Now Sonya checks her reflection in the black subway windows, then glances away and back again, as if in the interim a fairy godmother might have tapped her with a magic wand and given her something nice to wear, taken her out of her mousy teacher disguise, polished her nails, and dressed her in the first-date equivalent of Cinderella’s ball gown.
It will be another long subway ride from school to Bensonhurst, and seeing as how it will be five o’clock before she finishes straightening up the classroom and doing her paperwork, and dinner is at six (Greg apologized for it being so early, but it was the best Enzo could do), she won’t have time to go home and change. She’ll have to buy a cheap lipstick and a tube of mascara on the way. But that won’t alter the fact that she’s dressed to tell Guadalupe Martinez that she’s sorry she lost control of the class and will never let anything like that happen again, instead of like a woman who plans to seduce a thirty-two-year-old, six-foot-two, blond, athletic, foreign-born environmental lawyer.
Sonya knows the route to school so well she can navigate on autopilot, freeing her mind to scurry back and forth between worry about her job and anxiety about the date. Perhaps the monkey in her dream was tearing up her paycheck. Or the note that will be in her mailbox if Guadalupe wants to see her. Maybe it was Greg ripping up the paper on which he’s scribbled her number, though he would be more likely to delete it from his phone.
Sonya has so clearly pictured her mailbox with the note in it that when she gets to school and finds the note in her mailbox, it seems less like a real event than a déjà vu. Please see me at your earliest convenience. G. Martinez.
The note is all that Sonya can think about as she seats the children at their tables. She’d planned to do a counting game, with kids coming up to the blackboard and filling in missing numbers. They’d called it Hangman when she was their age, but of course she can’t call it that now. Instead she gives them crayons and pages to color. She grabs a sheaf of paper from the coloring cubby and has handed half of them out before she notices that they’re line drawings of Curious George, probably donated by George’s publisher.
The children are coloring monkeys! A monkey riding a tricycle! A monkey eating a banana! Monkeys are the last thing she wants the children thinking about today. Terence flashes her a triumphant smile, as if she is using Curious George to communicate with him, to validate what he told the class yesterday: humans used to be Curious George.
Edward won’t look at her. His eyes are almost closed. How beautiful his lashes are, two glossy black crescent brooms.
At recess, Sonya goes to the front office and asks Guadalupe’s secretary, Miss Gladys, if Guadalupe has a minute. Gladys’s concerned expression tells Sonya that her goose is cooked.
Miss Gladys says, “Let me check.”
GUADALUPE RISES FROM her seat, leans across her desk, and presses both of Sonya’s hands between her warm palms. She does this with parents, faculty, kids; everyone seems to like it. Her smile is kindly and genuine. There is no secret that she is trying to pry loose, nothing she wants to ferret out, or to extract from Sonya.
She says, “I got three very upset phone calls this morning from three very unhappy kindergarten parents with students in your class. Can we assume that you know what this is about?”
Sonya nods, though why should she assume anything? Maybe the parents were saying what a great teacher she is. Except for those two words: unhappy and upset.
“Darwin with the kindergarten kids? Seriously, Sonya?”
“I’m sorry. I knew it was a mistake. I guess I lost control. I want them to learn so much that sometimes I lose sight of what’s appropriate for them to know.”
Guadalupe says, “Look, I’m a practicing Catholic. Darwin is probably right, but I feel more comfortable going with the teachings of the church on this. Anyhow, my faith isn’t the point. Sonya, do you watch the news?”
Sonya nods. Can Guadalupe tell that she’s lying? Maybe napping during the early evening—when the news is on—and then ordering out for Chinese food may be part of the reason she can’t sleep. Is it legal to fire someone for having a sleep disorder? Sleep deprivation is a torture technique! Sonya loves her job, she loves her students, she loves their bright sweet open faces, their dusty milky smell. Her heart is heavy with love for them, especially now that she may be about to lose them. Isn’t that always true with love? Or maybe that’s just immature love. Maybe you can grow past needing the sharp goad of loss.
