Paradise, Piece by Piece

by Molly Peacock

  “Other people’s children”—he swung again—“that’s what I need, other people’s children, not my own!” He swung again. “Oh, Emma, I pray you hold out against your momma!” he said loudly his voice boomeranging off the stairwell walls.

  Then the metal door to the stairwell opened with a whoosh of rank air, and kids from the gym barreled past us, pinning him to the railing and me to the wall, though Jesse kept talking. “There’s enough of them, yes, you”—he pointed to the tall, wild-haired Hazel, now a junior, as she surged past—“there’s enough of you!” Then he raised his eyebrows and lowered his voice. “And there’s enough of their anxious, self-aggrandizing parents, too.” Hazel, however, had only one parent, a slouching, bewildered architect who became mom and dad after Hazel’s mother died.

  Hazel slammed the big metal door on the floor above. She was going to my room.

  “Dr. Fried has had his childhood,” Jesse went on in the third person, his imaginary backhand forcing me to leap down several stairs, “and he doesn’t want to relive it in a child of his own. And he doesn’t need to make a narcissistic mark by siring kid after kid in his image. He has the life he wants.”

  The life he wants. The life I want. The sentence snapped my attention like a stick. If we were to go on like this, I’d end up telling him I’d had an abortion and I’d cry and that would be the next piece of staff gossip to be passed around like precious jewels. I said, conspiratorially, pulling on his scarf, “We look normal, Jesse, but we’re not,” and fled up to my room without the cup of coffee I’d been on my way to get.

  The room was flayed when I opened the door. The assembly had been dismissed early, and the unsupervised students had run wild. Niles and Fionula whipped one end of the corduroy earthworm pillow out the window. Hazel was growling, “The worm’s gonna get you!” Philip and the others raced among the overturned desks. It wasn’t my room at all times; I shared this turquoise palace with other teachers, hogging the bulletin board for my kids and the cabinets for my supplies. The school’s idea of communal space destroyed everyone’s nesting instincts, and was easily trashed. It was last period Monday afternoon.

  “What’s the word for what this room should be?” I screamed over the screaming.

  Philip sat down.

  “Do you remember that word?” I screeched, asking them the same question I would have posed when they were twelve. The others began to sit down, but not fast enough. “How about making these desks into their circle and pulling the worm back from the window, you guys. Let’s get going.”

  “It’s not our fault!” Hazel declared. “It was like this when we got here!”

  “I know that, doll, but we’ve got to pull it back together.”

  “Go get the eighth-graders! It’s their fault!”

  “Come on, let’s do it,” I said, straightening the desks. They all began to move as I gave instructions, calling each of them by name and giving each a task. We had twenty minutes left by the time we cleaned up, and it was vocabulary prep day.

  “You say this room is a sanctuary, and it is not!” Hazel declared. “It gets wrecked all the time.”

  “Well, nobody said a sanctuary is inviolate, you just have to rebuild it when it’s wrecked. What’s inviolate?”

  We had to look it up.

  “OK, time for Vocab Charades,” I said with a brightness I didn’t feel. It was a game we’d invented to kill the boredom of the vocabulary lists at the end of their long day. I’d hand-lettered the words on cards I picked out of a box for each student to act out or to draw on the board. I agonized over whether the kids themselves should pick them, then commandeered the box so I could adjust each word to each student’s memory and skills.

  “I’m first!” It was Hazel.

  “OK, Hazel: RECUMBENT.” She scrambled under the computer table and lay down. I handed MAGNANIMOUS to Fionula who began drawing a huge hand reaching down to a tiny one on the board and PSYCHOSOMATIC to Niles. He brought it to the corner of the room where we had a butterfly chair and sat down to muse. By the time all the other kids had done two or three words, he would be ready with a killer performance.

  “Great, Good, Wonderful, Excellent!” I clapped, walking around the room supervising each student separately. Niles enlisted Philip to be the doctor in a mini-play called “The Psychosomatic Problem,” and at 3:12 P.M. they performed to our thundering applause. Then it was 3:15 P.M. and the drop of the minute hand signaled chaos again, the students scrambling to their lockers, me shouting to remember the assignment for tomorrow which I was reinforcing on the board, knowing I should have done it earlier and none but Philip and Fionula was reading it. Then I fled to the teachers’ room for tea.

