All Is Vanity (4 page)

When they ask why I listened to her, they don’t want to know about Margaret. They want to know about me. They’re right, of course. I can’t blame Margaret entirely. Though she directed, I acted. The question is: who wrote the script? “It takes two to tango,” as her father would say—he always played fast and loose with aphorisms.

Tango? Hardly. I feel too clumsy, oafish, and stupid ever to have been dancing.

I feel as I did the day Margaret made me climb over the fence that enclosed the tennis courts at East Mountain School. “Made me” is how I think of it, but in that case, too, there was no coercion.

It was the summer we were thirteen, on a Sunday morning, early.

“Those girls are never there early,” she promised.

I was a good girl. I was the kind who said, “Please pick that up,” in a haughty tone when my father dropped his gum wrapper on the sidewalk. The idea of sneaking someplace where we weren’t allowed made my breathing shallow. Nevertheless, I was a little bit thrilled. I liked the idea of me, Letty Larue, sauntering onto the well-kept courts at the East Mountain School for Girls, casually swinging my Chris Evert racquet by its handle. I liked the idea that we’d be doing something daring. And I trusted world-wise Margaret to make it all right.

At six-thirty on Sunday morning, I zipped with difficulty the back of the tennis dress I’d bought with my birthday money the previous summer. I’d worn it to play tennis only once before, since it seemed pretentious on the scruffy public courts we normally used, but I often tried it on in the privacy of my room and admired its crisp, white fabric and its kicky little skirt appliquéd with strawberries. It was tight under the arms now and slightly shorter than it was meant to be, but it fit well enough to work as a disguise, to show I belonged. At seven, we met outside Margaret’s house and rode our bikes to East Mountain.

Margaret and I lived in a nice neighborhood; but there was a distinct difference between our part of town and the area around
East Mountain School. In Glendale, as in Los Angeles at large, the greens of money and foliage run together. You know you’re in the best sections when you can walk more than three contiguous steps in the dappled shade of overhanging branches. The shade at East Mountain was so dense that the grounds were practically dark and the air tingled with eucalyptus. The grass along the edge of the courts was thick and Margaret had to shove hard to jimmy our racquets underneath the fence. Then she tossed the balls over and scrambled up, over, and down the other side herself, her Jack Purcells needing only the lightest purchase on the chainlink to propel her forward, the bones jutting out from her wrists as she hooked her long fingers through the wire diamonds.

I couldn’t move like that. Margaret always put my deliberateness in a good light; she would say I was careful and ladylike, but really I was scared, hesitant, and just plain slow when it came to using my body. I tried to jam the toes of my sneakers firmly into the links, though they would not fit; I glanced compulsively over my shoulder, scanning the smooth lawn for the principal (I hadn’t heard of headmasters then) or the police. I had to drag myself up; the chain dug into the flesh of my fingers and my arms quivered with effort. At the top, I nearly lost my balance, as I inched first one leg, then the other, over the points of wire that threatened to grab the hem of my skirt. Then, even harder than going up, was the way down with the asphalt yards and yards below.

Margaret seemed to draw energy from our illicit play and whacked the ball like a demon, but I was nervous and couldn’t concentrate. I tried to keep the ball from making noise when it bounced off my racquet, and I ran quietly on my toes, listening for the sirens and indignant shouts, knowing if anyone caught us
there, we were trapped, literally caged, two obviously guilty specimens.

We were caught, actually, by a man with a girl about our age. An East Mountain girl. We stopped playing when we saw the orange BMW pull into the parking lot, but though Margaret might have made it, there was no time for me to work myself over the fence. We stood by the gate, waiting for our punishment, me with my head down, pushing at the strings of my racquet, Margaret nonchalantly bouncing and catching, bouncing and catching one of our balls. There was no question of our continuing to play, though there was plenty of court space.

It was the girl who mattered, the girl who made me wish I could slither right through the fence and hide in the bougainvillea. It was nothing she said, only the way she held herself, sure of her place. She was wearing boy’s running shorts, loose and low on her hips, a T-shirt cropped with scissors, and scuffed leather tennis shoes. She paused before the gate, knowing we could not get out until she released us. She glanced at my dress, which was, I saw now, entirely wrong. She flipped her long, blond hair forward, and then tossed it back, gathering it with practiced fingers in a high, careless ponytail. The silver bangles on her wrist jangled elegantly as they fell down her arm.

Finally, cupping her hand behind the padlock, the girl lined up the numbers in the combination.

“Ready, Dad?” she said, looking away from us as she swung the gate open. She gave her head a little shake, so that her ponytail swished. We scurried out.

Now, remembering my humiliation as I rooted among the fat blades of amaryllis leaves for a ball Margaret had earlier sent over
the fence, while tugging down the hem of my too-short skirt, I suspect I may have been mistaken. The jangle of the girl’s bracelets might not have been smug; her pause may have registered only confusion, as she wondered how the gate could be locked if we were inside; her glance at my dress might have been admiring. It’s possible. Still, it was inevitable that I would see her the way I did, being as I was and as I would remain.

