“Your other students,” she added now, “what do they do?”
In all of Anne’s years working with kids, not one of them had asked a question about the others. They seemed not to want anyone else to exist.
Anne set down her cup. “Alexis, where you go to college is not the same as who you are.”
“No, but it shapes me. It, like, shapes everything.”
“Unless you consider that there’s a trajectory to all of this passion. That you have a destiny, an intellectual and an emotional destiny, and that this force you feel is driving you toward that. Regardless of whether you turn left or right, you’ll get there. You can’t not get there.”
“Oh!” Alexis exhaled, sending a little squall over the surface of her coffee. She set it down and put her palms to her cheeks. “Oh my gosh, that makes me cry.”
“Why?”
She looked, quickly and shyly, at the magenta-haired counter girl, who was prone over a magazine. She turned back to Anne. Her eyes shone.
“Just that it’s inside me.”
“Yes. Where did you think it was?”
“I don’t know. Out there. In everything out there.” She pursed her lips. “Hang on.” She bent below the table to dig through her book bag, resurfacing with a small wooden gavel with a fake metal plaque on one side. First speaker’s award. She set it between them.
Alexis continued: “I guess it sounds silly now. Freezing the Yale me. Sorry. That’s really embarrassing.” She peeled her gum from the side of her Styrofoam cup and popped it back in her mouth.
“No, no,” Anne told her. “It’s true. Sometimes, growing up—it does feel like playing God. Like being in the lab and having to just, make things happen. Make a person. It’s kind of amazing that no one’s there over your shoulder, telling you how to do it.”
Alexis rolled her gavel back and forth, over the pink flyer. “I guess that’s why we love teachers,” she said. “And parents.”
Anne knew from the Grants’ e-mails that Alexis had long ago passed her parents in aptitude and ambition. She wasn’t riding their fantasies.
“Are yours helping you with this one?” Anne asked.
“Well, you heard them. Grammar and stuff. That’s their way of helping.”
“Mine, too,” Anne admitted.
“So what do I do?” Alexis asked.
“Well, you come with me to Midway. And you get on an airplane and you fly to Kansas City and you have turkey with your grandma. And in May, or January or March or whenever, you write to some lucky college and tell them yes. And then you go.”
Alexis nodded. She was chewing softly. She picked up her trophy and began to whack her half-spent sugar packet. “I’ll never have this much choice again, though,” she said sadly.
“Actually, it’s going to happen over and over,” Anne corrected her, sounding sad enough herself.
Her tone startled Alexis, who stopped her gavel and looked up.
“And that’s bad?” she asked.
“I guess it just depends on how you feel about not knowing things,” Anne answered.
“I hate not knowing things,” Alexis declared.
“Maybe that’s the thing we have to actually work on.”
Anne was only half right: she needed also to let herself face the things she did know. Martin. Her work. But Alexis, for her part, was content. She seemed to have received what she needed to weather the trip to Kansas City and the weeks until Harvard would send her good news. She pointed to the silly gavel, now rocking slightly on the crappy table as they stood to gather their things.
“You should keep that,” she said, handing it to Anne.
It rested on the dashboard all the way home to her parents’ house in the suburbs, north and west of the city, not far from the Wisconsin border, those deep woods. First Speaker, First Speaker, it flashed, as the orange lights of the highway swept over the dash. It seemed a message to keep her mouth shut. Or else a message to figure out what it was that she should be saying, should have said a long time ago. And to herself, not to anyone else. Enough talking, said the little gavel. Enough, now.
“AND WHAT ABOUT that student in Colorado, do you remember that?” Anne’s mother was saying. “What was it, Aspen? And the parents told you what about her ski schedule?”
“That she needed her R-and-R, that it was an important part of her development, so I was only to expect to hear from her after her morning runs.”
“That’s right. I remember.”
“Ridiculous,” Martin declared. He swiveled his glass, whiskey, two cubes. Anne’s mother and grandmother had pulled their chairs closer to him, as to a hearth. Her father paced. Folded newspapers. Recapped pens and stowed them in a cup on the countertop.
