And he could sniff out her gratification through his own fumes of Old Spice and tobacco smoke.
“Good girl,” he said, patting her head fondly.
* * *
By the time the baby was born, she was no longer a guest columnist at the Times. She was a regular columnist there. At the newspaper of record, for heaven’s sake. A column that ran every other week. And, as if that weren’t enough recognition and opportunity from the gods on high, she had a book in the works.
Having so much work to do was essential, she thought, because babies distort the mind. They tire you out and hypnotize you and trick you into superhuman efforts and sleep deprivation that wear you down even more until you are completely under their tiny thumbs and praying to remain there.
“It’s a cult,” she said to Michael.
The baby lay between them in bed beside the cat.
“Our spiritual leader,” he said.
They stared at her for a long time.
“Prudence,” Daphne said to the baby.
Daphne loved the name Prudence. She loved that it was a word. It had been Michael’s mother’s name.
She apologized to her sister for ever doubting the sanctity of babies.
“I was blind but now I see,” she said to Laurel one glorious, sunny morning.
Laurel was helping her bump the baby carriage down the steps. Why Michael and her sister had taken an apartment on the third floor of a brownstone when they had so much to drag up and down, she would never understand.
“It’s on Charles Street, and it’s rent-stabilized,” Daphne said. “How many times do I have to explain? Do you know how hard that is to find?”
“But with this carriage…”
“We love the carriage, don’t we, Prudence? We wouldn’t be seen without it.” She stopped to say hello to another young woman pushing a baby carriage with one hand and holding the leash of two large collies in the other. “That’s my neighbor, Lydia. And that guy over there, going up the steps? He’s a weird old shrink. And his daughter is a lesbian named Phoebe and they fight whenever she comes to see him. They leave the windows open and everyone can hear.”
Laurel watched the old man struggle to put his key in the lock. Daphne waved to him but he didn’t see.
“I love this neighborhood,” Daphne said.
“So, worth the steps?”
“God, yes.”
Daphne maneuvered the pram into an infinitesimal café and sat down with a grunt of satisfaction. “The best latte here.”
Laurel thought of the place they used to go, dark and spacious and dusty. This café, called Café Caffe, was small, sleek, and immaculate. White walls, white tables and chairs, white floors, even. A simple arrangement of yellow miniature roses on each of the six tables.
“It’s very cheerful here,” she said. “You didn’t want to go to the Peacock?”
“For old times’ sake? But they have really good croissants here.”
“Well, I’m just so happy to see you,” Laurel said. “And Prudence, too, of course.” Laurel was so happy to be out of her neighborhood, talking to an adult, that they could have met at the women’s prison, as far as she was concerned.
Daphne stared down at Prudence, who slept peacefully in the enormous navy blue perambulator. “Thank you again for the carriage. Prudence loves it, don’t you, Pru? And I love to say ‘perambulator.’”
“Charlotte outgrew it after about two months. All the baby apparatus … you obsess about it and then a few weeks later it’s useless.”
Her sister said nothing. She was gazing worshipfully into the deep perambulator cave. Laurel had been overjoyed to get it out of their storage space. It was enormous and now took up all the room between their table in the front of the narrow café and the wall, which was also the only way to or from the other tables.
“Maybe you should move her,” Laurel said.
“In Iceland they leave carriages outside of shops. Can you imagine?” She reached into her diaper bag and pulled out the Sunday New York Times, handing Laurel the bulk of it.
“Here it is,” she said after flipping through the one section she kept. She began to read.
Is she reading her own column? Laurel wondered. She is.
Daphne nodded in agreement with herself a few times.
“Okay,” she murmured. “Mmm-hmm. Not bad, not bad…”
“You’re reading your own column?”
“Well, someone has to,” Daphne said cheerfully.
Everyone does, Laurel thought. Everyone I know. But she didn’t say it. She said, “Let me see it when you’re done.”
