Hold Still (11 page)

“Good morning,” Maya says. She straightens her legs and hops slowly from the desk. “You ready?”

He nods. “I think I am.”

“The plans look great.” She has them printed out and holds them now to show him. Five pages single-spaced. He's broken the time up into painstaking ten-minute increments.

His nose scrunches and his ears redden. “I thought I'd go off-script a bit,” he says. “Maybe just discuss the story and then I'd assign a sort of reader's response.”

“Sounds good,” says Maya. Her book's still open and she runs her thumbs along the pages, dropping his script back onto her desk.

“I love this story,” he says, taking off his glasses. He lifts his shirt to rub his lenses. He always wears the glasses and she likes the look of him without them. His abdomen—the bottom part, just above his jeans—appears from underneath his shirt as he
wipes carefully. His skin is taut along his hip, darker than she'd figured, firm.

Maya fixes her eyes on the snow that comes down in tiny flakes outside and holds her hands firmly on either side of the open book.

Two girls come tittering through the hallway, peacoats, soft black stretch pants. They come into the classroom; Jackie is the chubbier, the more self-conscious, and the smarter, and Chloe—the smaller girl, the one who wears a bright splash of sometimes pink and sometimes red lipstick, even with her T-shirt and sweatpants and artfully messed-up hair, who raises her hand before thinking of what she'll say—Maya has ignored her hand a few times, looking out the window as she lectures, waiting for the other, more insightful kids to speak.

More kids shuffle in over the next few minutes. There are the few who are two and then five minutes late and they avert their eyes from Maya, who makes a big speech at the beginning of each semester about her strict lateness policy and then is terrible about docking or scolding them as the semester proceeds. Their coats and hair and shoes all have tiny snow splotches. Their faces are all flushed and damp.

Charles is patient. He looks down at his notes, then over at Maya once they're seated, still shuffling, murmuring to one another, zipping and unzipping bags.

He welcomes them, stumbling a little, mumbling. His book is open on the desk and he lifts it as he dives into discussion. He looks up at them, makes eye contact with Chloe, then a couple of kids near the back. His is the same copy,
Where I'm Calling From
, that Maya has. Maya sits at one of the desks in the front of the classroom. She pulls her feet up on the chair, then places them back on the floor. She watches Charles carefully, feels the
students' attentions wander at first, then grow steady on him. He's careful, speaks slowly, makes a point to look up from the text and around the room as he speaks. He brings his palms together and holds his index fingers firm against his chin.

He's delicate with the final pieces of the story, the nuances of the main character's ambivalence, that moment Maya's always loved or hated depending on the men in her life—the point at which the man's wife falls asleep and then her robe falls open. And he goes to close it, before realizing the other man is blind, and just leaves the robe as it is.

“Charl—” Jackie says, and then stops herself. “Professor Mega-
los.” He's red, a little on the tops of his cheeks and ears, and Maya wonders if they've had a dalliance, if maybe they've been together, if maybe things unbecoming to their student-teacher interaction have taken place. Briefly, she feels something she doesn't recognize at first, but then sees and is amused and then uncertain: jealousy.

“Do you think we're supposed to like the narrator?” Jackie asks him.

Charles smirks and his shoulders square. He's prepared for this. Perhaps he will not blunder; perhaps one day he'll find and do all that he meant. She hopes this for him as he bounds through the answer. She hopes this in a way that's overwhelming and complete.

“I'm not sure it matters,” finishes Charles, “though, especially with Carver, I've thought a lot about this.” He turns toward the class, addressing all of them, bringing them in. “Do you guys like him?” He'll be a good teacher, she thinks. He will find his way.

A couple of the girls shake their heads; one nods. Jackie watches, interested but not willing to decide. A couple boys in back, who have hardly spoken all semester, shrug and look back into their books.

“Do you think you'd be more engaged with the story if you liked him? Would you be more likely to return to it?”

“I think it's more interesting,” says Jackie, “him being kind of an ass.”

Charles is silent when Maya would have already jumped in to flesh the point out, but in this silence, she watches Jackie gaining strength.

