Emma's Table

by Philip Galanes

  The two of them walked down the long corridor that led to Gracie’s classroom, the girl moving slower with every step.

  “Is it lunchtime, do you think?” Gracie asked.

  Tina had just given the girl a sandwich.

  “Are you hungry again?” she asked, surprised and annoyed in nearly equal measure: It’s no wonder she’s so big. Tina hadn’t eaten a bite herself; and after the morning they’d had, she couldn’t imagine ever eating again.

  Gracie shook her head.

  Her daughter was such a riddle. “Then why did you ask, sweetie?”

  “Because recess comes after lunch,” she said, looking down at her pink sneakers as she walked.

  Tina could feel her dread mounting with every squeaking step.

  “I’m pretty sure recess is over,” she replied.

  “Really?” Gracie asked, smiling up at her mother, relief blooming on those chubby cheeks, her eyes half a ton lighter.

  Tina nodded back at her. She thought her heart might break.

  They were both relieved to find class in session when they reached the classroom door. Tina gave her daughter a hug, and told her she’d be back for her at the end of the day. She wasn’t going back to the office herself. She had another errand in mind, walking back down the long corridor, her anger growing with every step: she was going to confront Benjamin Blackman.

  Where the hell does he get off? she wondered.

  Tina had only been hoping for insight when she peeked into Gracie’s medical chart—for some additional information. They’d told her that her daughter’s metabolism was “slow-normal,” that she’d always have trouble with her weight—they promised her that much—but Tina could keep it under control, they said, if she’d just stick to the diet she’d been given.

  She heard the accusation like a door slamming in her face.

  She tried convincing herself that she was being oversensitive. She’d always suspected that people held her accountable for Gracie’s weight, but she never imagined anything like what she found in that file—written on a pink message pad, with Benjamin’s name on the “from” line, his horrible accusation down below: “Suspects mother of making girl fat—intentionally.”

  She could see the heavy underlining on that pink paper still.

  Tina nearly screamed at the memory of it.

  But facts were facts, she knew that too: her nine-year-old daughter, barely four and a half feet tall, had weighed in at one hundred and fourteen pounds that morning, in her stocking feet. She’d gained three pounds more after six weeks of strict dieting. Gracie was literally off the charts; there wasn’t even a place for her on the height/weight graph that hung on the treatment room wall.

  It was a double mystery to her: How was Gracie gaining weight on so little food, and why would anyone think she wanted it to happen?

  Even the nurse there, Benjamin’s friend, who’d seemed sympathetic at first, had a hard time keeping her doubts in check. “You’re sure you’re following the diet properly?” she asked, when Tina pulled out the Xeroxed copy of the program she’d been following.

  “Down to the letter,” she swore.

  “The portions too?” the nurse asked, her voice rising up at the end—the disbelief audible.

  Tina had trouble believing it herself.

  As luck would have it, she saw Benjamin walking toward her in the hallway—as inevitable as a winter cold. She felt herself growing agitated at the sight of him. “What a coincidence,” he said, when they met, as if he were pleased to see her. “I was just about to—”

  “Save it, Blackman,” Tina said brusquely.

  She had no patience for small talk, no further use for his charm.

  What had they gotten her, after all, the progress meetings and the endless chat? Nothing more than a false accusation in her daughter’s records. She was finished with Benjamin—with the phony smile that was plastered onto his face, and the clean white hand that was extended to her still, as if she might actually shake it.

  “Excuse me?” he said—polite still, but stunned.

  “No,” she replied, shaking her head from side to side. “I can’t think of a single excuse for you,” she said. Benjamin was a snake in the grass, nothing more, as far as she was concerned—faking concern, but betraying them in the end.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. He sounded surprised.

  Benjamin looked all around them in the corridor, as if he were afraid of making a scene. “Can we go to my office?” he asked. It sounded like begging.

  Tina didn’t care who heard her anymore.

  She followed him back to his tiny office, next door to the gym. She peeked into that wide-open room and found an army of boys inside, divided into two camps—each one hurling bouncy red balls at the other, throwing them ferociously, with all their might. The gym teacher blew his whistle, but the boys didn’t care. They kept beaning each other just as hard. She heard balls whizzing through the open air, and the splat of stinging contact.

  “That’s enough!” the teacher cried finally.

  Tina wished for a bouncy red ball herself. She could feel the pleasure of whipping it at Benjamin’s face. She’d put everything she had into it too—just like those little boys did.

  Benjamin stood outside his office door, waiting for her to enter first.

  More of his phoniness, Tina thought with annoyance.

  She pulled roughly at the guest chair and took her regular seat.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” he said. He looked confused.

  She’d always suspected Benjamin of disliking her, ever since their first meeting, when she watched him flirt, then turn against her in a flash. She hadn’t the vaguest idea what she’d done to deserve his ill will, but all that seemed beside the point now—now that she’d read the cruel note in Gracie’s file.

  “I took Gracie to the Free Clinic this morning,” she said.

  Tina heard an unexpected flutter in her voice, as if she were running short of breath. She felt a quickening in her chest too: her anger shifting just a little, enough to let some nervousness in.

