Girls in Trouble: A Novel

by Caroline Leavitt

  He called Spitfire’s again. “The reservation for Rivers?” he said.

  “Your party’s here,” the waitress said and hung up on him. He dialed again, and this time the line was busy. Well, he’d drive there. He’d explain in person.

  By the time George walked into Spitfire’s, Anne was finishing a burger. She had gotten dressed up, had clipped back her hair with a golden barrette. She looked small and beautiful and his heart broke to see her, but she didn’t even look up at him when he sat.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I am so sorry. There was an emergency.”

  He tried to reach for her hands, but she pulled them away. “A burger at Spitfire’s!” He tried to joke. “You could have ordered lobster.”

  “I don’t like lobster.”

  “Want to order dessert?” he said.

  She pushed her plate away, and when she looked at him, she looked so unhappy, he couldn’t bear it. “I’m not hungry anymore,” she said. “I want to get out of here.”

  She was silent the whole way home, looking out the window the entire time. George kept offering alternatives. A mall. Miniature golf. “What do you say we go to a movie?” George said, and Anne looked at him as if he had three heads.

  “I want to go home,” she said, biting down on her lower lip.

  “Radio?” he asked, and she ignored him, and as soon as they got home, she walked inside, past Eva, and slammed the door of her room. “What happened?” Eva asked.

  “No dinner,” he said sorrowfully, and then he told her.

  In the morning, Anne was up and out of the door before her parents woke. George had tried to talk with her last night, knocking on her door, but she shut her eyes, pretending to be asleep. She waited until she heard her parents go to bed, before she got up again, and wrote at her desk, the one thing that was making her happy, that saved her.

  Monday, in class, Mr. Moto was already there. He smiled thinly at Anne which she took to be a great sign, and she took her seat. He said nothing about the papers, but Anne could see them in a pile on the corner of his desk and her heart skipped. She tried to concentrate on what he was talking about today—”Huck Finn is a parable,” he intoned—and Anne rested her chin on her hands. It wasn’t until the bell rang that he started handing out the essays. “Just trying to avoid a mutiny,” he said dryly. She heard the hisses, the moans, the audible sighs as kids took their papers. She knew he could be ferocious in his comments. “Anne,” he said and put a paper on her desk.

  There wasn’t a mark on it. Amazed, she looked at the page. Was it perfect? She glanced at the boy next to her who was scowling at his first page, which was covered in red, slashed and arrowed and mangled. “Fucking shit,” he muttered. She looked back at her paper. Nothing. She glanced at the sentences and felt a rush. There was that phrase she had labored over, how Carolyn had found the coffee “warming her like yesterday’s sun.” How deliciously happy the words were making her. In wonder she turned the page, and it was clean, too. She couldn’t help laughing out loud, and then she turned the next page, and the next until she got to the very last page and saw the huge, humbling red F.

  “Despite clear instructions, only you among everyone in the class did not follow the assignment but went off on your own merry tangent. I asked for an essay, not a story. Your puerile prose makes me cringe and there’s little grasp of proper style. The characters are so flat they can’t possibly draw breath. If I could have marked this lower, I would have. As it is, I did you a favor by giving you an F.”

  Her legs were buckling and she blinked back the tears. Kids were shuffling out, complaining to each other. One girl was waving her paper like a flag. “B!” she called out.

  Surely this was a mistake. She stared up at Mr. Moto, but he was sifting papers into a pile on his desk, humming to himself.

  She waited. Every sound seemed amplified. Her breath. The scrape of her shoes on the floor as she shifted weight. “Mr. Moto.” Her voice sounded foreign to her.

  He kept shifting papers. “Yes?” he said.

  “There must be some mistake—” she said, fumbling. “I worked so hard on this story. I wrote and rewrote—” She paused, catching her breath. “I want to be a writer.” Her words speeded up, like a car out of control. “Maybe I could show you other things I’ve written, maybe it’s just this one story—” And then he looked up at her, and she saw how eerily blue his eyes were, like beach glass worn smooth from the salt water.

  He sniffed at her with disdain. “There’s a very famous story I’d like to share with you,” he said dryly. “You’re familiar with I. B. Singer, of course?”

