The Learning Curve

by Mandy Berman

  Still, as she looked out onto her city, the neighborhood retained its beauty and its charm—at least now, at nine A.M. on a Sunday in winter, when everything was closed. The storefronts were grated and the balconies across the way were closed, the curtains drawn. Her mother was one of the last vestiges of the old Marais, still living in the place off Rue des Rosiers where Danièle and Simone had shared a bedroom until Simone went away to university. It had mattered to her father to live near the Pletzl, though now her mother stayed in the apartment only because it was rent controlled. Simone’s father had been the last of their family to follow religious or ancestral traditions in a serious way; now they were about as secular as could be, celebrating Hanukkah mostly because it was an excuse to give Henri presents. Should Simone be trying harder, for Henri? Should she be fasting on Yom Kippur? Should they be lighting candles every Friday night? What kind of Jewish identity would he end up having if he never experienced any kind of ritual?

  She also hadn’t been doing these things because Oliver didn’t believe in God. He was Jewish by identity, he always said, but not by religion. She wasn’t sure if she understood how you could extricate the two. Oliver didn’t want to indoctrinate his child with ritual, largely because his father had drilled the rules of Judaism into him out of a sense of duty and anxiety. Out of an intense fear of their people not surviving. It was painful for Oliver to go to services now, or to observe ritual; it made him think of his father, a German refugee who forever treated his Judaism like a scourge.

  And Simone had assented. She had not wanted to cause her husband undue pain.

  Maybe what Oliver wanted shouldn’t play such a giant role in the raising of their child. After all, he didn’t seem concerned about her pain. And he was not here this year. He was not even here this morning.

  Not a person was out on the narrow gray streets below, except for Oliver, somewhere down there, winding his way through the city alone.

  “This is delicious, Aunt Dani,” Simone heard Henri say. She turned to see him sipping from a giant bowl of cocoa. He sounded so adult, her boy. When did that happen? How much longer until he wasn’t a boy at all?

  Danièle, on the other side of the table, beamed at him, and Simone got up from the reading chair and joined them.

  PART TWO

  13.

  THEY CAME BACK for the poorly named spring semester: the trees on campus bare, the frozen dew on the quad crunchy underfoot. Real spring would not arrive until the last weeks of April, when finals loomed and papers were due and sitting on the quad for hours smoking hookahs and drinking clandestine beers was tempting but misguided.

  For Liv and Lula and Marley, it was their last semester; their grades and class rankings were more or less set. Marley’s grades didn’t matter at all; her med school applications were already in, and soon the acceptances would come rolling in, too. Lula and Liv were already networking, figuring out their postgrad jobs.

  Fiona, of course, would be back in the fall. She had taken her first semester of sophomore year off.

  That semester, she’d stayed in the house in Larchmont for what felt like decades. Neighbors and friends routinely delivered food. Liam kept busy around the house. He was always vacuuming, always mopping, even though there was hardly any foot traffic to clean up after, as Fiona and her mother rarely left their respective bedrooms. All her friends had gone back to school, so no one visited her. She kept her door ajar for Suzy, their yellow Lab.

  Suzy was maybe the saddest part of it all. The door to Helen’s bedroom remained closed—because keeping it open was a constant reminder she wasn’t there, and if it was closed one could make the mistake, for an instant, of believing that she might be doing homework or was on the phone with a friend. For the first several weeks, Suzy slept in front of the closed door. She never pawed at it or cried, just lay there with her head resting forlornly atop her paws. When Liam came up the stairs to take her for a walk, she lifted her head in anticipation—but not of going outside. The brief expectation, before recognizing that the footfalls belonged to Liam, that Helen might be the one coming up the steps. To not be able to explain it to Suzy, that Helen wasn’t going to come up the steps again, made Fiona’s heart break more than anything else had.

  And what was Fiona doing all this time, in her bedroom? Not much. She talked on the phone a lot, to Liv, and to Rachel, the friend who had known Helen best, though she never talked about Helen in these phone calls. She asked the girls questions about their semesters back at school, and the girls reluctantly answered after Fiona insisted that she wanted the distraction. She watched episodes of The Office and felt guilty every time she laughed. She heard muffled arguments between her parents at night. Often, she entertained the thought that she should be back at school—she could handle it. But she was struck by inertia. She could barely get up to pee. She ate only after everyone was asleep, walking down the dark, carpeted steps and poking into a casserole dish, lit only by the refrigerator, not bothering to put the food on a plate or heat it up or sit down. Sometimes she polished off entire Pyrex dishes of cold macaroni and cheese, the orange top layer hardened and plastic-flavored. Nothing tasted good, but that wasn’t the point. After those binges she wouldn’t eat for several days, as atonement. She liked the feeling of hunger as it grew: the gnawing emptiness of her insides made her feel clean, new.

  She would go days without seeing anyone. Would hear the door open only when her father left for work in the morning, close when he came in at night. Some nights he didn’t come back at all. She would hear Liam take the dog out, or hear Liam’s car going out of the driveway, then hear him coming through the front door an hour later carrying plastic bags of groceries they didn’t need.

