“Hardly—he brought it up today.”
“Oh.” She digested that. “Was he mad?”
“I think he’s over it.”
She smiled. “Well, then. And you know what will really make him see that you’re a nice person?”
I sighed. “Cupcakes?”
“Cupcakes,” she sang out in happy agreement.
7.
The lower-school courtyard was deserted when I walked through it the next afternoon. I knocked on Coach Andrew’s office door, which was in a hallway off the gym.
He called out, “Come on in.”
I called back, “I can’t,” because I was holding the platter of cupcakes with both hands.
A moment later, Andrew flung the door open. “Noah’s mom!” he exclaimed with genuine surprise. “Wearing cupcakes!”
I handed the platter to him. “I have another one in the car. Hold on.”
When I came back, he took the second platter from my hands. “You have a sec to talk? Believe it or not, I was just going to call you. I’ve been thinking about Noah, and I have an idea.”
“What about?” I asked, a little warily.
“Come in and I’ll tell you.” I followed him in. He put the platter on the desk, next to the first one. “Before I forget, what should I do with these plates when we’re done?”
“Can you send them to Noah’s classroom? I’ll grab them tomorrow.” A framed photo on the desk caught my eye: Andrew and Gracie were in bathing suits on a sailboat. She was wearing a bikini and looked model-fantastic in it. He was wearing board shorts and looked a little round-shouldered, but otherwise not bad. She was leaning back against him and smiling at the camera while he looked down at her, his face mostly in shadow. “I like the picture,” I said.
He glanced at it. “That was from this summer. Gracie’s family has a place in the Hamptons.”
“Wow. Nice.”
“You have no idea.”
“You both from the East Coast?”
He shook his head. “I grew up in the Valley.”
“And then UCLA?”
He nodded toward his diploma on the wall.
“Ever live anywhere other than Southern California?” I asked.
“Nope. You?”
“I was up north for a year. Berkeley.”
He gave a low whistle. “Impressive. Why just a year?”
I looked down at the tattoo on my wrist. “Noah.”
“Which brings us back to what I wanted to discuss,” he said, a little too quickly. People always got uncomfortable when I talked about dropping out of school to have a kid.
Only it was my life.
“Did something happen in PE today?” I asked, trying to sound calm about the possibility.
“No, no. Everything’s fine. I was thinking more generally about Noah and school and stuff.” He hesitated. “You know, yesterday you said things can be rough for him—”
“Yeah.” I was embarrassed he had remembered that. “The poor kid lives in a nice house on the Westside of LA and is forced to go to a really good private school. Get out your violin, right?”
“You meant it.” He had the calmest voice, this guy. I hadn’t noticed before how low and mellow it was when he wasn’t shouting from a platform above a dunk tank—or defending himself against the accusations of an angry parent. I wondered if he sounded like this when he was teaching the kids. It didn’t fit with the image Noah had painted of an impatient, vengeful teacher. “Anyway, I’ve seen with my own eyes how hard it is for him to join in with the other kids.”
“He’s just different.” A sudden and intensely loud buzzing sound made me jump. “Jesus, what was that?”
“School’s out. Sorry—there’s a speaker right outside my office.”
“I should go get Noah.” I edged toward the door. “I’m meeting him in the classroom and he’ll freak out if I’m late.”
“I’ll walk you over there. I wanted to include Noah in this conversation, anyway.”
“Don’t you have a basketball game to get to?”
“It’s a home game, and the other school won’t be here for a half hour or so.”
“Don’t you need to get our team warmed up?”
He cocked his head at me. “I get the feeling you’re not all that eager to talk to me, Noah’s-mom-whose-name-I’ve-forgotten-again.”
“It’s Rickie,” I said. “And, to be honest, I’m not all that into having another conversation about how my kid needs to try harder.”
“That’s not what this is going to be. I promise.” He followed me over to the door. “I actually think I’m beginning to figure Noah out.”
“Really?” I said. “Because I’m completely lost.”
