An Uncommon Education (14 page)

I nearly collided with a flushed and triumphant engineer as I stepped into the station.

He put out a hand to steady us both, but kept his forward momentum. “Hotels are booked, sweetheart, and no cabs will run in this weather. Hope you have someone to pick you up!” He looked elated by the storm, winking jovially at me before going on his way.

I blinked in the bright lights of the station, taking in the strong smells of urine and fuel exhaust. My stomach turned, briefly, roiling with the beginnings of panic. I willed myself to make a plan. The information kiosk was closed, but I had some loose change and a map I’d grabbed from a box on the wall to guide me. There was a Yellow Pages, too, tucked in under the phone.

But as I scanned the list of Rosenthals, I began to realize that I’d be calling not just Teddy but his mother. There were twenty-two C. Rosenthals in the Trenton area, but no Chavas. I started to warm up and pulled one of my gloves off with my teeth, the finger I now used to trace the numbers leaving a smear of damp on the page. I could feel the alarm rise in my chest, the inevitability of realizing that I had nowhere to go. I left the phone booth and found a bench that had only a few unidentifiable stains on it. I sat down, figuring I’d only lie down once I had to. The station was well lit, I told myself. No one would be out in this weather. But then I saw a figure coming toward me, hunkered down under a hood.

The suddenness of recognition first brought relief, then a new wave of worry. I felt my heart begin beating again as she got closer, wondering if she’d be angry and, on some level, disappointed in me for being reckless, or desperate. Or both. She didn’t pull her hood off when she stood before me, and my irritation flared. I wanted to yank it off her head, angry that, even coming to my rescue in the middle of a nearly abandoned train station, she would still need to hide. She handed me a slip of paper. “You forgot this,” she said, taking a seat beside me on the bench.

I saw Teddy’s envelope, not the letter, puzzling over it only momentarily before I realized what she’d wanted me to see: The return address:
T. Rosenthal, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Apartment 6G.
No town, no state, no country.

“How did you know I’d come here?”

My mother reached over and tucked my hair behind my ear to look at my face. “I always figured it was a matter of time before you’d go look for him. You just needed a little encouragement. And you left the South Station schedule and the map book open to Southern New Jersey on the kitchen table.” She picked up the envelope and waved it a little, making an attempt at a smile. I looked down at the Yellow Pages and found my way back into the R’s. She allowed me a moment of scanning before closing the book on my hand.

“It’s time to go,” she said, standing up. “The roads won’t wait.”

I didn’t move. Instead I looked at her, knowing how hard it had been for her to find me missing, how hard it would have been for her to realize she had to go after me and get dressed for this cold night, what it must have taken out of her to drive alone all this way, and I hated her for it. I hated her for being there when, for once, I hadn’t wanted her. There was a taste in my mouth like sand, like those dreams I had sometimes where I wanted to talk but found my tongue too heavy to lift.

“I could have slept here,” I said. And then, more defiantly, “He needs help.”

“You think you can help him, Naomi?” she asked tensely. The circles under her eyes were a deep gray, making the blue of her irises stand out as she took me in. I looked more closely at the way her eyes brimmed, the way her mouth stayed flat and drawn, then at the small spidery wrinkles that were beginning to crawl from her top lip, as if words had long been clenched there, the tension of restraining them creating crevices in her skin. For the first time, I saw some ugliness in her. I frowned.

“You can’t do anything for him, Naomi.” She shook her head definitively. “I don’t think anyone can.”

“You read the letter?”

“I read it.”

“It was my letter.”

She looked surprised at my insistence. “You left it on the table along with the maps and the train schedule.”

“It was still mine. What’s wrong with him?” I asked, struggling to keep my voice from breaking into a child’s cry.

She took a moment to collect her thoughts before answering. “Any number of things, I suppose,” she said vaguely.

“So we need to find out,” I said, standing.

For a moment, I thought she was about to argue with me, but instead she became thoughtful. She stared at me for a while before she spoke.

