All Is Vanity (13 page)

I uncapped my highlighters.

At eleven-thirty I recapped my highlighters. I had used the orange “good” marker four times. Once to highlight a piece of punctuation. In two months I had written altogether four pages and six lines of usable material. Unable to face my “work” another instant, I retreated to the circular staircase and slumped on the steps until some child insisted on using the handrail to which my nearly supine body was blocking access.

“This is the end,” I said wanly at lunch. Simon and I were seated in the back room of the sort of place beloved for its rough “authenticity” and its cheeseburgers. The air stank of authentic smoke. I might have let my head sink onto the well-inscribed table had several of the initials not been filled with ketchup.

“We can still have lunch,” Simon said, and I realized that he assumed I was mourning his leaving.

And I
was
mourning his leaving. That, too.

“Your office is on the Upper East Side,” I said. But, after all, what would stop me from taking an entire afternoon to subway up, eat a leisurely lunch, test perfumes at Bloomingdale’s, and walk back fifty blocks? It wasn’t like I was doing anything productive.

“You’re leaving me and my book isn’t going well,” I confessed. I kept my eyes down, watching my finger push grains of salt along the dark varnished table.

“Maybe you should take a class,” Simon suggested.

“A class? What class?”

“There’s a good one at the New School Extension this coming semester. With Peter Berginsky. He’s written at least fifteen novels and he normally teaches in the master of fine arts program at Columbia.” Simon tapped the air with a french fry, as if instructing me with a pointer. “Some people go to Columbia just to get into his class.”

“So why is he teaching a continuing education course?”

“For the money, I assume.” He touched the remainder of my cheeseburger with the tip of another fry. “Are you going to finish that?”

This was discouraging. I knew better than to think that novel writing could be a money-making scheme, so earning was hardly my primary purpose, but I did hope that after fifteen books an author wouldn’t have to scramble for extra cash.

The reasonable, competent half of my psyche agreed with Simon that a course would be good for me. Surely, the strict environment of a classroom and the pressing deadlines, not to mention the threat of public humiliation if I did not produce, would push me to
come up with a sheaf of coherent pages to snap into my three-ring binder, and thus would give me the running start I apparently needed to get this project solidly under way. My other half, however, was divided. On the one hand, I feared that my classmates would guffaw as they paged through my offerings in the elevator and later pass each other knowing looks over my head. On the other, I was pretty sure I would be Mr. Berginsky’s star pupil. I imagined him (as well as I could without having seen the man) giving me a special glance when we read my chapters, as if to say, “I would praise this as it deserves, but you know we must be fair to the others.” I decided to apply.

The pumpkin incident aside, I had done reasonably well in grade school, although on occasion my natural abilities had been hampered by my lack of interest in the make-work my teachers had arbitrarily deemed necessary. That same fourth-grade year-of-the-timer, for instance, I chose one evening not to waste an hour memorizing the nines times tables. I was, at that point, engrossed in compiling an exhaustive catalog, complete with full-color sketches, of the flora and fauna of Glendale and believed that I could not afford to lose a minute, if I hoped to complete it by Christmas, when I planned to present it to my father as my gift. I knew the eights, I reasoned; when it came time for the test, I would just do those and add one.

“Why should we have to become human adding machines?” I said to Letty on the phone, when she tried to quiz me. This was before every student owned a calculator, in the days when, despite the steady encroachment of the sets and subsets of new math, most
teachers and parents still did, in fact, think the safest course was for students to become human adding machines.

“Look,” she said, “we’ve learned every number up to nine, so most of them should be easy. I mean, if you know seven times nine, then you know nine times seven, right?”

“Right!” I agreed, although I, in fact, had already forgotten seven times nine. I sketched a royal palm on the scrap paper near the phone. I had not yet decided whether to use examples of all local plants and animals or only indigenous species, and was leaning toward inclusiveness because I was good at drawing our dog, Scout.

“So just remember nine times nine is eighty-one and nine times twelve is one hundred and eight and you’ll do fine. Ten and eleven are easy.”

“OK,” I said. “Eighty-one, a hundred and eight.” But even as I spoke I was forgetting, since I was now focused on the brown rats that were rumored to nest in the trees on our street.

The next day, in a panic induced by the very act of sitting at my hard desk, pencil poised above my rectangle of pulp-flecked paper, the reverse side of which had already been used for a spelling test—Mrs. Larson abhorred waste—waiting for the timer to ratchet into position, I recognized with a wave of horror the flaw in my plan. Eight times two and nine times two weren’t separated by one, but by two, and eight times three and nine times three were separated by three. I could not remember nine times four. Was it thirty-five, or was that seven times six? Or, no, it was only the fives that ended in five, so maybe thirty-five was nine times five.

Mrs. Larson sandwiched the timer between her large-knuckled hands. “Ready, class?”

No, I wanted to shout. I could feel my body lifting slightly from my chair, my pencil raised in protest. No! But that, I knew, was not an appropriate response.

Click, click, click went the timer, marking off sixty seconds, sixty fleeting seconds in which the well-rehearsed answers were supposed to hurl themselves eagerly from our minds onto the page.

