And then she had taken a pen and recorded everything ugly about my face.
* * *
—
The doorbell rang. I swore. Lacie wasn’t likely to waltz home in the middle of the day, but what if she had? What if she had forgotten her keys? I went to the door with my arms crossed against my chest, braced.
It was the UPS guy. “Lucinda Salt?” he asked, holding out a big brown box. More yarn, no doubt.
“Yep.” With the stylus I signed, a big L and S. “Thank you so much,” I purred.
“You’re welcome,” he gushed, taking in my short dress, my cleavage, my glossy red lips. Then he winked.
I was grinning as I shut the door. Her clothes were a kind of magic. With them, ordinary words, an ordinary moment, flushed pink.
Later, though, I felt disgusted and ashamed, bloated, as if I had gorged myself on candy. Lolling on the couch, back in my boring blue jeans, I vowed to stop.
When I was seven years old I had found my mom’s journal, a lavender lily-covered thing. She had hardly bothered to hide it, just tossed it in the wicker basket beside her bed beneath a few magazines. It was easy enough to find. For a few days after my discovery, I didn’t crack the cover. I would just go and touch it. I liked knowing it was there.
But eventually, I opened. I read. I was a good reader for my age; I could read her bubbly handwriting quickly, in the moments when she was downstairs flipping the laundry or fixing me a snack. In this way, I learned that when my father had forgotten my permission slip they had fought violently, in whispers, after I had gone to bed; that she felt he had never, never done his share of the household chores; that they hadn’t had sex in eight months; that she hated her thighs.
Hardly earth-shattering revelations, and yet they scalded me. The idea that the cheerful, supportive, steady presence in my life hated her thighs, and occasionally her husband, broke over me like a thunderclap. It was the beginning of learning that other people had private lives. It was the beginning of learning to write.
I’m still not sure how she caught me. I was always careful to put the journal back exactly where I found it. But one day I came home from school and found both my parents waiting. They sat me down in our white swivel chair and grimly explained that privacy and respect were more meaningful when freely given. They didn’t want to live in a home where some things needed to be hidden, and they were wondering: did I agree?
On and on they went, and the longer they talked, refusing to say the word “journal,” the more my shame became rage. Why couldn’t they be direct? Everything was soft with them. Everything was cloaked in cloth, and yet they were so self-righteous and sure. Mumbling my apology, I shook their hands, and that was that—no punishment, no consequence. As usual, just a “talk.”
In an act of naïveté—or defiance, I could never decide which—my mom continued keeping her journal in her wicker basket, and I continued reading it. We never discussed it again. Gradually I lost interest in her self-pitying complaints. Gradually I began to skim only for my name, which showed up with surprising infrequency. Reading her journal became less about cracking her psyche and more about separating myself from my parents. If they were going to be so smug in their self-control, then I would be the kind of person who had none. Who did what she wanted, and never apologized.
Not that I ever had the courage to execute that kind of stance in a public way. I just snuck. Snooped. All these years later I was still snooping, and as it fueled the novel I snooped more. Day after day, morning after morning, I went into Lacie’s room. I lay on her bed. I tried on her earrings and turned the pages of her notebooks.
Then, after a morning of “writing”—that is to say, drinking Lacie’s coffee and trying on her clothes—I would rise like an automaton and run the odd polygon that was Prospect Park, my legs mechanically pumping up the same hill, sailing past the boarded-up bandshell. Then I would frantically shower and stuff some more of Lacie’s food in my mouth before heading out—backpack swinging, hair still wet—to tutor.
Standing on the Manhattan-bound Q platform at Church Avenue, bag loaded with College Board SAT guides, purse packed with power bars and water and gum, I would think over and over, I hate this, I hate this, and then, almost immediately: Shut up, shut up. It’s not that bad. It’s just a job. It’s really not that bad.
To soothe myself I would think again of the hours already worked that week, of Lulu and Esme, Finn and Rome. If nobody canceled this month, if nobody got sick or had a baseball tournament or a long weekend in Hawaii or London or St. John’s, this total, multiplied by four, would bring me…well, minus rent, minus health insurance, minus groceries, minus…I multiplied and subtracted, estimated and rounded. Moving to New York had turned me into a calculating machine.
When people asked, I always said that tutoring was “fine,” that it was an “easy” way to make a living, that the kids were sometimes “fun.” But that was a lie. Sitting in a cramped or dark or fussy apartment, craning my neck as a high-schooler penciled in her algebra, I felt berserk.
I especially felt berserk when the parents wanted to “check in.” Although ostensibly checking in was a chance for me to tell them about their child’s progress, the real purpose of checking in was for the parents to brag. After a few weeks of working with Lila, for instance, her father, a semi-famous sexologist with a series of YouTube videos (“Is Monogamy Necessary?” and “Sexuality: We’re Learning More All the Time!”) asked me to step into his office.
Jazzy red polygons squiggled across the gray industrial rug. He offered me a cone of water from the cooler. Then, leaning back in his executive chair behind his massive desk, he said, “My daughter, she’s a wonderful human being. She’s a delight. I couldn’t be prouder of her.”