  Her mother did not want to be bothered. Fiona often knocked on the door, and was told, every time, “Not right now.” Every time, she hoped the response would be different. She longed, just once, for a “Come in.” She longed, just once, to climb into bed with her mom, the way she had when she was a kid, only this time she would try to be the person who did the comforting. She wanted to tell her mother that part of the reason she’d stayed was not because she was unable to concentrate on work—true though that may have been—but because she wanted to be home in case her mother needed her. Her mother did not allow herself to need anyone, though. Not even her only daughter who remained.

  Now she wondered what it had even been for, that semester off. Liam had been ahead on credits at Yale—it was his senior year; he took one extra class in the spring, and graduated on time. Fiona was not as smart or efficient as Liam. Everyone had always known this. So the fact that she had to stay at Buchanan an extra semester, after all of her friends had graduated, was a harsh reminder of that doleful autumn. She had been left behind then; she’d be left behind again. While her roommates were doing independent studies and taking 100-level classes in art or sociology, because their majors were mostly fulfilled already, Fiona again had a full courseload of English and French classes. They already had one foot out the door. Fiona had no direction but to keep studying. She had no idea, not a single inkling, of what she wanted to do when she was finished.

  She had done better last semester than in the previous year. Professor Roiphe loved the Lewinsky paper, deeming it a “fascinating discussion of the sentimental narrative surrounding the Lewinsky scandal, drawing a clear connection to the seminar texts” and giving her an A in the class. She got Bs in everything else, a B-minus in French. The closer her leaving this place loomed, the more she hoped she might find answers in her books, as if expanding her French vocabulary or researching in depth the plight of Monica Lewinsky would bring her some vocational clarity.

  “Well, what do you like to do?” Liv asked her.

  They were doing work together in Liv’s room in February, sitting cross-legged on her bed.

  “Watch reruns of Felicity,” Fiona replied. “Eat breakfast sandwiches.”

  “Seems p
rofessionally viable,” Liv said.

  “What do you like to do?” Fiona asked. “Do people actually get jobs doing what they like doing anymore?”

  Liv looked up at her friend. “I mean, yeah.”

  “In the recession?”

  “I’m not worried.” The truth was, Liv was such a good student, and so hardworking and well connected and attractive, that she had no reason to be worried. Publishing was dying out, but she’d find a job; they’d make room for her, somewhere. This was how Liv’s whole life went—people bending to accommodate her—and why should she expect anything different now?

  “My dad didn’t become a lawyer because he’s passionate about law,” Fiona said. “He did it to make a living.”

  “I think it’s different for men,” Liv said. “My mom loves her job.”

  “My mom never had a job.”

  “She’s not working now?”

  “I think she’s volunteering at the library. I don’t know. She has another man taking care of her.”

  Liv was quiet a minute. “Do you think it’s wrong to have men take care of us?”

  “No. Did it sound like I did?”

  “No. I do wonder about it sometimes for myself.”

  “Yeah.”

  “In theory, I want to be my own breadwinner and all that. But when I think about a future, and a family…”

  “You want to be taken care of.”

  “Is that terrible?”

  “I don’t think so,” Fiona said. “I think it’s feminist to be able to make that decision, right? As long as it’s your decision.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “My issue is I don’t ever think I’ll like anyone enough to spend my whole life with them. Or they won’t like me enough to be willing to take care of me.”

  “That’s not true! You’ll find someone.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Fiona said. “I mean I genuinely don’t even know if settling down with someone, with the same person always, is what I want. Sometimes it feels like searching is safer. I kind of want to be searching forever.”

  “That’s so lonely,” Liv said.

  Fiona looked back at the pages in her lap. They were reading a short story by someone else in their workshop, a girl named Sophie whom they’d both shared some classes with. It was about an American girl studying abroad in Paris, like Sophie and Liv both had. Nothing really happened in the story, just trite observations of the city, some French phrases thrown in to show off Sophie’s limited knowledge of the language.

  On their first day of the workshop with Oliver Ash, he had treated both girls as if he’d never known them at all. Liv’s crush on him had seemed to dissipate, but Fiona’s wasn’t entirely gone. He never responded to Fiona’s last email, in which she had asked to meet with him, and this had devastated and embarrassed her. She’d been worried about seeing him on the first day of class and how he might treat her. There was a kindness in his acting like the email had never been sent in the first place.

  “Professor Ash is going to tear this to shreds,” Fiona said. “ ‘The lights of the Eiffel Tower glittered in the distance.’ Yikes.”

  “I’m trying to be kind in my feedback,” Liv said. “I don’t want to be ripped apart when it’s my turn.”

  “Yeah, but you can actually write,” Fiona said.

  Liv shrugged. “Are you done with yours yet?”

  Fiona shook her head.

  Liv lifted her eyebrows as if to say, You know it’s due tomorrow, right? Mercifully, she didn’t actually say that, because of course Fiona knew it was due tomorrow. What she didn’t tell Liv was that she hadn’t even started it; the longer she waited, the harder it was to sit down and begin. Oliver would be reading this. And Dave, too, who was also unfortunately in the workshop.

