All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  Finally, cupping her hand behind the padlock, the girl lined up the numbers in the combination.

  “Ready, Dad?” she said, looking away from us as she swung the gate open. She gave her head a little shake, so that her ponytail swished. We scurried out.

  Now, remembering my humiliation as I rooted among the fat blades of amaryllis leaves for a ball Margaret had earlier sent over the fence, while tugging down the hem of my too-short skirt, I suspect I may have been mistaken. The jangle of the girl’s bracelets might not have been smug; her pause may have registered only confusion, as she wondered how the gate could be locked if we were inside; her glance at my dress might have been admiring. It’s possible. Still, it was inevitable that I would see her the way I did, being as I was and as I would remain.

  CHAPTER 2

  Margaret

  EVERYONE KNOWS SUNDAYS ARE UNGRASPABLE. I didn’t really expect to accomplish anything. But Sunday night, I prepared to buck the unproductive trend the weekend had begun by placing the laptop open on the table, ready for the next morning. I filled my new Mont Blanc with ink and scratched out a schedule on the legal pad.

  8:00–11:30 write

  11:30–12:30 buy baby-naming book

  12:30–3:30 write

  3:30–4:30 run

  4:30–5:30 grocery shop

  5:30–7:00 write to middle of scene

  My plans for that last hour and a half were inspired by Hemingway; I had read that he had always stopped when he knew what the next sentence would be so as to pick up the work easily the next day. It occurred to me that by this principle I should try to get a sentence or two down that night, but I liked the idea of starting fresh in the morning with a clean slate, so to speak. Clearly, Elaine and her hair had set me on the wrong path earlier and some unconsidered words now would surely do the same.

  I starred the hour I planned to devote to exercise to remind myself not to forgo that physical refreshment—mens sana in corpore sano, as they say—no matter how involved I was in the writing. I made a mental note to start with a good breakfast, as well—maybe sardines and tomatoes on Swedish flatbread, a snack that looked bracing and wholesome in television commercials.

  As it turned out, there were distractions at home Monday morning that I didn’t anticipate, used as I was to being out of the house by seven-fifteen. First, Ted dawdled over the paper, placed a few calls, and in myriad other ways made his presence unconducive to my settling down to work. After he left, the cable company demanded access to the roof, and, because I seemed to be the only one home in the building, or at least the only one willing the answer the bell, I had to let men in jumpsuits in and out three times, which, since we don’t even subscribe to cable, necessitated peevish calls to Benson Cable, to City Hall, to the landlady’s answering machine, and to Ted to express my annoyance over having to facilitate the money-making schemes of a giant corporation that was doing nothing for me.

  It occurred to me when the stomping overhead was at its most distracting that this might not be the cable company at all, but some elaborately costumed and orchestrated criminal gang, so I compared the number listed in the phone book with the one on the card the technician had given me, an operation that would have taken very little time, if we did not live in an apartment so cramped that we had to store the phone books behind the cookbooks behind the large pots in the bottom cupboard.

  Then, I had to eat something. We’d had only toast for breakfast, there being, in fact, no tomatoes, no flatbread, and no sardines. We did have a tin of anchovies, but at seven-thirty these had not seemed appetizing. At ten-thirty I made more toast and spread peanut butter on it. I read the story in that week’s New Yorker as I ate: depressed man lives in crummy apartment; pays much attention to grout between bathroom tiles; becomes more depressed. Indignantly, I tore it out to send to Letty.

  “I could have written this with one hand tied behind my back!” I scrawled on a Post-it with my Mont Blanc.

  Right on schedule at eleven-thirty I was standing in the childbirth aisle at the bookstore in Union Square, comparing Multicultural Baby Names for This Millennium and the Next with Jack and Jill, Jeremy and Jessica.

  “Ms. Snyder?”

  At the end of the aisle, her boy-cut corduroys slung low around her hips and flaring out over her running shoes, was Chloe Brown, one of my tenth-graders. Former tenth-graders.

  “Chloe. Hi. What are you up to?” It was always awkward to meet students outside of school, where I was not the teacher they knew. Presumably, they were not the students I knew either. I, at least, always felt as if I’d been caught doing something illicit.

  “Mom is forcing me to read something,” she said. As usual, the lift in her voice at the end turned her sentence into a question. “When we go to Nantucket.” She reached to pull the elastic from her ponytail, smoothed her fine, light brown hair back from her face with both palms, and stretched the elastic around her hair again.

  My WASP students had a habit of dropping the possessive pronoun when they referred to their parents, as if they were nurtured by some sort of universal progenitors. “Good idea,” I said. This was, thank God, teacher territory.

  I resisted the urge to suggest Wuthering Heights or Sense and Sensibility. She would not like them. “How about The Shining?”

  She’d stepped closer to me and I could smell stale smoke. Cigarettes were very in among upper-class New York children.

  “I think you’d like it,” I said. “Since you like scary stuff.” This was a gross generalization drawn from the observation that the single piece of literature in which Chloe had shown any interest over the course of the previous year was The Tell-Tale Heart. Even William Carlos Williams, usually a great hit with tenth-grade girls, who, after reading him, earnestly believed they, too, could be poets, as long as they eschewed the rhyme they’d deemed essential when they were unsophisticated ninth-graders in favor of sensual imagery, had left her cold.