The quiet of the chic café was suddenly rent by a high-pitched scream originating in the depths of the perambulator. Daphne smiled. “Some lungs,” she said proudly.
“Maybe it’s time to go.”
Daphne reached in for Prudence, held her against her shoulder, banging on her back, spilling her coffee with her elbow. With one hand she mopped up the mess using the crumpled pages that contained her column. “Good for something, anyway,” she said with what Laurel considered false modesty.
False modesty was a form of showing off that Laurel didn’t have access to much anymore. She resented how easily it came to her sister.
“Just gas,” Daphne was saying over the baby’s screams. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried about her, Daphne. It’s everyone else in the café.”
“Oh, them.” Daphne rolled her eyes.
“You know, for someone who judges others so harshly, you’re amazingly easy on yourself.”
“I don’t judge. I discriminate between right and wrong.”
A woman tried to make her way past the perambulator. “Excuse me,” she said. “Excuse me.”
“Perfectly okay. Go right ahead,” Daphne said magnanimously as the woman desperately pushed a table out of the way.
“You’re lucky you work at home.” Laurel tried to keep the envy out of her voice.
“I am a professional scold, and I like it.”
“You were born for the job.”
Daphne smiled in a bland, complacent way. “That’s just what Michael says! Anyway, no one’s stopping you from doing anything, Laurel.”
“I’m tired of scolding people, though.”
“Really? I feel like I’m just getting started. Not you,” she told Prudence, who was now asleep on her shoulder. “Just the barbarians at the gate.”
They walked to the Bleecker Street Playground and sat side by side in the sun, the carriage aimed so that Prudence was in the shade. They watched a little girl carefully poke apart a little boy’s sandcastle with a stick.
“Look how methodical she is,” Daphne said.
“I think the other kid is about to cry.”
“They’re playing, that’s all.”
But a young woman had already moved in, lifting the girl from the sandbox and apologizing to the little boy, whose lower lip was indeed trembling.
The little girl seemed good-natured enough, and after throwing her stick at the little boy followed her mother to the swings, where she allowed herself to be pushed for the next half hour. Daphne watched them with satisfaction long after Laurel had headed back uptown. She stretched out her legs and eavesdropped on a man next to her who kept ending his sentences with “you know,” sometimes as statement, sometimes as a question.
Yes, Daphne thought, closing her eyes, absorbing the sun and the child noises and the sounds of traffic and a dog whining and another dog barking and a distant siren. I think I do know. And that will make a decent little column.
* * *
On the subway going home, Laurel looked around, careless about making eye contact, protected by sunglasses. It had not been the sisterly coffee she had imagined, but so few things were what one imagined. In her bag, wrapped in a napkin, there was a croissant she’d gotten for Larry. She broke off a piece and ate it, then another. Daphne was right: the croissant was delicious. She knew Larry would understand though. Really, ther
e was no need to mention the croissant at all. Why tantalize him with something that no longer existed?
When she got home, Larry was peeling off his sweaty clothes in the bedroom after tennis with Michael.
“Charlotte’s in her room playing with some new doll my parents gave her,” he said. “You just missed them.”
He picked up his clothes from the floor and put them neatly in the hamper. Laurel watched him closely.
“What?”
“I still can’t believe you do that.”
“What?”
“You put your clothes in the hamper. When I lived with Daphne, she would just drop her clothes and leave them like, well, like droppings.”
“Kind of like you?”
She laughed. “Listen, I think I may want to go back to teaching this year. What do you think?”
“I think that’s great,” he said. “I had a feeling you would.”
“You did? Why?”
Oh, I don’t know. Because you’re reading an old grammar book and saying that Daphne thinks you’re a loser. He said nothing, closed the bathroom door partway, and got into the shower.
“I don’t want to be Charlotte’s teacher, though,” she yelled through the crack.
“Why?” Charlotte said. She had snuck up on Laurel, as she often did.
“Because the other children would be jealous. I’d make you sit on my lap and I’d smother you in kisses and I’d call you Char-char and Choo-choo.”
