All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  “You seem,” his comments began, “to be working within the framework of the word and its antithesis: the deed for which there are no words, the unspeakable, so to speak. The protagonist cannot even name himself, much as in Lear we see Edgar (the holy counterpart of evil Edmund) babble as a lunatic, not to mention Lear himself, who is rendered incoherent when the natural order becomes disorderly. (But what, after all, is natural, when it is Edmund, who is the child of ‘nature’?)”

  “Well, what does he say?” Ted was craning his neck around the page.

  “I’m not sure. Either he thinks I’m insane or he’s comparing me to Shakespeare.”

  “You juxtapose two worlds,” the note went on, “the despoiled paradise and the paradise utterly lost, the oriental and the occidental. Some reference might perhaps be made to the Native American experience, as compared, for instance, with the Khmer Rouge—the Red Man and the Reds, as it were.”

  Was he saying I should set the novel in Cambodia?

  “My advice to you”—I snapped the page as I read these direct words to bring it into sharper focus—“is to juggle the odd sizes. Swim with the chickens. Turn the details inside out until they smoke, threatening combustion. Also, don’t use so many adverbs. PB.”

  And then there was a postscript: “How do the cheating little girls fit in?”

  “I’m sorry, Ted,” I said, “but I really don’t feel like dinner tonight. I’m just going to lie down for a while.”

  Drained, I shuffled dramatically to the bedroom, dragging my purse full of cavils and worse behind me by the shoulder strap. I pulled back the tablecloth that served as a curtain and lay listlessly on the bed watching the people in the building behind ours enjoying lives Ted and I suspected had been scripted by a screenwriter who was smitten with lush interiors. These people occupied not an apartment, but an entire house on the next block. The man we thought of as the father was lighting votives on a table spread for guests on the flagstone-covered patio. The woman we’d decided was the mother moved back and forth between their wood-paneled refrigerator and their restaurant-sized stove. Between the picture window and a floor-to-ceiling painting on the third floor, in a room that, as far as we could tell, was completely devoted to exercise, the daughter pushed and pulled at some large piece of equipment, while a trainer stood beside her, spotting her now and then with a judiciously placed hand. I was sure that such people had never tried to write a novel and they, with their imminently arriving friends and their painstakingly prepared or at least carefully chosen meals and their well-toned bodies, were clearly the better for it.

  Letty was also having educational difficulties.

  Margaret—

  Just got a call from the principals office at Hunter’s school. I have to come in at three o’clock to discuss “a matter of grave concern.” I’m afraid I shrieked into the phone when I heard this. I suppose I feared some child had carried a gun into the second grade, or perhaps attempted to distribute Tylenol. “We’d prefer to discuss this with a parent in person,” the secretary said. Michael assures me that if Hunter had been kidnapped or molested, they wouldn’t wait for a three o’clock appointment to tell me. I guess that makes sense.

  L

  M—

  Me, again. It’s two-fifteen. Over the course of the last two hours I’ve had to breathe into a paper bag several times. Could the “matter of grave concern” be a horrible brain disease detected by a specially designed spelling quiz? A fall from the jungle gym? A fight in which precious tiny teeth have been lost? “Letty,” Michael said, the third time I called him out of a meeting, “calm down. I’m sure he’s all right. He probably walked into the girls’ bathroom by mistake.” When I worried that this might be considered sexual harassment, Michael was impatient. He was never impatient when I called him out of meetings at Ramona. In fact, back then he was pleased. He would stretch the conversation, ask what we’d had for lunch and whether I’d remembered to give the dogs their flea medication. He would inquire about the progress of potty training. Now it seems a museum meeting is more important than his child’s health and incipient criminality.

  L

  M—

  Hi. Me, yet again. I got to the school office at 2:45 and tried to be chummy with the secretary. “Hi,” I said, as casually as I could. “I’m Letty MacMillan. Some problem in class today?”

  She refused to be chummed. “Mrs. Henderson will discuss that with you,” she said. She looked at the clock disapprovingly. “At three.”

