Little Children Read Free

join the Peace Corps, or even figure out a way to climb onto the Internet gravy train like everybody else.
    What did her in was the teaching. Some people loved it, of course, loved the sound of their own voices, the chance to display their cleverness to a captive audience. And then there were the instructors like herself, who simply couldn’t communicate in a classroom setting. They made one point over and over with mind-numbing insistence, or else they circled around a dozen half-articulated ideas without landing on a single one. They read woodenly from prepared notes, or got lost in their muddled syntax while attempting to speak off the cuff. God help them if they attempted a joke. The faces looking back at them might be bored or confused or hostile, but mostly they were just full of pity. That’s what she got from her two semesters of teaching: enough pity to last her a lifetime.
    Broke and demoralized, Sarah quit school and landed back at Starbucks, this time with a seriously diminished sense of herself and her future. She was a failure, a twenty-six-year-old woman of still-ambiguous sexuality who had just discovered that she wasn’t nearly as smart as she’d thought she was. I am a painfully ordinary person , she reminded herself on a daily basis, destined to live a painfully ordinary life .
    As if to illustrate this humbling lesson, her old lover Amelia walked into Starbucks one chilly afternoon that fall. She looked absolutely radiant, with a strong-jawed Korean husband standing proudly beside her, and a plump, wide-eyed baby strapped to her chest in a forward-facing contraption. The two women recognized each other right away. Amelia froze in the doorway, exchanging a searching look with Sarah across the length of the floor.
    Sarah smiled sadly, trying to acknowledge the strangeness and emotional richness of the moment, but Amelia didn’t smile back. Her face—it was fuller, less girlish, with a touch of fatigue around the eyes—didn’t betray the slightest sign of desire or regret or even simple surprise. All Sarah could find on it was a familiar look of pity, as if Amelia were just another bored freshman who didn’t know what the hell the teacher was going on about. She whispered something to her husband, who cast a quick, startled glance at Sarah before mouthing the word, Really ? Amelia shrugged, as if she didn’t understand how it was possible that she even knew this pathetic woman in the green apron, let alone that they’d once danced to Aretha Franklin in their underwear and collapsed onto a narrow bed in a fit of giggles that seemed like it would never stop. At least that’s what Sarah hoped Amelia was remembering as the perfect little family retreated out the door, leaving her to fake a smile at the next person in line and explain for the umpteenth time that there was no such thing as “small” at Starbucks.
    That , she would have explained to the other mothers, was my moment of weakness . Except that it wasn’t really a moment. It lasted all through that winter and into the following spring, which was when Richard stepped up to the counter one tedious morning—he was a regular, a middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed beard and an air of quiet authority—and asked if she was having as bad a day as he was, which for some reason felt like the first kind thing anyone had said to her in years. And that was how she’d ended up at this godforsaken playground.
     
    Sarah knelt down and began slowly gathering up the vast assortment of crap that had been disgorged from the diaper bag. She knew she should have asked Lucy to help—at three, a child was old enough to begin taking responsibility for the messes she’d created—but asserting this principle was hardly worth the risk of provoking another tantrum.
    Besides, the less help she got, the longer she could stay on the ground, away from the accusatory faces of the other mothers, letting the sharp edges of the wood chips dig even deeper into her