“Well, she was burned out,” Anne said, feeling guilty she’d ever discussed the student in the first place. It had been years ago: Tilly Benson, a Chapin girl. They’d worked remotely except for the annual Christmas trip, where Anne was put up in a back room at the chalet, in an enormous bed made of logs. Not a skier herself, she spent mornings tramping through snow along the golf course, looking up into the mountains and wondering what it was like to be so little and so exposed on the slopes. Tilly emerged after lunch, flushed and slightly smelly, and sat in her long underwear to work with Anne until supper. She’d ended up at Sewanee. A failure, as she’d been aiming for UVA.
Anne wondered if this was what her mother was remembering—the failure. Anne had been very upset. But that was overly cynical. The machinations of her wealthy clients always made for good sport at the Thanksgiving table.
“And the kid in Paris? The boy?” Her mother held out a platter heaped with food, enough for three times the five of them.
“He was a doll,” Anne answered, shaking her head at seconds. “He went to Harvard.”
“You still had to fly there to help him get in,” said her father.
“Nothing wrong with a trip to Paris,” said her mother. “Or Aspen. Or New York City. Or any of these places, frankly. And they pay you awfully well.”
But she sounded angry, not proud. Anne realized, with a bit of shock, what her mother was doing: she was trying to impress Martin. As though this was what was keeping the ring off Anne’s finger.
“Or what about that one in Florida?”
“The sport fisher,” Anne answered. “A nice boy. Wasn’t his fault.”
“It’s not anyone’s fault, to hear you talk about it,” said her mother.
“Well, it’s not,” Anne replied.
“I know!” Martin laughed, leaning toward her mother. “I agree with you. No way I’d excuse these kids their behavior! Spoiled brats. I tell Annie all the time she should aim higher.”
“I’ll say,” said her father.
“Like what, screenplays?” Anne asked Martin.
He ignored her. “All that talent, going to waste on teenagers. Let them find their own way to college. God knows we all did.”
“That’s the truth,” said Anne’s father.
“I took the train by myself to Mills,” added Anne’s grandmother, looking at no one in particular. Divorced for fifty years, she was most comfortable in scenes of abandonment. “No one went with me at all.”
“Anyway,” said Anne’s mother, “I always think it’s wonderful that these kids have Anne. It’s just amazing that such a thing exists nowadays. And of course the parents adore her.”
“Of course they do,” said her father.
“Then, once I had your mother,” continued her grandmother, gesturing toward Anne, “I used to say to myself, ‘So this is what I went to college for?’ ”
Anne’s mother rolled her eyes skyward. She could be seen breathing in deeply. With Martin at the table, Anne thought for the first time of how very little she knew of her grandmother as a young woman. Only the story she’d absorbed of the train to Mills and the flyboy she’d met there, at a Saturday-night dance at the Sir Francis Drake in San Francisco. A tall man from Sacramento. Eventually he’d up and left, circumst
ances unknown, leaving his infant girl and her mother. All of this was visible in Anne’s grandmother’s curled claw hand, with its engagement ring still securely in place, sharp as a little pick.
“Well, Annie’s going to be moving on to other things soon, I’m sure,” said Martin, and there was a collective pause. Anne felt a rush of excitement in her belly.
“La-la land,” offered her mother.
Anne held her breath.
“Or wherever her heart takes her, God knows,” said Martin expansively.
At this, her mother flashed Anne a look of such hot frustration that Anne felt it on her skin, like peering into an oven. Fed up enough herself, she refused to indulge her mother with any sorrow or frustration of her own. She shrugged in return.
Martin stood. “That was the most delicious meal,” he said, giving her mother his best stage smile. Cross as she was, her cheeks peached up a bit in response. Martin could always, always pull that off; he always would. “As ever. Annie, want to take Mitchell?” This was code for needing a cigarette.
“Oh!” said Anne’s grandmother sharply, not willing to let pass an affront.She looked around the table, still laden with platters, and at her own, half-full plate, as though a storm were blowing through. She knew something was offtrack, but she was wrong about what it was.
“I’ll clear,” said Anne’s mother, folding her napkin. Anne’s father had already stepped out.
“But we’re not done here!” Anne heard her grandmother say.
Martin held out her coat and she twisted into it. Outside they sat on the stoop. Mitchell sniffed at the scrub trees in the yard, barely visible at the edge of the lawn. When Anne’s parents had bought this ranch house, when Anne was three, it had stood alone, a good twenty minutes from the nearest shop. But that was—what?—almost twenty-five years ago. The prairie was gone. Now the cornfields, all mowed, bristled with new bay windows and ragged yearling trees. The effect was to make her parents’ home seem even more remote. Anne wished Martin weren’t there, so she could cry. It was easier, missing him when he was away. Far more painful to do so when he was right beside her.
Something of the yard put her in mind of Hunter Pfaff’s big suburban home, the grounds, that dark night he was called a carp. Anne thought of something new to say to Martin.
“I’m my parents’ only child, you know,” she told him.
He turned to her, inhaled, and exhaled off toward the sky. “Yeah. And?”
“Just, you should know that.”
“I do.”
That hadn’t been the plan, to raise Anne alone. By the time she was five, her parents’ desire for a second child was so loud and took up so much space that it was as though there had been a baby in the house for years. As a small girl, Anne concluded that she was not a child, since if she had been, the problem would not have been so grave. They were three little adults, smart and capable and largely self-contained. It was only that they could not have a baby.
Long ago Anne had worked out that the second child was intended to be the genius, her father’s Bobby Fischer, but they’d had to settle for her; and now, it seemed, they were already looking to the next generation.
“That’s why they’re so annoying,” she said now. “There’s just a lot riding on me. Sorry about that.”
“Why don’t we go back down to your apartment?” Martin suggested. “Just us. And Mitch. We can have a drink, take a walk. Your grandmother drives me crazy. Plus they’re gonna make us sleep in separate rooms again.”
“ ’Cause we’re not engaged.”
“Annie, I’m forty.”
Their point exactly. But anyway.
“Sure, I’ll tell them,” she said. “Watch Mitch?”
Inside, her mother was elbow-deep in the sink. “Fine, I guess,” her mother said. “If that’s what you want.”
“It’s just easier in the city,” Anne replied.
“Whatever works best for you two.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Her mother pressed her lips together. Small creases had gathered above and below them, Anne saw, not unlike her grandmother’s face, and she wondered when this started—how long it would be before it happened to her, too. Sometimes lipstick crept up her mother’s upper lip, like tiny red veins. Anne was sure she was the only person who noticed. It made her at once furious and sad.
“Okay, well, we’re off, then,” she said.
“Your father’s gone off somewhere.”
“Tell him I’ll see him maybe next weekend?”
“Of course.”
Anne felt bolted to the kitchen floor. She pictured Martin outside, on the stoop, and Mitchell wandering idly. In the living room, her grandmother, sitting alone, sighed loudly. Her mother held up a dripping plate and studied her daughter, who dropped her eyes to the floor. So many hoops she’d made it through. High school, college, graduate school (some of it, at least). Working. Her first apartment. This handsome, near-celebrity boyfriend.
There are things parents wish for a child, and things parents want for the child, the difference being that wishes are received with a feeling of hope and goodwill, while wants are rightly heard by children in the imperative. Anne couldn’t recall her parents speaking of her getting married or having a family. But still she felt a missed command. It was as though they’d been blowing a dog whistle all her life that she couldn’t quite hear. She tried every trick she knew, learned every lesson, and still it wasn’t quite right. So was this it? Marry Martin? Get a ring, get on with it?
But her mother spoke first. “What is it that you want, Anne?” she asked.
She meant, want from me.
“Nothing, I’m good,” Anne replied. “Fabulous meal. Thanks again.”