EVERYONE KNOWS SUNDAYS ARE UNGRASPABLE
. I didn’t really expect to accomplish anything. But Sunday night, I prepared to buck the unproductive trend the weekend had begun by placing the laptop open on the table, ready for the next morning. I filled my new Mont Blanc with ink and scratched out a schedule on the legal pad.

My plans for that last hour and a half were inspired by Hemingway; I had read that he had always stopped when he knew what the next sentence would be so as to pick up the work easily the next day. It occurred to me that by this principle I should try to get a sentence or two down that night, but I liked the idea of starting fresh in the morning with a clean slate, so to speak. Clearly, Elaine and her hair had set me on the wrong path earlier and some unconsidered words now would surely do the same.

I starred the hour I planned to devote to exercise to remind myself not to forgo that physical refreshment—
mens sana in corpore sano
, as they say—no matter how involved I was in the writing. I made a mental note to start with a good breakfast, as well—maybe sardines and tomatoes on Swedish flatbread, a snack that looked bracing and wholesome in television commercials.

As it turned out, there were distractions at home Monday morning that I didn’t anticipate, used as I was to being out of the house by seven-fifteen. First, Ted dawdled over the paper, placed a few calls, and in myriad other ways made his presence unconducive to my settling down to work. After he left, the cable company demanded access to the roof, and, because I seemed to be the only one home in the building, or at least the only one willing the answer the bell, I had to let men in jumpsuits in and out three times, which, since we don’t even subscribe to cable, necessitated peevish calls to Benson Cable, to City Hall, to the landlady’s answering machine, and to Ted to express my annoyance over having to facilitate the money-making schemes of a giant corporation that was doing nothing for me.

It occurred to me when the stomping overhead was at its most distracting that this might not be the cable company at all, but some elaborately costumed and orchestrated criminal gang, so I compared the number listed in the phone book with the one on the card the technician had given me, an operation that would have taken very little time, if we did not live in an apartment so cramped that we had to store the phone books behind the cookbooks behind the large pots in the bottom cupboard.

Then, I had to eat something. We’d had only toast for breakfast, there being, in fact, no tomatoes, no flatbread, and no sardines. We did have a tin of anchovies, but at seven-thirty these had not seemed appetizing. At ten-thirty I made more toast and spread peanut butter on it. I read the story in that week’s
New Yorker
as I ate: depressed man lives in crummy apartment; pays much attention to grout between bathroom tiles; becomes more depressed. Indignantly, I tore it out to send to Letty.

“I could have written this with one hand tied behind my back!” I scrawled on a Post-it with my Mont Blanc.

Right on schedule at eleven-thirty I was standing in the childbirth aisle at the bookstore in Union Square, comparing
Multicultural Baby Names for This Millennium and the Next
with
Jack and Jill, Jeremy and Jessica
.

“Ms. Snyder?”

At the end of the aisle, her boy-cut corduroys slung low around her hips and flaring out over her running shoes, was Chloe Brown, one of my tenth-graders. Former tenth-graders.

“Chloe. Hi. What are you up to?” It was always awkward to meet students outside of school, where I was not the teacher they knew. Presumably, they were not the students I knew either. I, at least, always felt as if I’d been caught doing something illicit.

“Mom is forcing me to read something,” she said. As usual, the lift in her voice at the end turned her sentence into a question. “When we go to Nantucket.” She reached to pull the elastic from her ponytail, smoothed her fine, light brown hair back from her face with both palms, and stretched the elastic around her hair again.

My WASP students had a habit of dropping the possessive pronoun when they referred to their parents, as if they were nurtured by some sort of universal progenitors. “Good idea,” I said. This was, thank God, teacher territory.

I resisted the urge to suggest
Wuthering Heights
or
Sense and Sensibility
. She would not like them. “How about
The Shining
?”

She’d stepped closer to me and I could smell stale smoke. Cigarettes were very in among upper-class New York children.

“I think you’d like it,” I said. “Since you like scary stuff.” This was a gross generalization drawn from the observation that the single piece of literature in which Chloe had shown any interest over the course of the previous year was
The Tell-Tale Heart
. Even William Carlos Williams, usually a great hit with tenth-grade girls, who, after reading him, earnestly believed they, too, could be poets, as long as they eschewed the rhyme they’d deemed essential when they were unsophisticated ninth-graders in favor of sensual imagery, had left her cold.

The Shining
was, in fact, my standard recommendation for girls who wouldn’t read;
The Firm
for boys. This annoyed parents who envisioned their offspring tearing through Henry James (although, they, themselves, had only the vaguest memories of a sinister governess—or was it a nanny?—from the high school class in which they’d been forced through
The Turn of the Screw
and found the classics too unnecessarily dense and old-fashioned for their own tastes). Of course, there were always a few students who did
tear through James, or at least Edith Wharton, which made the inability of the rest to puzzle through even a paragraph of complex syntax and advanced vocabulary after ten years of the finest schooling money could buy (eleven or twelve, if you counted preschool) all the more exasperating.