The Learning Curve

by Mandy Berman

  “Original, Dr. Dorfman. I already told you. I’m not sleeping with him.”

  “Okay.” Marley seemed stung that her metaphor, which she’d perhaps practiced, had been shut down.

  “Sorry,” Fiona said, squeezing Marley’s hand once. “I appreciate your concern. But you have nothing to worry about. Everything’s under control.” She didn’t like this; she didn’t like her friends trying to constantly control her behavior. Why didn’t they trust her judgment? Why couldn’t they give her the space to make her own decisions, even if they were wrong?

  “I have been thinking,” Marley said, “maybe it’s time to…Have you ever thought of seeing someone, maybe? I know you did when Helen first…but maybe again?”

  “Like a therapist.” Fiona had, of course, thought about this. She saw the way her mother had become since therapy, full of platitudes that had been spoon-fed to her by this woman she overpaid. Didn’t Fiona have people like Marley and Liv and Lula to talk about her problems with?

  Marley nodded.

  Where was this coming from? The drinking? The fact that she had hooked up with, what, two guys since school started?

  No: it was Oliver. No matter how much she denied it, neither Liv nor Marley believed that she wasn’t having an affair with him.

  “Who are you to judge my motivations for sleeping with people?” Fiona said, beginning to go from annoyed to angry. “How can you possibly judge why I do the things I do? You sleep with random guys all the time.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Since when are you the Virtue Police?”

  “I’m not.”

  “I’d expect this from Liv. Not you.”

  “Enough,” Marley said. “I’m only trying to help. I love you.”

  “If you loved me, you’d believe me.”

  Marley sat for a minute, quiet. She looked as if she was about to start crying.

  “I’m sorry,” Marley said, shaking her head. “I’m not trying to slut-shame. You can do whatever you want. I just want you to be happy.” This was the first, really, that Marley and Fiona had ever had a conversation of such substance.

  Fiona hugged her friend, told her it was okay, then got into her own car to drive home. For some reason, the harder parts of the conversation dissipated, and she was left only with this refrain: You can do whatever you want.

  * * *

  —

  That night, she sent Oliver Ash an email to thank him for driving her home.

  To: o.ash@buchanan.edu

  From: f.larkin@buchanan.edu

  Friday, October 3, 2008, 9:47 P.M.

  Subject: thanks

  hey-

  it’s fiona from last night. just wanted to say thanks for the ride. i got some weird news beforehand & was kind of a mess. do NOT drive drunk, usually. so was glad to have you there. & also embarrassed. but mostly glad.

  registration for next semester closes next week and i’m thinking of taking your workshop. is that weird?

  f

  As soon as she sent the email, she second-guessed it. Was this a bad idea? It was innocent, she reasoned; she would have thanked anyone who had done what he had. And knowing that Liv had been emailing with him as well catapulted her into a state of action. It was immature, but she wanted to prove to herself that Liv wasn’t the only one who could garner his attention.

  And then he responded. Almost immediately.

  To: f.larkin@buchanan.edu

  From: o.ash@buchanan.edu

  Friday, October 3, 2008, 10:04 P.M.

  Subject: Re: thanks

  Fiona,

  Don’t worry about it. It happens to the best of us. I’m just glad to have been in the right place at the right time.

  I don’t see why taking my workshop would be “weird.” The fact that we ran into each other once socially should not exclude you from being in my class if you’re indeed interested in taking it. I only hope that I don’t disappoint you too much.

  I’m happy to give you permission to enter the class, and I look forward to reading your work.

  Best,

  Oliver

  Delighted and satisfied with this response, she decided to leave it there for now. She wasn’t going to pursue it any further.

  7.

  SIMONE WALKED ALONG her favorite canal route to pick Henri up from school; it was early November, and at 3:15 the sun was already threatening to set over the tree line, not to return for another fourteen hours. She’d been deep into Polish translations, finally excavating some meaning from a diary entry, when she realized the time. It felt like there were never enough hours in the day to get her work done, especially when she didn’t have Oliver here to help out. She spent most of the mornings in Berlin getting herself into the right frame of mind for translating, often clearing the hurdle of switching off her mom mode and no longer thinking about her son and worrying about whether he was having a good day—especially in light of the incident back in September. By the time she was finally able to focus and get into that sweet spot, that zone where her mind was singularly focused on the work in front of her, she only had two hours left before she had to leave. And then the challenge was transitioning back, from work mode to mom mode again. She was always toggling between the two, never fully in one or the other; at work, she thought about Henri, and when she was with Henri, she thought about work. When she picked him up, he was often—like her—exhausted, and the rest of the day was more a matter of enduring his grumpiness than of spending any remotely enjoyable time with him.