He laughed. “Well, I’m still working it out, but my theory is that he’s basically terrified of being bad at anything so he’d rather not try at all than fail. Especially when it comes to sports—he has zero confidence in his athletic ability. But if we can boost his self-esteem, give him a reason to feel confident—” He held the door open and gestured to me to go through it. He followed me out and shut the door. “Like just today, in PE, we were playing Capture the Flag and I made him captain of one of the two teams. Everyone was begging him to pick them. He definitely enjoyed the power.”
“How’d he do once the game started?” I asked as we went down the hallway.
“He lasted longer than usual.”
“I’m guessing that’s still not very long.”
He opened the door to the courtyard and held it open for me. “You wouldn’t be wrong,” he said as I went through.
We walked across the courtyard. Kids were dashing all around us on their way to buses, car pools, and team practices. A lot of them called out an enthusiastic “Hey, Coach!” as they passed Andrew. Noah was clearly in the minority in not liking him.
As we entered the lower-school building, I almost got knocked down by a pack of older boys. “Slow down!” Andrew yelled after them, just as another group of boys in basketball uniforms came running up to him.
“Where are you going?” one of them demanded. I knew he had to be in fourth grade, but the kid was probably as tall as I was and definitely weighed more. The way he was talking to the coach seemed pretty arrogant to me. “We have a game today.”
“I know,” the coach said calmly. “I’ll meet you guys in the gym in five minutes. Do some stretching till I get there.”
“Don’t be late,” the kid said and then he led the others toward the door.
We kept going down the hallway. A pretty young teacher was talking to a student outside one of the classrooms. She looked up and waved at Andrew. “Game today?” she called out.
“Yep.”
“I’ll come cheer!” She went back to talking to the student as we passed by.
“It’s good to be a male teacher, isn’t it?” I said to Andrew.
“I’ve never really thought about it,” he said uncomfortably.
We had reached Noah’s classroom. The door was wide open, but Andrew stopped and gestured me through first. “Who taught you to do that?” I asked as I passed him. “The whole the-girl-always-goes-through-the-door-first thing?”
“My grandmother. She was from the South. You think it’s sexist?”
“I think it’s fantastic. Oh, good, there’s Noah.” I mentally took back the “good” part as I realized his teacher was reaming him out for something. She was talking down at him very seriously while he hung his head and stared at his feet.
I suddenly felt very tired. I didn’t want to go over and get involved, but I knew I had to.
The really weird thing was that I’d actually had Ms. Hayashi back when I was in Noah’s grade. That’s how long she’d been teaching at Fenwick. As far as I could remember, my year with her had been pretty smooth. I was a confident kid, good at my classwork, well behaved, and eager to make my teachers like me. Which they pretty much did, all the way through. Hayashi had been no exception.
So when I found out Noah was go
ing to be in her class, I assumed he’d have an easy year, just like I did. But over the last couple of months, I’d come to realize that Hayashi must have liked me because I didn’t require any special attention or assistance, and that Noah, who frequently required both, wasn’t going to have such a smooth year of it after all.
We’d already had several moderately tense phone calls and e-mail exchanges about worksheets that hadn’t been finished, tasks that had been abandoned, and tests that were completed in a slapdash manner or not at all.
I took a deep breath and went over to them, leaving Andrew in a press of students eager to greet him. “What’s up?” I asked with fake heartiness.
“Nothing,” Noah muttered. He pushed his head hard against my side, and I put my arm around his shoulders.
I looked questioningly toward the teacher. The impressive thing about Ms. Hayashi was that she hadn’t changed much in almost twenty years. Her hair was more gray than black now, but otherwise she looked pretty much the same, straight-backed and very serious. She seemed shorter than I remembered, but I’d been a lot smaller back then.
She said, “Noah hasn’t turned in his spelling worksheet yet.”
“I did hand it in,” he said. “I handed it in with Clark’s.”
