The Learning Curve

by Mandy Berman

  “Reductive,” he had scribbled next to one sentence. “Why should we care?” he wrote at the bottom of the piece, a sentiment that was then echoed in more depth in his typed note to Fiona, stapled to the last page:

  Fiona,

  I expected more from you. You didn’t finish this piece; in fact, you did not even bother to finish the last sentence. You didn’t meet the page criteria of 6–10 pages. It is clearly not proofread. It switches from the third-person to the first-person perspective halfway through. I have to give you a D simply because you did not meet the basic requirements. I will not fail you this time, but you should know that next time I won’t be so generous for such substandard work.

  I’m not going to take the time to critique what is here, since you didn’t put in any time for this piece, either.

  —Professor Ash

  15.

  IT WAS A Friday morning in March, and Liv and Brandon were lying in her bed undressed, their legs tangled around each other’s. Liv held one hand on Brandon’s chest while his bare foot ran up and down the soft length of her calf. They were sleepy, having just woken up, but their wordless contentment was interrupted by the electronic melody bleating from Liv’s cellphone. Her mother was calling.

  “It’s sort of last-minute,” Kimiko said on the other end, “but I thought it might be a nice idea for all of us to go somewhere warm after this long winter. Does Brandon have spring break plans?”

  The Bahamas for four nights, she suggested, all four of them. A long weekend to inject some vitamin D into their systems. Liv fast-forwarded to an image of Brandon and herself in bathing suits, coconuts in hand, novels in laps, sunglasses on. They’d never gone to the beach together. But the fantasy was soon marred by scenarios of her dad’s potential behavior, looming like a giant question mark. He was so unpredictable, was the thing. He wasn’t always as bad as he had been at Thanksgiving; sometimes he was downright pleasant. She imagined the possibility of a universe in which her dad and Brandon went off to play golf together one day, the men returning sunburned and content, full of new in-jokes she would happily never be privy to.

  “Let me talk to Brandon about it,” Liv said to her mother.

  “Will you come, either way?”

  Liv said maybe, and hung up the phone.

  “Talk to me about what?” Brandon twirled a piece of her hair between his fingers.

  “You can say no,” she stipulated with the invitation.

  “Oh,” he said. “Wow.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, already defensive, already ready to rescind the offer. “I know it’s probably early to go on a trip with my family.” Even though she’d wanted him desperately to say yes, to say that nothing in the world would bring him greater pleasure. His acceptance would signal that maybe things hadn’t been as bad over Thanksgiving as she’d imagined they were. After all, Brandon had come to their house once more, during Christmas break, without incident. (Granted, her father had stayed in his study the whole time.) And it had been a whole three months since then, and Brandon had never said a word about it. Maybe it wasn’t as big a deal as she was making it out to be.

  “That’s really lovely of them to offer.”

  “They really like you.” Brandon should have understood by now that “they” or “my parents” tended to refer to Kimiko alone, that Robert’s nonmonetary contributions were not represented in the rhetoric about the Langley family.

  Brandon said, “Can I think about it?”

  She felt a constriction in her throat, a choking sensation.

  “Of course,” she managed, as level-voiced as she could. “I’m going to go either way,” she added, as if his decision was completely inconsequential to her.

  Later, when he left her house and went to the library to study, she broke down into a gloppy mess of tears and snot and hiccups.

  She was going to lose him over this. She just knew it.

  * * *

  On Saturday, they took a day trip to ski in the Poconos. It had been Brandon’s idea, a nice way to make use of the unreasonable amount of snow they were getting this late in the season. He was always coming up with sweet ideas like this: picnics when it was warmer, concerts, winter activities earlier in the semester, like ice-skating and tubing. She’d never had a serious boyfriend before, but judging by the college boys she knew—especially the ones in Brandon’s fraternity—she couldn’t imagine many of them were like this, so romantic and attentive to their girlfriends’ needs. On Valentine’s Day a few weeks earlier, he’d woken her up with a dozen red roses. The card inside said:

  My dear Olivia,

  I love waking up with you each morning, and going to sleep with you each night.

  You are my everything.

  I love you,

  Brandon

  Only a few months earlier, the nakedness of those sentiments would have made her squirm inside. But her feelings toward him had dramatically shifted after Thanksgiving. She had always expected that if a boyfriend witnessed her home life, he would run in the other direction. Brandon had seen the worst of it, and he hadn’t left. Now that he was involved, she could never let him go.

  During winter break, she had agreed to the idea of living together, if he ended up getting into law school in a place where she might also find work. Then, a few weeks ago, he’d found out he’d been rejected from Harvard and Yale, but accepted to Columbia. It seemed pretty likely that they were moving to New York.

  She’d never skied before, while Brandon was an expert, having spent winters with his cousins in Vermont. But Liv considered herself an athletic person, and thought she would catch on quickly, which Brandon also agreed would likely be the case. On the drive up, they listened to Bruce Springsteen songs that made her feel wistful for things she’d never experienced, and took quiet and winding country highways, the sky blue and bright with white-topped mountains in the distance. Brandon was wearing his Ray-Ban Wayfarers and a beanie. She thought he looked so cute.