  When I made my way back after the good-bye rush, I discovered Hazel still under the computer table, curled in a nearly fetal position.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. Alarmed, I scrambled down on all fours next to her.

  “I have a test!” she moaned.

  “Thank God it’s only a test! I thought you’d fainted under there!”

  “It’s not only a test!” she whined. “It’s a history test for Clemson!”

  I got up, realizing I had chalk dust all over my black pants. “Poop,” I whispered.

  “Pooooop! I’ve got to study sooo much,” she wailed.

  “Well, you can’t study under there, Hazel, so you’ve got to get up and go home. Your Dad waits for you whenever you have a big test.”

  “Not today.”

  “Well, you’re old enough to study on your own.” This wasn’t entirely true. She had a set of subtle learning disabilities that constantly threw her off. Her sense of sequence fell apart under pressure. And a history test is all about what happened when. Almost ethereally bright, Hazel could easily grasp the reasons for a social movement, but never get the order of events. She’d been sabotaged by sequence as a small child, when her mother’s sudden stroke unglued life’s order.

  “I hate our empty apartment!” Body bunched up in a ball, head sticking out from under the table, Hazel whimpered on the verge of tears.

  A pain flashed across my chest. It was the heart pain I got at awful moments. I thought of her on the phone the week before. She had locked herself in the bathroom with the telephone, screaming at her dad to leave her alone, her father helplessly pounding on the door in frustration. It was probably a big old bathroom in a prewar building. The pounding had a deep bass wood sound to it.

  Hazel hadn’t gotten an extension for a history project that was due, so she’d locked herself in the bathroom, overwhelmed. “I’m afraid of him!” she’d yelped. A zag of fear ripped through me, till I remembered. He’s only a poor shnook with a dead wife, Molly. He’s not a monster. He’s not Ted. He’s not going to harm her. He’s yelling from frustration, as anyone would. I knew this benighted father, who hadn’t a clue about Hazel’s Tampax or sport bras. He was fumbling now, but he’d be all right. I’d watched him watch his daughter in dumbfounded adoration, and I was taking his side. I had crossed over. There’s a line you’re only supposed to cross when you become a parent, but I had traversed it, without having a child.

  “OK, honeypie, do you have a Kleenex?” I had asked her on the phone.

  Yes, she had a Kleenex.

  “Now get the Kleenex and blow your nose, and get out your memory, because I’m going to give you Mrs. Clemson’s phone number, and you’re going to try to remember her number even though that’s hard for you, and when we hang up you’re going to call her and ask for an extension, and then you’re going to call me back and tell me what she said.”

  “I’M ON THE PHONE,” she screamed, “ON THE PHONE WITH MOLLY!”

  “Shit,” I heard Hazel’s father say.

  “Come on, Hazel, I’m going to give you Clemson’s number.”

  “I can’t!” she sniffled. “I can’t call her.”

  “It’s going to be awful, Hazel, you’re going to hate it. She might be nasty and she might be decent, I honestly don’t know, sweethear
t, but this is what you’ve got to do.”

  “Can’t you call her?” I was waiting for that. Of course I could, but I had crossed the line. I stood on the parents’ side now, with all the adults who knew they must stand by and watch as teenagers performed so painfully imperfectly those tasks so easy for adults to do.

  “You have to do it, honey, even though it’s hard. I’m going to stay right by the phone so you can call me back.” I had to wait on my side of the line, knowing that I couldn’t recross it. After a certain point, watching from the sideline is all a grown-up can do.

  “HAZEL!” Her father was still yelling.

  “Tell him you’ll be right out.”

  “I’m talking to Molly!” she said. “Molly says to tell you I’ll be right out!”

  “You’ve got five minutes to open that door, Hazel!”

  “Listen, Hazelpie, call Clemson and call me back. You’ve only got five minutes.”

  And so she did. Clemson was decent and gave her the extension. By 9 P.M. I was watching Mystery! in bed, alone, all alone in a monk-like blackness that was rich as soil.

  —

  “It’s a test for that witch!” Hazel moaned, bringing me back to Room 303.

