by Miriam Cohen
The salesgirl came out from behind the glass counter and touched Ms. Perry’s arm. Her breath smelled of spearmint and waxy strawberry. “I wish I could give this to you for free,” she said.
But she could give Ms. Perry complimentary wrapping. She used silk ribbons, crisscrossed them, looping the remaining ribbon into a bow. She looked Ms. Perry in the eye. “This is how they do it at Tiffany’s.”
If Ms. Perry squinted and held her hand far from her face, her hand was transformed entirely. She was someone she hadn’t realized she’d wanted to be. Of course! It was so obvious now. Marriage was the ticket.
Married and pregnant, she was intoxicating to be around. Her students gazed up at her during her lessons, pupils enlarged, as though stumbling from darkened rooms. Sophie Bloom’s eyes crossing more consistently than was usual.
Tell us the story! they demanded.
They interrupted the lessons: So was his family like the Capulets or the Montagues? Was he more of a Mercutio or a real, hunky Romeo? They hoped Romeo, but were pragmatic enough to account for this other possibility.
What was she going to name the baby?
And because she was a pushover, a teacher who was also kind of a friend, having failed to follow the advice she’d been given by any and all who heard she was to teach (never smile for the first month!), she made up stories for them.
She had direction, a purpose, as never before. She was not, anymore, just someone who chiefly corrected spellings: Lose; not loose. Comma; not coma, getting mixed up herself, scribbling on their papers, making arrows and asterisks and smiley faces: Never mind!
No longer did she sit in her apartment, watching teenybopper TV shows whose titles she carefully messed up if ever they should come up in conversation with people who were not her students. Dawson’s Lake? she’d say, and laugh and call herself a dork when corrected: No, no: it was Dawson’s Creek.
She prepared all the W and one H questions with an intellectual rigor she’d forgotten all about. It was like finding an old picture of herself. Oh yes, that was her, wasn’t it?
His name was Sebastian. He was a lawyer. They’d met on the street—it was so funny!—he’d literally run into her. And she’d dropped all her papers—their Lord of the Flies essays, in fact. And he picked them up, and then, well, he’d picked her up. He’d used all the hardest vocabulary words: Can I at least take you out for coffee to make up for my boorishness, my obstreperousness, my inanity?
It had all happened so suddenly. She’d been swept utterly off her feet.
The how of it was the only question that stumped her. How did it happen? How did one go from coffee and empty pleasantries to a whole life spent with this other person?
“It’s ineffable,” she told her students.
This satisfied them not all. They were like fact-checkers, scouring for details. “Sebastian, like the lobster from The Little Mermaid?” asked Susan Lee.
Actually, it was exactly like that. The Little Mermaid had been playing on a loop over the weekend, and Ms. Perry had somehow ended up watching it twice. That was just like her. Most everything that came to her was revealed, ultimately, as a thought someone else had had first.
“Did you get married because of the baby?” Amy Heller asked, her eyes wide and glassy with contact lenses that had only days ago replaced her glasses.
“Rude,” hissed Lisa Carter. Hissing, but smiling also. Because the answer seemed terribly clear.
“Actually, no,” said Ms. Perry. “We got married quickly because his mother is dying, and he wanted her to be at the wedding. And we’re hoping—we’re really hoping—she’ll get to see the new baby, too.”
She’d heard this story somewhere before, but she couldn’t place it. Was it maybe the plot of a made-for-TV movie? Something she’d read in Glamour magazine? It had the distinct ring of a story one of her student might have written for the brief and painful creative writing unit, which had to be unceremoniously cut short when Lucy Philips handed in a story titled “Guns are Good”.
Ms. Perry’s story, if it were a missing cat, would be one of those listed as, Without any distinguishing features.
But her girls seemed, strangely, to believe her. They were sighing and nodding, foreheads creasing with worry, with love. It was so romantic! It was really brave, also. And, like, was the wedding in her hospital room? Did Ms. Perry need to wear a veil and also a hospital mask? All the nurses, probably, were clapping, right? And were there so many flowers some had to be donated to sick kids or to people without enough visitors?
What was Sebastian’s mother dying of?