“I’ve looked through all the worksheets I have and it’s not there. I don’t mind his not finishing,” she added in a lower voice, leaning in toward me. “It’s the refusal to admit it that concerns me.”
“Noah,” I said, peeling him off of me a little so I could look down at his face. “Did you really hand in the sheet?”
“Yes!” he said and I believed him. He was a bad liar.
“You gave it right to Ms. Hayashi?”
He shook his head. “Clark said to put it in the homework box.”
“I told you to hand it in to me,” Ms. Hayashi said. “Not put it in there.”
I gave him a gentle shove. “Go check the homework box, Noey.”
Noah ran across the room.
“I wish he’d listen to directions,” Hayashi said stiffly. The natural awkwardness of the situation was exacerbated by the weirdness of my having once been her student. She had hugged me the first day I brought Noah to class, but since then neither of us could get back to a comfortable place.
We both watched as Noah rooted through a bin full of papers and almost immediately gave a chortle of triumph. He raised a sheet high in his hand. “See!” he called out. “It’s here. It’s been here the whole time. And Clark’s is here too.”
“Bring them both to me,” Ms. Hayashi said, sounding just as annoyed as before. “They shouldn’t have been put there. That was the wrong place,” she said to me. “That’s why I couldn’t find it. He didn’t listen to the directions.”
“Yeah, but Clark’s was in there too,” I said. “Why weren’t you yelling at him?”
“I wasn’t yelling at anyone. As you know, Noah struggles with getting his work in on time, so I try to keep an eye out for him. For his sake.” She turned. “Excuse me, some of the kids need my help getting ready to go.” She moved away.
“Amazing how quickly she needed to leave once we were right,” I said, more to myself than to Noah. I took the worksheets from him and tossed them on the teacher’s desk. They looked like stupid busywork, anyway.
Coach Andrew came over to us and said cheerfully, “Hey, there, Noah, how’s life?”
“Ms. Hayashi thought I was lying but I wasn’t.”
“Sounds like there was a misunderstanding.” Andrew squatted down. “Listen, buddy, I don’t have much time but there’s something I wanted to ask you and your mom about. An idea I had. You see, I’m very busy these days running the PE program for the lower school and coaching two teams, and could really use some extra help. So I was wondering: how would you feel about being my assistant?”
Noah eyed him warily. “What do you mean?”
“You’d help me out with my afternoon coaching and do stuff like carry balls out to the field, keep track of the drills I’m running, hold on to my clipboard when I need my hands free—stuff like that.”
“And you’d pay me?”
Andrew laughed and stood back up. “Sorry, Noah, I’m afraid this is an unpaid position. But you’d be—”
I cut him off. “I don’t think this is Noah’s kind of thing.” I knew it wasn’t a good idea, but I didn’t want to explain why in front of Noah. I could already see exactly how this would play out: Noah would start off wildly excited and have incredibly high expectations. Then, half an hour into the first practice, reality would set in: the kids would treat him rudely, he’d realize it wasn’t a real job and that the coach was patronizing him, he’d be hot (or cold) and tired, and he’d just want to go home.
That was just how things went with Noah. Life had a way of letting him down, and the more hopeful he got, the more it hurt when he hit bottom. I didn’t want to say all that with him standing there, but I also didn’t want him to commit to something I knew would end unhappily.
“Let’s let Noah decide for himself,” Andrew said. “I think he’s the kind of guy who’ll lend a hand when someone needs one.”
“Sometimes I am,” Noah said carefully.
“So what do you think?”
“Would I have to wear a whistle?”
Andrew folded his arms and considered. “Would you want to wear a whistle?”
Noah nodded, his eyes raised up to Andrew’s face. “Kids don’t listen to you unless you have a whistle.”
“Just so you know,” I said, “kids aren’t so great at listening to other kids even when they have whistles.”
“I won’t be just another kid,” Noah said. “I’ll be the assistant coach.”
Andrew raised a finger. “You wouldn’t blow on it unless I told you to, right?”
“No,” Noah said solemnly. “I’d wait for your signal.”