  The Shining was, in fact, my standard recommendation for girls who wouldn’t read; The Firm for boys. This annoyed parents who envisioned their offspring tearing through Henry James (although, they, themselves, had only the vaguest memories of a sinister governess—or was it a nanny?—from the high school class in which they’d been forced through The Turn of the Screw and found the classics too unnecessarily dense and old-fashioned for their own tastes). Of course, there were always a few students who did tear through James, or at least Edith Wharton, which made the inability of the rest to puzzle through even a paragraph of complex syntax and advanced vocabulary after ten years of the finest schooling money could buy (eleven or twelve, if you counted preschool) all the more exasperating.

  “Ms. Snyder?”

  “Yes?”

  “No offense, but is that why you’re not teaching next year?”

  “Is what why?”

  She lifted her eyes toward the bookshelves over our shoulders. “Are you having a baby?”

  “Well, in a way,” I laughed. “I’m writing a novel.”

  Her eyes actually got larger, something I had thought only happened in books. It was quite gratifying, and I had to remind myself that, contrary to popular opinion, it doesn’t take much to impress a fifteen-year-old.

  “That’s really sick! What’s it about?”

  “Well, it’s in the very early stages. I think I probably shouldn’t try to describe it yet.”

  “Would I like it?”

  “I hope so, Chloe.” Actually, I sincerely hoped not. “Right now, I’m doing research, trying to find a meaningful name for a character. You know, the way Estella’s name meant ‘star,’ and she was like a bright, cold star?” I said, shifting from insecure author to know-it-all didact, a guise in which I felt more comfortable.

  “Cool. I’m probably going to be a writer, too. After I go to law school.”

  Her confidence would have been intensely irritating had it not been so ill-founded. At Chloe’s age, I hadn’t carried myself with anywhere near such assurance and would never hav
e dared to ask a teacher whether she was pregnant or what the novel she was writing was about. Would never have dreamed, in fact, of uttering such a casual word as “cool” in conversation with her, and certainly would not have admitted to such a lofty goal as that of writer, or even law school. Did this reticence explain why I was so far behind now?

  “Well, I’ll look forward to your book, then,” I said. “And your mothers right; if you want to be a writer, it would probably help to do some reading.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “But I’m going to write about real life. I’ll probably do a lot of traveling first.”

  “Well, that’s good, too.” I resisted my impulse to glance at the book I was holding as a hint that it was time she moved along. It would have been easy, but unkind, to take advantage of my superior status as an adult and a teacher in that way.

  Chloe looked toward the escalator. “I should probably get my book.”

  As if I’d been keeping her! “Yes,” I agreed. “Maybe we’ll run into each other again this summer.”

  “I’ll be in Nantucket. Until September.” She pulled the elastic from her ponytail again.

  “Right. Well, have a good summer, then.”

  But Chloe was already drifting away toward a table display. As I watched her flip through the pages of a book of sexually suggestive photographs and then study a collection of Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, I felt sorry that I was no longer a teacher. Observing the Chloes maneuver their way across the rickety bridge between childhood and adulthood had actually been one of the delights of my former profession. I felt fondness easily for those who looked up to me, who trusted me, who needed my help.

  I reminded myself of how I’d chafed at other aspects of private school teaching—that sense of myself, for instance, as an earnest, gray lump, unfit to interact as an equal in the society for which my education had prepared me, far below even all of those “Moms.” Sure, I’d read a lot of books and could recognize a grammatical sentence, and these things were invaluable as far as they could be applied to preparing society’s children for and getting them into good colleges. This being an object second only to keeping those children alive, I ranked right up there with the pediatrician, when my skills were wanted. But outside of that narrow band of usefulness, respect for my abilities waned along with people’s interest in the “classics.” My colleagues and I were pitiable—we were intelligent people who weren’t bold enough to use our smarts to earn real money. Had we been blue-collar, we might have been romanticized as creatures of another world. Instead, we were condescended to as failures, glorified servants to those who’d worked the world better than we had, those who understood that an annual rereading of Leaves of Grass got you nowhere.

  But that lump was not me at all, or at least it hadn’t been me. Back in D.C. in my twenties and even my very early thirties, I’d liked the idea, as well as the work, of teaching at a fancy, private school. In the spring of my senior year of college, when for the first time in my life I had to choose what to do next, I’d disdained the various corporations and consulting firms that had recruited at Penn, because I was too independent to indenture myself to the Man, not to mention too artistic to soil my hands with workaday business concerns. At the same time, I was too much the over-achiever to fling myself into the currents of some exotic-sounding city and let them take me where they would. In the end, I’d applied for the teaching job because it was the only one I could think of that sounded challenging but did not involve the aforementioned tedious and humiliating apprenticeship—private schools did not even require an education degree—which I quite reasonably could not resign myself to until I’d decided on my true career.

