An Uncommon Education (12 page)

O
ne Sunday when we were thirteen, a tremendous windstorm whipped its way through New England. It was a wind from northern Canada, muscular and swift. Teddy and I were giddy with it. It was mid-March, and the winter was on its way out. We had gone to a local pond, Hammond Pond, to be outside and search for mallard nests, and Teddy’s father had given us his camera to photograph whatever we thought might be the roofs of the nest—the dry peaks the females like to tent above their eggs—so he could then look at our film to tell us what we had found. But when we arrived by the water, giggling, everything imaginable was littered with twigs and brush and broken sticks, so that the whole area was nested, the wind the author of the mess, fussing over this or that twig or branch. I took a step back and, with an exaggerated flourish, attempted to position the camera to capture the entire scene. When I put the camera down, Teddy was motionless, staring.

“Shhh,” he quieted me before I could ask what was wrong.

We stood still, both of us trying to listen for what he had heard. The wind whipped my hair across my face and flapped the hood of Teddy’s jacket against the back of his neck. And then, suddenly, I heard it: the low sounds of a duck, not quite a quack, more of a throaty, continual muttering.

An instant later Teddy pointed out what my own eyes had just landed on: one of the manmade mallard nests, tilting dangerously off its support. There were several of these constructions lining the shores of Hammond Pond; each spring, amateur conservationists rolled chicken wire that had been covered with sod into thick cylinders, then placed the cylinders onto rudimentary metal stilts that could be set into the water. This one had been partially knocked off its base during the wind storm, though it lingered there, threatening to topple.

In his heavy boots, Teddy waded into the water toward it. I don’t know why I thought immediately of disaster, but tears were already welling in my eyes as Teddy wrapped his long arms under and around the nest, lifted it with unbearable care, and brought it into the shore grasses where I stood. Then he bent his long body to the ground, set the nest to one side, and dug into a clutch of cattails, thinning them out to create an opening there. I joined him, wanting to look inside the nest to see if there were eggs there and if they were okay, but Teddy tugged on my sleeve, silently urging me to help him instead. I did, bending down to pull hard on the long stems, trying to keep myself from wondering what might have happened to the eggs.

We worked quickly, the urgency of our intrusion soon palpable. The owner of the nest had emerged from within the shrubs nearby, her black, opaque eyes unblinking as she watched us. She stood not ten feet away, rigidly attentive. The tears began to sting my eyes again. I fought against the pull of fear, forcing myself to focus on the task at hand.

When we’d dug a large enough space, Teddy settled the nest into the thinned cattails. The moment he was done we walked away quickly. After we’d covered a short distance, Teddy stopped abruptly, listening. He had put one arm across my chest to stop me as well. I looked back when he did.

The duck was sitting where she had been. But soon after we became still, she began to stir, shaking her legs out from under her, dipping her nose to the ground to investigate. A moment later she waddled over to the nest and hopped up to its edge. She bent her beak to the leaves, parting them, and a moment later disappeared within.

Teddy sat down with a thump, and immediately started laughing. I did, too, my chest releasing its fears in great breaths, my laugh ringing around and through his. I dropped to the ground, and we began tickling each other, unable to contain our joy, rolling in the mud and wind. Some of his hair caught in my mouth, and when I looked at his face there was a smudge of dirt on his forehead. These messes were intimacy to me; I would have tumbled with him forever just to acquire more. When we were tired, we lay still on our backs. He leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Do you think we saved them?” His eyes were pale amber and wide. “I think so,” I said, stroking his cheek with my finger, experimenting with a caress my father favored. In the past few weeks, kisses had become our greatest pleasure, soft and careful, like promises, and never too many at a time.

And just when it seemed we were alone in the world we were startled apart by voices, a collection of brightly colored coats, a group making its way through the woods that surrounded the pond. They had emerged only about a hundred feet away, their voices concealed and then amplified by the wind. They were carrying many things: baskets, blankets, chairs, wine, and a small dog. As we watched them, the wind grew fiercer, more assertive. And then, to our collective disbelief, the dog was whipped out from an elderly lady’s frail side, soaring out over the distance between us. We froze in stunned surprise, watching the small creature writhe in flight.