  Occasionally, Henri had playdates with classmates after school, which bought Simone another hour or two of work time; but then, these playdates had to be reciprocated eventually, which resulted in her having to manage two children on her own instead of one. Once, the mother of Henri’s closest friend, Jean, invited Simone to stay for tea while their children played. She’d been optimistic about it—the woman was an artist whose husband worked for the French Embassy in Berlin, and Simone thought she might have been an interesting person to become friends with. Instead, Jean’s mother gossiped about other parents at the school while their children built with Legos in another room. She had awful things to say about everyone: Claude’s mother had gotten so fat, and Gabrielle’s father had a drinking problem, and did she know that Isabelle’s father was having an affair with Mathieu’s mother? Simone decided she preferred dealing with her moody five-year-old alone to enduring and engaging in vapid conversation with an adult for two hours.

  These days she wondered how people raised more than one child. Just one was a second full-time job. Before motherhood, she could never have imagined how much it took over her thoughts: worrying about Henri, where he was at any given point in the day. If he was happy. If he was safe. The worries were mind-numbing, repetitive, too boring to share with anyone. Even Oliver seemed to have the capacity to turn off the anxieties about their son in a way that Simone couldn’t. Out of sight, out of mind, for him. Look at how he had run away this year, as if he were single and childless.

  Belaboring this thought as often as she did didn’t do anything. It didn’t make Oliver magically reappear. But he was coming home in six weeks for winter break, for an entire month, before returning for the spring semester. And as angry as she was with him, she couldn’t wait to see him. She missed his smell, like peat moss and Marlboro Lights (even though he’d quit smoking years ago, the smell lingered, like it had been embedded in his skin). She missed his presence around the house: on his good days, playful and efficient, fixing a drip in the sink, carrying Henri to school on his shoulders. She missed how he made her come, quickly and powerfully. She even missed the bad days, the ones when he didn’t leave his office, when a certain darkness permeated the house and kept her and Henri away.

  She turned away from the canal onto a cobbled street that looked wet and gleaming from the
glare of the setting sun. Her phone buzzed, and she looked down to see that Danièle was calling.

  “Simone?”

  Danièle’s voice was high-pitched and excitable, but Simone could not tell if it was on account of good news or bad.

  “Are you all right?”

  “It happened!” Danièle squealed. “We’re pregnant!”

  All this time they had been trying, Simone had assumed they would eventually give up: stop with all the treatments, which were becoming emotionally exhausting, and decide on adoption or surrogacy. Five years of trying was a long time, and Simone herself knew the toll that could take on a person. Simone immediately felt a deeply confusing mix of jealousy and joy. Hadn’t she just been thinking about how hard even one child was?

  Then there was being pregnant itself. She’d loved being pregnant with Henri, the magic in it, that this body that she’d been carrying her whole life was now working in a brand-new way. It made her feel powerful, purposeful, and utterly ethereal. And then, when he’d arrived, all of those little fingers and toes, and his baby laugh, and his smell. She’d never felt as content as she did when she fed him. He needed her; she’d never been needed before, not as desperately as that, and now she never would be again.

  Danièle was her sister, though, and her happiness was big enough to trump Simone’s envy. Now Simone would have someone to share all the mundane motherly things with, all the worries and anxieties that she kept to herself.

  “I wish I could be there to hug and kiss you,” Simone said, and she could hear that Danièle, like her, was crying. “How far along are you?”

  “Only six weeks,” Danièle said. “I’m due at the end of June. I wanted to wait to tell you but I couldn’t hold it in.”

  “I’m so glad you did.”

  “You’re the second to know. We just saw Mama. She’s completely beside herself.”

  This, now, made Simone sad. She wasn’t home to receive this news in person. She was missing everything. And she missed her father, who would never get to meet any of his grandchildren.

  “I’m so happy for you, Dani,” she said again, even after the tears turned sour.

  She called Oliver next.

  “My love,” he answered in French, which made her smile.

  She told him Dani’s news.

  “That’s wonderful,” he said.

  “It is.”

  “How far along is she?”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Early.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a pause. Two out of three of her own miscarriages were several weeks later into the pregnancy than that.

  “It seems very soon for her to tell people,” he said.

  “I’m not just ‘people,’ ” she said.

  “Well. A loss for her would also be really hard for you.”

  “I’d rather be there for her during something like that than not.”

  A pause. “I’m trying to be realistic.”

  He wasn’t wrong—Danièle’s odds, considering how long they’d been trying, weren’t great. But Simone felt fiercely protective of her little sister. Why assume the worst for her, too? She couldn’t stand to think about Dani enduring what she had.

  “It is very exciting news,” he said stiffly. “Please tell her I said congratulations.”

  “I will,” she said, and then: “It’s a little sad, too. For me.”

  “Why?”

  “It feels final. Like now I really never will be pregnant again.”

  “What does Dani’s pregnancy have to do with that? I thought we had come to that conclusion months ago.”

