would have already jumped in to flesh the point out, but in this silence, she watches Jackie gaining strength.

  “And in the end, it’s more, I think. I think it’s better. And that line, you know? At the end?” She flips the pages of the story. Charles, Maya, and the other kids join in. There are few things Maya enjoys more than pages shuffling. Jackie reads, “‘I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.’”

  Jackie glances briefly at Maya, then back at Charles. “I don’t know what it means,” she says. “It doesn’t even make any real kind of sense, you know? But it’s exactly right, I think.”

  Maya sighs. Charles nods and sits up on the desk. “Yeah,” he says. He’s smiling. “It is, isn’t it?”

  Maya breathes out long and grins.

  “You did wonderfully,” she says when the room has emptied. She feels happy, maybe. Strong.

  She takes hold of his arm and finds herself standing too close to him. She can smell his soap, a little sweat; she thinks that she can feel the churning of his excitement.

  “Thanks,” he says. He curls his neck down and curves his shoulders. She wants to hold his chin, to lift it up and make his shoulders square again. Stand up straight! she wants to say.

  And he does look up and then down at her face.

  They are very close. She leans toward him. There is a single, closed-mouth kiss.

  Summer 2011

  “You’re so grown up!” Annie says, then laughs at herself. She’s waiting at the bottom of the escalator near the baggage claim, off to the right of where the drivers stand in suits with signs. She bounds toward Ellie when Ellie is still five steps from the floor. Annie wears yellow Bermuda shorts and a white tunic, flip-flops—her hair is pulled back off her face—sunglasses perched atop her head. She’s thin the way lots of yoga in your forties makes you thin. No part of her looks like an accident.

  “Of course you are,” she says. She has a wide mouth, a great big smile. She reaches for one of Ellie’s bags and slings it over her shoulder. “I’m not sure when I got so old!”

  And she is old, older than Ellie expected. Her face is tan and lines form around her eyes when she smiles. There are two creases on her forehead that remain even when she’s looking straight ahead.

  It’s been years since Ellie’s seen her. They used to come down at least twice a year when she and Ben were small. But for a while after that Annie was traveling. She sent Ellie’s mom emails from different places Ellie had never heard of, the names of which Ellie liked to repeat quietly to herself for days—Luang Prabang, Phnom Penh, Vientiane—the way the syllables slipped into one another, the way their endings slid along her tongue. Then she was in San Francisco, then New Orleans. She’d moved around a bunch and then suddenly she’d come back here when Ellie was ten. She’d met her husband and took over the restaurant that had previously been owned by her parents. She’d had a kid. But in Ellie’s head she was still young and gorgeous in a silk backless wedding dress that had clung to her as if there were nothing about her that was not worth showing. She’d had her hair down and all crimped and artfully messy, blowing in her face; she’d been barefoot on the beach. El’s mom had made a speech during the reception; Annie had clasped her hands in front of her chest and grinned, her husband, younger by a couple of years, handsome with long thick sun-streaked floppy hair, in flip-flops and beige linen, had leaned over and kissed her cheek, his hand big and firm on her bare back.

  “You’re your mom,” Annie says.

  Ellie bristles for a minute, pulling out from the embrace Annie has so readily given her; she shakes her head. “No one says that,” Ellie says.

  “Oh, no, you are,” Annie says. “She was about your age when I met her. You had to know her then. She’s always that age in my head. Time passes and all that. But, this, you.” Annie swings her hand in front of Ellie, her fingers long and thin.

  Ellie angles her pinkie finger into her mouth a
nd bites down on the little that remains of her nail. “Maybe.” She repositions her backpack on her shoulder and glances at the conveyer belt that has just begun rotating, searching for, then grabbing her bag.

  “The flight was okay?” Annie moves to help, but Ellie pulls free of her. They walk toward the automatic doors.

  “Sure,” Ellie says. Her immediate reaction is to firm and harden. Annie’s tone, her trying, it’s too much like Ellie’s mom.

  “The car’s just out here,” Annie says as the doors swish open and they enter the thick humid air. Ellie’s forgotten the feel of summer in Florida, like the air’s so wet and thick it’s lapping at you, dulling your senses and weighing down your limbs. Annie’s car is a convertible. It’s a small black VW Bug, and as Ellie settles into the beige leather seat Annie starts the car and unlatches each side of the top, reaching over Ellie briefly, her shoulder almost brushing Ellie’s nose; she presses a button, quiet, as the top folds back into the trunk.

  “Nice,” says Ellie.

  Annie nods. “Jeff hates it.” They start driving, through the parking lot and out onto the highway. Ellie hasn’t been down here in a couple of years; there wasn’t time or space enough for such things with everyone so busy trying to Save Ellie From Herself. But it’s all exactly like it’s always been, the heat and the moisture, overgrown grass, short stretches of trees, the rolling too-bright green of golf courses, concrete walls in front of rows of cookie-cutter—beige, brown, green, repeat—houses of the same concrete.