  “Come on, Hazel, Mrs. Clemson isn’t that bad—after all, she gave you your extension.”

  “She’s still a goddamn witch.”

  Arianna Clemson was frugally fair with her students, the kind of veteran teacher who rarely gave exceptions because if I do it for one, I’ll have to do it for everybody. The juniors learned their American history, and they all learned it well, most with a grudging respect for her white-haired rules. Arianna had recognized that Hazel needed exceptions, though, and she granted them economically.

  “Come on, Hazel, Hazel,” I repeated her name softly, “you know Clemson isn’t a witch.”

  “I hate my name! Why did my mother name me this?”

  “Listen, I once knew a magnificent Hazel who raised Morgan horses. She had springy wiry hair like yours. This Hazel was the coolest thing in four counties and all the kids your age died to work for her.”

  “Fuck her.”

  “Just a minute here, madam, let’s not get out of bounds.”

  “Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her!”

  “Well, that certainly is a lot of fucking, Hazie. Aren’t you tired, dollface?”

  “Don’t call me dollface. Fuck you!”

  I crawled down to face her. “Hazel is a name I have loved all my life, and because I love that name I’m tolerating you, even though you are a junior in high school and acting like you are ten. But one more fuck and you have to leave.”

  “Fuck you!”

  Instead, I put on my coat, piled my papers into my backpack, and left the room.

  “OK, I’m going, I’m going!” she said, and followed me out into the hall.

  “I’m gonna fail this test!” she yelped, butting up against the lockers.

  “I’ll bet you released time on two vocab lists that you can’t get a zero on your history test.”

  “Fucking history,” she began.

  “Ah, ah, ah! Do not take one more step until you apologize.” Why was I asking her to apologize? I myself had thwarted history, the imperative of generations.

  “All right, I’m sorry, OK?” She looked plaintively pre-Raphaelite, her fair skin and red hair haloed above her violet parka.

  “OK,” I said, tempted to lift a wisp out of her face, but refraining. “Now go home!”

  “I’ll walk you to the subway.” She pouted.

  We tromped along Sixteenth Street. Though I felt gray from exhaustion, my feet surprised me by moving back and forth in the rhythm of walking.

  “Where are you going?” Hazel asked. “Are you going home?”

  “No, tonight I have a class for kids who have trouble in school.”

  “Really?” she said. Her eyes opened wide.

  “Yes, and one of my best friends is speaking, so I’m really looking forward to it.”

  “Is your friend married?”

  “Yup.”

  “Aren’t you ever gonna get married, Molly?” Hazel quizzed me. Her father had a serious girlfriend now.

  “I doubt it. I did that, a long time ago. It’s not for me.”

  “But don’t you want kids?”

  We had stopped at the corner to wait for the WALK sign. I turned toward her but was speechless. The No inside me felt pink and tender as a blister. Yet I refused to be irritated with her. “Well,” I teased, “not every kid can be as wonderful as you!”

  “Oh, Molly, you know what I mean.”

  “Well, what I mean is, having you guys in school is good enough for me.”

  “But you don’t want kids of your own?” She was as unyielding as a new shoe.

  “Well, it’s not exactly that. It’s that I want…something else,” I said, nearly on the verge of tears.

  “Oh! Because you’re a poet!” It appeared to Hazel that poetry was legitimately preclusive to children.

  “It’s because I want…a journey. A journey that’s different from being a mother.” I watched her face, open as a small plate. “But I’m glad to have kids around me, Hazel, even when they’re a pain in the tush like you.” She smiled, then seemed pensive for the rest of our walk to the station, eyeing me as I fumbled in my coat pocket for a clean tissue. My allergies had instantly acted up.

  “Good luck with the history studying,” I honked as she hopped down the stairs.

