The guy beside me raised his hand. “What if we just happen to be working with a kid who’s really bad at standardized tests? It seems a little unfair to get judged for a test we don’t actually take.”
Griffin gave a beneficent smile. “The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.”
Then came the checks—a thousand bucks—and a final speech. Griffin spoke to us directly, simply, making ample eye contact. We were to be the very best. We were not to try too hard. We should be confident, and never forget a million others would be thrilled to occupy our place.
* * *
—
Later that same week, I received my first assignment. Lupe Quiroz, of Eighty-Sixth and York, had a 1500 on her SAT, but her parents believed she could do better. Would I be available for a month of Sundays, an emphasis on math?
I began to calculate. Five hours, five hundred dollars. Four Sundays, ninety minutes each: six hundred dollars. And this was just the start. Sure, there were taxes, but April was a million years away. I said yes. When I slept on my cousin’s couch now, I dreamt of calendar squares, each marked with tidy sums ending in double zeros, a wave of cash carrying me to a completed novel.
* * *
—
When I arrived at 450 East Eighty-Sixth, having hoofed it like hell from Lex to York, the doorman patiently waited for me to butcher “Quiroz” before sending me soaring in a silver box.
A woman in an embroidered blouse answered the door. “Hi! I’m Rose! So nice to meet you!” I exclaimed, hand outstretched. She looked at me sadly and muttered over her shoulder.
From the depths (but not the deep depths; this apartment did not have deep depths; even on the threshold I could tell) emerged a second middle-aged woman, wearing loose sweats. “Hi, I’m Araceli,” she said. So this was the mother who sent emails from her DE Shaw account; this was to whom I should be directing my obsequious high-pitched flattery. It was the first time I had confused the housekeeper for the mother, but not the last.
I was ushered inside. Lupe, too, was in running shorts and a giant white T-shirt; everyone except the housekeeper was dressed as if for a slumber party.
We settled into the glass-encased breakfast nook, with its view of East Harlem’s gray-and-brown geometry. The apartment, in addition to being spotless and small, was muggy beyond belief. In a far corner, an ancient air conditioner ineffectively wheezed. No wonder the family favored shorts.
Lupe was petite, with dark, serious eyes and delicate cheekbones. Beautiful, and angry: “So, are you guys connected to the Ivy League?”
“Um, it’s sort of umm, a lot of the tutors went to Ivy League schools.” I made a big show of getting out my new pad of paper and sharpened pencils, the folder neatly printed with her name.
“But it’s not, like, official?”
“No.”
“So you can just call yourself that? Isn’t that illegal?”
“Well, it’s not illegal,” and I couldn’t help myself, I smiled a little, and that got Lupe. “That’s weird,” she muttered, but she was done arguing. Adult condescension her Kryptonite, I noted. This was a girl who wanted to be taken seriously.
She was right, though. Ivy Prep. It was a disgusting name, coyly false. We were both trapped, her family so desperate for some Ivy Prep that they’d hire an Ivy grad to do the prepping; and me, the Ivy grad wandering further and further off the path of economic stability, capitalizing again and again on the brand-name school that was supposed to have served as a launching pad eight years ago.
“It is weird,” I agreed. “But let’s get out the diagnostic. How did it go?” The diagnostic was another Griffin tactic: before a family could even begin tutoring, the child had to take a mock SAT. Cost? $225.
Silently Lupe slid the test across the table. The thirty-one questions of MATH TEST 4—CALCULATOR had been completed in very faint, almost unintelligible pencil. “Oh, okay, this looks great. Um. This is good. Okay. Why don’t we go over the answers real quick?”
A D C C B…a chain of letters like genetic code. She read, and I verified: she had answered every one correctly, save the second to last, which was an exponent-and-root question with enough checkmarks and cheeky superscripted numbers to resemble a three-story house. Number 29. What a coincidence. The coincidence was: I didn’t know how to do number 29 either.
Lupe was looking at me with mild interest. “What’s the trick?”
