“Then what am I supposed to do?” Beatrice opened her eyes a crack. “The whole point is to be collaborative.”
Maggie sighed, her eyes still closed. “Well. Just think of Mama. Think of Mama and me on a beach in the Caribbean.”
“Doing tai chi?”
“Okay. If you want.” She paused. “Think Aruba.”
That was easy. She could handle Aruba. White sand. Turquoise water. A scattering of cabanas. Beatrice squeezed her eyes shut and drifted over the island. She saw two little figures standing in the surf. Above her the black wind of the galaxies swept by. A passing comet showered her in sparkles. To her surprise, she was turning. And somewhere far away, her hands began to move. She tumbled through the ether like a satellite, keeping one eye fixed on the island below. White sand. Blue-green water. Her hands slid away from her. Which way was Yes? Which way was No? She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember if the board was upside-down or not. All she could do was watch the two people circling in slow motion at the edge of the sea. What was it that her sister wanted? An offshore bank account. A Princess cruise. Waves crashed, moons pulled, planets spun. Black holes swallowed everything in sight. The beautiful universe went on and on. I don’t care what she wants, Beatrice thought as her hands traveled below her and she, slowly tumbling, beamed her message into space:
Marilyn?
Papa?
Say yes.
Bump
MANY YEARS LATER, SHE WAS on her way to see some trees. A magnificent London plane tree, more than sixty-three inches in diameter, and an allée of horse chestnuts, somewhat sickly and tattered but still of interest. Of interest to her, who now spent her days thinking about such things. Gradation, drainage, compacted soil. Canopy coverage. The secret lives of city trees. They grew shadily at the perimeters of her imagination, and along the blocks she now walked to the park entrance from the station. Beautiful and various and unavoidable, trees: and yet working in the urban forest she still found great wide-open spaces in her mind where no trees grew at all. On this day, for instance, as she walked from the station to the park in a neighborhood she had no reason to visit, except for the horse chestnuts, she was thinking about something else entirely.
A girl with a wonderful butt was walking a few feet ahead of her. She didn’t even know how to assemble the phrase in her head — ass? bottom? There was no comfortable way of describing it. But seeing the girl from behind made her happy. She had first noticed her climbing the stairs from the station — her white flip-flops looking improbably clean against the grimy, gummed-up steps. Neat little ankles, lean calves. A cheap silky skirt — also white, with orange swirls — that ended just at the back of her knee. All of this moving crisply up the dirty stairs, as deliciously as a new pair of scissors biting into a sheet of paper. At the top the girl turned left and crossed over to the bright side of the street. In a stroke of fortune, she was headed toward the park. There were four whole blocks in which to wonder at her high, brisk bottom and the charming way it undulated beneath the thin material of her skirt.
Undulate? Oh help us. The word was practically dripping with oily intent. It really was impossible to walk behind a girl with a pretty butt — in objective appreciation — and not sound hopelessly slimy, even to oneself.
But a pregnant woman couldn’t be slimy. She might be constipated or gassy or luminous, but not slimy. And in her case, she was pregnant, objectively pregnant. If she found herself studying girls on the subway and the street, her gaze was not envious — she had never had neat ankles to begin with — but acquisitive. Collecting traits for the small body she was, to her deep bemusement, cultivating. She wanted nail beds that were long and narrow, shoulder blades that flared like wings. She liked freckles, thick eyelashes, feet with strong arches. On her way to see some significant trees, she was walking behind a girl and thinking, I hope its butt will look just like that.
The girl turned around.
“Ms. Hempel?”
It had been ages since anyone called her that.
“Sophie?” she asked, shocked that the person she’d been following was in fact a familiar one. Hard to imagine that this blithe creature was once stuck in the seventh grade. Sophie Lohmann. She would never forget their names, even years and years later; they were carved roughly and indelibly somewhere. “Oh, Sophie! Look at you.”
The young woman — she was not a girl anymore — smiled and retraced her steps. She held out her lovely arms for a hug.
“How are you? What’s going on? Tell me everything!” said Ms. Hempel, laughing joyfully and nervously, awash in Sophie’s lollipop perfume, surprised that even as grown-ups her girls still offered the same diffident, bony embraces as they did when they were children.
And how unexpected that Sophie Lohmann, of all those girls, should excite in her this rush of affection! Sophie with her unsettling doll-tiny features and huge kewpie eyes, now smoky with makeup. Not a soul that Ms. Hempel thought about much anymore, though at the time she had made enough of an impression. Sophie was new to the school, a new girl then. In the first few days she gave an elaborate performance of shyness and hesitancy that was later revealed to be purely perfunctory. She knew she’d be fine. How could she not be? She was cute and thin and blond and clever. Universal currency, accepted everywhere. But there was something in the pertness of her looks, or maybe it was her manner, that struck Ms. Hempel as uncanny, antiquated, as if Sophie were a resuscitated bobby-soxer with a little bit of freezer burn around the edges. On some days she would even take a curling iron to her ponytail. “Good morning, Ms. Hempel!” she’d say with a surplus of sweetness that made her blond ringlets bounce crazily about.
All that simpering — she never faltered. And she never once let her spine droop; she never slouched. Having abandoned her ballet career, she still kept a strict eye on her posture. During all-school assemblies, Ms. Hempel always knew where Sophie was sitting: the one child perfectly erect among the bodies hunched on the gymnasium floor. What else? What else came floating up out of the strange, drifting sediment? The sugary perfume made her dizzy. She couldn’t remember a lick of Sophie’s schoolwork — though maybe she did fancy covers for her book reports. There was a younger brother, in the fifth grade, who had starred in a peanut-butter commercial. A free trip to Hawaii, thanks to a magazine contest the mother had won with a photo essay about her kitchen renovation. Ms. Hempel couldn’t remember ever meeting this mother, or the father for that matter; she had no recollection of them at all. Which only heightened her sense of Sophie’s slightly concocted quality. What else. What else? Nothing more came to mind, except of course the fear: the embarrassing feeling of fear this girl had kindled in her.
“It’s so weird,” Sophie was saying. “I was just talking about that Constitution thing we did. Remember? When we went to that big courthouse downtown and everybody dressed up in jackets and ties? And we pretended to be lawyers in the Supreme Court? I was a justice; I wore a choir robe you got from Mrs. Willoughby. I think you gave me a B on the decision I wrote, which I didn’t quite understand, seeing that I worked really hard on it. But this is the important part: the whole case was about anthrax! Do remember that?”
“I do,” said Ms. Hempel, nodding rapidly, already marshaling silent arguments in defense of the ancient B. “I remember all of it.”
“So don’t you think that’s weird? Here we were, talking theoretically about anthrax. I didn’t even know what it was before then—”
To be honest, neither had Ms. Hempel. She thought Anthrax was a band who played their guitars demonically fast. But thankfully the Constitution unit came equipped with an instructor’s guide, which out of vanity she kept hidden inside a bland and unincriminating notebook.