  “This is a perfect day for a novice,” he said, and smiled at her. “I know your feet get cold, but the sun will help.”

  She couldn’t believe there had been a time when she was unsure about him, afraid to settle down with him. She couldn’t believe she had flirted with the idea of cheating on him with Oliver Ash. Now it seemed crystal clear that this was the person she wanted to be with. It was so nice, so easy. He was gentle with her, and kind, and giving. If life could be this easy forever, why not let it?

  * * *

  —

  They got to the mountain and picked up her rentals. The ski lift to the bunny slope took no more than two minutes, but she was still excited by it: the swoosh of the lift as it carried them into the air, the way her skis dangled below her, a pleasant heaviness in her legs. It felt like a ride, the way the lift glided through the air, over the tops of snow-dusted evergreens.

  Brandon held out his cellphone and snapped a picture of the two of them. The photo was from close up, and silly, the underside of his jacketed arm at the edge of the photo, but they looked happy.

  When the chairlift deposited them at the top of the bunny slope, she panicked, bracing her knees, having seemingly forgotten how to turn after Brandon’s brief tutorial before they got on. Brandon lifted one of his poles for her and she grabbed it, pulled along by him away from the lift. They were surrounded by children in bright purple and pink snowsuits, padded and gliding awkwardly on the snow, like Technicolor penguins.

  They stopped at the top of the hill, which was not steep, Liv knew, but it looked steep from this vantage point, and it scared her nonetheless. “You good?” he asked her, taking his ski pole back, and she nodded. He pulled down his goggles, which cast his whole face in a fluorescent yellow glow. “You go at your own pace. I’ll follow behind you.”

  Liv suddenly felt self-conscious, not wanting to be watched.

 
; “Can you go ahead of me?” she asked.

  He agreed, even though it didn’t make a whole lot of sense, she knew, for the teacher not to watch the student. She didn’t like being bad at things—and if she was bad at things, she didn’t like anyone to see it. Why had she agreed to this in the first place? Because it had sounded like a nice idea at the time. She couldn’t even turn getting off the lift; how was she going to turn going down a mountain?

  He went ahead, adept and controlled, and she watched as he glided across the width of the slope and then back again, sharply rerouting when a stray child crossed his path. His turns were clean, the skis always parallel to each other, slashing through the snow like sharpened blades. Liv found herself squatting but not moving, somewhat afraid to go directly forward, afraid that if she began to go downhill she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Brandon stopped about halfway down the hill, a spray of snow from his skis as he stacked them next to each other and looked up at Liv.

  “Face the tips of your skis toward each other,” he called up the slope. “Like a pizza. Bend your weight forward.”

  She bent forward slightly, feeling the start of velocity as gravity pushed her forward, and she wedged the skis together, one crossing over the other to lock her in place, letting out a little involuntary shriek in the process. She knew she was going to lose control if she started going downhill.

  “You’ll go slow,” she heard him say. “I promise.”

  She was paralyzed, stuck at the top of the hill as children whizzed fearlessly around her.

  Seeming to realize that Liv was not going to move, Brandon unclipped his boots, gathered his skis over one shoulder, and climbed back up the slope.

  “Hey,” he said, the cheeks below his goggles flushed.

  “Hi,” she said, in a wimpy, weak voice.

  He laughed. “What’s up?”

  She shook her head again. “I don’t know why I’m so scared.”

  “It’s fun,” he assured her. “I promise.”

  It was not normal, she knew, to be this afraid to go down a bunny slope when you were an adult. It was not normal for even a child to be this scared.

  “Do you want to hold onto one of my poles while I go down?”

  She shook her head. She would look like a kid holding on to her dad.

  “Go,” she said. “I’m okay.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked. His overattentiveness was beginning to irritate her.

  “I said I’m fine.” She said this more reactively than she’d intended, with a bite to it, her annoyance audible. “Just go.”

  He flinched, and turned to go down the hill without another word. He didn’t stop halfway this time to check on her, and she instantly regretted not accepting his help.

  After what felt like several more minutes of standing there paralyzed, once Brandon was a red dot amid the other red and blue and purple dots at the bottom of the snowy hill, Liv pushed herself forward with a little yelp, letting the momentum take over. She kept stopping and starting, the tips of her rented skis clacking as they crossed and uncrossed, and as she awkwardly sidestepped, skis parallel, down the hillier parts. She would have simply taken the boots out of the skis and walked if it hadn’t been so conspicuous. Children half her size flew past her, some falling and laughing, brushing themselves off, and getting back up.

  “I hate this,” she said to Brandon when she got to the bottom of the slope, and made her way toward the ski lodge, forcing him to follow behind.

  * * *

  —

  Liv took off her rented ski boots and warmed her feet by the fire, felt the flames bring blood back into her toes.