Behind Lupe’s head there was a shelf of square glass jars with round wooden lids, the kind of jars where quaint coffee shops kept biscotti. These jars, however, were filled not with baked goods but with matchbooks. Hundreds of them, each stamped with a restaurant’s logo.
“I thought I had it,” she continued. “But the two and the three don’t cancel out at the end.”
What did the matchbooks mean? Was the father secretly a red-sauce Italian fanatic, did he go to escape the housekeeper’s cooking and bring back, in apology, a little souvenir? Did Lupe, up late plowing through mountains of homework, ever lift a lid, plunge in her hand, and take out a book? Did she ever strike a light?
I forced my gaze down. “Well, yeah. This problem. This guy. Yeah. He’s a bit of a sly one. I think the thing is…”
Here I wasted a good two minutes carefully recopying the question onto my yellow legal pad. Triumphantly I turned it to Lupe. “So what do you think the first step should be?”
“I showed you. I did this.” With her mechanical pencil she made a series of pale gray lines.
“Good,” I said skeptically, staring bewildered at the faint lines. She’d simplified it? Maybe? Is that how square roots worked? Could you do that? Damp pools of sweat formed in my pits. “And then what do you think you do?”
Lupe reclaimed the yellow pad, squinted, and made more pale marks. My gaze wandered to the next room. Sunk into the paisley cushions of the couch, a man. How long had he been there? Hunched over a manila folder, he seemed part of the furniture. The father. Spying on his daughter’s tutor, hearing the bafflement in my voice. Thinking he had paid—what did Ivy Prep charge?—$300 an hour?—so $450 for this failed writer to fail at high school math.
Above his head, an antique clock was stuck at four minutes to three.
Lupe was scowling at the page. Solve it, I prayed. Please, oh Lord, solve it. I felt trapped in some Nietzschean dream of eternal recurrence, doomed to spend eternity here, several hundred feet in the air, shamefaced and sweaty beside a tiny teenage girl.
“I don’t know,” Lupe sighed. “I would think that you could do this,” she indicated a series of 7’s and 9’s with perky square-root signs, like overly exuberant checkmarks, “but the 3 still doesn’t cancel out.”
“Yeah, it definitely looks that way,” I commiserated. On the couch the father coughed and the plastic crinkled.
“You’ve got to,” I stalled. “Yeah, you’ve got to…this is weird.” Lupe regarded me patiently. “This is a weird one. Actually, I think they may have—sometimes, these packets, they’ve got, like, mistakes in them.”
“Oh.”
The father coughed again.
“Yeah, I keep, like, asking my boss to fix them but the thing is, it’s really hard to write a perfect SAT math question. They’re really hard to replicate because they’ve been crowd-tested. So, this one, for instance, it’s way harder than anything you’d ever see on the test. Plus, I think it even has a calculator error in it. It doesn’t simplify. The answer is really messy.”
My pits: drenched. God, it was hot. All that glass like a greenhouse in the summer heat. I pinched my biceps to my side and felt the damp patches cool my ribs.
“Ohhhh,” Lupe hummed, and then, “I think…” The mechanical pencil hovered, darted, struck. A predator drone, that Bic. “Yeah, you do it like this.”
She swiveled the pad around. The question was, in fact, solved. Square root of 2 and sq
uare root of 2, forever and ever, amen. “Amazing,” I said. “Fantastic.” I craned to see the green digit of the microwave. Seven minutes gone. Eighty-three to go.
* * *
—
Out, at last, on the gray cool street, I checked my phone and found I already had an email from Griffin. How’d it go? he asked. Think you’re going to rock SAT tutoring?
Hurriedly, before I could feel too embarrassed for him, I wrote back: Yeah! It was great. Lupe’s great. I think I’m going to like tutoring.
Then I was walking west with hope in my heart. About the next apartment, I had a feeling. It was very small and overpriced. It was on a beautiful block, in a beautiful neighborhood. It was foolish and maybe exactly right.