For a few blessed moments, my pencil moved down the paper just like everyone else’s while I wrote out the equations, leaving a blank where the answer should go. I filled in the first three and then decided to trust the pattern and add four to eight times four. Thirty-six, forty-five, it was working, I thought; I prayed. But six and forty-eight were hard to add and I couldn’t remember eight times seven. I knew eight times eight was sixty-four, so maybe I could subtract from that. But subtract what?

For the first and last time in my entire academic career, I failed to keep my eyes on my own paper. I glanced generally around the room, my eyes darting from the shelf of songbooks to the
World Book
encyclopedias to the rolled-up maps. Except for the clock, the beige walls were bare. Either Mrs. Larson didn’t believe in the educational efficacy of colorful posters or she couldn’t get anything to stick to the chilly cinderblocks. Furtively, I looked left. Melanie Parker had one hand cupped protectively over her answers. I looked right. Letty was just finishing. She erased one answer, wrote another number in its place, and neatly brushed the eraser bits from her paper. I could see her answers perfectly.

Immediately, I was overcome by a moral outrage that made me blush. I looked away and fixed my eyes on the blank spaces on my own page. Cheating is worse than failing, I told myself. And copying from your best friend is worse than cheating.

Failing, however, was quite bad. I thought of the way Mrs.
Larson made us stand up so she could record our grades. “How many had none wrong?” she’d say. I’d be the last, the very last, to stand.

Unfortunately, I’ve always had an excellent visual memory. Staring at my paper, I could not help but see Letty’s answers there, hovering, at the ends of my equations. It was almost as if I knew those answers myself. I had just needed a little boost, a reminder. Now I could even hear Letty’s voice from the night before saying, “Nine times nine is eighty-three and nine times twelve is one hundred and eight.”

Lightly, at first, I sketched the numbers I’d seen on her paper onto my page. Lightly, at first, but then, once they were there in my own handwriting, I shaded them in darker. I had finished by the time the buzzer went off.

“Pencils down!” Mrs. Larson said sternly.

Letty, I saw, had been about to erase the answer she’d already fixed. Biting her lip, she replaced her pencil neatly in the indentation at the top of her desk made for such a purpose. My pencil, less well stored, rolled onto the floor.

We exchanged papers with our neighbor, and Mrs. Larson briskly recited the answers. Letty, who was grading my work, gave me a puzzled frown before marking my paper with a neat red check, when it turned out that nine times nine was eighty-one. We both had only that one wrong, and as only Chuckie Toll and Patty Pennerson had gotten them all right, we had performed decently. Letty, I thought, must have told me the incorrect answer on the phone the night before. I gave her a forgiving little shrug, but knew that I would, in future, check her information for myself.

“Pass your papers to the front,” Mrs. Larson said.

The rest of the morning was filled with a review of the tens
(easy, as Letty had promised) to be tested the next day, a presentation of the basic food groups and a spirited discussion of where Space Sticks fit into them, Donna Kim’s oral book report on a biography of Julia Ward Howe, the copying down of homonymic spelling words, and a smattering of recorder practice. When the bell rang for recess, Mrs. Larson called Letty and me to her desk. A sound wafted through the room, half taunt and half sigh, but she squelched it with a look and the rest of our classmates scattered.

“You girls both did pretty well on the multiplication quiz this morning,” she said, when we were standing as close to her desk as we dared, which was a few steps away. Mrs. Larson was efficient. She had recorded grades during the book report. She sat with her hands clasped together, resting on her spotless green blotter, as if in prayer. “Pretty well,” we knew, was the best we could hope for if we failed to earn less than one hundred percent. “What interests me, however,” she went on, glancing down at our papers through her bifocals, “is that you both got the same answer wrong. Nine times nine!” she barked, suddenly, raising her eyes to us.

“Eighty-one,” Letty shot back.

I said nothing. It seemed wrong, somehow, to respond, even though I knew the answer now.

“But you both wrote eighty-three. What are the chances of that?”

It seemed an unfair question, seeing as how we’d not yet studied statistics.

“What might have happened,” Letty said, “is that last night I called Margaret. I told her to remember nine times nine and nine times twelve. I told her all the rest should be easy, because, you know, we’d done the eights. I must have told her nine times nine wrong then.”

“Well, I think Margaret should be responsible for her own work, Letty,” Mrs. Larson said.

“No,” I said. I pushed the toe of my sneaker into the unyielding linoleum.

“No, you should not be responsible for your own work?”

“No, that isn’t what happened,” I said. “Letty told me eighty-one last night. She got it wrong today and I copied her. I also copied many of her correct answers. From nine times six on.”

“Is this true, Letitia?”

Letty shook her head, terrified. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Mrs. Larson,” I said. “May I approach?” Without waiting for her answer, I stepped forward and put my hands on the edge of her desk. I leaned toward her for emphasis, my chest inches from the spindle. “Letty had nothing to do with this, Mrs. Larson. She had no idea I was copying from her. She keeps her eyes on her work.”

Mrs. Larson sighed. “Well, then it hardly seems fair to punish Letty.”

“That’s what I believe,” I said, nodding vigorously.

“But you girls will have to be separated. Margaret, you will trade seats with Donna. And you will receive an F on this quiz, as well as on the tens and elevens. Which, by the way, are easy. Also, tomorrow I would like a two-page explanation of why you will never cheat again. Using complete sentences.”