  “Better?” he asked.

  She nodded. They sipped hot coffees in paper cups and didn’t speak for a while.

  “You should go back out there,” she said when her coffee was almost finished.

  “You don’t want to try again?”

  She shook her head. “I have a book in the car.”

  “I wish you’d told me you were going to be scared. I only suggested it because I thought it would be fun.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have known that until I got up there. Obviously.”

  He pulled his head back, like she’d just swiped at him.

  “Sorry,” she said, a knee-jerk reaction, and then felt mad at herself for saying sorry. Why should she be sorry for not being able to predict the future? For not knowing something about herself because she’d never faced that thing before?

  “I don’t really want to ski by myself,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  “No, I want to stay,” she said. “Maybe I’ll go again in the afternoon.”

  He looked at her, seeming unsure whether she was telling the truth or not. She probably wouldn’t try again, but she didn’t mind the idea of reading in the lodge. It sounded kind of nice, actually.

  “I think we should just go,” he said.

  “No,” she said forcefully. “I said I want to stay.”

  “I don’t—” He sighed deeply, resignedly. “Whatever,” he said, and tossed her the car keys. “For your book.”

  * * *

  —

  The drive home in the early afternoon was quiet and moody. They’d only stayed until lunch, after which Brandon said he wasn’t exactly having fun skiing alone and knowing that she was in the lodge by herself. Liv found this self-serving on his part, even though she knew he thought he was being charitable.

  When they were about a half hour from home, Brandon took a deep breath, prepping to say something.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I was thinking out there. About the Bahamas.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal.” She didn’t want to hear his reasons for not wanting to go. She wanted to pretend she’d never asked him in the first place.

  “I don’t think it would be a good idea,” he said.

  “Because of today?”

  “No.” He glanced over at her, a look weighted with meaning that she didn’t want to unpack.

  “I get it. It’s early for you to go on a trip with my parents.” She thought of how to quickly change the subject, to signal how little she cared about this trip.

  “It’s not really that,” he said, now staring at the highway ahead. “I would happily go to the Bahamas with you and with your mom.”

  “Oh.”

  “I know we never talked about it. What happened.” It was convenient for him, Liv thought, that he was driving, and didn’t have to look Liv in the eye. “I just. I’ve never experienced anything like that before.”

  Her heart pounded. No one had ever named this.

  “I’ve been struggling about what to do, or say. I even talked to my parents about it, because I didn’t know how much was my place.”

  “You did what?”

  He didn’t seem to hear her, kept talking. “I couldn’t pretend that was normal, Liv. I just couldn’t. And I know it’s your family, not mine, but I love you. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

  Was she supposed to be grateful to him? She was too shocked to be grateful. It felt like he had taken a hammer and cracked her in half.

  “I can’t believe you talked to your parents,” she said, realizing only as she spoke, as her voice came out broken and wobbly, that she was crying.

  “What else was I supposed to do?”

  She didn’t have a good answer to that. She crossed her arms over her chest. She was shivering.

  He reached one hand over to her leg and squeezed her thigh. She pushed the hand away.

  “Did he ever…” Brandon said, still looking ahead. “Did he ever hurt you?”

  She wiped away a tear with the back of her hand. She was so mad at herself that she couldn’t stop crying.

  “I feel ambushed,” she said.

&nbs
p; “That isn’t my intention.”

  “No one wants your help,” she said, and the strength of that—and the truth of it—steadied her voice. “You don’t want to come on vacation with my family, that’s fine. But you have some nerve trying to put your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  He was rendered speechless by this, at least momentarily.

  “I thought I did belong,” he said.

  She could think of nothing to say to that, and they didn’t speak for the rest of the drive. When he pulled up in front of her house, she got out and slammed the passenger door firmly shut.

  16.

  SIMONE HAD STARTED taking Henri to Paris every other weekend. It was mid-March; Danièle was six months along now, and Simone found herself wanting to be there with her more and more often. Alex was traveling so much for work these days, and their mother, loving as she was, doted too much, pitter-pattered around Danièle’s apartment asking her what she needed, how much she needed, when she needed it. Was she hungry? Thirsty? Tired? Did she need to throw up? Did she want to go for a walk?

  “Please come this weekend,” Danièle had first begged Simone over the phone in January, not long after Oliver had left. “She’s driving me nuts,” she whispered from her bedroom, their mother clearly in the next room.

  So, starting then, Simone and Henri went to Paris for long weekends twice a month, flying Ryanair and only bringing carry-on luggage.

  Danièle was one of those pregnant women who looked as if she’d swallowed a basketball. While Simone’s entire body had swollen when she was pregnant with Henri, and never quite returned to its natural state, Danièle retained her narrow face, her lithe limbs. From the back you couldn’t even tell. The only thing that had changed—besides her stomach, of course, which had begun to jut out dramatically, as if independent from the rest of her body—was that her small breasts had gone up to a perfectly respectable C cup, and her long dark hair had grown even more silky and full.