The Law of Loving Others Read Free

I would sleep late and my mother would come in around noon to wake me, ask me if I wanted breakfast. Did we want to drive to the mall to do some back-to-school shopping?
    â€œEmma,” my father said at dinner, slicing asparagus up into tiny pieces with the side of his fork, “did Mom tell you we’re thinking of redoing the basement?” He was tall and thin and balding, with a thick, graying beard.
    â€œShe didn’t.”
    â€œAt least part of it. I’ve been toying with the idea of turning the bathroom down there into a darkroom. What do you think?”
    â€œSounds cool. Are you still teaching photography at school?”
    â€œI’m not right now, but planning to in the spring. I’ll probably teach an elective just for juniors and seniors.” My father had been a history teacher at the same public school in Westchester for almost twenty years; this was also the school that I’d recently transferred out of (and his being there was not totally unrelated to why I’d left). He taught a number of different classes, though what he really loved was the comparative American-studies elective. He was beloved at the school, and yet constantly battling the administration on what he could teach and how. The central problem always came down to this: he never understood how he could possibly teach an
apolitical
history class. The simple retelling of history
was
of course a political act! It always troubled him when people didn’t understand (and this was something he had ingrained in me as a young child) how the stories put forth by textbooks year after year were the rich white man’s story, not the stories of the enslaved and underprivileged.
    My father, I could tell, was simultaneously envious and proud of the fact that I was at Oak Hill. A private school—and a Quaker one nonetheless—granted a freedom that he was unaccustomed to. It was unabashedly progressive, offered no AP courses so that teachers wouldn’t have to “teach to the test,” was the first boarding school in the country to accept people of color, and had a course catalog as thick as any small liberal arts college. (And ultimately they had offered me the most generous financial aid package, so that was why I had accepted.)
    My mother was sitting at the head of the table, her back to the refrigerator, which was crowded with magnets displaying cat jokes and photographs of various children in our extended family. She was picking some dark-meat chicken off a thigh, examining it closely, and then she looked up.
    â€œOh stop,” she said, her voice was quiet but oddly cheerful. “It’s really not their fault.”
    â€œHuh? Not
whose
fault?” I asked.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou just said, ‘It’s not their fault.’”
    â€œOh nothing, sorry.” She looked down again and scooped up a forkful of rice.
    My father brushed her wrist. “You okay, sweetheart?”
    â€œYeah, I’m fine, sorry. Just a long day, four lessons this morning, back-to-back.”
    â€œYour mom is becoming the talk of the town around here. Some crazy mother from Scarsdale called and asked if she could give a piano lesson to her two-year-old.”
    â€œNo way. The kid is actually two?” I said.
    â€œSomething like that.”
    â€œAre you gonna do it?” I asked her.
    My mother was quiet for a moment, and my father immediately interjected.
    â€œShe’ll have to see if the scheduling will work out—the kid has SAT tutoring after day care, so it might not work.”
    â€œGood one, Dad.”
    I watched as my father slid some of his chicken onto my mother’s plate, pushed it toward her with his knife. She was the kind of woman who people were always trying to feed. She had a small waist, dainty wrists, slim fingers, and even my seventy-eight-year-old grandmother was always encouraging her to eat more. Before she moved to Florida, my grandmother often came