  So I had to wait, shrinking into a fragile second-grader myself as I sat in that office, waiting to be summoned.

  Mrs. Henderson has wispy, home-permed hair and a wide waist. She wears flowered dresses and inexpensive navy or beige pumps. In other words, she is a reassuring figure and I’d never had cause to fear her before. Today, however, she didn’t smile when she opened her door to me. “Mrs. MacMillan,” she said. “Thank you for coming in.”

  “Of course,” I said. “What happened? Is Hunter all right?”

  “Physically, yes,” Mrs. Henderson assured me, “but we’ve had a worrisome episode in the classroom today.” She indicated that I should take the chair in front of her desk and sat down behind the desk herself. The vinyl padded seat sighed beneath her, as if weary of troublesome children and their anxious, obviously ineffective, mothers. Lying precisely across the center of the desktop was a purple pen. Positioning an index finger at tip and base (presumably to avoid leaving fingerprints), she lifted the pen and held it toward me. “Have you ever seen this before?”

  I shook my head. Was it a knife, cleverly disguised? Was it a bomb?

  “You see, we do not allow these sorts of pens in school,” she said, replacing the implement at the center of her desk.

  I nodded, though I didn’t understand the point of this nor its application to Hunter. How could pens not be allowed in school?

  “The ink” she said, “is erasable.” She smiled, then, as if she pitied me, and sat back in her chair. “You see, we like to allow the children to correct their own exercises out of a master book. We believe that encouraging the student to seek his or her own correct answers fosters a sense of independence and intellectual initiative, and allows the student to view the educator as a facilitator in the search for knowledge rather than as a dictator of right and wrong. It also,” she added, “saves the teacher a great deal of time.”

  I continued to nod. Again, I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant, but it sounded friendly.

  “The children are supposed to mark incorrect answers with a check. Hunter,” she leaned toward me here, “your son,” she added, as if I might try to disclaim our connection, “has been using this pen to erase his incorrect answers and replace them with the correct ones.”

  “He’s cheating?”

  “Well,” she leaned back again and waved one hand dismissively, “there seems to be some possibility that he misunderstood the purpose of checking his answers, but we believe it’s best to nip this sort of thing in the bud. You can see why we’d rather he not use this pen in the classroom.” She picked it up again, this time with one hand in a normal fashion, and handed it to me.

  “Of course,” I said, quickly dropping the pen in my purse. “How about pencil?”

  “Pencil is fine. Young children, we find, are not very adept at cheating with pencil,” she said. “They press too hard.”

  Hunter and I had a little talk on the way home from school. It turned out that I didn’t even have to broach the subject.

  “Mom,” he said, “did you know that you’re not supposed to change your answers if they’re wrong in the book?”

  “I found that out today,” I said.

  “Me, too.”

  He’d traded his mechanical pencil with Bailey for the pen. Michael was more upset about the choice of color than the possible cheating. “I can’t believe a child of mine would want to write in purple,” he said. “It’s undignified.”

  While I’m on the school subject, did you know there
were tests for private ones? I mean, just to get in? (Obviously, there are tests once you get there. It wouldn’t be school without tests.) Mario has to take a three-hour exam on English and math. “It’s really designed for seventh-graders,” one of the admissions directors told me, “but we like to see them give it a try in fifth. Of course, we don’t expect our fifth-graders to ace it.” Then she pulled open a drawer of her Mission-style oak file cabinet. “I don’t give this to everyone,” she said, “but your daughter seems like such a nice girl.” She leaned a little to her left to look out the door—I suppose to make sure no one was spying on us from the hall—then slipped me a vocabulary list. “Study this,” she said. I’m not sure if she meant Mario or me. What does “termagant” mean? How about “perspicacious”? “Otios”? Also, we both have to write essays.

  I hate private school already, but Mario is so excited. At night, under the covers with her Hello Kitty flashlight, she’s paging through glossy brochures. I can’t blame her. All the children look so happy and attentive in those pictures. I don’t remember smiling in middle school. Do you?