“And in the end, it's more, I think. I think it's better. And that line, you know? At the end?” She flips the pages of the story. Charles, Maya, and the other kids join in. There are few things Maya enjoys more than pages shuffling. Jackie reads, “‘I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn't feel like I was inside anything.'”

Jackie glances briefly at Maya, then back at Charles. “I don't know what it means,” she says. “It doesn't even make any real kind of sense, you know? But it's exactly right, I think.”

Maya sighs. Charles nods and sits up on the desk. “Yeah,” he says. He's smiling. “It is, isn't it?”

Maya breathes out long and grins.

“You did wonderfully,” she says when the room has emptied. She feels happy, maybe. Strong.

She takes hold of his arm and finds herself standing too close to him. She can smell his soap, a little sweat; she thinks that she can feel the churning of his excitement.

“Thanks,” he says. He curls his neck down and curves his shoulders. She wants to hold his chin, to lift it up and make his shoulders square again.
Stand up straight!
she wants to say.

And he does look up and then down at her face.

They are very close. She leans toward him. There is a single, closed-mouth kiss.

Summer 2011

“Y
ou're so grown up!” Annie says, then laughs at herself. She's waiting at the bottom of the escalator near the baggage claim, off to the right of where the drivers stand in suits with signs. She bounds toward Ellie when Ellie is still five steps from the floor. Annie wears yellow Bermuda shorts and a white tunic, flip-flops—her hair is pulled back off her face—sunglasses perched atop her head. She's thin the way lots of yoga in your forties makes you thin. No part of her looks like an accident.

“Of course you are,” she says. She has a wide mouth, a great big smile. She reaches for one of Ellie's bags and slings it over her shoulder. “I'm not sure when I got so old!”

And she is old, older than Ellie expected. Her face is tan and lines form around her eyes when she smiles. There are two creases on her forehead that remain even when she's looking straight ahead.

It's been years since Ellie's seen her. They used to come down at least twice a year when she and Ben were small. But for a while
after that Annie was traveling. She sent Ellie's mom emails from different places Ellie had never heard of, the names of which Ellie liked to repeat quietly to herself for days—Luang Prabang, Phnom Penh, Vientiane—the way the syllables slipped into one another, the way their endings slid along her tongue. Then she was in San Francisco, then New Orleans. She'd moved around a bunch and then suddenly she'd come back here when Ellie was ten. She'd met her husband and took over the restaurant that had previously been owned by her parents. She'd had a kid. But in Ellie's head she was still young and gorgeous in a silk backless wedding dress that had clung to her as if there were nothing about her that was not worth showing. She'd had her hair down and all crimped and artfully messy, blowing in her face; she'd been barefoot on the beach. El's mom had made a speech during the reception; Annie had clasped her hands in front of her chest and grinned, her husband, younger by a couple of years, handsome with long thick sun-streaked floppy hair, in flip-flops and beige linen, had leaned over and kissed her cheek, his hand big and firm on her bare back.

“You're your mom,” Annie says.

Ellie bristles for a minute, pulling out from the embrace Annie has so readily given her; she shakes her head. “No one says that,” Ellie says.

“Oh, no, you are,” Annie says. “She was about your age when I met her. You had to know her then. She's always that age in my head. Time passes and all that. But, this, you.” Annie swings her hand in front of Ellie, her fingers long and thin.

Ellie angles her pinkie finger into her mouth and bites down on the little that remains of her nail. “Maybe.” She repositions her backpack on her shoulder and glances at the conveyer belt that has just begun rotating, searching for, then grabbing her bag.

“The flight was okay?” Annie moves to help, but Ellie pulls free of her. They walk toward the automatic doors.

“Sure,” Ellie says. Her immediate reaction is to firm and harden. Annie's tone, her trying, it's too much like Ellie's mom.

“The car's just out here,” Annie says as the doors swish open and they enter the thick humid air. Ellie's forgotten the feel of summer in Florida, like the air's so wet and thick it's lapping at you, dulling your senses and weighing down your limbs. Annie's car is a convertible. It's a small black VW Bug, and as Ellie settles into the beige leather seat Annie starts the car and unlatches each side of the top, reaching over Ellie briefly, her shoulder almost brushing Ellie's nose; she presses a button, quiet, as the top folds back into the trunk.