“She’s great,” I murmured, though privately I thought she was dumb as a rock.
“And Lila, the thing about Lila is, she’s never going to be a top scorer. That’s not where she is. And my wife and I, we don’t want to make her into something she’s not. We don’t want her to go to a school where she shouldn’t be. But I’ll tell you, Barnard could be an excellent opportunity for her. She does very well in an all-girl environment. And it’s funny, I said to her, we only get a few days in our lives to change our lives. We only get a few opportunities. And this could be this for her, that day that she takes the test.
“And so, I just don’t want this test to shut down any opportunity for her. I don’t want it to be the reason she doesn’t get into some school. Because once she’s there, she’ll be fine. She’s such a kind, giving, generous young woman. But I just think…you know, once, I took her up to the roof of our summer home, in East Hampton, I did, and I taught her the times tables. I said, we’re not going down until you’ve got the twelves. Because me, I happen to like numbers, I like math. You know, when I was a kid, I memorized my times tables, up to the fifteens, just for fun.” He laughed fondly. “And when we came down, it had started to rain, we were all wet, and her poor mother was like, Where did she go? What did you do to her?”
“You were really helping her,” I murmured.
“Numbers,” he said. “I liked numbers.”
When at last I spilled out to the sidewalk, I took great greedy gulps of air. Nighttime, and a borzoi was pissing on some chrysanthemums while the doorman wearily watched.
* * *
—
Then came test day, too soon, a flurry of last-minute texts, Good luck! and You’re going to kill it! and You got this! to which my charges mostly did not reply. Then the eager How’d it go?, also ignored, and then the waiting, and then the scores.
It wasn’t precisely that the scores hadn’t gone up, though from a strictly mathematical perspective, that was true. It was that the scores had gone up and down, up in some places, down in others, up for some kids, down for others. Eagerly I celebrated the gains to the parents. I reminded them that progress was nev
er linear.
“What do you think is the average gain made by an Ivy Prep tutor?” Griffin Chin asked. It was the Tuesday after the scores had been released and he had asked me to “stop by” his office for “a chat.”
“A hundred points?” I asked hopefully.
“One would think, one would think,” he hummed excitedly. “But here at Ivy Prep, our average gain is two hundred points. Average, I’d say. And our top-of-the-line tutors, now, I’m not talking people like you, who’ve just joined, I mean folks who’ve been perfecting their craft for years…they can see upward of three or four hundred points. Rose? Do you see what I’m saying?”
I smiled without showing my teeth.
“So, Rose. Let me be frank. You’re a—you consider yourself an educator?”
“Um, I’ve mostly been writing—”
“All”—he held up his finger—“our tutors are educators. Because that’s the business we’re in. Education. But as I think I mentioned, we only want you to educate in the subjects you’re extremely good at.”
“Right, totally. That makes sense.”
“But I don’t want you to think of this like you’re getting into trouble, because the truth is that we actually have a really wonderful opportunity for you.”
Icy sweat slid down my back. It was so typical of Ivy, of every elitist institution, that the first hint that you’ve royally fucked up is the emphatic insistence that you have in fact not fucked up.
“I really do like the SAT. I’m beginning to develop a real soft spot for it,” I improvised, but Griffin was squinting and dabbing at his iPad.
When he finally found what he wanted, he swanned his fingers out and announced, “The Wests. Now. It’s a very tricky situation.”
“Yes,” I said ambiguously.
“Rose,” and his voice had an okay, you got me tone, as if I were driving a particularly devilish bargain, “I’m going to be perfectly frank here. I wouldn’t say this to everyone, but I’m saying it to you, because I like you. I trust you. Now. The Wests. They’ve let a lot of our tutors go. They’re picky. Not that I blame them. You know how these families work.” His voice warmed with indignation. “There’s the pretty daughter, and then there’s the smart daughter. Isabel’s sister is very smart. And Isabel is very beautiful.”
There was nothing I could say to this that wouldn’t be offensively sardonic or disgustingly creepy, so I stayed mum.
“They’re a good family,” he insisted, as if I had spoken. “A very good family. Ivy Prep has known them a long time. The sister goes to Columbia,” he gave Columbia a breathy hush, as if it were an obscure sexual act, “so, just do what you can do. The family has high expectations. They’ll want you to work with Isabel a lot. You know, it’s college essay time. So I think this will more than make up for…the adjustments we’re making here.”
* * *
—
The elevator down from Griffin’s office made me sick, dropping so fast, then bouncing to abrupt stops at random floors. Once outside, I nearly ran, furiously navigating the stalled ballet of shopping carts in front of Fairway, and then heading south on Second, a monologue ramping up in my head. I hated that I hated being bad at tutoring, though it wasn’t really being bad at tutoring that I minded; it was the money. I had a money problem.
When I had moved in, Lacie had said she “didn’t want to be an asshole” about rent, but introducing financial obligation into the web of debt between us didn’t exactly seem like a brilliant idea. But I didn’t have another one. The question was how to ask. With a joke? I couldn’t believe I was in the position of needing something from her again.
