And if she didn’t look when she crossed the street, it was because she was too preoccupied, thinking of ways she might shock or demolish her school.
There had to be a sort of dangerous magic at work—when she was a student, she never felt, for even a day, that the school belonged to her, or she to it; and now here she was, sitting in a bookstore, recognizing herself as one of those blessed, oblivious, coltish people who could cross a public street without looking both ways. She had read the story; she had thought, My school! But it probably wasn’t her school; there were probably at least a hundred other schools just like it, schools where students believed that if they sauntered out into the street, traffic would stop for them. Now she was inducted into that awful confederacy.
SHE HAD SCOWLED AT MR. WARREN, her history teacher, but even if she had decided to join the discussion, she wouldn’t have had much to say. Her mother remembered little about the crossing. She was six years old at the time; all she could distinctly recall were the boys, diving for coins. The boat had anchored in Hawaii, and the passengers had stood along the railing, mesmerized—or so Ms. Hempel imagined—by the harbor and the people and all the activity. For days they had seen nothing but water. The most charming attraction was the boys, balanced along the edge of the pier like birds. If you tossed a coin over the railing, the boys would tip over into the water, easy as you please, as if tumbling into sleep. Straight down they dove, until they disappeared. The passengers would lean over the railing, peering breathlessly below them. And then a sudden rushing, a breaking of the surface, and a single arm appears, a beaming face, a hand holding up a bright coin for everyone to see. The boys paddle back to the pier, hoist themselves up, resettle; they turn their faces to the boat.
“Your grandmother remembers it all much more clearly than I do,” her mother had said. “You should ask her about it.” And, although she should have known that to suggest the idea would be to instantly sabotage it, she added, “You could interview her, use a tape recorder. You could do an oral history project.”
Ms. Hempel had planned to ask her grandmother; in good moods, she had even considered the project her mother suggested. She had also planned to learn Mandarin once she reached college. She did still plan to learn it; she did still mean to ask her mother about the objects illuminated inside the case at the far end of the living room: an inkstone; a brush; a peach, carved with monkeys; a scroll.
Yurt
A YEAR AGO MS. DUFFY HAD come very close to losing it, with her homeroom right next to the construction site for the new computer lab, and her thwarted attempts to excise the Aztecs from the fifth-grade curriculum, and her ill-fated attraction to Mr. Polidori. But now, upon her return, she looked unrecognizably happy. She held court in the faculty lounge, her hair longer than ever, her big belly sitting staunchly on her lap and demanding rapt attention from everyone but her. Above the belly, Ms. Duffy laughed and swayed and acted careless with her hands, as if to say, Why, this old thing?
Ms. Hempel couldn’t take her eyes off it. It looked as tough as a gourd.
“Yemen is magical,” Ms. Duffy was saying. “Just unbelievable. The pictures—the pictures don’t capture it at all.”
A stack of parched-looking photographs circulated around the lounge. After her difficult year, Ms. Duffy had sublet her apartment and struck out for the ancient world. At first, her e-mails had been long and poetical and reasonably free of gloating, though full of figs, marketplaces, bare feet against cool tiles, shuttered naps at noon. In between classes Ms. Hempel would stand in front of the faculty bulletin board and read about Ms. Duffy’s naps, trying to detect in these messages a note of melancholy, of homesickness. Miss you all!! Ms. Duffy would write in closing, but the absence of a subject, as well as the excessive punctuation, made the sentiment seem less heartfelt. And then the e-mails stopped arriving altogether.
Ms. Hempel studied the photograph that had been passed to her: a blazingly bright and empty street with the tiny figure of Ms. Duffy standing at its center. Who had taken the picture—a Yemenese friend? A Yemenan? Both sounded lovely, though incorrect. It seemed important to know who had stood in the shade of those massive, intricate buildings and held the camera. Perhaps this was the first of many foreign transactions that would result, so spectacularly, in Ms. Duffy’s new belly.
Ms. Hempel waved the photograph in the air. “Anna, where was this one taken?”
But Ms. Duffy wasn’t able to answer as one after another, colleagues came in and embraced her. “You astound me!” Mrs. Willoughby said, pressing her clasped hands to her lips, a gesture she normally bestowed upon seniors who were making their final appearance in the spring choral concert. Ms. Duffy looked easily as triumphant and beautiful as them. Her face shone; her long light hair flared out behind her; gone was the faint grimace that had once been her expression in repose. The change seemed complete and irreversible; this wasn’t like the first week of school, when the teachers wore shorts and sundresses and still had their summer tans. Ms. Hempel remembered the shock of seeing Mr. Polidori’s firm, hairy calves rising up from a pair of glistening orange sneakers—but within days, everyone looked haggard again and it was as if summer had never happened.
“Have you seen your kids?” asked Ms. Cruz, the assistant librarian. “They’ll go crazy.”
“They will freak!” Ms. Mulcahy said. “Suzanne, where’s the sixth grade now? Are they at lunch?”
“Gym. That’s all I’ve heard this year:
