Little Panic

by Amanda Stern

  “Well, then you should go,” she says. Just like that, like she doesn’t understand me.

  “No! I can’t! I can’t do that!” I feel like a steering wheel after someone lets go. I can hear my voice crackle.

  “Have it your way.”

  “They all have secret jokes without me, and I’m always left out of stories and things.”

  “That’s not very nice,” my mom says.

  “No! It’s not nice at all!” I say.

  “I’ll call Marie tomorrow,” she says, as if Marie has any control over my social life at school.

  “No! Don’t call Marie! That will make things worse.”

  “Well, then I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

  “I want you to fix it! I want you to tell me what to do!”

  “They’re just jealous of you,” my mom says. “Maybe they want to be more like you.”

  “No, they want to be less like me. I want me to be more like them.”

  “They sound jealous, if you ask me.”

  I’m so frustrated. “Just forget it! You don’t understand anything!” I yell and storm upstairs to my room, throw myself down on my bed, and sob. After a while she comes up to check on me.

  “I don’t want to go back to school,” I say into my pillow. “Everyone is so mean to me.”

  “What can I do to make it better?”

  “Send me to a different school,” I say. “I hate it there. I don’t want to go back.”

  “Do you really want to switch schools?” she asks.

  “Yes!” I say.

  “Where do you want to go?” she asks.

  “I want to be with Kara, and I want to wear a uniform.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  This picks me up off the pillow. I peer up into her face. “Really?”

  “Of course. If switching schools would make you feel better, then that’s what we should do. I’ll call Mrs. Maynard and make an appointment for a tour.”

  I nod and then hug her. “You’re the best mom in the entire world.”

  * * *

  That night I lie in bed, thinking about how much better things will be, how all my problems will be solved now that I’m going to a new school. Except—I scramble for the pad and pencil.

  “Dr. Fine never said why I was so short!” I scribble in a note to my mom.

  “You’re right! If you’re really worried, we can go to a growth doctor.”

  “I’m really worried!!!!!! What’s a growth doctor?”

  “A doctor who can tell us whether you need to take something to grow.”

  “There’s something you can take to grow?????”

  “Of course! There’s a pill for everything,” she writes back.

  I can’t believe what I’m reading. Why didn’t she tell me about this sort of doctor earlier? She knows I’ve been hanging from my chin-up bar for weeks; but also, if there’s medicine for everything, why didn’t Dr. Rivka give me one for my worries?

  Before school starts the next morning, my mom drops me off at Eric’s office. He’s the assistant of someone I can never remember. Eric sits on the edge of his desk and plants one foot on the ground; I can tell she’s told him kids were making fun of me for my size.

  “Amanda, I want to tell you a secret,” he says.

  “Okay,” I say. I like secrets.

  “What I’m about to tell you will change your entire life. It will turn all your worries upside down.” I am getting chills on my actual organs. “Amanda,” he says and stands. “Men”—he turns to the window, pulls in as much nostril air as he can, and then faces me—“don’t like tall women. I want you to burn this into your memory. You are lucky to be small. Tall women are too masculine. No man wants to be with a woman who reminds him of a man. Trust me on this one. Don’t worry about your height. Your height is perfect. Men love small women. Got it?”

  I blink. Does he know about Tony at the restaurant?

  He leans into me. “Now, don’t tell anyone. This is just our secret. You don’t want other small girls knowing what you know, right? Then they’ll go steal your men.”

  I hesitate. “Right.” But I already know men like small women, because they also like small girls. I am not interested in keeping any of them for myself.

  “You’re welcome!” He stands up straight, beaming, and returns to his seat at his desk.

  I hurry back to my classroom in relief, until I see Imogen standing near the window and notice something new: buds.

  A Beautiful, Gorgeous Life

  New Year’s Eve is tomorrow, and Javier and I are throwing a party together in my apartment. Frankie and I have been inseparable since the Christmas visit a week earlier. We tear open the decorations, blasting the radio, and hang New Year’s banners and streamers on the wall, and dump 2011 plastic glasses on the table along with hordes of other 2011 items that will be of no value by 12:01 a.m. Javier isn’t joining us, and eventually I find him on my bed. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” he says. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Except you’re lying in bed staring at the ceiling while we’re in there hanging things up and having fun. You don’t want to join us?”

  “Some friends of mine are having a last-minute New Year’s Eve dinner party upstate.”

  I can feel the heat of disappointment sweep across my face. “You want to go?” I ask.

  “Maybe,” he says. “I don’t know. Do you?”

  He never seems to know what he wants or how he feels, and this is making me increasingly nervous. “We have twelve people coming over tomorrow for our own dinner party,” I say. “Lili and Frankie are having a sleepover.”

  “Can’t we just cancel?” he asks.

  The party is in twenty-four hours. I can’t believe he just asked me that. Or that he’d rather be with his friends than do something domestic with his daughter and me. Even though a week ago I was wondering if I should leave him, now that I feel him leaving me, I’m unglued. I’m trying not to pirouette into panic. Why does this relationship make me feel so off-balance? One week I know where I stand, and the next I don’t. What is wrong with me?

  Finally, he glances at my face. “No. No, I don’t want to cancel,” he says. I breathe out in relief. “…I don’t think.” Oh God, why is he doing this? At this point, I don’t care what he decides—he just needs to make a decision. His equivocating makes me more anxious than anything else.

  I pretend I’m going to the bathroom, but instead I duck into the pantry and open the party whiskey. I take a long pull and then return to Frankie, who’s done an excellent job of decorating. The whiskey does what I needed it to do: lower the volume on my apprehension. We wrap up, turn off the radio, and then lie on the couch to read books. Finally, Javier comes out. He picks up my guitar and starts playing and singing “Wild and Blue,” and for a moment I am happy again. I long for these minutes to be my entire life, instead of just one turbulent drop on this unpiloted relationship.

  Over the past two weeks, I had thought things were finally solved. For the first time in years, I hadn’t felt anxious. Instead, I had been flooded with calm, a surety that time had finally opened its door to me, was allowing me to step through and get what I’ve wanted for so long: a family of my own. This sense of certainty—the faith that I’m adequate, capable, and seen—is what I’ve been chasing my entire life. I’ve felt it once before—with Peter; but as soon I felt sound and certain, he changed his mind. The idea that I could lose this, too, terrifies me.

  Later, when he finally says, “Let’s have the party,” he doesn’t look convinced. My stomach is in knots. So much for that whiskey.

  “Great,” I say.

  Lili comes over the next afternoon, and she and Frankie play while Javier and I cook. I’m trying to tell if Javier would rather be upstate with his friends, but he’s not revealing anything. It doesn’t matter, though. The fact that he had been willing to cancel our party is something I can’t un-know. Inside his waffling is another story I can’t extract,
but I recognize it’s an old threat, a story my body knows about being rejected in favor of other people. Like sleeping in the maid’s room so my dad’s new-and-improved children could have their own, glorious bedrooms. At Rebecca’s bat mitzvah, I watched my dad give a speech about how proud he was of her, and I cried silently, jealous that she got my dad in a bargain neither of us made. What I feel now is similar. The central place Javier’s ex-wife’s painting occupies in his apartment, his following her and her boyfriends across the country, wherever they moved…I don’t want to be anyone’s remainders. I go sit on the floor of the pantry to try to stop this spiral of panic.

  “What’s going on?” Javier’s head pops in.

  Before I can stop myself, I let it all burst out: “What if none of this happens?”

  “None of what?”

  “This, us. Upstate. Living with Frankie. What if Meredith won’t move, or won’t let you take Frankie? What if the Jersey City house doesn’t sell? What if I can’t get out of my lease? What if you change your mind about me, about all of this?”

  “You want to come out of the pantry and we can talk about it?”