In the week since visiting Lacie, I’d spent every morning refreshing Craigslist and every afternoon and evening trekking along strange side streets, meeting real-estate agents on corners and following them to new or ancient or crumbling studios, listening grimly as they rattled off all the reasons I didn’t know how lucky I was. But I never could get out my checkbook. With fees and first and last and security the total simply to sign my name often hovered near the $8,000 mark, but it wasn’t only the money. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ditmas. I couldn’t stop thinking about how easy it would be.
But Lacie had been flat-out panicked when I had appeared at the farmers’ market, though she had soon tactfully disguised it, and when, a few days later, I had asked her to the movies, she said she had plans. I suggested another night, and then another, but she kept dodging. Finally, awkwardly, I dropped it. She was too busy for me. She certainly wasn’t interested in living with me. And the sooner I gave up that dream, and resolved the pesky question of where to live, the sooner I could return to writing.
There were other reasons to hurry. My cousin was getting progressively less good at hiding her dismay at finding me, every night, still parked on her couch. Next week Griffin had promised me even more tutoring students: “You’re going to be busy!” he had chirped. It was time to find a place. It was time to make it work.
And indeed, this studio, two hundred square feet, with a shower jerry-rigged into the broom closet and the kitchen sink the only sink for ablutions, could work. More than work: it was bright and sun-filled and private, in a gorgeous historic brownstone of chocolaty purple. There was no broker’s fee, no last month’s rent. Right away I told Tony, a stocky Italian sculptor, that I wanted it.
To celebrate, we sat on the steps and shared a beer. He waved off my list of references. “Hey, hey,” he said. “Listen. I don’t do that. I don’t need a guarantor. I don’t need to hear about the size of your bank account or the fancy job you’ve got. Just look me in the eye and tell me that you’re a good person. Tell me you’ll pay the rent on time.”
“I am obsessive about the rent,” I assured him, unable to say, with a straight face, that I was a good person. “I’ve never missed rent in all the years I’ve been renting.” I chuckled. “I’m crazy about rent. Just the thought of missing it makes me nervous.” I scrunched up my shoulders to show how nervous it made me, playing neurotic writer to his primitive, sensualist sculptor; he may have been all brawn and intuition, but I was all brain, all twitchy, live-wire brain. Not a friend, and definitely not a potential lover, some hot young thing he could seduce into bed, no, no, just a type A, beige-dull neurotic.
Another woman appeared: young, pretty, tidy in a pleated skirt. “Excuse me? I’m here to see an apartment?”
“It’s been taken.” Tony winked at me.
Furiously she took me in: my unbrushed hair, my empty beer, my scuffed shoes. “You can’t possibly have had time to check the references of anybody,” she hissed.
Tony sighed and waggled his fingers at her. “Here, here, I’ll take your, your whatchamacallit.”
“My application.” She brandished a silver folder. He flipped it open. Katrina Vosges had gone to RISD and worked in industrial design, where she made a healthy five figures—far healthier than my five figures, which were, anyway, purely speculative, even if I had undergone Ivy Prep’s “comprehensive, rigorous, groundbreaking” training.
When she had gone he turned back to me. “I like to rent to artists. We understand each other.” He tore her application in half. Then he giggled wildly. I joined him. I told him I would bring the check tomorrow. He suggested seven o’clock, and we shook on it.
Why hadn’t I said to Tony that I was a “good person”? Why had I settled on “obsessive about the rent”? For I thought of myself as a good person, a basically good person. I donated to charitable organizations, I recycled, I held the elevator. I was a good listener, I was relatively close to my parents, every so often I made people laugh. I didn’t lie. I hardly ever lied. But right in the middle of all this self-congratulation was a soft spot of rot.
Often I thought about what had happened at the pool. I knew I wasn’t to blame, and yet when I tugged at the car crash, trying to unravel its threads, I always ended up thinking about that day at the Swarthmore Swim Club: they were yoked together in my mind.