For a moment, Ms. Perry felt like asking, Who? But then she remembered: Sebastian, the boorish, obstreperous, inane, apologetic, romantic, sincere, hunky Romeo of man, was her husband. Ms. Perry lowered her eyes. “Emphysema,” she whispered. “From smoking in high school.”
Sophie Bloom lingered one day after class, slowly, slowly dropping her pencils into her pencil case. One. Another. Another. Amelia Miller stood behind her, a presence to be ignored. If Ms. Perry spoke to Sophie long enough, Amelia would give up. She, surely, had a bus to catch, a mother waiting in a mini-van.
“Sophie,” Ms. Perry said. “What’s up?”
Sophie shrugged. “The sky,” she said, but without her usual oomph.
Ms. Perry sat at the edge of her desk with her feet dangling. All her favorite teachers had had feet that dangled from desks.
“I made you something,” said Sophie, shrugging. “In art class, I did.”
“How lovely,” said Ms. Perry.
“It’s just”—and Sophie’s face became extremely scrunched—“I just really hope your baby turns out to be a girl.”
She rummaged through her knapsack, which stank, Ms. Perry couldn’t overlook, of overripe cantaloupe. Sophie pulled out a tiny pink hat. “My older sister says it’s bad luck,” she said. “To plan in advance.”
“In advance?” said Ms. Perry.
“In advance of the baby.” Sophie twirled a strand of hair around her finger so the tip went white. “Because you never know about these things.”
Sophie’s eyes seemed to kiss, then parted, embarrassed strangers. It would not be a lie to say Ms. Perry loved Sophie Bloom.
“I don’t believe in bad luck,” said Ms. Perry. “And Sophie is my grandmother’s name, actually. If it’s a girl, that’s what we’ll name her, Sophie.”
Sophie looked at the floor and beamed.
Amelia Miller, still there, said, “Ms. Perry?”
A deep breath in, out. “I’m talking to Sophie,” Ms. Perry said.
“It’s okay,” said Sophie. “That was it.”
And Ms. Perry was forced to collect herself, make a kind of smile. “I only have a few minutes,” she told Amelia. “So you’ve got to make it quick.”
Amelia nodded. Her face had taken on a kind of Victorian pallor, her skin stretched taut over the hollows of her cheeks. She looked old, but also, from certain angles, much too young. Not for her were the awkward buds of breasts held in place, even if they didn’t yet quite need to be, with bras adorned with tiny ribbons, flowers that poked through uniform shirts like oddly misplaced nipples. Or sports bras for the more embarrassed, worn backwards, in Lisa Carter’s case, in a terrible, poignant attempt to hide what was becoming clear. Amelia was entirely flat. It was even possible that she wore an undershirt instead of a bra.
“I didn’t realize you were pregnant,” Amelia said. “It seemed like something else. Like, the smell. I think gin.”
Ms. Perry’s laughter sounded like it came from a cartoon: ha ha ha.
She wasn’t going to ask Amelia how she knew what gin smelled like. Where was everyone else? Where was the guidance counselor, the principal who cared so much? And what about, for god’s sake, the other teachers? Was she really the only one who noticed what was going on? It was so clear it might have come from a psych 101 textbook: an introverted, upper-middle class, white, preteen girl with problems at home.
There had be
en girls like Amelia in Ms. Perry’s high school, though none in middle school, she didn’t think. Actually, now that she was thinking of it, there might have only been one girl. There was Ms. Perry’s imagination again, overacting, multiplying when it should be staying out of the way and still. The girl—it was just the one, Ms. Perry was sure now—had been a kind of celebrity in the school. Every so often, she’d be hospitalized, and then return looking normal, but not really. The normalcy was only temporary, worn like a new, ill-fitting dress. Soon enough she’d be thin again, very and then ghastly. One day, she came to school with a tube in her nose. And she was so nice, so friendly. Always smiling, even with that tube, even with the strips of healed or healing cuts that braceleted her wrists. It was possible that she’d ending up dying. There might have been an email.
“Well, clearly it wasn’t gin,” Ms. Perry said now to Amelia. “It’s dangerous to drink while you’re pregnant. Don’t they teach you anything in Health?”
