As soon as he walked into her classroom, Jeff noticed her new confidence. Just as he’d predicted, after weathering the first three months, Nina had returned from winter break with fresh purpose. She struggled, but she wasn’t nearly so bewildered. At last she understood what she could cover in one period, and arrived at class with two or three main questions instead of an entire lecture.
“Sevonna,” Nina said. “Sevonna. Cierra…” Nina walked over to the pencil sharpener, where the girls were whispering, and escorted them to their seats. “We were talking about the way Puritans policed one another. Xavier?”
“Courts.”
“Peer pressure,” said Rakim.
8:20 good intervention / continuity with scarlet letter…Jeff typed into his computer log.
“In those days a lot of morality came from peer pressure,” Rakim said.
“Say more!”
“Like the stocks,” Xavier said. “When you were publicly humiliated.”
“But did it work?” Nina asked.
8:25 avoid jumping in too fast
“Obviously it didn’t work for Hester Prynne,” said Diana, “because…”
“Because what?”
Jeff surveyed the class. Only two heads down. Open books on half the desks. One hand raised. Nina waited for Diana, even as she shook her head slightly at Rakim, who was leaning back in his chair again. He landed with a thud, but only a few people laughed.
“Because she had sex anyway, so the peer pressure wasn’t working on her,” said Diana.
“Exactly.” Nina tried not to look at Brynna, who was examining her own long hair, holding up strands as she looked for split ends. Probably lots of pregnant high school girls studied The Scarlet Letter, but Brynna was Nina’s first, and she couldn’t help worrying about what a sixteen-year-old in her third trimester might make of this.
“It’s so ironic,” Xavier said, without raising his hand, “that usually peer pressure is for bad things, but in this book it’s all about morality.”
Nina smiled.
Was she really smiling at Xavier? The eleventh graders shuffled in their seats. Oh, my God, Xavier was such a player. The word ironic was like crack to Miss Lazare.
good pause, Jeff typed. He assumed Nina was counting silently to ten, as he had suggested at their last meeting, to allow her students more time to answer.
She was not counting to ten, or any other number. She felt delicious, strangely alert, then suddenly sleepy. She and Collin had been together three weeks.
As soon as the bell rang, she rushed off with the students. Jeff tried to catch her with his notes, but she slipped into the windowless, overheated photocopy room and hid behind the supply shelves stacked with paper and toner cartridges. There were several old wooden chairs behind the shelves, and she sat there for five minutes, just to close her eyes. She had to think, she had to dream, but the bell was ringing again. How did it ring so loud? So fast?
At lunchtime, she escaped to the basement, threading her way through tiled corridors, past the cafeteria smelling of disinfectant and steamed broccoli, to an abandoned resource room filled with giant therapy balls. As she leaned against the biggest, the ball deflated slightly, cushioning her body and her sleepy head. There she could rest and feel his hands. Remember him kissing her bare shoulders, burying himself inside her, breath quickening, fingers knit into hers.
She had been in love before. Away at school there had been a boy named Emmett, a runner with long dirty-blond hair, always in his eyes. She would sneak out early before class to find him coming back from morning practice and they would walk together through the Hill School’s misty playing fields, to lie down in the wet grass. She had ruined a coat that way, spreading it like a blanket over sticks and stones. Emmett was already warm in his running shirt and shorts; he was wet anyway, his body sleek with sweat. Nina was the one who got suspicious looks at breakfast. Leaves caught in her long hair. She had to carry her black coat to math.
In college she had loved a scruffy literary guy named Jonah who concentrated in philosophy and wrote for the Lampoon. Theirs was almost a shipboard relationship; they had lived in such close quarters, studying and sleeping in his narrow bed in Adams House, editing each other’s papers, reading poetry.
Jonah had curly hair and wore faded cords and raggedy old sweaters. He had theories about religion and politics and the frayed dynamic between love and friendship. He was interested in transcendental meditation and tech design and stand-up comedy. He wanted to be rich, but, like a juggler tossing knife, tennis ball, and frying pan, he debated management consulting, Hollywood, and graduate school. He never tired of perseverating about his future, or pondering the world. He’d hurt Nina when he began tweeting bits of news she’d told him about Viktor and OVID.
Collin came as a relief. He didn’t ask about her father, nor did he talk about the future. He brought takeout to her apartment and he spent the night and they laughed about her students. After bad days he comforted her.
“I could not get them to listen,” she said.
“Buy a police whistle,” he suggested. “Bring free food.”
She leaned against him on the couch. “My students deserve a better teacher.”
“Do something else, then. You could do so many other things.”
“But this is what I want to do.”
“Why?”
“I want to give back.”
He looked at her and said in all seriousness, “Why? What did you take?”
She shook her head. He knew that she was rich, but didn’t see the rest of it. Her father produced mind-blowing, immersive entertainment. She wanted to separate herself from that. She dreamed of enchanting kids with words instead of optics.
“There are lots of other ways to give back,” Collin pointed out. “Homeless people, clean water, the environment.”
She was almost too shy to look at him. “I want to teach because that’s the real magic.”
