All Is Vanity

  “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 cl
asped 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.”

  This incident, when I’d padded it with some fictional material about Mrs. Larson and a few of the other more colorful members of our class and typed it out double spaced with wide margins, came to eight pages and two lines, which I figured was close enough to the ten pages the New School catalog indicated were required to be considered for the class. Besides, having been a teacher, I knew that Mr. Berginsky might appreciate brevity.

  Now I needed only to convince Ted that a class was worth the price of admission. Obviously, we were not poor—we had enough money to live in Manhattan—but Ted had a horror of profligacy and was convinced that the seemly way to live was never to spend more than was absolutely necessary. To this end, he’d kept track of his expenses ever since I’d known him, when they’d run heavily to books and cheese steaks. Since we’d married, one of my Christmas presents was invariably a ten-by-fourteen-inch, forest green, vinyl-bound ledger in which we both were to record every purchase, including items like shoelaces and Tic Tacs. I balked in the first few months of married life, and then often simply forgot, but when I neglected to make entries he spent hours searching for receipts, making estimates, and quizzing me four days after a meal about whether I’d had the chef or the garden salad, so disturbed was he by the notion of not knowing where our money had gone. Out of compassion for us both, I became more vigilant.

  “What do you think of writing courses?” I asked casually, forcing a stack of newspapers into a brown paper bag at midnight on Sunday. We were tackling the IQ test that was New York garbage disposal. “Only cans in the blue bag, Ted!”

  “Where does this go?” he held up the wastebasket from the bedroom.

  I sighed impatiently. “Paper in clear, Q-Tips in black.”

  “What about gum wrappers?”

  “Foil or paper?” I was in charge of reading the bimonthly modifications and exhortations from the sanitation department. “And is that plastic from hot and sour soup? Because Chinese food plastic is apparently not the same as other plastic.”

  “What writing course?” Ted started down the stairs with a black plastic bag in one hand and a blue one in the other.

  “Just, in general, I mean,” I said, leaning over the railing. “Do you think they’re a good idea?” I wasn’t sure he’d heard me. It was late, and I spoke quietly so as not to disturb the other tenants.

  At the bottom of the stairs the door clicked shut, swung open again, and then feet tramped back up.

  “Do I think someone can teach you how to write?” he whispered from the landing.

  Ted had an annoying habit of cutting to the heart of a discussion.

  “No,” I said, sidling past him at our apartment door with a load of newspapers, “but don’t you think that having an audience, deadlines, comments from someone who teaches in the Columbia MFA program, could be helpful?”

  “It could be.” Ted followed me down with a clear bag bulging with yellow pages covered in my handwriting. “You’re throwing all this out?”

  “It’s just early drafts.”

  “Wow!” He looked pleased and held the door open for me with his foot. “Then you must be pretty far along.”

  “Pretty far,” I said. “Not done yet, though.”

  “I’ve heard Anita Brookner writes a novel every summer,” he said. “But I’d think your first one would probably take a little longer.”

  “Ted.” I looked at him seriously. “It’s going to take quite a while longer, you know.”

  “Oh, I know. I know.” He was holding the recycling bag at eye level, trying to read from the crumpled pages. Firmly, I wrenched the sack from his grip and set it on the sidewalk.

  “Simon thinks I should take this class at the New School. Just to give me some feedback.”

  “Feedback?” Ted and I agreed that jargon was one of the banes of the modern world.

  “You know what I mean.” We were wandering down the street now, as was our custom.

  “But won’t you have to read other people’s work, then?”

  “Of course. That would be fun.”

  “Well, sure it would be fun, but that’s time you could be spending on your own writing.” We’d turned into the Korean grocer’s, and he picked up a package of sesame candies. “Do I like these?”

  “You like the ones from the place on Fifth Avenue better.”

  He put them back, and we inspected the mélange of specialties from many lands available at the hot food buffet, including but certainly not limited to baked ziti, Swedish meatballs, corned beef and cabbage, turkey with gravy, and teriyaki chicken, and then circled the compact but impressively varied produce display. I was delighted to discover that I could buy shallots at three in the morning.

  “I think I’ll get the sesame candies,” Ted said finally.

  “I’d have to submit something to see if I could get in,” I began, when we were out on the street again.

  “I’m sure you could get in!” Ted exclaimed. Ted also had an endearing way of letting me know he was on my side.

  “I’d like to do it,” I said. “I think it would help to have other people read my work.”

  “But, Margaret, how can they help you? These people will be lawyers and accountants; they won’t be writers. They’ll be …” He hesitated.

  “Just like me? Except currently embarked on successful alternate careers? Is that what you were going to say?”

  “Why can’t you just ask Simon to read your work without taking the class?”

  “Ted! I can’t do that! He’s a published writer. We’re not equals.” I stopped. “Why do I have to fight you every step of the way with this? I’m trying to do something extremely difficult, probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, and all you do is hamper, hamper, hamper. We’re not
talking about a lifetime commitment here. This is one night a week.”

  “All right, all right,” Ted said, “you asked what I thought. How much does it cost?”

  When I told him, he held up his package of sesame candies ruefully. “Shouldn’t have bought these,” he said.

  That evening, when I logged on to explain to Letty that the external discipline and structure of a class were the key to whipping my novel together, I collected a letter from her.

  M—

  Should one accept a job because one has fallen in love with a blond office?

  “The finish on the paneling is … how can I describe it?…” (remember this is Michael, a man who has no trouble assigning a name to Titian’s favorite blue) “… sort of a clover honey. No, more of a maple sugar with bronze undertones.” This is what he said when he got home from another “get-acquainted” meeting tonight.

  It’s wood, Margaret. It is not edible. But there is a private chef for the staff, who serves, as far as I can tell from the menu Michael described, a sort of Asian/French/Italian/Southwestern mélange. Fusion with a twist—or a tornado.

  “I can bring a guest,” he said.

  The ultimate selling point is Paul, who would be Michael’s assistant and is engaged to the Xerox man. I sincerely believe that Michael would do anything to escape the daily strain of his relationship with the departmental secretary at Ramona. She has this habit of sighing heavily—it’s really, at least according to Michael’s imitation, almost a groan, as if someone were pushing a letter opener into her abdomen—whenever anyone other than the chair gives her work, and Michael’s afraid to ask her to do anything for him. In fact, I once caught him addressing envelopes for her. He always makes his own copies and the machine inevitably breaks down and then he has to sneak away and spend the rest of the afternoon peeking out of his office at half-hour intervals to see if someone’s come along who knows how to fix the thing.

  And, honestly, I can’t blame him for being dazzled by a fancy office, given the grimy, dank slot he’s working in now.