Charlotte nodded in sober agreement. She said, “Yes, and then I might kick you.”
“That’s my girl.”
* * *
Gravit’s solution for the mother/daughter kindergarten dilemma was that Laurel should teach sixth grade. He needed a sixth-grade English teacher.
“How can I teach sixth grade? I’m not qualified. I barely made it through kindergarten.
“Come on board and fill old Mrs. Turner’s shoes.”
The thought of old Mrs. Turner’s shoes made the whole idea even less appealing.
“What are Mrs. Turner’s shoes like?” Larry asked.
“I’ve never noticed. I’m sure they’re sensible. She’s sensible. Or she was until she got so…”
“Nonsensible?” Larry said. “So, what, she switched to Manolo Blahnik?”
Larry was covering for her. How sweet of him. She needed to think. She poured more wine for all of them. She got the chicken marbella out of the oven. Olives, prunes, capers. Her father once told her that capers were fish eyes, and she had believed him for years. You have to be so careful what you say to children. They can be so literal-minded. How could she possibly cope with a class of sixth-graders, practically adolescents, literal-mindedly challenging every word she uttered? She couldn’t trick them by singing, the way she had the little ones in kindergarten.
“I’m so sorry Pamela couldn’t make it,” Larry was saying.
“Yes, so am I. But she’s gone.”
“Where to?”
“Gone to her mother’s,” Gravit said in a melancholy voice.
“She was at her mother’s the first time we had you to dinner,” Laurel said. “Daphne and I, remember? When you brought us Bunny the cat in your briefcase instead of wine. Daphne was certain his wife had left him that night,” she said to Larry. “But Pamela had just gone to visit her family.”
Gravit’s chin was shiny with oil from the chicken. Laurel wished Pamela were there to mop him up. He was drinking an awful lot, too. He tipped his glass back to get the last few drops, then held the glass out to Laurel, tapped it for more.
“Now she really has,” he said.
“Has what?” Laurel poured him another glass, not as full as the last three.
He frowned at the glass, reached across the table, and took the bottle. “Left me.”
“Business trip?” Larry asked. He looked at Laurel, the bottle, back at Laurel, and opened his eyes wide in a signal of alarm. “Where to?”
A shrug from Gravit. “Away. Gone. Gone away.” A sigh. A tear.
“Hey, whoa,” Laurel said. She handed Gravit the clean napkin from his wife’s empty place. “Pamela left you left you? As in left you?”
She poured Gravit another glass in a sort of haze. The subject of the conversation had molted so suddenly, and what was left? That plucked, naked creature: Mr. Gravit. But the thought of Gravit naked was not a felicitous one and she pushed it from her mind. She looked at him, clothed in his Gravit clothes, the front of his necktie higher than the back, the tag showing. A collar stay that had not stayed and poked out from one bent wing of his frayed shirt collar. Ink stain in his breast pocket. A bright Bugs Bunny bandage on his thumb. The end of his watchband was not in its keeper and flopped as he wiped his eyes with the napkin. He was such a hapless thing. How could Pamela abandon such a man, an eternally flightless nestling?
Yet he functions perfectly well in the world, Laurel reminded herself. He’d held on to his well-paying, prestigious—to the extent there was any pay or prestige in education—position for years, and the school had prospered under his guidance. He amused the parents. He was their Mr. Chips and it suited them to patronize him rather than question him, which allowed him to do exactly what he wanted to do, which made the school better and better. He was a kind of benevolent, passive-aggressive tyrant, she realized, a poorly dressed, highly articulate Zen willow that bends in the wind and never breaks the way the brittle trees around it do. Never breaks but also soaks up all the good sunlight and the rain and all the rich soil, and she suddenly imagined Pamela’s life. But the willow gives back refreshing shade, she quickly reminded herself. She moved to the chair next to him and put her arm around his shoulders. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“I don’t think she’ll be back. She’s always come back before. But I think she’s had it. Because imagine living with me,” he continued. “It can’t have been easy.”