  “No, no. I don’t want to come out of the pantry,” I say. I’m unstrung and ashamed of having a panic attack in front of him, traumatized by the chance that he’ll think I’m crazy and leave me.

  “Can I come into the pantry?” I nod. Javier gets a chair from the kitchen, pulls me onto his lap, and rubs my back. “We can do whatever we want. No one is going to stand in our way,” he says.

  “But what if you change your mind? What if you decide you don’t want this, or me, or a family?”

  “That’s not going to happen. I want to have a baby with you. I want a family with you. You’re the one. You’re it. We can do whatever we want. We can get married if you want.”

  “Really?” I ask. Do I want that?

  “Of course. We’ll live upstate; it will be a beautiful, gorgeous life. You have to be optimistic about it. You have to look on the bright side of things.”

  “I know, but…you change your mind all the time. You almost bailed on our party.”

  “So what? A party isn’t life. It’s not good to see everything in a negative light,” he says.

  “This isn’t negativity. It’s worry.”

  “Well, it seems sort of negative to me,” he says.

  He knows about my anxiety—I’ve even named it for him—though he’s never seen me having an actual panic attack. But now he’s rejecting the identity I’ve shown him, assigning me a new label to match a problem I don’t have. I know this game. It makes me shut down entirely.

  “You okay now?” he asks.

  I know he’s not going to help me. “Yes. Thanks,” I lie, feeling deadened.

  “Good, because…brussels sprouts.” He points to the stove with the spatula. He kisses me and returns to the kitchen. He has dismissed my actual feelings and given me new ones he can understand. How can I make a life with someone so determined to misunderstand me?

  Lili and Frankie have been writing fortunes for everyone to pull out of a hat at midnight. It isn’t until I inspect their work that I finally see the difference between Frankie and Lili, and perhaps identify the thing I sensed in Frankie early on: darkness.

  Lili: “This year you will find a new nail polish color and get a beautiful new hairdo.”

  Frankie: “You will (probably) not die this year.”

  Lili: “You will find a million dollars on the ground and you’ll get to keep it.”

  Frankie: “At the end of this year, only four people will exist. You will not be one of them.”

  “Frankie!” I say. “You can’t put that in there. Write positive ones,” I add, feeling instantly like a hypocrite, and sounding too much like her dad and my mom. I wonder if Frankie is being overlooked for who she is, erased in favor of a preferred and easier child, and that’s when I realize what rubbed me the wrong way was our sameness, like Pilot.

  Despite its rocky beginnings, the party is a triumph, and for four hours I am upbeat and untroubled. I feel necessary and loved and known, and I finally understand what my role should be in Frankie’s life: to be the adult who can see her for who she is and protect her. In bed later, I turn to Javier.

  “I have something to tell you,” I say. “For years and years I’ve known the name I wanted to give my daughter someday. I’ve been so sure about it I even made my friends promise they wouldn’t use it.”

  “Okay?”

  “The name is Frances Bird. Frankie for short. Bird is the middle name.”

  Javier sits up and looks at me. “You know Frankie’s middle name?”

  I shake my head.

  “Bette. Frankie Bette.”

  The names are so close that cold creeps up my arms. “I think your Frankie is the Frankie I was meant to have.”

  “Me too,” he says. “Me too.”

  A Stay-Behind Kid

  A few days later I’m standing on a dark gray carpet at Kara’s school uptown, watching girls in uniform with books under their arms, studying their braces, middle parts, and glasses. The younger girls wear headbands and barrettes. Instead of “Hi,” they say “Hello.” I appreciate their manners. Our tour guide, Jorie, wears pearls, has thick black arm hair, and wears white gloves “to keep her manicure.” She apologizes for running late, but it’s “review week” and she “doesn’t dare miss a word.” My mom nods and smiles.

