I decided to move to Albuquerque because I didn’t know anyone there, because it was far from Chicago and Boston and Philadelphia, and if the terrain was different, dry and mountainous and spiked by strange plants, I imagined maybe I could be different, too. Escape, like unrequited love, is an old story. Less than a month after Henry had told me Suzy was pregnant, I was ensconced in the second bedroom in Lisa’s house here on Coal Street. I spent the summer working as a hostess at a French restaurant, and in August I was hired for my current position as an assistant teacher at Praither Exceptional School. I knew little about special ed when I started—my only real exposure to anyone with developmental issues had been my cousin Rory—but I felt ready for change. My salary now is not high, but luckily, neither is the cost of living in New Mexico. I am especially pleased to report that as of February, I have paid off my student loans.
Last week we took the boys out for recess—the other teachers in my classroom are named Beverly and Anita, and the head teacher is Graciela, though she stayed inside to prepare ingredients for the English-muffin pizzas we were teaching the boys to make that afternoon—and a few of the students were shooting baskets while the others climbed on the jungle gym. I was standing by the slide as a boy named Ivan described to me his wish to buy a tractor, when I heard a wail. It was Jason—he’s the temperamental one who carries the cat brush and other items in his pockets—and I turned and saw that he was sitting on the platform that connects the two sections of the jungle gym and that his fingers were stuck in one of the platform’s drainage holes. I should point out here that the jungle gym is designed for children smaller and younger than my students. I climbed onto the platform and knelt next to Jason, thinking that if he held still, I’d be able to pull his fingers out. He was shrieking and weeping, and, as gently as possible, I tugged at his hand, but his fingers—it was his middle and ring fingers—stayed where they were. Anita and Beverly came over, and the rest of the boys were watching us by then.
“Can one of you go get some Vaseline?” I asked the teachers. “Or maybe soap and water?”
“We’ll take the kids inside,” Anita said.
After the playground emptied out except for us, Jason was still howling. “Jason, what’s on your shirt?” I said. “That’s a fish, right? A fish from Texas?” He was wearing a turquoise T-shirt that said SOUTH PADRE ISLAND. “What kind of fish is that?” I asked.
His wailing slowed and dropped in volume.
“I wonder if it likes to eat candy,” I said. “Do fish eat candy? Not in real life, but maybe if it’s a movie fish or a pretend fish.” The candy reference was cheap on my part—to help students work on math (I assume you know it is far from true that all autistic people are mathematical geniuses) as well as to practice making purchases, the classrooms hold sales on alternating days. Our classroom, Classroom D4, sells popcorn for thirty cents a bag; it is Classroom D7, the oldest kids, who sell candy, and many of our boys, including Jason, are fixated on it.
Jason had stopped crying. I pulled a tissue from my pocket and held it out to him. “Blow,” I said, and he scowled and turned his head in the other direction.
“What about a lollipop?” I said. “Would a fish ever eat a lollipop?”
His head swiveled back around. In my peripheral vision, I could see Graciela and the school nurse emerge from the building and walk toward us. Jason was staring at me. “Are you fourteen?” he asked.
I shook my head. “You’re fourteen,” I said. “Right? You’re fourteen years old. But I’m a grown-up. I’m twenty-eight.”
He regarded me impassively.
“Twenty-eight is twice as old as fourteen,” I said. Jason still didn’t respond, and I asked, “Why are you staring at me like that?”
“I’m looking for social cues,” he said.
I had to bite my lip. “That’s great!” I said. “Jason, that’s wonderful. That’s just exactly what you should be doing. You know what, though? When you’re looking for social cues, you usually don’t tell the other person. You don’t need to.”
He was quiet. Sensing that I’d discouraged him, I added, “But I’ll tell you a secret. I’m looking for social cues, too. It’s not easy, is it?”