Whenever I passed the plate glass of a store window my footsteps slowed as I glanced at my pale, washed-out reflection. I hated how I looked, yet I kept looking, as if a different glass would give a different answer. But to my question Who am I? every store answered: just a pink slab of face.
Of all Lacie’s soups, I liked her curry-coconut one best, with its great chunks of butternut squash and leeks, its silken tofu and roasted peanuts, the pale wedges of lime and brilliant green sprays of cilantro served in bright ceramic dishes. This morning I had seen a bulbous squash on the butcher block, and all day—right up until my conversation with Griffin—I had thought longingly of the brown sugar and ginger, garlic and cumin, but by the time I got home Lacie had already eaten, and the soup was cold on the stove.
Lacie at the loom resembled a dedicated queen. For weeks boxes of carmine yarn had been arriving, material for the truly epic blanket she was making. I kept waiting for her to declare it done—by now the tightly stitched bloody shroud nearly covered the daybed—but like Penelope, she kept going.
With a bowl of the cold soup I curled myself into the couch. “What are you making anyway? I’m almost afraid to ask.”
She shook it out. Wispy red threads floated up. “A cocoon.”
I couldn’t tell whether she was joking. “Oh my God, that’s what I need. A cocoon. Somewhere I can just hide for the next six months.”
“Exactly. That’s the plan. I’m going to knit us both cocoons, and we’re just going to hibernate this winter. We’re going to be baby bears.”
“Perfect. You’re brilliant. This soup is delicious, by the way.” I sliced open a cube of butternut squash.
She held her stitching up to the light, squinting intently. “It’s really easy to make,” she murmured, lowering her arms and unraveling her last stitch. “How was your day? What’s going on?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Do you ever feel like the whole city grosses you out? It’s just like, I’ll never have kids here. It’s a cruel thing to do to a child.”
She smiled in a motherly way, as if touched to hear me figure out such basic facts about New York. “I don’t disagree with you.”
“It’s just—these parents. They’re the worst. They’re like total Calvinists. They work all the time, and they make their kids work all the time, as if the moral crime of being so ridiculously rich in a city with so many poor people is somehow negated by never actually enjoying your wealth.”
Her clacking stopped. “Did something happen?”
“No. Just the usual bullshit. It’s like, this guy, right? I told you about him. The sex therapist with the freaky dyed eyebrows?”
She nodded vaguely.
“He sat me down in his office the other day, and he just starts going on and on about how wonderful his kid is, and then he starts in on how he’s not that kind of parent, he doesn’t want to pressure her, but he also doesn’t want her to miss out on any opportunity, which is totally code for ‘get her into Barnard.’ So I’m just supposed to magically pull this high score from her, so she can get into this college where she doesn’t even belong, and at the same time not do anything to heighten her anxiety. And when that doesn’t happen, I lose my job! After a month! I mean, whatever happened to a learning curve?”
“Wait, what? You lost your job?”
“Not really. They’re just taking away my SAT students. Which is totally fine. I suck at it anyway.”
“But what are you going to do? Isn’t their main business the SAT?” Her concern jolted me. She wanted things right in my life.
“Yeah, they have some new girl for me to work with. Her parents just basically want someone to sit with her while she writes her college essay. It’ll be super easy.”
“Oh, okay. So it’s good. I mean, so it’s working out.” The lightness in Lacie’s voice—how quickly she was assuaged—made me want to smash her calm. I needed her worried ahead of my ask.
“It’s kind of good, but what if she gets mono? Or jets off to Vail? These kind of people, they’re always leaving. And then all my income disappears,” I snapped my fingers, “like that.”
“Well, I told you. You can give me the rent whenever.”
Getting what I wanted so quickly left me breathless. She
was so good to me. “Yeah,” I sulked. “I feel bad.”
“Don’t feel bad.”
“What pisses me off is that Griffin just sits me down and says they’re taking away all my students as if it’s no big deal, as if I weren’t counting on that money. It’s like it would be gauche to say, Hey, actually, that’s my income. There’s this fiction that we’re all doing it out of the goodness of our hearts. It’s such bullshit.”
“You’re freaked out about money.”
“No, not really. It’s just—maybe I’ll get another job.”
“Look, Rose. Really don’t worry about the rent. I mean, pay me eventually, but don’t freak out.”
“But don’t you need the money?”
The red yarn tangled around her wrist. “I mean, yeah, but not like, immediately.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, it’s like, I mean, my parents sort of—I mean, I pay most of the mortgage.”
“Wait, you own this place?” I couldn’t keep the shock from my voice.
“I mean, my parents do. My mom. And me, I guess.”
“But how did she even—” I was thinking of the small white house where Lacie had grown up, single-story, on the edge of town.
“When Bee died.” She shrugged.
Amid the snapshots taped to the fridge there was the program from her grandmother’s memorial service. Often when Lacie was out I had taken it down, puzzling over the list of Quaker hymns and Jewish prayers, the Wallace Stevens Lacie had read.
“Oh.” I nodded. “I’m sorry.”
She laughed. Everything in the room felt pressurized, the objects shuddery and wavering. “Now you’re judging me like you judge those rich kids.”
Everyone Knows How Much I Love You Page 7