  “Did you meet the nurse I was telling you about?” he asked.

  “I know what you said about me,” Tina replied, ignoring his question—her voice trembling more than before, like the fast-beating wings of a tiny songbird.

  “I’m sorry?” he said, polite but confused.

  “Don’t treat me like a fool,” Tina snapped. “I read it in Gracie’s file.”

  She let her voice grow loud and harsh. She was aiming for the antithesis of his. “You told them I’m to blame for Gracie’s weight. You said that I’m making her fat on purpose.”

  Tina glared at him hard. She expected him to wilt on contact. That’s what they said about standing up to bullies, wasn’t it?

  “Yes,” Benjamin replied calmly, not wilting at all. “I did tell her that was one possibility.”

  Tina was impressed with his nerve, acting so cool in the face of confrontation, but she could be tough too. “What are you talking about?” she said, bringing her fists down hard onto his desk.

  Benjamin didn’t flinch.

  Tina felt a flash of fear, a burgeoning sense of what she was up against. When she first met Benjamin—back in January—he’d told her that he wanted to work with Gracie because of some nasty business on the playground. She’d taken it all at face value then, but now she wondered if he’d suspected her all along.

  “I wish there was a better explanation,” he said, his voice measured still and calm. “But the people at the clinic assured me there’s no medical reason for Gracie’s obesity.”

  He wasn’t backing off at all.

  “That means,” he continued, looking straight into her eyes, “that the people who’ve been entrusted with her care are letting her down.”

  That’s me, Tina thought. He was blaming her without using her name.

  “And I’m not going to let it continue,” he said.

  Neither was she. “Are you crazy?�
� Tina shot back at him, his calm demeanor like an accelerant to her own. “Do you have any idea what we go through,” she cried, “Gracie and I? Do you know how many times I’ve dragged her to that Free Clinic, begging for help? How many times I’ve come in to see your useless school nurse?” Tina felt walls of frustration building all around her—as tall as mountains and pressing in close. “So you solve the problem by blaming me?” She was nearly shouting then.

  “Please,” Benjamin answered, bouncing his hands lightly in the air—a polite request for modulation.

  “Please what?” she said, ignoring him and his sign language both.

  Tina heard the trace of a sob breaking on that final word.

  Please, God, she thought—don’t let me cry. She begged herself not to, even as she felt her eyes welling up. She wanted to kick herself for being so weak.

  Benjamin reached his hand across the desk, as if to comfort her.

  It was just the push she needed.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said—three hard pellets, fired at him fast.

  She pulled her hands away from him and dug them into her purse instead, pulling out a sheaf of yellow papers.

  She thrust them across the table at him, her hands trembling with anger and more than a trace of fear: six yellow pages—one for every week of Gracie’s latest diet. She saw their pale blue lines through watery eyes; she watched them swimming across the pages.

  Benjamin took the papers from her hands, turning them like a steering wheel in both of his—from vertical to horizontal—like some kind of treasure map that needed orienting to the west.

  He kept his eyes fixed on them.

  Tina had drawn vertical lines down every one. She’d used a ruler to make them straight: three lines making four columns, with underlined headings at the top: “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” “Dinner,” and “Snack.” She’d been meticulous about it, recording every morsel of food that Gracie had eaten since the diet began—even the gingersnaps she’d caught her with the day before.

  The papers looked worn from all her constant handling, the folding and unfolding. Tina updated them all day long.

  A nurse at the Free Clinic had suggested it: a food log.

  Benjamin was quiet still, studying the pages one after the next.

  Tina began to settle down then, breathing more easily as she watched him read. These papers would prove that he was wrong.

  They will, she thought, won’t they?

  She summoned the determination she felt in making them. The breakfasts were easy, she remembered, the dinners too. She fed them to the girl herself, after all. Sometimes Tina recorded a meal before Gracie had even eaten it. Her bowl of cereal barely moistened with milk, the chicken breast cooling on the counter still, and Tina rushing to the bulletin board—so anxious to record every bite.

  She saw the messy trail of tack holes running across the yellow pages, the pinpricks of light that came shining through.

  They looked like track marks to her.

  Benjamin sighed a long, deep breath. He looked up at her finally with a benign expression on his face.

  “It’s the lunches that give me trouble,” she said, blurting it out in spite of herself. It was the one weak spot on her careful log. She wanted to admit it before he found her out. The school sent lunch menus home for the week, and Tina did the best she could: poking and prodding, as gently as possible, trying to work out what the little girl had eaten, without making a federal case of it.

  The lunches may not have been complete.

  “Thank you,” he said, in a gentle voice, nodding his head a little.

  For just a second, he looked—to Tina anyway—as if he weren’t quite sure how to proceed, as if he’d been set down on the open road without a map or any clear directions for getting to the place he wanted to go.

  Welcome to the club, she thought.

  “Are you telling me that this is everything she’s eating?” Benjamin asked, gesturing down to the papers in front of him.

  Tina nodded her head. She told him it was.

  “And you do all the grocery shopping?” he asked, as if to cover every angle.

  “We live on our own,” she replied.

  With that, Tina watched him begin to harden on his side of the desk—like a lump of molding clay that had been left out in the open air. He sat a little taller in his chair.