  Jorie shows us the entire school—all five floors. We ride the elevator—a privilege, Jorie tells us. Only seniors, faculty, and visitors are allowed. Friday privilege is for everyone. That’s when students can wear their own clothes, which doesn’t feel like a privilege to me. We see the middle and upper school, and we meet uptown-named girls: Vandy, Miven, and Bellamy. Every time we step into a classroom, the girls stand until they’re told to sit. When Jorie finishes the tour, I stay with the sixth graders and learn amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant in Latin. Everyone thinks it’s cool that I live downtown, in the Village.

  After lunch, Jorie takes me back to Mrs. Maynard’s office and shakes my hand good-bye. When I go here, I’m going to start shaking hands also. Mrs. Maynard opens her office door and signals me inside.

  “Hi, pumpkin. Did you have a nice time?” my mother asks. I nod a big yes, even as a warning goes off in my gut; something is wrong.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Mrs. Maynard says. “Your mom and I wondered whether you might like to spend the rest of the day here.”

  “Yes!” I say. Maybe they like me so much they’re going to let me switch schools right now.

  “Great. Winifred will be your guide, and you’ll spend the rest of the day with her and the fifth graders.”

  The fifth graders? I look at my mom, who smiles like Mrs. Maynard didn’t say anything weird. Is it bad manners to correct a headmistress?

  “You mean the sixth graders?”

  “No, the fifth graders.” The room shifts to the left.

  “But I’m in sixth,” I say.

  “I wonder if you noticed that the sixth-grade girls are quite developed. I worry that with your stature you’ll feel left behind.”

  “Left behind?” My scalp feels tight.

  “Developmentally. We think it’s a good idea for you to spend the day with the fifth graders and see how you like it.”

  I look at my mom, but she’s quiet. A flash fever scampers under my skin.

  “But I’m in sixth grade,” I repeat, not knowing what’s left to add.

  “I understand, but we thought it’d be a good idea to give your body a chance to catch up,” she insists.

  This is really happening. I have to repeat a grade and my mom isn’t saying anything. I failed the ERB test; that’s why she never told me the results even when I asked.

  “Winifred will escort you to the fifth-grade classroom, where you’ll spend the remainder of the day. She’ll bring you back here during the last class, and we’ll all make a decision together.”

  All I can do is nod.
I feel helpless, and my mom isn’t coming to my defense. Winifred appears, her body dusted with a thin downy platinum, even on her face, and I follow her. I look around the fifth-grade classroom. White, small faces clot the room. In the back, off to the side, two black girls sit together. A skinny blond girl with an upturned ski-slope nose and dried whiteheads on her chin sits cross-armed, her face fixed in teenage hatred and boredom. Her body hasn’t come in either, but still, there’s something oddly adult about her. Maybe it’s because she looks like she’s from an L.L.Bean catalog.

  I look carefully at everyone and notice that even among the fifth-grade girls I am still the smallest. I sit with them through math, gym, and English. They are nice and all, but still—babies. There’s no way I’m staying back.

  At the end of the day, Winifred walks me back to Mrs. Maynard’s office and hugs me good-bye. Then she gives me her phone number, which I’ll never use but makes me feel special. I join my mom in the office.

  “They’re a lovely class, aren’t they?” Mrs. Maynard says. I agree. “Do you feel like you fit in a bit more?”

  “Not really. I mean, I’m still the smallest,” I say, regretting it instantly.

  “Your mother and I have been talking, and we really do think it’s best that you stay back a year. You are much better suited to that grade.”

  I don’t understand. I thought we were going to have a discussion and decide together. Why am I always left out of conversations about me?

  “So, if we’re all in agreement, you can start Whittaker in the fall, repeating the sixth grade. Or, you can remain at your school, and advance with the grade you’re in.”

  I am going to be behind, always—for the rest of my life.

  “But I learned sixth grade already.”

  “Well, think how smart you’ll feel when you already know all the answers,” my mom says.

  This isn’t a choice.

  * * *

  There is a way to be and I’m not being it, and I don’t know how to change. Is there someone I should be the exact copy of, and they’ve forgotten to introduce me? Or maybe a person is supposed to be a fact, like an answer that doesn’t change, and I’m more like an opinion, which the world doesn’t want?