It had happened the year we were ten. By then, we were old enough to ride our bikes to the pool, to sign in without parents, to buy greasy dogs at the snack bar with bills damply mashed in our hands. That summer we spent nearly every day there; we came to know all the pool’s colors, its faded cornflower in the morning, the sparkling afternoon turquoise, its flickering white diamonds and the deepening sapphire of twilight.
I had passed the test for the deep end easily—I had done it the summer before, and the summer before that—but I stayed in the shallows with Lacie, who couldn’t swim, and who doggedly pretended she had no interest in the shimmering depths, where the blues were more layered, where the boys played.
If we could have gone beneath the red-and-white buoys, we would have played a few paces from the boys, pretending we were oblivious to their presence. Instead we had to pretend we were oblivious from the shallows, which was much less effective. For hours we held cannonball contests and underwater tea parties, and not even when Leo Kupersky yelled that we were totally gay did we look over. It would have been beneath our dignity.
After swimming we would lie on the side of the pool like two shivering seals, our arms tucked under our torsos, the gritty sidewalk abrading our skin, and it was nice, somehow, after the blue water’s give, to have tiny sharp rocks dig into our flesh. We rocked and baked in the heat. We soaked up all the sun stored in the pavement, and slowly the dark hairs on Lacie’s arm would soften, slowly her goosebumps would disappear. Watching her was like watching myself in the mirror; what I saw in her body was happening to mine. Yes, I thought. If the color this summer is blue, the sensation is heat.
I could lie in the sun forever, rays prickling and crinkling my skin, heedless of burns. I could even fall asleep like that, right on the pavement, with the shriek of the high divers in my ears, which must have been what happened that August afternoon, for I didn’t hear Leo come over, didn’t see his long brown foot nudge Lacie. Maybe distantly their voices braided through the gauze of my dream, but then I fell more deeply asleep. When I woke, I was alone.
The air at once felt colder, the sun dimmer. I scrambled upright. The skin of my thighs was mottled and red from loose stones.
They were playing by the deep-end’s edge, pushing and shoving, Leo grabbing Lacie and shaking her, her twisting free and raining slaps on his chest.
“Lacie can’t swim!” Leo yelled when I came over. “Everyone knows how to swim!” and he punched her on the shoulder. She was giggling, a high-pitched hysterical giggle I had never heard from her before.
“Yeah!” I yelled, seizing Lacie’s other shoulder. “Everyone knows how to swim!”
Lacie tried to wriggle free, but she was not very strong, and now there were two of us. She kept laughing, an exaggerated laugh that sounded like a sob, and screaming in a breathy voice, “Help! Help! They’ve go
t me!” while Leo and I chanted, “Everyone knows how to swim! Everyone knows how to swim!” shaking her, tugging her, as though she were our prisoner of war, and even now I can remember the feel of her sun-warmed skin beneath my palm, how I clutched it, how it felt good to grab and claw, to dig my nails in and screech near her ear, “Everyone! Everyone!” something mean and nasty in my hands, and while I was grabbing and shouting, Leo hooked his thigh around her leg and tipped her smoothly into the pool.
I don’t think we actually believed she couldn’t swim. When she dropped like a stone we were astonished. A moment later, she emerged, legs and arms flailing wildly in a spray of white surf. Then she disappeared again.
Neither of us moved. I almost thought she was pretending. It was like her weird laughter. Those fake screams.
Somewhere kids were shouting Marco! Polo! The diving boards creaked. There was a splash, and then the lifeguard’s whistle. I looked at Leo, his tiny delicate face, like a lemur, pursed in concentration. The two of us, together. The two of us with a problem to solve.
It must have been less than five seconds, those moments of hesitation, though in my mind they go on forever. They last and last. Lacie in the water, and me looking at him.
Then Leo took off yelling. He bolted to the lifeguard’s stand and grabbed the guard’s ankle. Shouted. Pointed.
Lacie bobbed up. Her dark eyes were alive with animal fear. I stretched out my hand, and she lunged, though the distance was impossible. Again she disappeared beneath the water.
When I looked up all eyes were on me. The pool had gone silent.
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 4