She hadn’t meant to ask a question.
“We talk about healthy eating,” Amelia said. “We learned about the food pyramid.”
“That’s nice,” said Ms. Perry.
“I know a lot about it,” Amelia said. “Because of my diet, so.”
Ms. Perry had to say something. She had to.
“That’s nice,” she repeated.
Amelia looked at her scabbed knuckles.
“Your mother must be waiting,” Ms. Perry said.
“My babysitter,” said Amelia.
“Well, a babysitter shouldn’t have to wait!” Ms. Perry was all but shouting. She was all but smiling.
Amelia heaved her knapsack onto her thin, breakable shoulders.
Ms. Perry had been in awe of the girl in her high school. How controlled she was, how good. Once, Ms. Perry had tried to starve herself, but by dinnertime she was so hungry she couldn’t see straight. She liked to eat. There it was. In a fury, another time, she’d smashed the glass frame of a portrait her grandmother had painted of her. The symbolism, she’d thought at the time, was profound. She’d made a scratch along her wrist, but she couldn’t bring herself to dig deep enough to draw blood.
Ms. Perry missed her bus and had to wait.
The sky had turned an oily kind of gray, the color of pigeon wings. She liked who she became under this sky: a harried, youngish wife who was keeping her husband waiting. A wife whose husband, Sebastian, would yell at her and then apologize. He would put his big hand on her belly and, tears in his eyes, tell her it was just that he was afraid of how enormously everything was about to change. She would understand. I know, she’d say. I know, but we’re in this together.
The next bus was so packed there were no bars to hold onto, and so Ms. Perry was held upright, it felt, by strangers’ bodies. There was someone’s arm thrust against her breast, someone else leaning into the small of her back. Ms. Perry might not have been there at all. Just across from her was a pregnant woman, seated and beatific.
Ms. Perry twisted her engagement ring so the fake diamond pressed against her palm. She twirled it back around. Now it caught some florescent light.
“When’s the baby due?” Ms. Perry said.
The woman lifted her pocketbook to her lap.
“I’m just a few weeks in,” said Ms. Perry. She put her hand to her stomach. Oh little plum. Oh tiny, blushing, feathery sprite. This was what it was not to be lonely.
The pregnant woman smiled. She was Ms. Perry’s best friend now. “I’m at the point where, when I stand up, I don’t want to sit down. I might not be able to get up the next time! But of course, everyone gives up their seat for you once you’re showing so enormously. And, right, that’s not even when you need a seat. When you need a seat is right in the beginning, when just breathing makes you nauseous.”
There was no heaving or panting, but a sudden, simple lifting. “Please,” she said, waving majestically. “Have my seat.”
It became time to hand in report cards. The principal left a detailed letter in Ms. Perry’s faculty mailbox. The letter was printed on grainy white stationary that had a weight like no other paper. The principal outlined the due dates and expectations, ending on a jubilant note of faith in her abilities as a tough-but-fair educator. All the other teachers had identical envelopes tucked into their mailboxes. He believed strongly in the personal touch.
Ms. Perry’s students didn’t receive letter grades, but numbers, ranging from one (unthinkable!) to four (she was not supposed to, officially, award them as cavalierly as she did). She decided she’d go to the faculty break room during lunch so she could copy her grades onto to the carbon paper against the copy machine’s sputtering whirr, which might pass, in moments of severe desperation, for postmodern music.
The guidance counselor stopped her in the hallway. She plucked the carbon paper from Ms. Perry’s arms. “You don’t want to unduly exert yourself.”
She pretended to stagger beneath the thin stack of paper.
“I swear, I’d never guess you were pregnant,” she said. “Boy, when I was pregnant, my bust went straight one way, my bottom the opposite!” The guidance counselor became suddenly serious. “I gained a great deal of weight. A great deal. It’s not a favor to anyone to stay thin during your pregnancy.”
And then her face lit with sudden delight: “To try to stay thin.”
Her hand shot out and was now patting Ms. Perry’s stomach, just between her hipbones, where period cramps came to congregate. Ms. Perry thought of pro-choice campaigns: Leave my uterus alone!