  Love, Letty

  P.S. I’m looking for a good nursery school for Noah for next year. There’s a kindergarten I’d like him to go to and he might not get in if he does preschool in a church basement like Mario and Hunter did.

  CHAPTER 9

  Margaret

  M—

  Our kitchen is a disaster. Or rather our kitchen is a superb example of Italian design, French sensibilities, American cherry and granite, and German knives, cunningly arranged in a 9 × 4 foot space that now makes the rest of the house the equivalent of the cheap cardboard and plastic photo album that I purchased at a yard sale in 1987—I remember because I was so pregnant with Mario at the time I could not bend properly to pick it up—and used to hold recipe cards. We resold said album to a Honduran family at our own yard sale last weekend.

  The historical refrigerator was reclaimed by the people we bought it from—remember that day? We’ve replaced it with a supersized model of the brand everyone agrees is best. Never previously owned! Any dried egg, mustard, or inexplicable pinkish stains original to us! It’s pristine and spacious and full of clever compartments that I suspect are for items like pâté. Also, it’s energy efficient and installed flush with the cabinetry. It seems to take offense when you refer to it as the “fridge.”

  Remember the cupboards that were covered in fake wood grain Con-Tact paper when we bought this house? We’ve replaced them with deep, ceiling-high, glass-fronted “cabinets.” Change begets change, however—now we must go to the Rose Bowl flea market on Sunday to replace plastic Tom-and-Jerry-ware, as mouse and cat do not look elegant behind glass.

  I would take photos—have, in fact, taken photos—before and after, so what I mean is I would send photos, if you were not planning to be here at Christmas. Right? You are planning to be here at Christmas? I want very much to see you. Stunning as this kitchen is—and conducive to cooking, which is, after all, the point of a kitchen—it’s making me at the moment a little sad, since it’s so far removed from our former life.

  Your friend, the proud operator of a garbage disposal,

  L

  It made me sad, too, to think of what was gone. Ted and I had shopped the secondhand (fifthhand would be more accurate) appliance stores—free pickup and delivery—on Western with Letty and Michael for that refrigerator. We’d rejected several round-shouldered ones with the kind of handle that snaps satisfyingly open and shut as niftily vintage but impractical. We’d finally selected a largish, somewhat more up-to-date model in hideous harvest gold at a price Ted approved. A cockroach scurried to hide from the light when I slid open the crisper, but I kept that observation to myself and used the bleach liberally when the appliance was safely in Letty and Michael’s kitchen. The four of us made up a history for that refrigerator, the family of six for whom it sturdily held gallon jugs of whole milk; the single mother who juggled baby, toddler, and string cheese while pushing the door shut with one flip-flopped foot; the fraternity, who’d let it grow a lining of mold in their basement, while they forced it to open wide for case after case of Heineken.

  Letty and I had peeled the Con-Tact paper from those cupboards and then chipped away with our putty knives at the layers of paint—yellow and cream and pink and beige, down to the original green—just to see—and then smoothed our own green, Letty’s custom color, over it all. Where was the silver-star-spangled mint linoleum now?

  I looked forward to Christmas not only because we would see Letty and my parents and possibly even Warren, if we could lure him away from his phone, but also because a government-sanctioned holiday would provide a legitimate break from the drudgery of my solitary work, or rather the drudgery of my solitary not-work.

  I’d taped PB’s notes to the table beside me. Ted had several times set his coffee mug on the page, but I could read around the rings. After my early debacle, the specter of the class’s response dogged me as I wrote, but I kept my apprehensions at bay by reminding myself that I’d have plenty of time for meticulous editing, since I wouldn’t have to distribute pages again until early December. Unfortunately, the balm of “plenty of time” also soothed the itch to rush forward. Freed from the pressure to produce quickly, I spent many hours composing insightful and witty notes to my classmates about their work.

  M—

  I just spent an enormous sum on a dress. Just the dress. Not the shoes necessitated by the dress nor the bag necessitated by the shoes. Not the shawl the saleswoman said I might like to throw over my shoulders, because for a price I once spent on a car I don’t even get sleeves. Granted the car had been worn. It was also a Chevette. The dress is much nicer—it’s black, ankle-length. It has hematite beading on the bodice. But it is, as my mother would say, just a dress.