“Well, no,” Laurel began.
“But no one is easy to live with,” Larry said quickly. “Not me. Right, Laurel?”
“Well, you are pretty easy to live with,” she said, then caught his eye and said, “I mean, no, no, you’re impossible.”
“She might come back, you know,” Gravit said, looking up from his glass. “She always has before,” he repeated. “In the past. She has come back. But not this time, no, I can tell. Why would she? Unless she changes her mind.” He sighed. “She has, you know.” More sighs. More wine. “In the past.”
“Right,” Larry said. “That’s right.”
“‘Let grief convert to anger!’” Gravit banged his fist on the table. He was truly drunk now, his speech slow and heavy. “Or not. I’ll just go on as before. One day much like another. Not like Macbeth at all. A lonely dinner at a dimly lit diner. Alone. A lonely—”
“How is Miranda taking it?”
“Miranda? The stormy child swept up in the storm. Miranda. She suffers with those she sees suffer…” He went on, quoting Shakespeare and Horace and, once, Cole Porter, until abruptly he stopped, facedown on the table, like a toy that had run out of batteries.
“Should we put him in a cab?” Larry asked.
“But where can we send him? Home? What if Pamela left but also kicked him out of the house? Or something. I don’t know. And how would he even get in the door, in his state?”
They stood over him and watched him for a few silent moments. Then Laurel poked his shoulder. “Are you there, Gravit, it’s me Laurel.”
“Excellent book,” he murmured. “Excellent woman, Judy Blume. Fucking parents, fucking ignoramuses…”
With some patience, difficulty, and firm words, they were able to help Mr. Gravit, headmaster, onto the couch and cover him with a blanket.
“Well,” Laurel said as they got into their own bed. “I guess this means I’ll be teaching sixth grade next year, doesn’t it?”
“I think you might have to. As a humanitarian act. You can’t really leave Askew in the lurch now. Too many lurches at one time.”
Charlotte w
as delighted to find Mr. Gravit on the couch in the morning. She brushed his scanty hair as if he were a huge doll.
* * *
It did not take Laurel long to adjust to sixth grade. The old, pleasant feeling of Teacher had washed over her as soon as she walked into the classroom: she was a shepherd, a sheepdog, a shrink, a referee, a prophet, a friend. The children, awkwardly approaching the supreme awkwardness of adolescence, sucked on their new braces and smelled like the fruity soaps from the chain of shops that had overtaken her neighborhood hardware store, but there was an arrogance still softened by innocence, which she found irresistible.
Gravit was a little smug about her easy transition to sixth grade. But smug, as an emotion, was a step up from his general sadness, and Laurel did not mind. He spent a fair amount of time at the apartment now that he’d been kicked out of his house.
“Just thought I’d drop by for a minute. I’ve brought you a book,” he said on each visit. Then he would settle himself on the sofa. The books were often in Latin, old volumes from the library he was disassembling.
“Now, this book,” he said one Saturday afternoon, “could be very helpful. It was revolutionary in its time. It would have been, at any rate, if more people had read it.”
“When was its time?”
“Nineteen twenty-six.”
He placed the green clothbound book in her hands, tenderly.
“The study was begun in 1926, but the war came along, you know. One of my professors studied with the author at Michigan. He gave this book to me. And now I give it to you.”
American English Grammar, English Monograph No.10, National Council of Teachers of English by Charles Carpenter Fries.
“Sexy title.”
“He was interested in real, spoken language rather than formal, written language.”
“Hence the sexy, colloquial title,” Laurel said, thinking, English as She Is Spoke! “But why is spoken language more real than written? Written lasts longer. Spoken English is so … ephemeral.”
“So is life,” Gravit said. And marriage, he was obviously thinking.
“Yes, but come on, Gravit, that’s exactly why written language is so important, good language in books, because it’s not ephemeral.”
The Grammarians Page 15