  Anne had no idea who he was talking about, but she nodded.

  “I. B. Singer said he wasn’t scared of a burglar breaking into his house and taking something. What he was scared of was a writer breaking in and leaving him a manuscript to read.”

  Anne stared at him and blinked. What did that even mean? She couldn’t read any meaning in his face. He walked to the door, opened it and stood there, waiting for her to leave. “Your grade was exactly right.

  You didn’t follow the assignment. I did you a courtesy even reading it.” Haughtily, he raised one brow at her.

  “I want to be a writer,” she repeated, her voice a whisper.

  “Pardon me,” he said coldly, “but you don’t write that well.”

  Dazed, Anne retreated. She walked out of his classroom, down the crowded hall, her books clutched to her chest, and when she got to the front door of the school, there seemed nothing more to do but walk out of it and keep walking.

  The whole way home, she wept. A few cars beeped, a voice called out, “You okay? Hey, girlie, you okay?” But she ignored it and kept walking.

  She assured herself that he was wrong, that he didn’t know good writing if it turned around and bit him in the butt. She thought of Carolyn, living on the page, how she had labored and labored to get the words right so she would feel them deep inside of herself. How much pleasure she had taken in the writing, as if she were in this whole other magic world. Really, if he was such a hot writer himself, what was he doing teaching here in some crummy little high school instead of a college, at least? Why wasn’t he home writing? She tried not to let her mind go anywhere near the thought that he might be right, that maybe she didn’t have talent after all. It was too terrible to contemplate. Because if she couldn’t write, if she wasn’t talented, then what was left her? Where was her comfort?

  Inside the house moved and settled. She went to her room. She took the story out of her backpack, ready to rip it to pieces. And then she glanced down, she saw her words again, Carolyn the waitress pouring coffee, and for a moment, the pages breathed. Wrong. Wrong. Surely he was wrong. She folded the story in half. She bent and tucked it in between her mattress and box spring, on top of her journal. Then she went to the bathroom to splash water on her face. She’d take a walk, all the way to the Rite-Aid and back, and by then, the dangerous shaking feeling inside of her would be gone.

  * * *

  Eva scooped up her daughter’s laundry. She had come home to an empty house, but had spotted Anne’s things. Anne must be out walking. How that girl could cover ground! She’d get upset and just storm out and walk and walk for miles and then come back, the anger or sadness or whatever terrible emotion she had been feeling walked right out of her. And if Eva felt shut out, at least she was relieved that Anne felt better.

  Puddles of clothes were kicked in the corner of Anne’s room, dresses were slung on chairs and doorknobs. Seventeen magazines spilled over the bed with an ad for a hair straightener circled, and there was a half-eaten jelly sandwich on the desk. George had already called her twice today, once to tell her his office manager had come in two hours late, and the second time to tell her they were so backed up he wasn’t sure he would make it home for dinner and not to hold it for him, that he’d grab something later. In the background, Eva could hear his phones ringing, she could hear the buzz of talk, like bees swarming around him, a
nd worst of all, she could hear the exhaustion in his voice.

  “I’m worried about you,” Eva said. “And I miss you.”

  “Doctor—” Eva heard.

  “I’ve got to go,” George said, and then the line went dead.

  A vague irritation prickled along Eva’s spine. Here she was, brushed off by her busy, worried husband, as if she weren’t involved in the worry, too. Here she was, picking up after her daughter yet again. She felt a pulse of heat. Hot flashes. Menopause. “Getting old, old girl,” she tried to joke to herself.