  Michael made me buy it. I balked at the door—actually, I balked at that block on Wilshire where the little brown sign says “Beverly Hills,” but I was in the passenger seat. My feet jammed against the floor did nothing to slow our progress. “You need it,” Michael said. “For the Christmas party.” He did not need to remind me that at the last Otis event we attended—a cocktail party to celebrate the acquisition of the new curator for painting restoration—the caterer’s assistant, a gawky nineteen-year-old, was wearing a black velvet skirt identical to mine, right down to the unstylish length and the slightly off-seam zipper.

  We went into the kind of store in which a jacket on sale costs $850. And, no, that does not include the pants. I hovered near the escalator, so as to make a quick getaway when we were found out, while Michael methodically worked his way through the display racks, holding each dress out at arm’s length and studying it—eyes slightly squinted, mouth a little ajar—with the same degree of concentration he devotes to a work of art. Outfitting me is his new hobby, Margaret. He’s already made several trips to the mall that’s on his way home from work and purchased clothes for me—khakis and a pair of black capris, a jersey skirt and a bright white poplin blouse that reminds me of a pajama top—casual things that cost what I would normally have spent on something special for my sisters wedding. “They’re just basics,” he says. “Trust me, you need nice basics.” And it’s true that I am better-looking in an azure cashmere turtleneck than in a faded cotton T-shirt, spotted with bleach from an errant spray of toilet cleaner. But now what do I wear to clean the toilet?

  Love, L

  On November 1, a letter arrived from Brooke, my college friend now in London, who had already excelled, although she had not, in fact, become an international investment banker as she’d planned. She’d discovered during her second year at Tuck that she’d been “born to be a management consultant,” a career that, as far as I could make out, demanded she convince executives nearly twice her age to restructure corporations in industries and services in which they’d spent their entire working lives and in which she’d invested a few months.

  Her envelope—not airmail tissue, but the regular, thick sort—
sliced my finger as I opened it. Clutching a damp paper towel to the wound, I read that she would be in New York in two weeks and hoped I could join her on Tuesday for breakfast.

  Prime work time, I thought resentfully. Between the meal itself and the hair drying, outfit choosing, and discreet makeup application I’d need to make myself presentable for breakfast wherever she’d propose, probably her hotel (where I’d have to limit myself to coffee and an English muffin and still end up spending fifteen dollars, actually more like thirty, since I’d feel obliged to treat her, which would mean closer to fifty dollars, since she’d certainly order juice and an egg-white omelette), the entire morning would be used up by the time I subwayed home, and I would be too drained and depressed to be productive in the afternoon. I decided to start immediately making up for the anticipated lost time.

  I turned off the computer that evening after four hours of steady application, perhaps the most focused period I’d spent working on the novel since I’d had to deliver the twenty pages for class, and stood up from a table spotted with blood, coffee, and crumbs. The thought of seeing Brooke had spurred me on. If only the book could be comfortably published before our breakfast!

  I wished this again two weeks later as, in a subway-induced stupor, I clung with an upraised hand to a metal triangle in the aisle of the number 4 express train that hurled me uptown. Brooke I imagined in the sitting room of her suite, paging through The Wall Street Journal or perhaps that pink financial paper, her stylishly hosed legs crossed, her Manolo Blahniks (did people wear such shoes to breakfast?), one tipped coquettishly on its side, waiting beside her. I was wearing clogs, purchased in 1985.

  I reminded myself that I, deep underground, pressed and jostled by elbows and shoulders padded in damp wool and leather and some stifling-looking blend of nylon and rayon, bombarded with smells of mustard and wet newsprint and patchouli and aging perspiration, was a part of the city’s lifeblood. A Coach briefcase banged against the back of my knees, a plastic bag containing a pointy-edged object poked me in the ribs, a sharp-heeled woman danced on my toes whenever the train changed speed, and the man beside me rested his paperback on the top of my head. I would have to remember to wash my hands before eating.