“Nice,” says Ellie.

Annie nods. “Jeff hates it.” They start driving, through the parking lot and out onto the highway. Ellie hasn't been down here in a couple of years; there wasn't time or space enough for such things with everyone so busy trying to
Save Ellie From Herself
. But it's all exactly like it's always been, the heat and the moisture, overgrown grass, short stretches of trees, the rolling too-bright green of golf courses, concrete walls in front of rows of cookie-cutter—beige, brown, green, repeat—houses of the same concrete.

It's forty minutes to Annie's, but they have to stop halfway there to put the top up as a cloud comes out of nowhere—a big loud Florida storm that rains torrentially for fifteen minutes before they're clear of it. Annie reaches past Ellie to relatch the car's top and Ellie presses herself hard against the seat to be sure their skin doesn't brush.

“He doesn't hate it,” Annie says. It takes Ellie a minute to realize to whom Annie's referring. It's been half an hour since the comment about Jeff hating the car. “He just gets worried about
me and Jack. He thinks I drive too fast.” Ellie's eyes wander to the speedometer. Annie's been going ninety the whole trip. Annie laughs, watching Ellie's eyes. “I'm better with Jack.” She reaches up to the thick expanse of plastic that stretches across the middle of the car. “We have the roll bar. I always make him wear his seat belt and sit in his booster. It's not much different from any other car.” Annie keeps one hand on the roll bar, arching her back and rolling her head down to her chest and then right and left, ears against shoulders. She turns and winks at Ellie. “The fresh air's good for us.”

She looks a little younger than forty now, though when Ellie does the math she realizes she must be closer to forty-three or -four. Ellie's mom was twenty-two when she was Annie's teacher. They're only six years apart.

“How's everyone?” Annie asks her. “Your mom?”

“Fine,” says Ellie. It's her father's least favorite word. He says it doesn't mean anything. But Ellie's not sure what or how much she wants to give Annie yet.

Annie nods.

“And you? How are you?”

Ellie wants to ask her what she knows, how much her mom has told her, how much she's left out. She thinks, briefly, of telling her the whole thing start to finish, just to see if she's still willing to let her near her kid.

“I'm fine,” El says.

“Right,” Annie says.

Ellie holds her right arm out the window. She straightens her elbow and moves her hand in waves up and down as they hit the exit and head toward Annie's house. It's the same exit that takes them to her mom's.

“You know, just trying to be Good this time,” Ellie says. She
smiles straight ahead. “I'm the Great Struggle of all their lives.” She keeps her voice low as she says the last part and her eyes roll up higher in her head.

“Hmmm,” says Annie. “I used to be one of those.”

At Annie's wedding: Ellie'd worn a yellow dress that she'd loved when she'd found it with her mom in a little store near their house in Brooklyn. It was a simple sheath but flared at the waist with lines of slightly brighter yellows folded in. Her mom had told her she looked beautiful and she'd believed her. She'd been grinning, proud, as the saleslady stood behind her watching when she'd tried it on. They'd done her hair up in a simple twist. She'd worn drop pearl earrings that were her mom's, and she'd felt grown-up the whole ride to the wedding. Benny wore a blue bow tie and El had held his hand. She'd liked the feel of her mom so close to her and proud to be there, other people smiling down at her and then up at her mom. But then everyone had gotten quiet and Annie had come up over the dunes all by herself and perfect, not looking like a bride at all. Her dress was nothing like the ones Ellie had seen in pictures or at the handful of other weddings they'd been to. She didn't wear a veil. The dress had thick twisted straps and the neckline bunched down into her chest. It was a perfect cream, falling down her body with no ornamentation until below her waist. Then, just above her knees, layers of thin lace fell one atop the other, blowing in the ocean's breeze. And every face, hands reaching up to shade against the setting sun, smiled, eyes focused on Annie. And Ellie felt herself begin to disappear.