He nodded, because, of course he’d heard this language before. He’d grown up with his mother’s golden apples, her #1 TEACHER paperweights. “Transforming lives.”
“I want to give at least a little bit of what my teachers gave to me—but my kids don’t even listen.”
“I guess you have to be patient.”
She tucked her legs under her and considered him. If he’d been patient he would have stayed in college. “Why did you quit?”
He thought of his mother, always hoping he would learn marketable skills. “I hate Web design.”
“But you could do studio art.”
“Nah.”
“Why not?
“I’m not conceptual.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not big-picture. My art’s not deep.”
“You’re just being modest!” She was thinking of the tiny line drawing he’d given her in Grendel’s.
“No, seriously. I have nothing to say. I like to draw. That’s all.”
“What?” She had never heard anyone admit to such a thing. Jonah had been all ideas; he’d never stopped talking. “That can’t be true.”
Collin teased, “You think I’m tragic!”
Guilty again. “No, that’s not what I meant!”
“I don’t need ideas,” Collin declared. “I don’t need theories in my life.”
“What do you need, then?” she asked, partly curious, partly fishing.
Was he supposed to say you? All I need is you? He answered, “Just a box of chalk.”
“You’re funny.”
“I’m serious,” he said, as he caressed her hand.
—
The world was brighter now, and strange. She saw rabbit prints on the clean snow, and trees of diamonds glittering. When the last bell rang, kids flooded the staircases, and she could lose herself in the crowd, forgetting books and lessons as her students surged around her. Thrilled to leave, she was becoming just like them.
She took Collin to Burdick’s in the Square. He had never had such da
rk hot chocolate. She took him to Upstairs on the Square just two flights up, but a world away from Grendel’s. The dining room all pink and gold, with marble-topped tables and gilt fireplaces.
Every object in her apartment had a history. Her furniture came from the 1950s. The atomic clock on the kitchen wall came from Finland. She had a Narnia chess set—Aslan and his fauns carved of ebony, arrayed against the White Queen and her henchmen cut in alabaster. When Nina was ten, her father had promised her the set if she could beat him, and then relented when she fought him to a draw.
On her bookcase she kept a framed drawing of her father, a pen-and-ink caricature by Al Hirschfeld, an artist Collin didn’t know. Collin studied her father’s cartoon face, his dark eyes, his curly hair, his exaggerated nose. She told him, “If you look here, you can find my name.”
Sure enough, Hirschfeld had hidden the name Nina in Viktor’s bushy brow.
In the moment, none of this seemed strange. She had beautiful things, but she piled her dishes in the sink like everybody else. When they were together he felt at home. White kitchen, river view, clean sheets. Then he got back to his own place, and he felt like a hobbit living underground. He stood in disbelief on his own threshold, taking in the mousetraps in the kitchen and the dank, shared bathroom. Reentry required several beers. He would sit on Darius’s salvaged couch and he would blast Bent Shapes, and draw until he collapsed into his unmade bed.
Never in his life had he devoted so much time to anyone; he barely saw his friends; he abandoned his old haunts—but his behavior didn’t seem unusual to Nina. Always, in her quiet way, she wanted more. When she couldn’t reach him, she texted, IMY.
Alarmed, he typed, Dont do that!
The next time they saw each other she asked, “What’s wrong with saying I miss you? It’s just a fact.”
But it wasn’t a fact for him. It was a demand. He read IMY as “I want more of you.” He told her, “This is all the time I have.”
“I understand,” she said, but she didn’t, really.
“I can’t be with you every minute of the day,” he told her.
She shot back, “I know! I never asked you to.”
She got skittish. She needed reassurance—not just words but hours, entire afternoons. Day to day they held each other in suspense. He had to back off and breathe. She wanted to know him better, to unfold their friendship like a map. What else could he give her? Sometimes the question scared him. Sometimes the answer came easily. He would give himself.
On a slushy day in late January he met her after school and said, “I want to show you something.”
It was drizzly cold as he hurried her up Cambridge Street, past the fabric store, and the senior center, the Portuguese savings and loan. They dashed across Hampshire in the rain. The trees and bus shelters were dripping. Even the birds hunched up, wet and miserable, on telephone wires.
“Where are we going?” Nina asked.
“You’ll see.”
“Your apartment?”
“That needs fumigating first.”
“You always say that.”
“Because it’s always true.”
“I still want to see it.”
“No,” he told her. “It’s embarrassing. Emma labels all her food with skull and crossbones, and Darius forgets to flush.”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
That angered him. Of course she didn’t mind. She didn’t live there. “It’s a pit.”
“But it’s yours.”
“Exactly,” he exploded. “It’s my pit of an apartment, and I promise you won’t like it there.”
She said, “But it doesn’t matter what—”
He cut her off. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter and you wouldn’t mind. Don’t be so fucking condescending.”
He had never spoken so harshly to her. Maybe nobody had spoken to her that way before. He watched her turn and walk away toward Kendall Square.
She provoked him with her eagerness, her gentleness, her noblesse oblige. After all, what was she doing, spending time with him? He had nothing, he’d done nothing; and when Nina said she didn’t mind, she acknowledged it was true.