Most of Sonya’s friends are in love with men who don’t love them. Sonya has mostly stopped seeing her friends. Is that a sign of depression? She tells herself it’s exhaustion. Let them do what she does every day at school. Let them see how much energy they have left for clubs and art openings and the tedious plays and poetry readings they pretend to find enthralling. Maybe she should videotape those events and watch them to help her fall asleep.
“Well, then, Sonya, if you pay attention to the news perhaps you saw the story about the fifth-grade teacher who got fired when he assigned a demented math problem about the slave trade. If a slave ship with the capacity for five hundred slaves drops off half its human cargo . . . What was that man thinking? Couldn’t he have said, bags of candy? They fired the principal too. Or maybe you heard about the English teacher who took the whole school administration down with her by mentioning some famous essay about how Huckleberry Finn and Jim were gay lovers? Or the history teacher who lost his job for assigning seniors to write about 9/11 conspiracy theories?”
Sonya vaguely remembers hearing about something like that, so nodding isn’t, strictly speaking, lying. She thinks, I wanted to be a poet!
“Need I go on, Sonya? With even more depressing examples of hardworking teachers and administrators axed for having imparted actual knowledge or expressed a reasonable opinion? Dedicated teachers punished more severely than pervs who diddle kids and get away with it for decades? Need I, Sonya?”
Sonya shakes her head no. Judge, the prosecutor is badgering the witness. Guadalupe waits for Sonya to regain her composure and ask, “What now?”
“Let’s wait it out.” Guadalupe takes off her glasses and rubs one perfectly groomed eyebrow. “My gut says that this will blow over. The abusive phone conversations with me may be all that the parents want. But you’ve got to promise me that nothing like this will ever happen again.” She crosses her wrists to demonstrate that her hands will be tied.
Sonya nods again.
“Let me give you some advice,” Guadalupe says. “You know that reality show, The Dog Whisperer? The guy who teaches Hollywood starlets how to train their pups?”
Sonya watched it once: a super-skinny starlet’s pug kept vomiting on her Jimmy Choos. The Dog Whisperer accompanied his client to the vet (she’d been too anxious to go alone) to make sure that there was nothing physically wrong with Perrito: the problem was all in his mind, which had been permitted to become undoglike, competitive with costly high-heeled sandals. It seemed to Sonya that Perrito might have learned about vomiting from his owner, but this theory was never mentioned, and in the last sequence, the starlet and her pug were happy. Two by two, her shoes gleamed, backlit, in her closet.
“I love that show,” lies Sonya.
“You don’t have to love it,” says Guadalupe. “Just watch it a few times. Do what the man says, only with children instead of dogs. You are the leader of the pack. Calm assertive authority. Trust me, it works. And be ready to fall on your sword if the parents get crazy.”
“I will,” Sonya promises. “I’m sorry.” Later she will sort out how she feels about apologizing for having told the truth.
“Take care now.” Guadalupe gives her the thumbs-up sign, and Sonya does the same. Like two monkeys.
Somehow she gets through the afternoon. The kids will think of words beginning with A all day if they get the shriveled apple (another A word) she’s offering as a prize and if they can keep the others from winning. She sees Edward holding back, knowing more words than his classmates and pretending not
to know any. It makes her want to stop the game and take a nap.
Terence wins the apple. His victory word is armadillo. She can’t tell Terence that he can’t have the apple because Edward knows more words but won’t say so. How can she even be sure?
Calm assertive authority. She is the leader of the pack. Today the pack gets an extra-long rest period. She can say that the kids were tired from working so hard on the letter A. Why can’t she just have a bad day like everyone else without thinking that she is failing the children?
Just when she is beginning to fear that the bell will never ring again, the bell rings. One day less of her twenty-sixth year, one precious day of her students’ only childhoods, never to be repeated.
It’s her responsibility to walk the kids to the door and make sure they get picked up. She’ll look for Edward’s mom or dad. She wants to tell them something. But what can she say without betraying his trust? Anyway, he is almost always collected by a beautiful French girl named Sophie, whom Edward’s parents have put on the after-school pickup list.