I suppressed a groan. Noah was falling in love with the idea and taking it way too seriously, which was exactly what I was afraid of. “Maybe the coach and I should talk about this by ourselves,” I said.
Andrew turned to me. “It’s not a lifelong commitment.” His tone was perfectly friendly, but I still got the sense I was being rebuked. “Why not let him give it a try and see how it goes?”
“I know how it will go,” I said grimly.
“Maybe not.” He studied me for one brief moment then turned to Noah and held out his hand. “Is it a deal? You’ll give it a try and see what you think?”
Noah put out his much smaller hand and they shook. “When do I start?”
“I was thinking you could help me coach the fifth-grade girls’ basketball team. They have practice on Wednesdays and games on Fridays. You can start this week.”
Noah turned to me. “Mom? Can I? Please?”
I sighed, shrugged, and finally gave a weak nod.
On the way to the car, Noah said, “We better go buy a whistle now.”
“I’m sure Coach Andrew has one you can borrow.”
“I’ll need my own. I’ll probably have to use it a lot.”
“I’m a little confused,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully. “You don’t usually like anything that has to do with sports.”
“That’s because I’m so bad at them,” he said. “Not because I don’t like them.”
“You’re not so bad. You just need to try a little harder.”
“Mom,” he said passionately, “I have tried. I swear. I just suck at sports. But if I’m the assistant coach, I can be on a team without making us lose the game so all the other kids hate me. So can we go get the whistle please?”
We got the whistle.
We also picked up a kids’ book on basketball. Noah wanted to study up on it. But once we were home, he didn’t even make it through the introduction before he had dropped the book on the table and gone to play on the computer.
Later that evening, he blew his new whistle right next to Eleanor Roosevelt’s head and the poor dog squealed and jumped about thr
ee feet in the air. I confiscated the whistle and told him he couldn’t have it back until game day because he had violated the rules. He screamed that I was the meanest mom in the whole entire world and slammed the door to our room in my face. I muttered a sarcastic thank-you to Coach Andrew for bringing a whole new source of tension into our lives.
The next time I saw her, Melanie informed me there was going to be a “wrap-up” Event Hospitality Committee meeting on Wednesday morning.
“We can skip that,” I said.
“But we’re not going to.”
“We did our part. We were good citizens. Now we’re done.”
“We’re not done until we’ve celebrated with everyone. It’s about community, Rickie.”
“You suck,” I said.
“I’ll pick you up at nine.”
This meeting was at Maria’s house, a beautiful and enormous yellow Monterey Colonial in Bel Air. There were at least four or five gardeners working in the front yard when we arrived. The noise from their blowers and mowers was deafening.
“Sorry!” Maria shouted when she opened the door to our ring. “I forgot they’d be here this morning.” She ushered us in and hurriedly slammed the door. “You’d think after twelve years I’d have learned not to schedule anything here on Wednesday mornings, but I always forget.”
She steered us into an airy living room near the front of the house. Tanya waved absently in our direction from a big armchair, where she was talking into her BlackBerry. Carol Lynn and Linda were discussing something quietly on the dark blue silk-covered sofa and just nodded at us.
“I’m serving mimosas,” Maria said. “To celebrate being done with the festival.”
“It’s a little early for me,” Mel said.
“Just try one. I’m using very good champagne. Dos mas,” she told a dark-haired middle-aged woman who had just entered the room from another doorway. The woman instantly withdrew again and Maria turned back to us. “It was my husband’s. The champagne, I mean. He had a killer wine collection. I got the house but he stiffed me on almost everything else. Then he asked me to give him back all his wine. Which was in the wine cellar. Which was in the house. Which I got.” She grinned wickedly. “I don’t think he had thought that one through entirely. Sometimes I’ll open a bottle of something that’s probably worth three hundred dollars, just to have one glass all by myself. And let me tell you, I enjoy it very much.” She nudged Melanie’s arm. “You probably have your own war stories, right?”
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