The beginning of the school year loomed before Sarah like a photographic negative of its usual excitement. The shopping for new clothes and notebooks, the cheerful chaos of parents and children reconnecting after a summer apart, the effervescent promise of fresh starts all seemed a spectral taunt.
She pictured the scampering about in the school yard that first day, the mothers animatedly comparing notes on camp experiences and country houses, lamenting summer’s end but pleased to be back, to be freed of their offspring full-time, gossiping about teachers and school supply lists while they watched their children out of the corner of their eyes finding their places anew. Sarah did not know how many of them had heard about Todd and she couldn’t imagine how to impart the information standing in a school yard bustling with children. This was not, after all, a simple tragedy she could hand them—my husband died of a heart attack, my husband ran off with another woman—that, no matter how dreadful, was at least in the realm of the familiar. She would have to find a way to give enough of a shape to her situation without stripping herself bare.
She would also need words to hand Eliza, sentences she could utter when other kids asked how her summer had been and teachers put forth the standard beginning-of-the-year question: What did you do on your vacation?
Sarah wanted to run away, pull Eliza out of school, anything to spare her the queries, the eyes, the muted, confused responses that would surely follow.
The day before the beginning of school, she called Eliza’s first-grade teacher, Alicia Harcourt, and told her in halting sentences what had happened. Once more, she found herself leaking out the inky mess of her personal life before a stranger. This time, though, the stakes—her daughter’s well-being, the way she would be seen in the world from this moment on—were higher than ever. Sarah tried to appear as normal and matter-of-fact as possible as she outlined the last month, attempting to impart that Eliza was, despite everything, coping well, that she was fine. She hated that this would be Miss Harcourt’s first impression of them—a woman who had literally lost her husband and a little girl with nothing but open-ended questions.
Miss Harcourt murmured her sympathy, promised to keep a special eye on Eliza and report anything that warranted comment or concern.
For the past two years Todd had photographed Eliza on the first day of school against the same white wall in the living room. Their plan had been to continue the tradition until she graduated from high school, a visual record of growth and expectation. Sarah picked up last year’s photo from where it rested in an engraved silver frame on the bookcase—Eliza in a green-and-blue-striped knit dress, her hair in pigtails, clutching a stuffed pink flamingo, her face open and filled with anticipation as she headed off to kindergarten. She put the photo down and called out once more to Eliza, who was sulking in her bedroom, unused to the schedule, unhappy with her chosen outfit, dreading school for reasons she could not specify.
“Come, sweetie pie, breakfast is waiting.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I have chocolate chip muffins.” Sarah, who usually forbade sugary treats in the morning, would do anything to tempt her daughter, to offer what little pleasure she could.
“I’m not hungry,” Eliza repeated churlishly.
Sarah took a deep breath, her anxiety about sending Eliza off on an empty stomach warring with her desire to avoid any further arguing.
“How about some juice?”
“I’m not thirsty.”
Sarah ran her fingers through her hair. Despite her concern, her patience was wearing thin. Her own anger was pushing against the membranes of her skin, desperate to be let loose at the nearest object, the nearest person. The problem for both Sarah and Eliza was that the nearest person was the other.
She walked back to Eliza’s room, knocked gently on her closed door—a formality more than an actual request—and entered. Eliza was curled up on her maroon fake fur beanbag chair, staring off into space. Sarah knelt down beside her.
“Are you okay, sweetie?”
“I’m fine,” Eliza replied irritably, turning her back to her mother.
“Come then. You need to get your shoes on.”
“I hate my shoes.”
“But we just bought them. You chose them yourself. You loved them in the store.”
“I changed my mind. I hate pink.”
“Fine,” Sarah said, rising, her patience exhausted, tears about to spill out. “Wear whatever you want. But you have got to get up and come out of your room.” She softened, tried a new tactic. “Let’s do your picture, okay?”
“No. I do not want my picture taken.”
Love and exasperation knotted Sarah’s brain until she could not think straight and she stood silently in the center of the room wondering what to do. Which traditions do you cling to, which do you alter, which do you let go? She went into the living room, grabbed the disposable camera she had bought for the occasion, flung it into the garbage, and slammed the cabinet door loud enough to scare both Eliza and herself.