  “I appreciate your showing me this,” he said; his voice sounded harder too. “I can see it took a lot of work.”

  Tina nodded her head.

  “It shows me that some part of you wants to make things better,” he said.

  Tina kept nodding, straight through her confusion. It wasn’t some part of her that wanted things better. It was every fiber of her being.

  Doesn’t he know that? she wondered.

  Tina had to find a way to make herself known to this man. She thought she’d done that though, in their earlier meetings. She thought her food log would make things clear as day.

  Tina began to feel a little helpless.

  If Benjamin reached his hand to her again, she might not pull her own away so fast. She and Gracie needed all the help they could get.

  “I’m confused,” he said.

  “How’s that?” she asked. He didn’t sound confused at all.

  Tina stared across the desk at him like an animal in the wild: she was frozen in place, just waiting for the smallest twitch.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, “for Gracie to be eating as little as this, and still not losing weight.”

  It didn’t make sense to her either. She stayed quiet.

  “I know she’s eating more than this,” he said finally—laying the yellow papers down on the desk.

  But how could he know that? Tina wondered.

  She tried not jumping to conclusions, or landing on the accusation she heard so clearly in his voice. Tina picked up the yellow papers from the desk.

  “This is what she’s eating,” she said. “I swear it.”

  Those yellow pages weren’t wrong. They couldn’t be: she’d kept such careful track.

  “But I see her loaded down with junk food every time we meet,” Benjamin said. He sounded exasperated. “That’s not written down.”

  What junk food? she thought.

  “And Gracie as much as told me you give her boxes of cookies,” he said, “and candies from the place you work.”

  Tina was stunned. “Gracie wouldn’t say that,” she told him. “I never give her sweets.”

  There’s something physically wrong with the girl, she thought—there has to be.

  “Then where’s she getting all that food?” he asked, his voice sharper than before. “I’ve seen it myself.”

  Tina didn’t know the answer.

  “She’s only nine years old,” he said, pounding away.

  Tina shook her head.

  She wasn’t convinced that he was telling the truth about Gracie—her daughter never lied—or about the junk food either, for that matter, but it was clear enough that he was back to blaming her.

  “I want to help you,” Benjamin said. “I really do.”

  Tina stared back at him, as worn out as if she’d lain awake for three days running. She wanted desperately to believe him, in the prospect of some kind of help anyway, but he’d already made it plain enough that he couldn’t be trusted—putting lies into Gracie’s mouth, dismissing her careful food log.

  Benjamin wasn’t the help she needed.

  “We’re going to get to the root of this problem,” he said. “I promise you that. We’re going to find out why this is going on.”

  Tina breathed a long, deep breath.

  That was all she’d ever wanted—from him or from anyone else, for that matter. She only wanted to know why this was happening to her little girl.

  “We think a psychiatrist might be helpful,” Benjamin said.

  “For Gracie?” she asked. “I don’t understand how—”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head and interrup
ting her fast—as gently as possible, under the circumstances. “For you.”

  Chapter 8

  MONDAY AFTERNOON:

  Café con Leche

  AT THE STROKE OF FIVE, EMMA’S DRIVER PULLED up to Modern Edge, the finest shop for mid-century furniture in the city. Its proprietress, Christina O’Dowd, stood in the doorway, a dark-haired woman in her middle forties. Emma could see, from behind her car’s tinted windows, that the shopkeeper was already on high alert, looking out for her special guest like a duck hunter in a wooded blind—peering out through squinted eyes, searching for movement in the brush. Christina opened her glass door the moment Emma stepped out of her car, and she held it open too, taking careful aim as Emma crossed the busy sidewalk.

  “Querida,” she sighed, once the eagle had landed.

  It was some kind of Spanish endearment.

  Emma knew that, but she couldn’t say which exactly, and she couldn’t imagine what prompted it either, suffering both her cheeks to be kissed by the woman.

  Ridiculous, she thought—of the foolish kisses, and Christina’s getup too. She was dressed as an Old World widow that afternoon, in a loose black shift with heavy brogues on her feet.

  “Café con leche?” Christina offered—again, in Spanish.

  Emma shook her head, brushing imaginary lint from the sleeve of her sweater. She’d left her fur in the back of the car. She couldn’t imagine why a woman no more Hispanic than herself would cling so fiercely to a Latin identity. Emma studied the shopkeeper’s ruddy cheeks and bright blue eyes.

  What a fake, she thought—Christina’s surname was O’Dowd!—but a consistent fake, at least: the woman had been doing this Spanish Rose routine for as long as Emma had known her, coming on twenty years now, with Spanish endearments pouring forth and that strong black coffee bathed in sweet milk.

  Emma never cared quite enough to get to the bottom of it.

  Everyone’s got their shtick, she supposed.

  She began to look for Tanaguchi.

  It was a sea of white inside the shop, with bright white walls and shiny bone floors, dozens of hot white lights burning down from above. The furniture couldn’t help but blaze against so clean a canvas. Emma was impressed with the upkeep too. She knew that scuffs would be inevitable on a floor like that, but she didn’t see a single one.