She stepped backward.
The guidance counselor looked as close as she ever could to concerned. “You’re, what would it be now, four months along?”
All Ms. Perry could think to do was agree.
She smiled a doll’s smile, all mouth and no eyes. She was reminded of being a child: Alarm, alarm, she and her brother used to bleat, running from imaginary robbers, so breathless it hurt to breathe.
She left the carbon papers with the guidance counselor, laughing in a kind of way, and went to find the principal. His door was all the way open, held in place by a dictionary that was terrifically thick. He had an open door policy, he liked to say. He called for her to come on in and not at all to be shy.
She was not feeling, she said, her best.
He mimed the pregnancy he imagined for her.
She made her lips a line and nodded.
The principal was at once on his feet, tiny springs maybe really beneath his wingtip shoes. He all but slung her over his back and out of the office, as though she were a bag of recyclables, or a bride.
Ms. Perry did some research and found a four-month-term fetus would have bendable bones, fur, a light marbling of fat. And it could kick. She had gone wrong somewhere, but she couldn’t figure out how to retrace her steps, locate her former self, shake her, stop her in the act. Because here she was, no different from her students, getting caught up with some fad, some hobby, getting obsessed, and then forgetting. Not forgetting. The pregnancy had become like a pimple: She was aware of it, it worried her, but for now, she was going to let it sit.
She lost the baby.
And her husband, boorish and perfect, abandoned her. Her mother-in-law went into shock and died. Ms. Perry removed her ring.
She called the principal. He offered condolences. He told her the students would make her a card. He told her there would be a sub, not to worry. She drew the shades in her apartment, sat quietly on the bed, head in hand, as though there were something real for her to mourn.
The thing to do was call her friend Jeff. They weren’t friends, really. Or, they had once been friends. But then they’d almost dated, after his girlfriend had told him she loved him but he wasn’t smart enough to be her husband. Ms. Perry had thought, at the time, Well, why not. But after the one date, she’d stopped answering his calls. So he surprised her, came to her apartment uninvited, with grocery store flowers, said he thought he loved her, or could love her. Thanks, but she was pretty busy, she’d said.
He should really call, if he was going to come over. They hadn’t spoken for months after that, but then they ran into each over at a party and pretended nothing had ever happened. And then she fell into the habit of sometimes going to his apartment, which was dirty and cold and narrow, though with multiple rooms. Jeff didn’t have a steady job, but he kept himself in the money by renting out rooms in his apartment for triple their worth. That was what he said, anyway. His parents might have been supporting him.
He told her, now, to come on over, sure.
On the bus, she held herself gingerly, shoulders straight. No one gave her a seat. Those seats weren’t for her. There was a pregnant woman on the bus—there were pregnant women everywhere, it turned out—gazing out the window, eyes bovine and glassy. Another woman sat with a little boy on her lap, the stroller precariously balanced against the wall next to them. The boy had white-blond hair that fell partway over his eyes. His nose was running. Her boy would have had a haircut; he wouldn’t have gotten a cold.
When she got there, Jeff offered her water. The water was from the tap and came in a smudged, dirty glass. She imagined she saw the ghost of another woman’s lipstick, though she knew Jeff didn’t go for women who wore lipstick, and also that it didn’t matter. She wasn’t his wife. He wasn’t her husband.
“Don’t you ever do the dishes?” she said.
“Yes, I do, thanks for asking, Mom,” he said.
She became a cartoon again: ha ha ha.
When she was done with her water, he cut his toenails. It was an unrelated activity, he told her. He’d been planning to cut them even before she called. “I do the deed in the bathroom,” he explained, inviting her to follow him in. “More sanitary.”
She politely acted not horrified by the bathroom. Chunks were missing from the walls, mold blossoming along the edges of the tub. Two cockroaches perched on the edge of the sink like a pair of doves. There didn’t appear to be a toothbrush. Jeff hummed a non-tune as he clipped off the yellow whirls into the rust-outlined toilet. The hair on his toes, she noticed, was black, mossy, edging into the territory of gorilla. It wasn’t like she could ask him to shave it. But she did. She shaved her toes.