“I’m afraid so,” I say, a ribbon of irrational satisfaction threatening to pull my mouth into an unprofessional smile. He cannot simply demand what he wants and expect me to give it to him. Everyone wants to think they are an exception. He grumbles while I take out the consignment forms for him to sign.
After my shift, I message Arjun. On my way over. Can’t wait to see you. Then I text Ima that I am doing homework at a friend’s house, though I skipped another few classes this week and, to be honest, am not entirely sure what my homework is. Lying to my parents has become easy, perhaps because they want so desperately to believe I am not lonely. My positive result has made me a social butterfly.
What I have realized is this: The relationships I’ve had were not about love. They weren’t even relationships. Whatever they were, they were about need, about want. A pretty girl like you should have a boyfriend, Tamar Mizrahi said. As though there is something about being pretty that makes you deserving of love. If there is, I haven’t gotten there yet. To love.
That is what I need from Arjun: a declaration, a commitment.
He doesn’t text back right away, but that’s okay. Sometimes it takes him a while to reply, but he has two dozen students to keep track of, and maybe he’s getting his apartment ready for me tonight, planning something special. After all, I did something special: I bought him a set of viola strings with my employee discount. The good kind, the kind he probably wouldn’t splurge on for himself.
It is a mystery to me when lust turns to love, when sex turns into a relationship. If a relationship means playing duets and cooking together and teaching each other words in other languages, then maybe that is exactly what Arjun and I have. Maybe love is what comes next.
Arjun could love me, I’m sure of it, and that night I make sure of it twice.
At Ima’s retirement party, Tovah and I sit in her classroom chairs made for ten-year-old bodies. It is probably the last time I will sit in a chair like this.
Next to me, Tovah grinds her teeth.
“Can you stop?” I ask. “Do you have any idea how annoying that is?”
“No. I can’t.”
Some of Ima’s former students are here. “Mrs. S was the best teacher I’ve ever had,” says a twentysomething guy speaking in front of the room. “I hated math, but she wouldn’t give up until I got my multiplication tables right. And now . . . I’m getting a PhD in math!” He holds up his hands and wiggles his fingers. “I don’t count on my fingers anymore, Mrs. S!”
Finally, Ima gets up to make a speech. Her aide, Jackie, who’s already taken over her classroom, gives her shoulder a pat. Ima grips the edge of the podium, but when her body shakes, she sinks back down in her chair.
“This is a little . . . difficult . . . for me to do,” she says. The bandage is off, thank God, but she still doesn’t look like herself. She staggers and slurs her speech and needs Aba’s help getting dressed in the morning. “I love teaching. I didn’t have a big family growing up, and teaching is like having a huge family. I’m going to miss this so much, but I need this time to spend with my family. My husband . . . Mark . . . and my two talented, intelligent, beautiful girls.”
Matt. My father’s name is Matt, not Mark.
The speech ends and kids’ parents start distributing slices of the WE LOVE YOU, MRS. S cake. Ima gets the first piece, which she promptly chokes on. Aba thumps on her back, and her mouth drops open to reveal a chewed-up yellow mass that gets all over her chin and blouse.
I push out my chair, the legs squealing across the linoleum, and race for the door. My boot hitches on the threshold, and I stumble into the hall, righting myself before I fall. Panic flares through me. Clumsy again? I vow to be even more careful. It was stupid of me not to pay attention to where I was going.
Self-portraits cover the bulletin board outside the classroom. Distorted eyeballs and noses and wacky hair and skin colored green and blue. My mother’s distorted too, though not yet quite as alien as these drawings. She will continue to become less and less familiar to me. I dig for good memories: when she chattered at five times her normal speed and volume with Tamar and her other Israeli friends or sang songs in Hebrew to herself as she cooked shakshuka or showed me my first movie with Gregory Peck, whom she admitted was her first crush.
I want that old Ima back so desperately that even the calloused pads of my fingers ache. One day she won’t even know who I am. She spent eighteen hours in labor before Tovah and I decided we were ready for the world. Tovah first, and then an emergency C-section for me, since I was a miniature contortionist. She has the scars to prove it. How can someone forget all that?
Part of me, a dreadful part, hopes Ima isn’t lucid enough when I start to show symptoms. She might be in a home then, eating meals through a tube. Someone—Aba? Tovah?—will tell her what I’ve done and she will be too far gone to react.
How were your students? I used to ask my mother. What will I ask her now?
Kids . . .
Even if I get married someday, if I have time for it, I will never have kids of my own. I couldn’t pass on my fifty–fifty chance to someone else. I’ve never allowed myself to ponder whether I want them. Sometimes I think I could be a good parent to a musical child. But more likely, I would be a terrible, selfish mother, too absorbed in my own life to be responsible for another human being.
Still, I would have been grateful for the chance to consider it.
None of that matters now, I remind myself. There is no room
for doubt in my beautiful new life.
My phone lights up with an e-mail, and the words on the screen change everything. They make me forget about babies and the impossibility of my stomach growing big.
I have an audition at the Manhattan School of Music in March.
Inside my chest, a tiny orchestra bursts to life with “Spring,” the sunniest of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I read the e-mail over and over, making sure it’s true. The orchestra plays louder and louder and louder and yes, I want to shout. Yes.
When I glide back into the classroom, I watch the threshold to make sure I don’t trip. But my sunny mood storms over when I nearly run into Tovah, who is being fawned over by our old fourth-grade teacher.