It did not seem that anything so fragile could land and not be broken. And just as I had this thought, I felt Teddy’s body lift beside me. For an instant I thought he was being taken by the wind, too, but he was jumping, high and long, reaching for the dog. I didn’t breathe, watching the space where they might just meet, though I feared it was impossible.

But a moment later the dog was in his hands, then against his chest, and then they had both fallen into the mud, a tangle of slender bones and dirty brown hues of skin and fur and hair. From the ground, Teddy looked at me, his expression unbelieving and joyful. For many years later, when I would recall all this I would remember the thrill of believing we could have saved anything that day.

I have often wondered if his father died at just that instant, just as the small impact of the dog punched into Teddy’s round chest, extinguishing his father’s heart. If the shock of the small body against Teddy’s had been too much. I hadn’t known Teddy’s father well, but I recognized that he loved his son deeply. He had even been fond of me.

When we came home later that afternoon, Teddy caught my hand again when I went to drop it from his. We usually separated once we came to our block, careful to shield his mother from something she didn’t want to see. But that afternoon we were wind-bitten and triumphant. A life had been saved. Perhaps more than one. Teddy gripped my hand tightly to communicate his confidence, and the sensation warmed and thrilled me, the sting on my cheeks spreading to heat my whole body. As we rounded the corner to his house, we saw the white-and-red back of the ambulance, all of its lights on but not flashing.

Eight

W
ithin two weeks the house was packed and sold.

The night before they moved, Teddy walked into my bedroom. “The back door was open,” he said. He crawled under the covers with me and we lay in the dark, staring at nothing. I began to cry, and Teddy found my hand. “I’ll come back,” he promised. I shook my head. “How can you?” I asked, choking on the tears and the words.

He had no answer for me, and I must have fallen asleep shortly after. Just before morning he crawled out as silently as he’d come in, almost as though he had never been there. I wanted to shout out, but I couldn’t. I was already in the dreams I would have of this moment for years, watching him leave, unable to stop him, knowing he was going as surely as I knew the sun was rising in a few minutes, bringing a bright, empty day. I stood up and found a collection of drawings he’d made of me on my desk. I sorted through each one, thinking of the way he had of placing his hands on the back of my neck and sliding them into my hair, lifting it swiftly up and back, forcing my chin to lift, displaying me to the sky. “You remind me of lemons,” he said one day a few months before they moved. He opened his book and sketched all of me in a painfully bright yellow. I did not like the effect and frowned at it. “I think I like it better when you use charcoal,” I commented.

“No,” he shook his head. “You’re just not used to your own brightness.” He scooted closer to me so that our hips were touching. “This is how I see you,” he explained, staring down at the paper. “Your face isn’t really beautiful,” he once admitted, “but it is wonderful. More wonderful than beautiful.” I remember staring down at that paper, seeing a girl with a big, uneven smile looking out at me. I had never considered that someone might see me that way—bursting with light and wonderful.

He had continued drawing as definitively as I had given it up after our week at Milnah, sketching illustrations of me sick, then himself sick, then his mother in her chair, then everything else that came into view that puzzled him. I think that by drawing life’s mysteries he could study them uninterrupted, for however long it might take him to make some sense of them.

F
or several nights after they left I didn’t sleep. My mother walked by my room once, a shadow by the time I looked, barely pausing at the sight of me lying there. It was too much misery for both of us. My father would come to check on me before he went to bed. Even though my light was off, he knew I was awake. He sat down beside me.

“A remarkable young man,” he said. “A good friend to you.” He had both of his hands on his knees, steadying himself. I knew my grief was overwhelming to him, already, and I turned from him, facing the wall. He got up a few minutes later. “Get some sleep,
ketzi
,” he said. “You have school in the morning.”