He watched her figure receding, and he was furious with her and with himself. He’d been planning to surprise her.
“Nina, wait.”
She didn’t turn.
“Don’t go,” he called out, as he sprinted down the street, splashing through slush puddles. His shoes were soaked when he finally caught up to her.
She spun around to face him. “I was telling the truth,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind. And didn’t you say the same thing to me about my apartment? It didn’t matter where I live?” She had been continuing the argument in her head.
Breathing hard, he took her hands in his. “Let me take you somewhere.”
She shook her head.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I’m an idiot.”
She didn’t contradict him.
“Let me start over. There’s something I have to show you.”
It was as if they’d never quarreled; his mood changed that fast. She was the one who lagged behind. His anger flared and burned out fast; hers smoldered.
He said, “I’ll take you to my place when Darius and Emma are away in Maine.”
“No, that’s okay.”
“I’ll wash everything down.”
Silence.
He almost coaxed a smile when he said, “I’ll cook.”
They retraced their steps to Antrim Street, and he led her to a dark-green triple-decker, three Victorian apartments stacked one atop the other with three porches.
Nina turned to him in surprise. “Did you tell her that…Shouldn’t you call to warn her first?”
“Why would I warn my own mother?”
She hung back. “What if it’s a bad time?”
“Sh.” He ushered her into the entrance hall and knocked on Maia’s door. “There’s no bad time.”
“Hey,” a voice called out. “Come in.”
They slipped off their wet coats and shoes and walked into a half-painted living room with all the furniture piled in the center of the floor. “Who is it?”
Collin called back, “Me.”
“Hello, you,” Maia said, as Collin led Nina into the kitchen.
“This is Nina.”
Nina felt flustered, entirely unready. It was just like Collin to spring this on her. Even so, she gazed in fascination as Maia took her hands. Collin’s mother was tall, and muscular, a dancer wearing plaid pajamas. She had close-cropped hair, showing off her small ears, her beautifully shaped head. Her almond eyes were dark, and she had a birthmark in one, a sepia ink blot in the white. Nina saw the mark, and immediately forgot it, as everybody did.
Maia ushered Nina in with such warmth that Collin shook his head in silent warning.
“She’s so pretty,” Maia whispered when he followed her to the hall closet with the coats.
He shot her a look. “Don’t screw up.”
“That’s just what I was going to say to you.”
In the kitchen Maia poured them each a glass of wine.
Collin asked his mother, “What are you doing with the living room?”
“You don’t like the green?”
“I think it looks like mushy guacamole.”
“Okay, thank you, sweetheart.” Maia turned to Nina. “I’m not listening to him. Peanut brittle? Caramel corn? Fruit cake?” She covered the kitchen table with Christmas gifts parents had brought her. “Try this.” She sliced homemade fruit cake, dark-spiced and walnut-studded, jeweled with candied cherries, carbuncled with pineapple.
“Wow,” said Nina. “I got candy canes.”
Maia waved her hand over her cards and deluxe candy apples, her mugs filled with gift certificates, and she told Nina, “Someday all this will be yours.”
Nina looked doubtful, and Maia laughed.
“Tell her your secrets,” Collin said.
/>
“I don’t have secrets.”
“You know what I mean. Secrets of teaching.”
“Well, the first ten years are the hardest,” Maia told Nina.
“Come on, Mom.”
“It’s humbling. I’m not gonna lie.”
“Give her something she can use.”
“Hmmm.” Maia took a long sip and set her wineglass down. “There is such a thing as reincarnation. If you teach long enough, the same kids keep coming back again.”
Nina said, “In different forms?”
“Yeah, but they’re recognizable—like, Oh, yes. I remember you. The ones who can’t keep still. The ones who don’t listen. The ones who fall in love with you.”
“That’s not advice,” Collin pointed out.
“Advice.” Maia pondered. “Be funny.”
“I’m not,” said Nina.
“Be desperate.”
“Okay, I’m good at that.”
“See, you are funny,” Maia said. “Be surprising. For example, I came in one weekend and painted my classroom purple. It’s good to blow their minds.”
“She likes paint,” Collin said.
“Yeah. If you’re wondering where he gets the art from, it’s from me.”
Maia pulled down Collin’s paintings from the refrigerator, his splotchy grade-school pictures of the river. She spread his drawings of ducks across the kitchen table. “The early years. See how he did the webbed feet?”
“I should have warned you,” Collin told Nina. “She keeps all my old stuff.”
“I’d keep the new stuff too,” Maia said serenely. “Oh, wait. You work in chalk.”
“I like chalk.”
“I like a green living room.”
“That green is way too blue.”
Maia watched Collin pace the kitchen and drink another glass of wine. “Come back and see it in the light.”
“It won’t work in daylight either.” Collin swiped a kitchen towel, soaking it in water.
Maia said, “If you want a rag, look under the sink.”
Collin ignored this and disappeared into his old bedroom for socks and shoes. “Come on.” He ushered Nina to the entry, where he opened the cellar door and pulled the light string.