Graciela and the nurse had reached the jungle gym. They’d brought Vaseline and soap, and Beverly soon followed with dental floss and ice chips. Nothing worked. Graciela and the nurse stood under the platform pressing ice against Jason’s fingers, slathering them with Vaseline, turning and prodding them, and they stayed stuck. The nurse called the paramedics. I kept talking to Jason as they hunched under the platform—I could tell when they were really pushing at his fingers because he’d yelp and then, as if preparing to ride the wave of a new set of tears, glance at me. I’d shake my head. “You’re fine,” I’d say. Or, “They want to help you feel better.”
The paramedics showed up twenty minutes later. The police came, too—they have to by law—and it turned out to be my roommate, Lisa, and her partner, which has happened before. “What have we here?” she said. She offered to let Jason put on her hat, but he didn’t want to. I could feel his capacity for hysteria growing again with the arrival of the new cars and people, and he teared up a little but stayed composed. Even when the paramedics jammed his fingers out—I suspect all they did was use more force than Graciela or the nurse could bring themselves to—Jason stayed composed. When his fingers finally were free and he could stand, I hugged him. We try as much as possible to treat the boys as we’d treat other fourteen-year-olds, to impose the same boundaries of physical contact—Mickey in particular has difficulty with this and will wedge his head beneath my armpit and croon, “I love you, Ms. Gaahv”—but in this instance, I could not help myself. I sensed that Graciela simultaneously disapproved and understood.
I was wearing a gray button-down shirt, and as Jason headed inside with the nurse, I noticed that Vaseline was smeared on it in several places, and I felt in that moment—you can see the Sandia Mountains from the school playground—that I was meant to live in the desert of New Mexico, meant to be a teacher with Vaseline on my blouse. I do not want to idealize the boys or pretend they’re angels; on a regular basis, Pedro picks his nose until it bleeds, and all of them stick their hands in their pants and fiddle with their penises so often that we have pasted paper hands on their desks where they’re meant to place their palms. “Public hands!” we remind them. “Public hands!” And yet I feel somehow that my students contain the world. This is difficult for me to express. Like all of us, they are greedy and cranky and sometimes disgusting. But they are never cagey; they are entirely sincere.
My students’ lives will be hard in ways they don’t understand, and I wish I could protect them—I can’t—but at least as long as I’m trying to show them how to protect themselves, I don’t think that I am wasting my time. Perhaps this is how you know you’re doing the thing you’re intended to: No matter how slow or slight your progress, you never feel that it’s a waste of time.
I am glad, honestly, that I didn’t get what I thought I wanted back in Chicago. If I’d gotten what I wanted, I’d never have learned to physically restrain a teenager trying to attack me, I’d never have pinned a dashiki to a bulletin board while decorating for Kwanzaa, I’d never have stood before a classroom of boys, making a presentation on puberty and hygiene. And sincerely I feel that I am lucky to have stood there simulating the application of deodorant. What would Henry and I have been like if we’d married? I picture us spending Saturday afternoons at upscale houseware stores, purchasing throw pillows or porcelain platters meant for serving deviled eggs.
Sometimes in the afternoon, after I’ve used the bathroom and am approaching the sink to wash my hands, my reflection in the mirror is that of a person whom I know that I know but cannot immediately place. This, too, is because of the boys: because of how they require all my attention, how they consume me and make me forget myself. Or if, while washing my hands, I notice that a piece of food is stuck in my teeth and I can infer that it’s bee
n there for several hours and during those hours I’ve talked to other teachers, including male teachers, I would not say I don’t care at all, but I don’t care very much. In my life before, both in Chicago and in Boston, how embarrassed I’d have felt to know I’d been talking to people with food in my teeth. But that never would have happened, because I cared enormously about such things.
