She laughed suddenly, a pretty sound.
“So I was telling this to my friend the other night, and he says that either I’m paranoid or a total narcissist. He’s still trying to figure it out.”
Sophie couldn’t help smiling slightly to herself at the mention of this unnamed friend, this friend who was contemplating her personality disorders. Ms. Hempel knew that happy, inward look. That buzzy feeling. And she knew that if Sophie was gazing so softly and fondly at her now, on this sunny, dirty block lined with its malodorous ginkgo trees, it was only because Sophie had spoken of her to this friend, and that she and anthrax and the United States Constitution had all been graced, made golden, by his skeptical attention.
“But seriously,” said Sophie. “Didn’t that freak you out?”
Well, yes, it freaked her out. Sure it did. It freaked her out to remember that the most terrible things in the world had once been her handy tools for the sharpening of critical-thinking skills, the assigning of argumentative essays, the fostering of middle school debate. Frequent visitors in her classroom, the theoretical terrorists—they dropped in all the time. Her innocence (stupidity?) was astounding. About everything—dangers outside and in. To think that she once found Travis Bent’s misanthropy endearing! His gloomy looks, his jittering leg, his bloody works of fiction. Now she’d have to report him. When he was put on medication, he took to signing his name as “Travis Bent, 50 mg”—and she thought it droll. But everything had changed. A kid couldn’t be left to his own odd and unsociable ways; a teacher couldn’t call upon the phantom terrorists to illustrate a point. The delicate, treacherous scrim was torn. Three parents from her school had been lost. And what an oblivious twit she’d been for all those years, leading her little ducks on picnic outings along the brink of the abyss. From the great distance of her thirties, she peered down and saw the tiny figures playing kickball while behind them opened up an immense and roiling pit of darkness. It made her sweat, that picture in her head. Then again, a certain well-scrubbed sort of blue autumn morning gave her pause, too.
What was she doing, procreating? Looking at trees? What in the world was she doing.…
Before her stood Sophie Lohmann, survivor: of the seventh grade, of Ms. Hempel’s innocence, of the hazardous times that had befallen everyone since then. Sophie, searching through a dainty handbag for her phone. Standing there pristinely on the sidewalk, she looked indestructible and full of secrets. The phone kept humming, humming, humming until she pinched it savagely and it stopped. The little strap was hoisted back up onto her shoulder, the purse tucked beneath her armpit like a football. Its color was pale orange, like the swirling patterns in her skirt.
“Sorry about that,” said Sophie, frowning. It wasn’t her friend who had called; someone else. She swept back her hair, shaking off an invisible dusting of filth. “So, Ms. Hempel,” she said seriously. “You’re done with graduate school? You’re teaching college now?”
Ms. Hempel hesitated, half pleased and half chagrined. For how kind it was of them, her former students, to remember these things, to keep track of her muddled goals and aspirations! “No, no. Not at all. I sort of changed direction.” And how complicated it was for her to explain where she happened to find herself now. “The program wasn’t really what I’d expected. We didn’t spend a lot of time reading actual novels.” Just slim little volumes of theory—and not of the congenial French variety—as well as religious pamphlets, etiquette manuals, ship manifests, broadsides, classified advertisements. Who knew that the definition of literary text had become quite so all-encompassing? It was her own fault. When Mr. Polidori left the science department to earn his master’s in—of all beautiful things—music composition, she had thought, Aha! School would save her. A noble exit, provided by her lifelong commitment to learning. She made a dash for the escape hatch. “And I was a redundancy. Nobody wants to see another dissertation about the Brontë sisters or the Shakespeare romance plays or Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”
“That’s terrible!” cried Sophie. “I love Shakespeare.”
“I’m a dropout!” Ms. Hempel announced good-naturedly.
Sophie found this perturbing. Her eyebrows twitched. “Do you think they’ll let you back in?”
“I found something else to do,” said Ms. Hempel hazily, reluctant to trudge up her unlikely path again: the temporary job that turned without warning into a real job, the classes at night, the slow acquiring of a new vocabulary, not to mention an entirely new way of seeing. “I don’t want to go back. You shouldn’t look so worried. It’s something I like.” She then said the words that usually cheered people up: Planning. Conservation. Design. But Sophie’s tiny eyebrows refused to relax.
“Good for you,” she said finally.
“I’m on my way to the park. Isn’t that where you’re heading?”
“I live here, Ms. Hempel,” said Sophie with dignity, nodding at the long glowing row of brick fronts and brownstones, worn and well loved, in uneven states of repair. “I’m just coming home.” Oh yes; Ms. Hempel remembered. A flushed, tearful discussion in English class—what were they reading, The House on Mango Street?—about good neighborhoods and bad. But Sophie had nothing to be ashamed of now: There was a wine shop! And a sushi place. A store devoted to baby clothes made of organic cotton. Her maligned corner of the world—just look at it now. And Sophie herself had been the harbinger of all this.
“So it’s your park! How lucky you are,” Ms. Hempel said. “You must know it inside and out.”
“I don’t think I’d be much help,” Sophie said, misunderstanding. “It’s not like I hang out there. I don’t have a dog or anything. I mean, we go there sometimes, but only