  —

  The grimy NYU seminar room smelled of the fungus that had infested the ventilation system. The guest this week for my graduate course in learning disabilities was none other than Lily Allisman, the youngest superintendent of schools in the state. She was brilliant on the subject of legislation for the learning disabled, and looked brilliant, too, in a lavender shantung blouse and amethyst earrings below her short dark hair and excited brown eyes. As Lily’s bony shoulders moved inside the blouse, it shimmered, and the earrings flashed at the sides of her angular face. But the blouse barely covered the famous ass, now perhaps even more famous because of its increase in width. She fielded questions from the posturing graduate students and from visiting teachers and the graduate faculty member who’d invited her. Efficient and funny, she wise-alecked with the interlocutors as she gave knowing answers. Maggie and I had been wrong to pooh-pooh her practical choice of education school. It was just the first step toward becoming the social mover we always thought she’d be, though in a realm we hadn’t imagined.

  “I’m taking you out to dinner,” she said as we put on our coats after the seminar. “Let’s go to Cafe Loup.” That was the restaurant where the three of us, all still friends, had our reunions, though tonight it would be us two.

  “You don’t have to take me!”

  “Expense account, sweetie pie.”

  We strolled through the crowds on Eighth Street, gawking in the store windows at the T-shirts.

  “Who do you think buys those things?” Lily asked, pointing to one that sported a cartoon blonde, shouting from the bubble over her head, Oh no, I forgot to have children!

  “Gruesomely inappropriate.” I shuddered, then smiled.

  “It is funny, but, I mean, can you imagine owning one?”

  “God no.”

  “But they’re in every window. Somebody must be buying them.” Yet of all the T-shirts parading on Eighth Street, this one was not in evidence.

  “I’m going to keep on looking,” Lily said. “I want to find the brave girl who’s going to wear one.” How about the plain old brave girl by your side? I was too aggrieved to ask.

  We turned up Sixth Avenue, sticking to the crowd so Lily could continue her search, our bags banging against our hips, our conversation veering as we missed colliding with other pedestrians.

  “Alex is graduating from college this year, and he’s off to the West Coast. Now it’s just me and Tom all cozy and nice,” Lily shouted in my ear. Her sister had died and Lily and her husband, Tom the carpenter,
had taken in their nephew. “I love the kid, but God I’ll be glad to see him out of the…” Lily stopped. A horde of teenage boys swarmed past us. “There it is!” she whispered, pointing to the T-shirt on a scrawny torso below bleached-blond dreadlocks. The boy sneered in surprise.

  “Hah! Now I know who wears them,” she said sourly, “the ones without the biological clocks.” She grabbed my shoulder in sudden sympathy, rocking me against her book bag.

  “We’re ticking, we’re ticking,” I mocked, “like the alligator in Peter Pan.” The alligator had swallowed its clock. As I was doing.

  Finally we turned onto quiet Thirteenth Street. Why had we steered so long through the noise and crowds?

  “So, as I was saying before we were assaulted by that shirt, it will be just Tom and me, all nice and cozy the way we like it.”

  “That’s great for you,” I whimpered. “Tilla and I are a mess.”

  —

  On the weekend I crabbed and whined, my voice a dripping stalagmite onto the rock of Tilla. He would not change, he insisted. I, the materialist, should change. Like Nina, I wanted too many luxuries. “You’re buying extraordinary things,” he stormed when I appeared with striped shopping bags with new blouses. “I cannot even pay for ordinary things!”

  “Can’t you ever pay a few bills?” I nagged. We were a mess, I repeated, we were going to break up, I repeated, is that what he wanted? For once he didn’t quote me Popeye. He didn’t say, “I yam what I yam, Molly Oil.” Instead he used a line he also seemed to have memorized. “Yes, Molly Oil,” he said formally, “maybe someone can give us some advice.” Immediately I produced the number of a counselor that Ruta had given me.

  —

  Our couples therapist, Eloise, had a generous face that hung above her shapeless clothes like a pumpkin over a sheet on Halloween. The word mourning was never uttered, not by Eloise, or Tilla, or me. Yet it was grief that had driven me to relentless activity and continual harping at Tilla’s anorexic wallet. The grief had found its way to expression through the subtle cracks of blaming. Tilla was to blame. If only he had been more solvent, more stable, willing to sacrifice himself…but of course, he was only himself. And I, too, was only who I was, curiously becoming more complete as the refusal sunk in. We were in mourning for a loss we chose. We elected to have an abortion, but that did not stop our pain or make our choice a mistake. We were not wrong, we were sad.