Out here, I do sometimes miss my family, but they seem to be getting along well. Allison is pregnant again, and Fig is pregnant, too—the world is a very fertile place these days—and relishes discussing with anyone who cares to listen that the anonymous sperm donor she and Zoe used has an IQ of 143. Darrach and Elizabeth and Rory visited me in the winter, and we did lots of touristy things—they all three bought turquoise necklaces in Old Town—and Elizabeth kept saying, “It’s so stinking cool that you live here. I’ve wanted to come to New Mexico for my whole life.” I’m not sure if you’d remember my friend Jenny from Tufts, but she lives in Denver, which is a short plane flight away, so we keep talking about trying to see each other; she’s in her second semester of nursing school. (I hope in providing updates about other people I am not assuming in you an excessive degree of interest in my life now that I am no longer paying $105 an hour. Please know also I am not trying to mock the fee, as I’m aware that other clients paid up to $70 more. I guess part of the reason I haven’t written to you before is that when you said to let you know how I was doing, I just didn’t know if you meant once or regularly.)
But back to Henry: I suppose the easiest explanation is that he didn’t find me that attractive. But my attraction to him was flattering, and he genuinely enjoyed my friendship. What did he have to lose by keeping me near? I don’t resent him for suggesting that I move to Chicago, because the fact is, I didn’t require much persuasion—I heard in that conversation at Fig’s wedding what I wanted to hear. Or maybe he was sufficiently attracted to me but didn’t want the person he told everything to also to be his girlfriend. I can see this, how one might prefer a little distance. I can see, too, how because he denied me, I had the luxury of being sure of him, but because I never denied him, he was burdened by uncertainty. And then I think, no, no, it was none of that. It was me—all along, I was the one who resisted. I wanted to hold happiness in reserve, like a bottle of champagne. I postponed it because I was afraid, because I overvalued it, and because I didn’t want to use it up, because what do you wish for then? That possibility, that I was intimidated by getting what I wanted, is the hardest one for me to consider, which might mean it is the likeliest. On three or four occasions Henry would, I think, have kissed me, and on all these occasions, I turned away. Sometimes only an inch, or only with my eyes. It was never purposely; I’d always done it already, before I’d decided to. One of the times was when he was lying in my lap in front of the TV, and he looked up at me, he gazed at me, and I should have gazed back, but instead I wondered if he could see my nose hair, and I tilted my head so we were no longer making eye contact. I never felt ready in those moments, I felt like first I needed to go take a shower or prepare some notes, and so, I guess, it was my fault; I choreographed my own devastation. A part of me thinks, But why couldn’t he have accounted for my nervousness, why couldn’t he just have set his palms against my ears and held me still? And then another part of me thinks, He was never single anyway. Maybe it all did turn out for the best.
I sometimes remember driving back from the Brewers game, how I believed I would never love anyone more than I loved Henry. In a sense, I may have been right: I can’t imagine ever again feeling that infatuated and free of doubt. I think Henry may have been the first and last person about whom I believed, If I can get him to love me, then everything else will be all right. That I am no longer that naïve is both a loss and a gain. I have dated a bit since moving to New Mexico—I even once really did meet a guy at the supermarket, which was something I thought happened only in movies—but I am not in love. I am writing you now anyway, not in love. If I had to guess, I’d guess I will get married eventually, but I am far from sure of it. When I think of Henry and Oliver and Mike, I feel as if they are three different models—templates, almost—and I wonder if they are the only three in the world: the man who is with you completely, the man who is with you but not with you, the man who will get as close to you as he can without ever becoming yours. It would be arrogant to claim no other dynamics exist just because I haven’t experienced them, but I have to say that I can’t imagine what they are. I hope that I am wrong.
Mike is the only one of the three I look back on with much nostalgia. I do think it might be different if we met now, when I have enough of a frame of comparison to recognize how rare his goodness to me was, but then I think how I grew sick of kissing him. How can you spend your life with a person you’re sick of kissing? Regardless, I have heard through the grapevine that he is married. Oliver is still in Boston, and we exchange occasional e-mails. I don’t harbor ill will—I really did get a kick out of him—but I’m glad we didn’t stay together any longer than we did.
