Forgot to do that, he said, and she laughed.
Or did she? She would like to think that she had, that she had kept her wits about her and laughed, kept things floating along lightly, the encounter accidental and jolly. She would like to think that she hadn’t swooned. Hadn’t shut her eyes and given way, tipped her head and held on. There was no hesitation—only treachery, only readiness—a perfect swan dive into the dark pool of flings and affairs. Maybe she had let out a little moan. But then the song came to an end, and he clasped her bearishly, pecked her on the forehead, said: I bet you make all the boys crazy, Ms. Hempel. And after releasing the latch, gallantly held the door open for her.
She walked, obedient, to her seat at the bar, wondering, What just happened?
Later, she would return to this moment, flipping it back and forth like a tricky flash card, one that somehow refused to be memorized. She asked herself all the boring questions (not pretty enough? odd smell? fiancé?) but couldn’t quite manage an answer. Causality kept escaping her. He kissed her, then he changed his mind—that was as far as she ever got. But always fascinating to her was the fact that she could feel him changing his mind. Feel it in her muscles and on her skin. Not that he did anything so obvious as stiffen, and his body didn’t once let go of hers; yet something shifted: the pressure that was once excited now merely emphatic, the mouth still warm but only reassuringly so, the embrace turning into a squeeze. His body’s gracious withdrawal of interest in the very moment that he decided, No, this really isn’t for me.
And though many things would reveal themselves in time—the sex of Ms. Duffy’s baby, a girl; and the name, Pina, after the bleak choreographer; the name of the woman who worked at Amit’s lab, which was Lilly; the right word, the word she’d been looking for, Yemeni—still she returned to the bathroom at Mooney’s, to its perfect mystery, to the moment when Mr. Polidori wrapped his arms around her like a bear. So that was what it felt like, someone making a decision. She wanted to remember how it felt.
Satellite
MS. HEMPEL HAD A WAY with girls of a certain age. They hung around her after school; they invited her over to their houses for dinner. They sent notes at the end of the year, usually on cards they had drawn themselves. Serpentine flowers. Primitive stars. On overnight trips they asked if they could play with her hair. They showed her their poems, sought advice about boys. At Christmas they gave her poinsettias and a gift certificate for a back massage. They liked her shoes, her clothes; they liked every time she did something different with her hair. Not once did they miss her birthday. On the last day of school, they hugged her, speechlessly. But later she would read, in their purple handwriting: I’ll always remember the seventh grade.
Her sister, Maggie, found all of this difficult to believe. “I would never do that for a teacher,” she declared. “Is your school a hippie school?” She wanted to know if they had to do gym. “Can they call you Beatrice?” She narrowed her eyes. “Do they get real grades?”
“Of course they do!” Beatrice said, and snatched the birthday card back from her sister. “I failed a kid two years ago.”
Maggie returned to her puzzle book, spread out on the kitchen table. She resumed chewing the beleaguered eraser at the end of her pencil. Rotating her ankle, she kneaded her long monkey toes against the floor.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Your students sound weird.”
According to whom! But Beatrice contained herself. She gazed at her sister—the shiny, pebbled dome of her forehead, the butterfly appliqués on her mall-bought top, the chapped knuckles of her long, desiccated fingers—and thought to herself, without much pleasure, My students would eat you for breakfast.
Did Maggie even know what it meant to shape an eyebrow? To do an ollie? Would she say tuna sashimi was her favorite food ever? Would she choose Elie Wiesel as the subject for her next book report?
Probably not. She wasn’t in any hurry to become a knowing, complicated member of the world. She was content to do puzzles and enter flute competitions and behave ingratiatingly with their mother. Often Beatrice had to remind herself that her sister was the same age as the girls she taught at school. Compared to them, Maggie seemed either stunted or strangely wizened.
“No tea for me,” she said, though Beatrice hadn’t asked. She poured the boiling water into a cup and opened the refrigerator.
“Where’s the milk?”
“You’ll have to use soy,” Maggie said. “Turns out I’m lactose intolerant.”
“But we love milk,” said Beatrice. “We love all dairy products.”
“Remember last summer? The banana split?”
Beatrice nodded, haunted not by the explosive sounds emanating from the bathroom but by the hoarse moans coming from what must have been her sister. She had sounded like an old sinner on his deathbed.
“Well, that was the problem,” Maggie said.
Beatrice shook the little box of liquid soy. She shook and shook, but didn’t have any plans to open it. “Mama puts this in her coffee?”
“Mama didn’t even drink her first glass of milk,” Maggie crowed, “until she was seven years old!” No wonder she looked so pleased with her deficiency. Once upon a time, there was no such thing as milk in China! She could have stepped right out of the mythical rice fields herself. Not like Beatrice, or their brother Calvin: those shaggy, beetle-browed, milk-drinking mutts. Maggie’s hair was straight and black, her limbs as dreamily smooth as their