Her mother returned her attention to the dishes. It was the good china and could not be run through the machine. On the counter, wineglasses were drying upside down. The heavy silver would be rinsed and put away for another year. Something should have happened, but it hadn’t. Anne felt responsible.
“Just drive safely,” her mother said.
THAT NIGHT MARTIN was as attentive as he’d been in those first months, when he’d used to kiss her so hard it hurt her back.
“You’ve gotten skinny,” he told her, lowering over her belly. “It’s sexy.”
“I was always skinny,” she said.
“I know, but now you’re hungry skinny. Very L.A.”
Come to think of it, she had lost her appetite. And she’d been running more. Skipping breakfast because of the damn New York Times, which wasn’t there to read over her cereal.
“You don’t mind the boobs?” she asked him, conscious that everything had slackened some.
“Not if it means these hips,” he said, cupping her bones.
Afterward he’d kissed her good night, and then leaned away to tuck his phone under his side of the bed, as he always did. There, under Anne’s eyelet bed skirt, the phone pulsed like a cricket. She could feel Martin’s muscles working not to respond. “Could be Lawrence,” he said. His agent.
“At this hour?”
“Time difference.”
“On Thanksgiving?”
“He may just have met with somebody. Lots of people out today.”
“He can leave a message.”
“He hates that.”
Anne had left her parents home alone on Thanksgiving to be here with Martin. Lawrence could damn well wait. “Well, tough. I hate it that we have to always be available to him.”
“Thanks for supporting my work,” Martin answered bitterly. “Do you have any idea how tough it is out there?”
“Do you have any idea how tough it is here?” she answered.
“What’s tough about Chicago? College essays? Hell, it’s a seasonal industry, Anne. I don’t have a long time. I’m trying to make it for both of us.”
“I don’t have forever either,” she answered. She wasn’t sure where this came from.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Am I not successful enough for y
ou yet?”
“I’m not talking about your success, Martin. Jesus.”
“Then what?”
Anne sat up and pulled on her nightshirt. Her body felt skimpy and cold. “It’s just—you’re away. That’s hard, is all.”
“Look. I’m here now,” he said. “Can we not fight when I’m here? Can we not just fucking fight when I’m actually here?”
“Of course,” Anne said softly.
“Good.”
They lay there. Eventually Martin leaned over. By the rise and fall of light, Anne knew he had checked messages and switched off his phone. He resettled himself beside her, seeming somehow accompanied. She waited for the news.
He said nothing. His breathing slowed.
Finally, she sat up. “Martin, what happened?”
“Hmm?”
“With Lawrence. Was that him?”
“Jesus, Lynn!” Martin snapped back. “I’m trying to get some sleep.”
Lynn?
It was so bitter and so true, she played it over a few times to be sure.
It was not the name she would have expected: so simple and uninteresting. What did a Lynn look like? She knew only one, her third-grade teacher. Wide cheeks, pinned hair.
“Oh,” Anne said aloud.
“What?” asked Martin, pretending to be half asleep, but even he couldn’t sustain the lie. “I don’t know why I just said that,” he added easily. “That was ridiculous.”
“Who’s Lynn?”
“There is no Lynn. That’s what I’m saying. It’s ridiculous.”
“No Lynn?”
“No. I don’t even know a Lynn. Anne, come on—it’s me. It’s Martin. Listen to me. I don’t even have anyone by the name in my life.” He switched on the light and rubbed his eyes. “I was half asleep. I was already dreaming. I just snapped. I’m sorry. Can we just go to sleep, please?”
The light illuminated Anne’s room: the floral wallpaper her mum had insisted on; the set of doors across the shallow, overfull closet; the curtains intended to soften the grimy, wire-hatched window that faced the fire escape. What was remarkable about being called Lynn was not even that it evoked another woman, who Anne had always half believed was there anyway. It was the way he had said it, in practiced exasperation: he fought with this Lynn, too. They were in deep enough to argue, plain as day. Anne wasn’t special even in that way.
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