  Come to that conclusion? There was no official conclusion here, only a sad inevitability. And where was the we in this situation? He wasn’t the one who had to endure the miscarriages, not in the way she did. He wasn’t the one who let out a piercing scream that third time, the worst one, ten weeks along, as she doubled over in pain as the bloody clot of fetal tissue fell out of her body and into the toilet so wholly it made a plop. She’d stayed in bed for days afterward, not only out of physical pain but out of a legitimate inability to work or to move or to think. She didn’t sleep. She couldn’t close her eyes without seeing the beginnings of a person floating in the toilet water—the stringy tissue among the remains of a broken, bloody sac. At ten weeks, the baby would have already had kidneys and intestines, a brain and a liver, fingers and toes.

  No: Oliver was able to keep working. He’d checked in on her, and comforted her as well as he could, but kept working. Unsure what else to do, he had flushed the thing—their child?—down the toilet.

  “I’m both happy for Dani,” she said now to her husband, “and sad about myself.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “I don’t think you do,” she said.

  He sighed. He would never get it: the envy and happiness and fear all wrapped up into one singular emotion. Since the miscarriages, she felt like she needed too much from him, like she had too many feelings, which overwhelmed him and confused him. He used to be attentive to Simone’s needs, but recently she had the sense he’d started to give up on her. Like at some point he was tapped out, leaving her feeling bad and wrong for having those needs in the first place.

  “I’m at Henri’s school now,” she said, even though she had ten more minutes left in her walk, and hung up the phone.

  * * *

  —

  Simone got to Henri’s school at exactly 3:30, politely smiling at the other mothers waiting for the classroom door to open, saying hello to the headmistress, who walked through the hallway now. She had spoken to Madame Bouchard after Henri’s incident in the playground and told the headmistress what the girl, Isabelle, had said to Henri. Madame Bouchard was shocked and appalled—or at least she feigned being shocked and appalled—and said that she would speak to Isabelle and her parents at once.

  Simone had heard nothing else about it, and when she asked Henri, a few weeks later, if there had been any more problems with Isabelle, he had said no; in fact, he’d told her that they were friends now. She’d been eyeing Isabelle’s mother at pickup ever since the incident, a petite Alsatian woman who was always chatting with the other mothers in that ugly accent. She seemed friendlier with them than she ever was with Simone, for reasons that seemed fairly obvious. It made Simone ill to think about the kind of rhetoric that went on in that household.

  When the door to the classroom opened, she looked over the tops of the children’s heads for her son. Several kids streamed out, their mothers or nannies greeting them at the doorway with big hugs and smiles, as the children handed over their backpacks and whatever art projects they were taking home and asked for help with their coats. At the end of the line, finally, was her son. Holding hands with a girl. With Isabelle.

  Simone saw now that only she and Isabelle’s mother were left waiting for their children, and they stood on opposite sides of the doorframe. The boy and the girl paused inside of it.

  “Isabelle is my girlfriend now,” Henri announced to Simone. They were kids; this was what kids did. It would have been silly to react in any way other than pleasant complicity; they’d be uninterested in each other in a week.

  Isabelle’s mother was looking at the children with her mouth pinched into a closed circle. Perversely, Simone wanted the woman to say something. She longed for ammunition, she longed to have someone to be angry with other than Oliver. For someone to understand why she was angry, because everything she expressed to him, everything she wanted, everything she cared about, seemed to go misunderstood.

  The woman grabbed her daughter’s hand and, when she saw that Simone was looking at her, changed her facial expression to one of placidity.

  “Well, isn’t that nice,” the woman said to her daughter.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Simone said, and stared at the woman, unsmiling,
until she was forced to look up. Simone was much taller than the woman, and towered over her. She grabbed her own son’s hand. He was still holding on to Isabelle’s hand, so that now all four of them were connected in a chain, like paper dolls.

  She called me Jewish.

  Jean’s mother over tea: “Isabelle’s father is having an affair with Mathieu’s mother.”

  People like this woman were allowed to make children, and bring them up in this world. Pass down to them whatever they believed. It was entirely random, who got to become a mother.

  Maybe Isabelle was nice to Henri now, but the woman would still retain her beliefs. She would still point out Jews, or any “others,” when she saw them, to or around her young child.

  Simone could tell her right now: Your husband’s cheating on you with Mathieu’s mother.

  Then she’d hate Jews, if she didn’t already. It shouldn’t be Simone’s responsibility to be a virtuous Jew on behalf of all Jews, and yet—she felt that it was. It was possible that Simone and Henri were among the only Jews this woman had ever met.

  Simone leaned in close and very quietly, so the children couldn’t hear her, said into the woman’s ear: “It would be wise to be careful, next time, about how you choose to talk about my son in front of your daughter.”

  It was satisfying to watch Isabelle’s mother become visibly shaken, to see her pull her head back in shock and say to her daughter with fake sunniness: “Time to go, my love.”

  Simone and Henri walked outside after the mother and daughter, ambling out of the school gardens and into the darkening German city. Simone felt a deep sense of contentment, of power reclaimed.