  There was so much going on in her head and not enough ways to get it all out of her. What she didn’t like was having to organize those thoughts into stories, narratives that other people would read and form their own opinions of. She knew this was the point: writing was meant to be read. But she wished that it wasn’t. She wished she could get an A from the originality of the garbled thoughts in her notebook, an A from the exquisite expression of the private feelings she shared only with the pages of the journal she kept beside her nightstand. She kept a scrim over the work she handed in in the writing classes she took at Buchanan, withheld what she really felt and wanted and believed, got Bs. Wrote fiction that took place in the past or in a vague, dystopian future. Because what could she write about truthfully? She did not want to be known for just one thing; she would rather be disliked or slut-shamed than pitied. And yet, she knew that, at some point, she was going to have to write about Helen. Everything else felt untrue in comparison.

  “I want to go to Paris,” Fiona then said, to change the subject. “Sophie’s observations notwithstanding.”

  “We should go,” Liv said, as casual as if suggesting they go pick up sandwiches from the deli. “Maybe this summer.”

  “I feel like traveling with friends can be tricky.”

  “What do you mean?” Liv seemed offended. “We live together fine.”

  “What about Brandon and New York?” Fiona asked. Brandon had recently learned that he’d been rejected by the law schools at Harvard and Yale, but accepted into Columbia, his third choice.

  “I can’t go to Paris with my best friend for a week because Brandon will be in New York without me?”

  It had been a while since Fiona had heard Liv refer to her as her “best friend.” It felt nice.

  “You know my aunt Lacy has an apartment in the fourth, right? She’s basically never there.”

  Fiona did remember hearing about this aunt once, a favorite of Liv’s: one of her dad’s sisters who’d married older and rich, had no kids, and now was widowed and split her time between Paris and London.

  “Don’t you think it would be a sweet graduation gift to each other?” Liv said. “We could buy each other’s plane tickets.”

  “Yeah. That would be cute.”

  “You can finally use your French,” Liv said, getting excited. “I know the city. I know where to go and where to eat. We’ll smoke cigarettes and drink rosé outside at cafés and wear black and read Flaubert and pretend we’re Parisian. We’ll be walking clichés. It’s perfect.”

  “What about Marley and Lula?”

  “Lula’s been a thousand times. Marley is all about speaking Spanish. The two of them would have no interest whatsoever.” Liv paused for a moment. “You only went the one time, right?” she said. “When you were fourteen?”

  Fiona knew what she was going to say, and she didn’t want to hear it—the promise her mother had made to Helen. Each girl got a trip to Paris with Mom when she was fourteen.

  “Don’t bring her into this,” Fiona said.

  Liv seemed eager and excited enough about the idea of Paris together to be in the mood to challenge this. Back when Helen had just died, Liv was a comfort; she would talk about whatever Fiona wanted to talk about, do whatever Fiona wanted to do. She wanted to push now. More and more she wanted to push Fiona into things she was not ready for, under the pretense that these things were for Fiona’s own good.

  “Don’t you think—”

  “What? That Helen would want me to go?”

  “Maybe?”

  “Helen can’t want anything.”

  Liv looked hurt. But this wasn’t Liv’s right. It wasn’t Liv’s family.

  “Well,” Liv said then, “what do you want?”

  Fiona snickered. “Isn’t that where this conversation started?”

  Liv smiled. “Exactly.” Then she went back to reading Sophie’s bad short story.

  Paris with Liv was, in fact, plausible. Fiona had all that money from her dad sitting in her bank account. So far, her only other option for
this summer seemed to be sitting around and feeling sorry for herself.

  * * *

  —

  Later, when Liv said she was going to bed, Fiona grabbed herself a leftover can of PBR from when they’d had a few people over the previous weekend. This was what writers did, right? Drink while they worked into the wee hours of the morning? It wasn’t fine whiskey, but it would do.

  Sitting down at her desk, cracking the beer and opening her laptop, she thought about her options. She looked at the dreadfully blank Word document. She never wrote about herself. In poetry, the previous semester, she had written broadly about love she’d never experienced, about observing others from afar, once recording a conversation she overheard in the coffee shop on campus and transcribing it into a poem.

  On the first day of their class, Professor Ash had shared a quote from Ernest Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

  “Not literally, of course,” he explained. “This is a fiction course. But all of your characters, their sentiments, their feelings, their dialogue—these things should feel plucked from life. Strive, always, for verisimilitude.” Then he wrote this on the whiteboard behind him.

  STRIVE FOR VERISIMILITUDE.

  She could not give him the dystopian story she had half-baked in her head, or the prototypical teenage heartbreak scenario that she’d been kicking around. Those weren’t real, human stories. They weren’t memorable.

  She thought of her unanswered email to him, dangling there like an unfinished sentence. If she wanted to impress him, she knew, she would have to write about the truest thing she’d experienced. It wasn’t her first choice, but she couldn’t stand the idea of him thinking any less of her than he did now.

  She began to write.

  Fiona Larkin

  Senior Fiction Workshop/Professor Ash

  2/26/09

  THE ORDINARY INSTANT