“Did I ever tell you that your father wanted to name you Ruth? I wouldn’t let him. I was sure there was an omen there, something about having to leave home to be with the people you loved. So we settled on Naomi. She got to bring the one she loved back home with her. It seemed she got to have it all.”

She sighed. “It’s terrible having to leave home. Especially when you know you can’t go back.” She reached over and pulled me by the wrist of the jacket, trying to get me to sit back down. I wouldn’t.

“Teddy has his home now, Naomi, and it’s not with you. You need to realize that no matter how much you may want to fix things, there are times, including now, when those things will be beyond your reach.” She took a deep breath, pulling her hands into her lap. “Anyway, he has his mother,” she added, trying to comfort me, though her face stiffened after she said it. She must have known it wasn’t the right thing to say. “I’m tired,” she concluded.

In the car on the way home, we didn’t speak until we reached the Massachusetts border. The clouds were still heavy overhead, but the snow had stopped. The only other vehicles on the road were trucks, their dragging weights rocking our car every time they passed by.

“If it was so terrible to leave home,” I finally said, “maybe you shouldn’t have.” I couldn’t understand exactly why, but I was furious. I didn’t want to look at her.

She shot me a quick glance. “It wasn’t an option,” she clipped. “And it’s none of your business.”

“Of course,” I said. “Your life is none of my business. I almost forgot.”

“Naomi, I know you’re upset . . .”

I was boiling. “And is this,” I took her right wrist forcefully with my hand, my thumb over her scar, “none of my business, too? Or do you just expect me to wait until it happens again?”

She pulled over. After a few minutes she whispered, “Jesus, Naomi.” I pressed my head to the icy window, waiting for the car to start again. It was already getting so cold that I had to sit on my hands to keep them warm. She was so silent, as she always seemed to be in the face of my most urgent questions, my voice the antidote to hers. She must have remembered, too. She must have also remembered our last night together in the cold. How could she not? How could she not have guessed that it all started with her?

“We weren’t married in ’73,” she said after several more minutes had passed. The color of her eyes was now watery, her expression once again empty. “It was ’74. February of ’74.” She waited a beat, letting me figure it out. My birthday was in June of the same year. She continued to let it sink in before going on.

“We had been dating for a few years and were living together, but I had no intention of marrying your father. I had no intention of marrying anyone. Then I got pregnant with you. And I panicked. I, my own mother, she . . .” She lost her way momentarily. “I didn’t know what to do with a baby. I was so scared. Paralyzed.” She shook her head. “I could only think you’d be better off without me. We’d both be better off without each other.” She leaned forward, resting her head on the steering wheel, her hands on either side of it. I had a sudden vision of her driving off without looking up. I wanted to say something, anything, but my throat was tight with emotion, so thick it was hard to swallow.

“So, I tried,” she said, finally looking at me. “But I couldn’t follow through with it. And then I wanted to stop. Oh, God,” her voice broke, “It was the worst moment, my resolve, all my reasons, everything was washed away in something else, panic, or something else. Something more than grief.” She took a shuddering breath. “I didn’t really think there would be anything other than grief left.”

I waited for her to say that she couldn’t follow through with it because of me, but she said nothing more. I watched her go through the motions of collecting herself, like folding a toy back into its box.

“So you got married because you were pregnant. With me.”

“I got married because I thought your father would be a great father. I married because I’d found a little faith because of your father’s. I married because I thought we could make a home for you, that with him you could grow up and be well, do things with your life.”

“Because having a daughter wasn’t doing enough,” I concluded, wanting a definitive pain more than a doubtful one.

“I wish it had been,” she said. “I wish something was enough, Naomi.” She sighed. “You might not think I wish for much, but I do wish for that.”

I have often wondered what else she might have wished for. I missed the opportunity to ask her that night, but I have thought of it many times since.

M
y mother and I never spoke with my father about the night I went looking for Teddy, or one another. If she had been struck by how far I would go to get what I wanted, from her or from Teddy, she never let on. She was simply there to bring me home, like a messenger disinterested in the contents of the message.

So I had to let Teddy go. Neither one of my parents wanted to hear of him—especially, now, my mother—and it became too painful to think of him as constantly as I had. As my mother had learned, no grief can be sustained indefinitely. So from then on, when Teddy did come to mind, I shook myself free from the thought, like starting from the ache of a worrisome daydream.

Ten

I
had enrolled at Adams High School that fall. With nearly two thousand students in four grades, it was huge when compared with Beacon Junior High and Kennedy Elementary, both of which had been small, neighborhood schools. Although its halls were narrow, the ceilings were so high that it seemed full of empty space even when crowded with students. Its demands were empty, too: the right clothes, a light attitude, a willingness to appear to be having fun. I was able to meet none of the qualifications.

I did well in my classes right away, but Anna Kim continued to do well, too, and pretty soon we both distinguished ourselves as top students. To get back at me for the threat I posed to her, she spread the rumor that I had my sights set on Wellesley because I was a lesbian. I wanted to go up to her and shake her hand out of gratitude: having people believe I didn’t like boys was a much better way to stay away from them than admitting that I never wanted to become attached again. Occasionally, one of them would remind me of Teddy—George Mason was tall, and awkward; Joe Giangrasso had muddy-brown eyes—but I was safe admiring them at a distance, never allowing myself anything more than the most basic and improbable romantic fantasies.

The Adams college counselors made it their job to inform those of us who were going to apply to “selective colleges” that we needed to start creating our applications four years before they were going to be written. This, we were made to understand, involved far more than getting the best grades: we had an extracurricular résumé to build as well.

The fall of my sophomore year, I signed up to be a transport volunteer at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a job that entailed sitting in their basement for four hours every Sunday morning, waiting on a folding chair with about thirty other people in a crowded, windowless room for my number to be called. Most of the other people working there were paid employees who eyed me with distrust. I took to reading terrible magazines while I waited so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions. After a while I became a part of the scenery. Two imposingly voluptuous sisters began sitting on either side of me and having loud arguments with each other in Haitian French. I liked to think they were acting as noisy guardians, keeping anyone more intimidating away.

Like everyone else there, when my number was called I was given a slip of paper with a room number on it and a grading: green for nontoxic and nonhuman fluid transport; orange for patient transport from one floor to another via wheelchair; red for transport of plasma or blood. I was never given a chance with the toxic fluids, just the human. These were ensconced in thick, malleable plastic that obscured them just enough to allow us to walk throughout the hospital without alarming nonnatives. I was given a twenty-minute break I didn’t need every shift, and spent my time in the gift shop, wondering what the well bought for the sick.

I was also busy ignoring my own developing body and its desires. As my hungers grew, I simply ran more, pounding them out beneath me as best I could. I ran almost every day, even when I had a practice or a game across town—our public school team wasn’t too rigorous. Sometimes it was dark when I ran, which my father hated. But I had to; it was part of the tacit agreement I’d made with my body to let my mind run my life. And as I ran my mostly thoughtless runs, I often chanted, soothing myself by reciting incantations that might lend me their calming powers: the periodic table; the Einstein I’d memorized years ago; snatches of the Hebrew prayers my father used to recite; the various geometric theorems; anything that could serve as proof that the spinning universe could, indeed, be mastered. On my worst days, though, I found myself on a loop with whatever text was in my head, trying to work it out of my head and into the pavement, woefully unable to reach thoughtlessness or anything near it.

The spring of my sophomore year, I had the unfortunate timing of being the second person to walk into the school auditorium where a beautiful, popular boy, Anton Bascilia, had hung himself from the rafters. I liked to use the auditorium as a shortcut, bypassing the crowded halls, but that morning I opened the door and walked right into Lilly Fawlke, her mouth open, her face white. Anton was swinging above us both, the tongue of a bell that had no sides. It took me a moment to recognize his face; he had smiled at me once and, had I allowed myself real crushes, he would have soared to the top of my list. I cried out, then began to scream.