That’s the one I get asked about the most.
Like the others, of course, there’s not a shred of truth to it.
—
I NEVER DID let them fire me. And, in fact, I’m not even sure they would have. I walked outside that morning, ate a cart breakfast on the piers, and for several minutes enjoyed the underbridge light show that you see from that part of Manhattan at that hour of the day. By the time I took the elevator back upstairs, HR had arrived. I brought two cups of coffee down to the sixty-fifth floor and explained to the rep what I’d decided to do.
Our life up here:
Emmy is the earliest out of bed in the morning. She rises at dawn and performs a check of the house, glancing into all our rooms, then heading downstairs to look out through the kitchen window into the barley field beyond our backyard fence, where deer in impressive numbers congregate at first light. On some mornings there are twenty-five of them. Emmy watches them while she does what she calls her meditating.
“What’s your meditating about?” I asked her one day.
“Oh,” she said, smiling patiently at me. “I don’t know. About life.”
Sometimes the deer will come close to the fence to nibble the branches of the cedars. In the yard they stare back at the spot where Emmy stands behind the glass. She’s told me about one of them in particular, a gangly white-spotted yearling who wanders into the mowed area next to the kitchen and lowers her head to eat, despite my daughter’s presence in the window. Emmy believes that this particular fawn has learned to trust her.
My wife likes the fact that Emmy believes this. She thinks it shows that she’s decided to move outward into the world.
Both kids have changed, I have to say.
Emmy’s in sixth grade now, with all the eleven-year-olds, though she’s just turned nine. When I drop her off at school in the morning, she lets go of my hand and glances up at the building, then walks halfway up the path before she turns around to look at me. I nod, like a coach sending in a new player. Not that she needs it, of course — not for her schoolwork, anyway. I imagine, actually, that she’s already capable of doing the problem sets for most of the math majors at Cornell, a campus not that far from here. But she wears this fact low, like a rabbit’s foot in her pocket. In class, she hardly speaks and on the playground she favors the boys’ games. She’s not the only girl who favors them, though, and she spends her time on the weekends with a couple of like-minded allies — shy, oily-haired, front-of-the-class girls who nonetheless like to reach barehanded into the muddy stream behind the house and pull out frogs and tadpoles and even turtles. Emmy’s what my sister used to be.
She can also multiply three six-digit numbers in her head and, from twenty-five miles away, point without hesitation straight at our house. If I ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she’ll look at me, smile, and say, “Older.” If someone else asks, she’ll answer, “A veterinarian.” And if they press, “Small animal.”
I’d like to believe it. Though I also believe she’s saying it to reassure me.
If Emmy has something to tell either of us, she’ll behave like one of her deer, sidling up alongside her mother or father the way a yearling sidles up alongside a cedar. Warily, but for the duration. Standing next to me at the sink while I rinse dishes for the washer, she’ll tell me about the bad dream she had the night before or ask what to do about the boy who called her a name at school. I, in turn, must behave like the man watching the deer. No sharp movements. No quick answers.
About Emmy’s night habits, Audra is at her wit’s end. After dinner, Emmy will dispatch her homework in fifteen minutes, then bake cookies with Audra or sit out on the porch with me until it’s time to go upstairs for her bath. Then she’ll get into bed. On her night table is a stack of books, and she’ll think very deliberately about which one she wants to read. One of us will go upstairs to kiss her good night, and later, at 2:00 a.m., that same one will generally have to rise from bed, go into her room again, and take the book from her hands. For good measure, we’ll unplug the bedside light and move the rest of the stack, too, all the way to the far side of the room. The book in her hand, by the way, is as likely to be White Fang by Jack London, as Rational Points on Elliptic Curves by Silverman and Tate. Sometimes I think Emmy has to read simply because she doesn’t know how to extinguish her thoughts. Exceed. Discover. Outdo. That’s our daughter.
As for Niels — well, he too could probably do the homework for the math major at Cornell. But it would take him longer than Emmy, and he’d emerge with a red face and a pencil broken two or three times at the tip, then in half. Niels has always been our emoter, and now the emotion he’s becoming acquainted with is frustration. He’s learned to handle it by running forward into everything — into birthday parties, into the student-council meetings, into his scout hikes, into the spelling bees and science fairs that he’s won a couple of times now.
A significant part of his success is due to the single capacity that he’s developed into something far beyond his sister’s. That is, his capacity to work. My son is a powerhouse that way — as was my father, for a time. (I also think that Niels runs so eagerly forward because he must hear the soft, quick footsteps behind him.) Niels might be able to multiply two of those six-digit numbers in his head, but I doubt he could do the third, like Emmy. But he’s learning not to let this bother him. Connect. Advance. Contribute. That’s Niels. He’s always been our social one, and now he’s turning out to be our striver, too. When I ask him what he wants to be when he grows up, he smiles winningly and says “A named professor of mechanical or electrical engineering.” When pressed further, he’ll expand: “At a Research One University.” And further still, “At Caltech, maybe, like Aunt Paulie.”
Audra, God bless her, doesn’t miss Manhattan at all. Or at least, not that she tells me. She prefers the life up here, where the biggest event of the fall is the Wildcats’ homecoming parade, and the biggest moment of the homecoming parade is the rambling, overwide turn that our local corn farmer takes onto Main Street (yes) in his half-million-dollar John Deere combine, an S-Series that he banners in Wildcats purple, pulling behind it a flatbed on which stand all the junior and senior members of the football team. They shake their purple helmets and cheer. Audra reaches up her purple sleeves and cheers them back. I know that the players appreciate her. Everybody does at school. She still has that frank South Texas charm. At Westinghouse, she teaches part-time — remedial English three afternoons a week — a schedule that allows her to spend the rest of the days at home, raising two kids who can solve Korteweg — de Vries equations in their heads but still have a hard time making their beds in the morning.
As for me, I teach my two sections of geometry, my two of trigonometry, and my one of senior calculus. I sit on the Curriculum Committee and codirect the annual PTA garage-sale fundraiser (I’m also its largest buyer). My other jobs: cross-country assistant coach; freshman counselor; Math Club adviser. The Math Club, by the way, meets five mornings a week, by request of the membership.
Do I like it? Well, yes.
Mostly.
If you’re looking for the Wall Street profiteer turned Good Samaritan in the small-town classroom — well, it hasn’t worked out that way, exactly. The truth is, I still miss Physico. Sometimes badly. It’s not so much the money (which I still have) as — I don’t know what else to call it: The Game maybe? The Juice? There was a sameness to that life, just as there’s a sameness to this one, but the sameness at Physico came with a lot more fist thumping.