  The only thing making Eva happy now was her job. She couldn’t wait to get to school tomorrow, for all those clamoring children, all so in love with her, it made her giddy. Fifteen friendly faces instead of the sullen one of her daughter. Just thinking about school made her excited. At the beginning of every month, she surprised the kids by changing the room around as dramatically as possible. She knew just how she wanted to do her room this month. She’d paint each wall a different color, and one wall would be that new blackboard paint so the kids could scribble all over it if they wanted. Any kid who walked in would just about go crazy with excitement. The other teachers thought she was a bit eccentric, that she went overboard. She didn’t speak in that “teacherly” voice the others sometimes affected, a tone they told her commanded children’s attention. Like little soldiers, Eva thought dryly. She didn’t walk into her class on the first day with the fierce look in her eye all the other teachers said was mandatory for keeping control. “Don’t smile until mid-year,” they advised, but Eva just laughed. It didn’t matter what the other teachers said to her because she had seen how they copied some of the things she did, how one of the other teachers had come in dressed in costume one day the way Eva sometimes did when she wanted to read a particular story, how another even wore roller skates to teach the kids about wheels and what they did. Eva wanted to make a time machine this year; she’d paint a box silver; she’d attach knobs. She’d have the kids go in and she’d have artifacts from different years. Wooden teeth that she’d swear were George Washington’s. A Pilgrim costume. A space suit she’d sprinkle with gold dust. Letters she’d age by crumbling them up and smearing on a little dirt. She’d swear they were from Paul Revere. The kids would die from happiness.

  The weather was too hot and sticky for all this cleaning, but if Eva stopped moving, she’d think about what was going on with Anne.

  The other mothers she knew told her that this was all perfectly normal, par for the course for a teenage girl. All kids yanked away the umbilical cord. Her friend Jennifer’s daughter crossed the street and walked the other way when she saw her mother coming. Her friend Adelle had overheard her son call her “the dried-up old bitch” on the telephone, and when she had confronted him, he had said mildly, “Well, I guess the truth hurts.” “Not more than this does,” Adelle had said, smacking him across the face, instantly horrifying them both. Eva would never hit Anne, would never even raise her hand, but God forgive her, that sure as hell didn’t mean that sometimes she didn’t feel like it.

  The other mothers she knew, though, were undeniably different from Eva. They were in their thirties, while she was approaching the end of her fifties faster than she would like. Once she stopped talking about Anne, she didn’t have much else to say to these other mothers, and the sad fact was she probably had more in common with these women’s mothers than with them.

  She and George didn’t know what to do about their daughter. Anne, her sweet, dreamy little Anne, used to listen to them, used to obey. She used to have friends, two girls they liked, who were always hanging about the house, or tying up the phone, but then these girls had disappeared, and if they had replacements, Eva didn’t know them.

  She swept up notebooks, and pens, and then tore off a piece of paper and wrote on it: “I love you! ”‘She tucked it into the edge of Anne’s mirror.

  She was stripping Anne’s bed when she noticed how lumpily the mattress was settling. She straightened it and saw a book poking out under the mattress. Don’t, she told herself. She pulled off the sheet, the pillowcases, and then resettled the mattress and the book fell out. Put it back, she told herself, and then she saw the typed pages poking out, and she couldn’t help herself. She sat back on the bare mattress and began to read.

  A waitress was pouring coffee, making friends with a housewife, but the waitress wasn’t telling the truth. It just sounded like truth. Eva couldn’t stop reading. The housewife had been a kindergarten teacher and she was talking about a short skirt, finally saying, “It’s not me,” and Eva started. My God, that was something she had said to Anne the week before. She blushed, as if she had been complimented, because really, wasn’t it a compliment to find yourself in your own daughter’s story?

  Eva turned a page. Why had Anne hidden this? It was pretty good, wasn’t it? And how could she get her to tell them about it? She kept reading. The housewife was drinking, pouring booze into the coffee, and Carolyn, the waitress, kept serving, and the dilemma was, if the waitress turned a blind eye, she’d have a friend, but if she didn’t, the woman would leave and God knows what. The story ended with Carolyn outside, spiking her own coffee with booze, and then not taking a sip, so you didn’t know what was going to happen. Eva turned the page, and then saw a scribbling of red, a huge red F.

  Shocked, Eva blinked. F? How could this be an F? Was she going crazy? Or was the teacher nuts instead? She read the note and then sat back. Wait, wait, here it was. Anne hadn’t followed directions. She hadn’t done the assignment. It didn’t matter how good it was if she didn’t fulfill the assignment. She leafed back through the pages and suddenly words jumped out at her. Weak adjectives. Funny constructions. Why hadn’t Anne taken more care? Poor character development. Well, yes, she could see that. Carolyn’s motives weren’t quite clear. Eva let the papers settle on her lap. She was about to put them back in place, under the mattress, when she heard the front door open, heard the clack of Anne’s shoes and suddenly there didn’t seem to be any real reason to do anything but wait.

