Page 19
She wore the floral dress with the cardigan over it because it was warm enough for the dress and cool enough for the cardigan, and because the combination made her feel like herself without making her feel like she was trying too hard, which was the exact calibration she needed on a first day. She put on the gold necklace. Then she stood in front of the long mirror on the back of the bedroom door and looked.
Brown eyes. Dark hair, wavy and heavy, doing something reasonable for once. A face that had gotten more sleep in eleven days than it had in the previous three months.
And the rest of her, the way she had been for as long as she could remember. Soft and full and curved. Generous hips that the dress skimmed over and then let go of. Full breasts. Thighs that touched. A round softness at her stomach that no amount of walking city blocks had ever changed, and that she had stopped apologizing for somewhere around thirty. Under the dress, faint silver stretch marks traced her hips like old pencil lines. She was thirty-four years old. She had a real body, a grown woman’s body, and on most days, if she was honest, she liked it.
Today she liked it a lot. She looked like a woman about to walk into a room full of children and be exactly who she was.
She decided she would do.
She walked to school.
* * *
Merrybrook Elementary smelled like every school she’d ever been in... that combination of industrial cleaner and paper and something indefinably institutional that she had loved since she was a child and never stopped loving, because it smelled like the beginning of things. The hallways were quiet when she arrived (she was early, the kids wouldn’t come for another forty minutes) and she walked to the end of the east hallway and unlocked her classroom door and stood in the doorway for a moment.
The marigold was still on the windowsill. She’d half expected it to have wilted.
It hadn’t.
She set her bag down and got to work.
* * *
She had the classroom arranged the way she wanted it, tables in clusters of four rather than rows, supply stations at each cluster, a materials wall along the back that she’d organized yesterday afternoon, her own small desk pushed to the side because she rarely sat at it, when she heard the first sound of the day begin outside: buses, and then voices, and then the energy of children arriving somewhere they’d been all summer and simultaneously didn’t want to be and were glad about.
She went to her door.
The hallway had filled in the way hallways did on first days, suddenly, all at once, noise and backpacks and reunions conducted at a volume that suggested the children had been separated for years rather than months. She stood in her doorway and watched them and felt something settle in her chest that had no name but felt like rightness. Like a word landing in the right sentence.
She’d been a teacher for eight years. She’d spent two of them in this state of not quite belonging that had permeated everything since the city, the feeling of being adjacent to her own life rather than in it. But here, in this doorway, watching kids pour down the hallway with their enormous backpacks and their summer tans, she felt, present. Fully, actually present, in a way she hadn’t in longer than she wanted to count.
This, something in her said quietly. This is why.
She smiled at a kid who looked up at her from the hallway, uncertain. He had a Spider-Man backpack and a missing front tooth and the expression of someone trying to figure out if a new person was safe.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Ms. Hayes. Are you in art today?”
He looked at the room behind her. At the supply stations and the organized materials wall and the marigold on the windowsill that had turned, she noticed, very slightly toward the light.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “Come in. You can pick any seat.”
He went to the table closest to the window. He sat down and put his backpack on the floor and looked around the room with the attention of a child deciding whether a place was worth being interested in.
She watched him decide it was.
* * *
By nine o’clock she had twenty-two kids across three different grade levels and she knew every name. Merrybrook Elementary was small enough that art ran in mixed sessions, three grades at a time, and over the course of a week she would see every one of the two hundred and forty children in the building. The job existed at all because of an arts endowment an old Merrybrook family had left the school decades ago, which was also, Helen had explained at her third interview, why the salary was so much better than a school this size had any business paying.
This was not a skill she’d ever had to work at... names had always come easily to her, attached themselves to faces before she’d consciously decided to learn them... but it was one she never took for granted because she remembered what it felt like to be a child and have a teacher call you by the wrong name, the small erasure of it. She said each name back to each child when they introduced themselves. She connected names to details. Marcus who had the Spider-Man backpack, Lily who had a pencil case covered in horse stickers, a quiet girl in the back named Sophie who was watching everything with the alert careful attention of someone who needed to understand a place before she’d commit to being in it.
She recognized that quality. She’d had it herself, at that age. She’d mostly had it at thirty-four as well, if she was honest.
By nine thirty she had Sophie sitting at the front table voluntarily, because Allison had asked for someone to help distribute the supply sheets and Sophie had looked like she’d wanted to be asked but hadn’t wanted to volunteer, which was a distinction worth respecting.
By ten o’clock she had twenty-two kids making the first marks of the year on paper, just marks, just exploring what the pencils and pastels could do, no instructions beyond make something that feels like you, and the room had taken on the quality of a room full of people concentrating, which was one of her favorite things in the world.
