“Oh please,” Ms. Hempel said. “I’m not your teacher anymore.” And the two of them tried to laugh.
But herein lay their problem, precisely—if she wasn’t Sophie’s teacher, then who was she? And who was Sophie now, if not a bright-eyed seventh grader? A girl in too much makeup, a girl with a perfect behind. A girl who was taking an undetermined amount of time off from college and manning the front desk of a health club, where she offered up towels to busy people in ties (and the teacher felt a sure prick of disappointment upon hearing this). But they couldn’t let each other go; they couldn’t pass with just a startled wave and a smile. Though that would have been the gentler way! Instead of all the anxious pawing, the sniffing around, as each tried to dig up what was dearly buried in the other.
Ms. Hempel wished she could summon up the old, fearful, Sophie feeling. That slight tightening in her stomach, as if at the sound of a distant alarm, an invisible trip wire set off by the batting of Sophie’s eyelashes or the rolling of her enormous eyes. The fluttering eyelashes were on display all the time; but the eye-rolling she would catch only fleetingly, on rare occasions, just as she was turning back to the blackboard or ushering her class out the door. Those tricky looks! They made Ms. Hempel afraid. As if Sophie’s coyness and fawning were merely her flimsy disguise for a violent, barely controlled contempt. At any moment this derision might be unleashed—and her teacher would be dead meat. Her drooping tights; her hysterical hand gestures; her insistence that everyone, everyone, finish their outlines by Friday! In other words, Ms. Hempel was just begging to be laid out, flattened—no, obliterated—by Sophie’s rolling eyeballs. Remember you’re the grown-up, Ms. Hempel would reason. All the power is yours. You give out detention, you give out grades, bathroom passes, chocolate bars—you’re in charge! While she, she’s only a child.
Monologues that were of little help or solace.
True, Sophie was a child; but she was also a person, a young one but a definite person nonetheless. This was the feeling that Ms. Hempel couldn’t shake: a conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they were most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all of those thrumming, radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced at dissembling. Even Sophie, consummate performer, was as transparent as glass. The terror, the thrill, of encountering such superiority in its undiluted form! Those baby-doll eyes just shimmering with scorn. Ms. Hempel was regularly undone. But any other encounter proved no less shattering: in Cilla Matsui, with sympathy; in Emily Radinsky, with genius; in Jonathan Hamish, with wildness and beauty and torment.
“Does this mean I can call you Beatrice now?” Sophie asked, and Beatrice said yes, thus ending the search. The dimpling and disdainful child—the person—was nowhere to be found. This clean young woman was standing in her place. “Finally! Beatrice. It’s funny, because I always kind of thought we should call you that, and now that I can, it sounds completely strange.”
“You thought of me as a kid?” Beatrice asked, brushing off some bagel crumbs that had found their way to the front of her shirt. “Inexperienced, maybe? Or just lacking authority?”
And as much as it might have sounded like a question she would have asked in her past—a question frankly in search of assurances or compliments—she was asking it now because she was simply interested, and felt nothing but a cool curiosity, as if she were inquiring about a person quite separate from herself.
“No,” said Sophie, “you were like a real teacher. That wasn’t why.” She paused to think. “I guess I felt that way because we were close to you.”
Beatrice looked up, stunned by this kindness, but Sophie appeared to have taken no notice of it.
“I don’t know why I even asked. As if I could ever get used to calling you anything but Ms. Hempel. That’s ironic, isn’t it? We still think of you as Ms. Hempel and we’re almost the same age you were when you started teaching us.”
Could that be possible? Was she really that young? Of course, at the time she had felt washed up, nearly ruined. Her first birthday in the faculty lunchroom: staring dolefully at a little tub of rice pudding and sighing, “I can’t believe I’m turning the big two-four,” and Mrs. Willoughby, upon hearing this, hooting with laughter.
“Not quite the same age,” Beatrice said. “In a few more years.”
“Well, close enough. We’ll be there soon. The point is I was over at Jonathan’s and we were all sitting around talking—”
“Jonathan?” Beatrice said. “Jonathan Hamish?”
“I know. Weird. There’s sort of a group of us—Elias, Roderick, Julia Rizzo—how random is that? And Robert Levy-Cohen. He goes by Bob now. Remember how quiet he used to be all the time? Well, it turns out he’s crazy. Completely hilarious…” Sophie smiled to herself, and began drifting once again toward that dark, blank space that Beatrice realized she did not in any way wish to see further illuminated. Whatever they were up to in their newfound adulthood, she did not want to know. The dusky parks, the shifting neighborhoods, the old bedrooms and kitchens, emptied of parents.… She found herself wrapping her cardigan more tightly around her in some sort of feeble precautionary measure. Meanwhile, Sophie made her way back to the bright sidewalk. “You know, when everyone graduated, it was like we couldn’t wait to get out of there, to meet actual new people. But then after the first year or so, the first few years, we all started coming home and hanging out again. It’s not as pathetic as it