Edward has told Sonya that Sophie works for his dad. Stylish girls like Sophie, who seem to care nothing for style, make Sonya feel like a homely undateable kindergarten teacher, which naturally reminds her of her upcoming date with Greg.
Edward runs to Sophie and flings his arms around her long beautiful legs, which today are sheathed in leggings printed to look like tattoos.
“Dites ‘merci, Mademoiselle Sonya,’ Eduard,” Sophie says.
“Merci, Mademoiselle Sonya,” says Edward.
How does one say You’re welcome in French?
“De nada,” says Sonya.
Greg probably speaks French. He probably speaks many languages. He should be dating Sophie! Sonya wants to cancel her date but won’t, partly because she has never Internet-dated before and doesn’t know the etiquette. Etiquette is her mother’s word.
Anyway, there’s something wrong with Sonya’s phone. It refuses to send messages, though at least she still gets texts. She doesn’t have time to get it fixed or enough money to upgrade to a new one.
She completes the attendance sheet and the lesson plans and files them and punches out. Feeling the need to hurry ratchets up her anxiety level as she rushes to the station. She doesn’t like unfamiliar subway lines, though she never minded them when she lived with Warren. But if she were still with Warren, she wouldn’t be dating Greg, though that never stopped Warren from dating girls he met on the Internet, as Sonya eventually discovered.
The trains arrive rapidly, not too empty, not too crowded, not too hot, not too air-conditioned. She never once thinks she might be lost. She emerges from the station directly across from the restaurant. And she’s right on time. Like magic, Sonya thinks, briefly saddened to realize that this is what magic means now: not being late, not getting lost on the subway. Whatever happened to the fairy godmothers, to all those bunnies yanked out of hats?
Enzo’s is more or less what Sonya expected, and yet she is unprepared for the energy generated by diners who love the feeling of being special and chosen, of being among the special and the chosen. She feels nearly faint with gratitude for the kitschy beauty of Christmas lights in September, for the glittering holiday cheer too warming and familial to be confined to one short season, and for the doughy but vigorous handshake she receives from the charming gnome who turns out to be Enzo.
“Buona serra, Signora!” He ushers Sonya to a table from behind which a tall young man rises to greet her. Even as she is deciding that Greg is twice as good-looking as his TrueLove.com photo, she intuits, from the slight but perceptible dip in the temperature of his smile, that Greg is deciding that she is only half as pretty as hers. Well, of course! She forgot to buy lipstick and mascara. Should she throw herself on his mercy and tell him that she went to work expecting to get fired? Who would go on a second date with a woman who introduced herself with such an embarrassing over-share?
As she puts out her hand, he’s already wrapped one arm around her shoulders, and they exchange what must surely be the most awkward handshake-hug in first-date history.
“Please. Sit down,” says Greg. Sonya can’t bring herself to stare directly into the radiant sun of his perfect face. So perfect it’s almost boring, she thinks, as she lowers her gaze and feels a shaming urge to fondle the weave of his expensive black jacket. Everything about him is perfect except for his tie, which is purple with a weird iridescent red sheen. Why would Mr. Perfect choose a tie that color? And why is Sonya analyzing everything Greg is wearing, when she can only hope that he is not lavishing the same critical attention on her please-don’t-fire-me skirt and granny-gray cardigan sweater?
She says, “Thanks for texting me the address . . . That was very thoughtful . . . I mean, I could have looked it up, I did look it up but . . .”
Greg puts his thumbs against his chest and splays his fingers.
“That’s me,” he says. “Mr. Thoughtful.”
Just then, the Angel Enzo reappears. “A nice red for Romeo and Juliet?” Greg looks at Sonya, who nods, though red wine gives her a headache and so exacerbates her insomnia that no (safe) amount of Xanax will stop her from waking at three in the morning, certain that she is going to lose her job and die alone and be eaten by the cats she will have acquired by then.
Enzo says, “Mario will be back with the wine in a minute.”
“Catch you later, An-so,” Greg says. Then to Sonya, “An-so’s a friend of my dad’s.”
Sonya’s father, whom she adored, has been dead for fifteen years. Bringing up her personal tragedy now would just make her seem sad. A sad case. Even thinking about her dad is a bad idea. She can feel the memories tugging down the corners of her mouth.
“How was your day?” Greg asks, which seems like a good sign. Of what? Politeness? Interest? She’ll settle for politeness.
She says, “Good. Good enough. If the kids are good, I’m good.”
Greg says, “I get it. It was good. You said good four times.”
“Did I?” says Sonya. That’s four lies, and they’ve only just met. How tactless of him to notice.
“But who’s counting?” he says. “A good day is a good thing.” Why would Greg care if a bunch of five-year-olds were well behaved and happy? He’s probably looking for a supermodel who wants to party and have lots of edgy sex before he dumps her and finds a wife whom his family will approve of. But it was Greg who got in touch with Sonya. He knew what she does for a living and what she looks like.
Her friends, the friends she’s too busy and borderline depressed to see, posted her profile and treated her to a manicure to celebrate her toe-dip into the dark, churning waters of computer dating. That manicure has peeled, so that now her nails look like ten tiny pink row houses, weather-beaten, in desperate need of a paint job. On the dating site, under hobbies, her friends made her write, “Work. I work all the time.” No point pretending, they said. She’d be better off looking for a work-obsessed maniac like herself.
At first Sonya refused, then agreed to let them do it. It had begun to occur to her that she could stay single forever. An elderly kindergarten teacher and her feline friends.
A tall waiter with an unusually long, cylindrical head appears with a bottle and glares at them with hate, pure hate. He pours a taste for Greg, who pinches the air, approvingly. The waiter fills their glasses and leaves.
“Waiter Frankenstein,” Greg says. “That dude never waited on me when I was here before.”
There’s a silence. How many girls has he taken here?
“With my dad,” Greg adds.
He drinks most of his glass in one gulp, sluiced down by his pistoning Adam’s apple. Sonya takes several swallows to keep up, and Greg refills her glass. All right, let’s see how this goes. Sonya’s not a prude, and Greg doesn’t seem like a potential date-rapist. Though girls always say that, after.
“What does your father do?” she asks.
“He’s in business.” Greg hooks his fingers around business.
“If I knew what kind of business he was in, he’d have to kill me.” He laughs, and so does Sonya. Okay, she can date an oligarch’s son. It’s not Greg’s fault, what his father does. Greg’s an environmental lawyer.
“I actually don’t know . . . ,” says Greg, and some as yet unseen (by Sonya) emotion disturbs the glassy calm of his features. Is he afraid of his powerful father? Sonya will never know him well enough to know. She doesn’t want to know him that well, and yet the thought that Greg’s deepest emotions will forever remain unknown to her makes her sad.
“How was your day?” she says.
“Lousy,” he says. “Worse than lousy.”
Actually, so was hers! But he’s allowed to tell the truth, and she isn’t. Such are the rules of dating. “What happened?” she asks, her voice honeyed with womanly sympathy.
“It’s starting to look like we’re going to lose a big case.”
“Bastards,” Sonya says. “They can always outgun us. Outspend us. What’s it about?”
“The Carolina speckled mouse,” says Greg. “Size of your fucking pinky. Endangered species. The usual bullshit. So three thousand North Carolina men and women who would have gotten jobs are going to stay unemployed and unable to feed or clothe their kids because some morons in Washington strong-arm the fucking lumber companies into protecting a fucking rodent who could just move the next county over. Excuse my language.”
It takes Sonya a while to understand: they mean different morons and bastards! She’d assumed that “environmental lawyer” meant Greg fights for endangered species, not for the right to wipe them out. Is Greg representing the lumber company? No matter how she turns the page, that is the only way she can read it. She pictures swarms of teensy mice screeching with terror as they dodge the giant tree trunks crashing down around them. Then she thinks of Edward telling the class about Mister Monkey. Wasn’t there a lawyer in that? How can she not remember? She read the book as a kid. She remembered the story yesterday. Trying to make sense of it feels like trying to glue together the shards of a dream. A dream about a monkey. Did someone put something in her drink? Wine on an empty stomach is enough to start the room slowly revolving, scattering colored Christmas lights.
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