  And I enjoyed it. Since an inexperienced teacher does pretty much the same thing as an experienced one, albeit somewhat less smoothly, I had more authority than most of my contemporaries in other professions. I was immersed in the transcendent works of Western civilization, and what I said about them was pretty much the last word. The job connoted smarts without the stuffy specificity of the university professor, a dedication to the right values and an enviable rapport with the hip, younger generations.

  But then, some time after I’d passed my thirtieth year, I began to see it differently. No longer was I dallying for a few years after college, passing on my freshly acquired knowledge and zest for learning, while I looked about me. I was a teacher. And what had been an absorbing game while I was only playing became a drab and repetitive chore. If it were only that I would spend every November with The Scarlet Letter, every February with As I Lay Dying, and every April with Huck, I might have been grateful at least to be in good company, but I feared the prospect of delineating the contrast between the wilderness and society and nodding sagely at the irony of going to hell for helping Jim year after year, as far as the eye could see. Worse, I would do this while my students, many of whom would never understand why Vardaman’s mother is a fish, would nevertheless become doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs and pass me by.

  On my way out of the store, I hurried past the new-fiction shelves. All those hopeful covers, putting a brave front on story after story about “the twisted, unbreakable bonds of love” and “the triumph of love over abuse in the South/in the Midwest/in Big Sky Country” and “man/woman/child coming to know himself/coming to love herself/coming of age” made me feel ill. This was only one seasons crop. Authors were out there by the hundreds, ceaselessly writing, writing, writing. It seemed when I looked at those books, which would soon be replaced by more of their kind, that there could not be left for me a single plot unturned, a character undelved, or a situation unexamined. And these were only the lucky few that were published! How long would they last? A few months, most of them, with those that made the New York Times notable list hanging on a season longer. In short, there were too many books already. What made me think that it was worthwhile even to try to add to their number?

  This, I told myself, scowling at a cyclist who was riding on the sidewalk along University Avenue, was not the way to think. Marguerite Yourcenar and Barbara Pym would not have quailed at the sight of other people’s books. A really good book, written with original style and a deep understanding of human nature, would find its way. That was the sort of book I had in mind.

  A thick envelope from Letty awaited my return. The first page was written on the back of a school flyer announcing Dinosaur Day, February 27. I poured myself a glass of iced tea, rummaged unsuccessfully through the crisper for a lemon, and then settled on the couch. I anticipated a good read: Letty understood human nature.

  Dear Margaret,

  You’ll notice that one corner is missing from this page. I think Noah ate it. Or possibly one of the cats. (I mean that one of the cats ate the corner, not that Noah ate the cat, of course!) I only left it alone for thirty seconds, but obviously I should have taken it into the bathroom with me. Anyway, I am now writing to you from the closet where I am hiding from 1. letter-consuming children and/or pets, 2. the room with the oven and refrigerator, which some maniac tried to use as a four-star pastry kitchen, 3. any activity that will highlight my glaring inadequacies in the eyes of other mothers.

  The day after we’d last spoken, Marlo’s school year had finally come to an end, and her class had scheduled a party for that final afternoon to which parents had been invited and for which Letty had cheerfully promised to produce “a treat to share.” For both of her daughters, Letty’s mother had always turned out perfectly serviceable devil’s food cupcakes on similar occasions, and Letty assumed she’d make the same. “Although,” she wrote, “I considered picking up a couple of bags of mini carrots, so as not to offend the health-conscious.” But then Alex Prescott drove Mario home from an afternoon of stages-of-metamorphosis poster construction with her daughter, Chelsea Prescott-Fang. Letty has felt a little defensive around Alex ever since “Take Your Daughter to Work Day.” It was Chelsea’s idea, not her mother’s, that Mario should accompany her to her mother’s office, but Alex did give her permission.
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  “I felt so terrible,” Letty’d said then, almost crying. “I mean, don’t I work? I feel like I work! Why am I so tired if I’m not working!”

  I assured her that certainly she worked, that I was sure Alex Prescott was only trying to secure entertainment for her daughter, who was probably dreading a boring day producing independent films with only her insensitive mother for company. I suggested Letty give permission for Chelsea to join Mario on a day of work with her. Nevertheless, we both recognized that in this episode “Mothers Who Work Outside the Home” had scored.

  The letter continued on a piece of paper that had obviously been torn from a Big Chief tablet.

  So here she is now, leaning against the doorframe and crossing her arms over her perfectly cut raw silk jacket. The color of this jacket, by the way, is a violet next month’s Vogue will announce as the shade du jour, while I sport a rugby shirt in Lands’ End–catalog grape circa 1986. “What’re you bringing tomorrow?” she asks.

  She does not wait for my answer before producing hers. “I thought I’d make some tuiles,” she says, and triumphantly dislodges the toy from a long-consumed Happy Meal from under our threshold with one pewter Ferragamo car moccasin.

  I wouldn’t have even known what a tuile was, except that Martha Stewart was rolling them about a month ago. From what I could see in the five minutes I watched while scrubbing out the dog dishes, it took about an hour to make four. Tuiles will prove that despite Alex’s demanding profession she is not skimping on her child, and further that she’s capable of pursuing domestic chores with the passion and perfectionism of the artist.