The Woman Upstairs Read Free Page A

thunderous outbursts. My emotions, shall we say, are in their full gamut recognizable to the children, which seems to me pedagogically sound.
    It was both a great compliment and a crushing blow to have a father say to me, a couple of years back, that I perfectly fulfilled his idea of a teacher. “You’re the Gerber baby of schoolteachers” is what he actually said. “You’re the exemplar.”
    “What exactly does that mean, Ross?” I asked with a big, fake smile. It was at the end-of-year picnic, and three or four parents clustered around me in the playground’s fierce sunlight, clutching their miniature plastic lemonade bottles, daubing away at their chins or their children’s chins with ketchup-stained napkins. The hot dogs and tofu pups had already been consumed.
    “Oh, I know what he means,” said Brianna’s mom, Jackie. “He means that when we were children, everyone wanted a teacher like you. Enthusiastic, but strict. Full of ideas. A teacher who gets kids.”
    “Is that what you meant, Ross?”
    “Probably not exactly,” he said, and I was surprised to recognize that he was flirting with me. Parents at Appleton rarely flirt. “But close enough. It was intended as a compliment.”
    “Well then, thank you.”
    I’m always looking for what people are really saying. When they tell me that I “get” kids, I’m worried that they’re saying I don’t seem quite adult. The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people’s. I see what he means, and because I’ve learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that’s always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained, I’ve come to understand that grown-ups, mad or sane, ought really to be accorded the same respect. In this sense, nobody is actually crazy, just not understood. When Brianna’s mom says that I get kids, part of me puffs up like a peacock, but another part thinks she is calling me crazy. Or that, at the very least, she’s separating me from the tribe of thefully adult. And then this, in turn, will explain—if not to me then to someone who is, seerlike, in charge of explanations—why I don’t have children of my own.

    If you’d asked me, upon my graduation from high school, where I’d be at forty—and surely someone must have asked? There must be a feature tucked away in the long-lost yearbook laying out our plans for later life—I would have painted a blissful picture of the smocked artist at work in her airy studio, the children—several of them, aged perhaps five, seven and nine—frolicking in the sun-dappled garden, doubtless with a dog or two, large ones. I wouldn’t have been able to describe for you the source of income for this vision, nor any father to account for the children: men seemed, at that juncture, incidental to the stuff of life. Nor did the children require a nanny of any kind: they played miraculously well, without bickering, without ever the desire to interrupt the artist, until she was ready; and then, the obligatory and delightful picnic beneath the trees. No money, no man, no help—but in the picture there were those necessary things: the light, the work, the garden and, crucially, the children. If you’d asked me then to winnow the fantasy, to excise all that was expendable, I would’ve taken out the picnic, and the dogs, and the garden, and, under duress, the studio. A kitchen table could suffice, for the art, if need be, or an attic, or a garage. But the art and the children—they were not negotiable.
    I’m not exactly not an artist, and I don’t exactly not have children. I’ve just contrived to arrange things very poorly, or very well, depending how you look at it. I leave the kids when school gets out; I make my art—I don’t have to use the kitchen table, because I have a whole second