As for Henry, we haven’t been in touch since I left Chicago. I assume that he and Suzy are still together; when I picture him, I picture her in the background, cradling an infant. The day I left Chicago, Henry and I had breakfast together at a diner, at his suggestion, and as we hugged goodbye, he said, “I feel like I made some mistakes with you,” and I said, “I feel like you did, too.” Yet again he looked like he might cry, so I shook my head, almost irritably, and said, “It’s not that big a deal.”
Incidentally, I described Henry to my roommate, Lisa, once, soon after I’d moved to Albuquerque. Though I’d been speaking for about fifteen minutes, I’d barely, in my own view, gotten going, and she glanced over—we were in her car, and she was driving—and said, “He sounds like a pussy.”
That day last week on the playground, after Jason had gone inside, Lisa called into headquarters on her walkie-talkie, then paused as her partner headed back to the police car. She said, “Hannah, what did I tell you about sticking your students’ fingers in drainage holes?” She grinned. “So you want to grill out tonight?”
“Do we have stuff?”
“I’ll stop at Smith’s on the way home.” Lisa climbed into the car, then unrolled the window, poked her head out, and said, “I can’t believe you’re wearing clogs. You’re such a teacher.”
Dr. Lewin, I am telling you all of this so you’ll know I moved on; I progressed. During the time we met, I must have seemed so stuck—in my ideas of myself, of men, of everything—and it must have seemed as if I were hearing and absorbing nothing, but all along, I was listening to you; I was learning. And I’m learning still: Even after I moved out here, I felt that I ought to send a present to Henry and Suzy to wish them well, plus, because I was bitter, I believed it was a way to show how not bitter I was. So I bought a grill one day, at a sporting-goods store, and I brought it home and started to address the box, and then I thought, What the fuck am I doing? This is the grill Lisa and I use in our backyard. The grass in the yard is long dead, but there’s a deck to sit on. It is spring now; in the evening, the light over the mountains is beautiful, and the hamburgers we make on Henry’s grill are, I must say, exceptionally delicious. If you should ever find yourself in Albuquerque, I hope that you will look me up and let me fix one for you. I send this letter with the greatest affection and appreciation for the many ways in which you helped me.
All my best,
Hannah Gavener
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY AGENT, Shana Kelly, is calm and wise even when I am not, and does an excellent job of every single thing she does on my behalf. I also am looked out for at William Morris by Suzanne Gluck, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Tracy Fisher, Raffaella DeAngelis, Michelle Feehan, Andy McNicol, Alicia Gordon—who is able to explain Hollywood in a way I understand—and Candace Finn, who is unfailingly cheerful and well organized.
At Random House, I am lucky to have the support of Gina Centrello, Libby McGuire, Jane von Mehren, Sanyu Dill
on, Avideh Bashirrad, Allison Saltzman, Victoria Wong, and Janet Wygal. I have not one but two wonderful editors: Daniel Menaker, who is the sensei to my grasshopper, and Laura Ford, who was both Lee Fiora’s and Hannah Gavener’s first friend at Random House. Dan’s and Laura’s careful feedback, amusing e-mails, wise counsel, ongoing availability, and general good humor make me feel grateful every single day. Meanwhile, my publicists—Jynne Martin, Kate Blum, Jen Huwer, Jennifer Jones, and Megan Fishmann—are the cleverest and hardest-working group of women on the planet. Total strangers sometimes tell me that my publicists must be miracle workers; I agree.
My Prep editor, Lee Boudreaux, read parts of this book in an earlier form and offered her characteristically smart and useful advice; although we no longer work together, it’s a better book because of her. Several of my writer friends also critiqued this material, and I especially thank the ones who had the patience to read it multiple times and still respond intelligently: Jim Donnelly, Elisabeth Eaves, Emily Miller, Sam Park, and Shauna Seliy.
My parents, Paul and Betsy Sittenfeld, and my siblings, Tiernan, Josephine, and P.G., are much warmer, weirder, and funnier than any characters I will ever invent. And they are good sports about having a novelist in the family.