For a month I only slept fitfully. The feeling of loss grew like a stone in my chest, so that every night when I lay down, the pain became heavier, pressing into me. I taught myself to sleep with my back resting against the wall. If, one night, someone were to appear at my door, I would already be halfway up to greeting him. I was torn between the present and a dream: his father had not died, his mother had not taken him away; it was only a misunderstanding, he was home. I used these fantasies like a drug, knowing before I entered them that they were thin veils before reality, but I was too desperate to refuse them. I could make no sense of why Mrs. Rosenthal had snatched him away as she did, why she could not understand the need for friendship, especially her son’s.

Mrs. Rosenthal had acknowledged my misery by conceding a few personal details. They had gone to a new Orthodox community a short distance outside the established enclave of Lakewood, New Jersey. They could not afford to live in Lakewood, but Freehold was a new development, even more observant than Lakewood, she claimed, her shoulders back, her chin lifted with pride. She felt that Mr. Rosenthal’s death was a message to herself and to her son to increase their attention to God. He did not like a halfhearted Jew, she intoned significantly. If I were older, I would have been only mildly shocked by her implied accusations, perhaps even amused; as it was, I was sure they were leaving because I and everyone around me would never be able to measure up to the God she believed governed us all.

Both my mother and father absorbed these happenings as members of an audience at a somber play. I asked my father in the weeks after the move how we might figure a way to visit, to go see Teddy soon after they’d settled in a bit, get him back into my life before, I thought, it might be too late. Instead he told me, “Mrs. Rosenthal has made it clear she wants a clean break for the boy, Naomi,” presenting that line of reasoning as unassailable. “I think we have to respect her wishes.”

Maybe he was trying to protect me from further hurt. But a gathering fury wove its way through me, whispering that my parents just didn’t care enough to speak up; that politeness and civility took precedence over all. I couldn’t even look at my mother, who mentioned Teddy even less than my father. In my darkest thoughts I blamed her, blamed her for going to the window that day and telling me to look out, seeing Teddy as a possible friend even before I had.

My father, at least, had the grace to hesitate a little in his resolve. Shortly before they left, he went through the motions of objecting to Mrs. Rosenthal’s plans. “The boy has a good school here,” he argued, “and attachments.” Mrs. Rosenthal didn’t even bother to shake her head. Teddy and I were like tin soldiers, unblinking, tense in view of what lay before us. “I know what is best for my boy,” Mrs. Rosenthal kept insisting, right up to the moment they left. She was once again standing in our kitchen, but this time there was nothing else to say. “I have told Tee-o-dore he may send you a letter,” she said to me by way of goodbye. Then they were out the door and on the street, where a taxi stood waiting to whisk them away impassively and efficiently, like an ongoing force that had always been there. One only had to step in its path to be swept away.

O
ne morning I sat in my bed, clasping my knees, tired of watching the changes of light. The sun coming through the window was weak and barely warm, but the energy in my body suddenly began to respond disproportionately until it became acute, almost painful. I grabbed my wrists until they grew white. It might have been rage, it might have been the limits of misery, it might have been still more grief. But whatever it was bubbled to the surface, taking me along with it. I stood up, threw on some clothes, and took off.

I started to run before I even left the house, leaping down the stairs, passing my mother in the dark with her coffee, and letting the front door slam behind me. There was just enough daylight to see the sidewalk and the streetlights, but it was misting and my eyes blurred. My father must have followed me almost immediately, I heard him calling, but I was already far away.

I ran through our streets, farther and farther, my feet smacking the cold pavement. The pain shattered into my hips and spread upward until I was able to gulp it back down in breaths that filled my rib cage to its limits. The rhythm of my feet hitting the earth began to feel like a sort of grace, an acknowledgment of the hardness of being alive and growing, the harshness of it.

I was still running when I realized the car behind me was following me. I turned to look. My father. I dove into the tennis courts of the Roosevelt Academy, a private school about a mile from our house about which I knew nothing. I stood on the court in the darkness, listening as my father killed the motor and slammed his door.