  Anne strode in, her hair damp from the outside, and as soon as she saw the story on Eva’s lap, her face changed. Eva waited to be accused of snooping, but Anne simply stood there. “What’s wrong?” Anne said.

  “You got an F,” Eva said quietly.

  Anne’s mouth snapped shut and then opened again.

  “Why didn’t you follow directions?” Eva asked.

  “What?” said Anne, astonished.

  “You didn’t do what your teacher asked. There were sloppy mistakes—”

  “I did more than what he asked for—”

  “And it got you an F!”

  “It’s a good story! I know it is! I worked so hard—I wrote ten times more than anyone. He’s wrong! He just didn’t see it!”

  Eva looked at the paper again. “Maybe if you redid it. Showed initiative—

  “I did show initiative! I wrote a story!” Anne grabbed the paper out of Eva’s hands so hard it ripped. “Did you even read it?” she asked Eva. “Did you like it—even a little?”

  “Well, yes, but that’s not the point. Honey, you can do better,” she said, and then she saw Anne’s face folding like a flower. “I know from my own class, I’d rather see a child trying and trying until he gets something right than just giving up on it after the first try.” She tried to think of an example. “Bill Broomer,” she said. “Couldn’t tie his shoes and instead of running around with them hanging out and tripping over himself, he missed a playtime activity so he could sit in the corner and just practice and practice and get it right, and when he did, I swear I couldn’t tell who was happier or more proud, me or him!”

  “I’m not one of the kids in your class,” Anne whispered. “This isn’t tying shoes.”

  The door opened again, and George called out, “Anyone home?” his voice tense and weary. “Cancellations so I’m home early,” he said, his voice growing louder as he came toward them, and then he stopped at the door of Anne’s room, look
ing from Anne to Eva. “What’s wrong?”

  “Daddy,” she cried. “I wrote this great story—”

  Eva handed the paper to George. “An F?” George said.

  “Read it!” Anne cried. “Just read it!”

  “I told her to rewrite it as an essay, to give the teacher what he asked for—”

  George glanced at the paper and then rubbed at his temples. In the hall, the phone rang, and George stepped out to pick it up. “Yes,” he said shortly. “You’re sure? Yes. You’d better come in then.” He hung up and sighed. “I can’t believe this but I’ve got to go back to the office. Another emergency. Does it ever end?” He looked at Anne.

  “You’re not going to read it?” she asked.

  “Honey, I can’t read anything right now. I think your mother’s right on this one.”

  “Daddy—”

  “Just redo it.”

  As soon as Eva was out of the room, Anne shut the door. For a moment, Eva stood there with George, wondering what Anne was up to. And then they could hear the whir of the computer going on, the soft tap of Anne’s hands on the keyboard.

  Relieved, Eva rested her head against George’s shoulder. “She’ll be fine,” she said.

  For two days straight, Anne worked on her essay. She sighed heavily, she kept glancing at the clock, but she did it. And when she came home with an A on her temperance essay, Eva and George made a huge deal out of it, reading it, exclaiming over how well it was organized, how intelligent it sounded, how even Mr. Moto’s comments (“Clearly stated. Good segue.”) were something exceptional, especially since Anne had told them how he never liked anything, much less gave praise. “You should be so proud of yourself,” Eva said, giving her a hug.

  “I thought it was so dull,” Anne said quietly. “I wrote it in my sleep.”

  “Keep up the great work,” George said and rushed off to work.

  * * *

  Anne’s grades improved. If she didn’t come home with friends (and Eva kept encouraging her to join clubs), well, she now came home with fresh surprises. College catalogs tucked under her arm, but always to schools as far away as she could find them, New York City, Maine. Books about different professions, ambitions Eva never knew anything about. So You Want to Be a Veterinarian lay by the tub, with a bookmark in the chapter about exotic reptiles. Today’s Advertising was shoved under Anne’s bed, with passages underlined in yellow. Get the Big Picture. Make It Pop.