A half hour later, they sat on the Third Avenue bus, barely talking to each other. Eliza pressed her forehead against the window and stared out at the morning traffic. When an elderly woman in a brightly flowered dress sitting across from them smiled and rolled her eyes in sympathy at the stubbornness of children, Sarah smiled wanly back, embarrassed. “First-day jitters,” she remarked.
Sarah and Eliza walked the two blocks from the bus stop to the school yard, already filled with clusters of children running up to each other excitedly. The boys greeted each other with tackles, tussling on the ground, rolling over and over in clumps of skinned knees and elbows, the only way they could express their joy at being reunited. The girls ran up to each other, hugged, and then stood in tight groups, talking rapidly. Eliza walked slowly toward them without looking back at Sarah and hovered on the outskirts of her circle of friends. Slowly she inched in further, and further still, seduced by their laughter, until she had forged a place within. Sarah watched her begin to talk and finally exhaled, her shoulders relaxing.
She glanced back to the gate, planning her escape. She was tempted to dart out without speaking to anyone but she had felt the eyes on her already, noting, appraising, waiting. She steeled herself and walked purposefully over to a group of mothers from Eliza’s class. She knew their conversations, she had been a part of them, been soothed and amused by them so many times, their complaints about their children’s unpredictable sleeping patterns, the recalcitrance of husbands, their diet frustrations and impossible mothers-in-laws, the lack of heat in their sex lives. They helped each other out when one got sick or a babysitter quit, they made inordinate amounts of Duncan Hines cupcakes for bake sales, they passed along rumors about whose child had lice. And she knew the boundaries, the commiseration but deep-seated fear when a marriage broke up—they were aware of the odds and, like cancer, they hoped it would happen to someone else, sparing them. All of them had heard one way or another about Todd’s moving out last year.
Sarah was cognizant of the impression she and Todd had initially made—living slightly to the left of the rules, the romance of an artist so much headier than that of their own lawyer and banker husbands—but she sensed now that they were relieved, vindicated, as if their more pragmatic choices inured them against anything similar happening to them. Perhaps they were right. Sarah had realized lately how little thought she had given to the future and its looming responsibilities when she married Todd. She had only wanted to be with him, nothing more. Love truly is the greatest act of naïveté.
“I heard what happened. I’m so sorry.” Sarah looked up to see Tara Benson, Jackie’s mother, talking to her. The other mothers stood a few inches back, looking on sympathetically, desperate to hear the conversation but wanting to at least appear to give her space.
“Thank you,” Sarah said.
She did not know what they had heard, which version of events. She did not know what, precisely, the sympathy was for.
The mothers waited silently for details.
“He drowned,” Sarah told them. “They haven’t found the body, so we’re not exactly sure how it happened.”
Even as she said it, she wondered how she would explain it if he came back, or if it turned out he had died another way.
“If there’s anything, anything at all I can do.” The other mothers murmured in assent.
“Thank you.” Sarah looked away, then back to them. “I should get to work,” she said.
She walked quickly out of the school yard and then stood, her face pressed against the cool metal of the gate, watching her daughter until the class was led inside and Eliza’s blond head disappeared behind the heavy red door, taking a piece of Sarah with her.
All day, she pictured Eliza silent, Eliza in a corner, Eliza hiding from questions; and she pictured her relenting, joining the games at recess, sitting on the rug at story time, leaning on her elbows, listening intently. We never truly know who our children are when they are away from us, their personalities alter outside the familiarity and proscribed roles of home, but Sarah knew less than ever now.
“How was your first day of school?” she asked over dinner that night. She had set the table, made the effort.
“Fine.”
“What did you do?””
“Stuff.”
There was little more information to garner, Eliza had shut the door.
Miss Harcourt called on the third night to say that Eliza was doing fine. “She’s participating in class, though not as much as I’d like to see yet, but that’s true of many children in the beginning of the school year. I didn’t know her before, so I don’t know what her ‘normal’ is.”
Sarah wanted to say that she didn’t either.
“Most important,” Miss Harcourt continued, “she is engaging with other children. I haven’t seen any outbursts or signs of withdrawal that would indicate a cause for concern. She seems to enjoy the class.” Dora, also, reported no problems when she picked Eliza up from school each day. Sarah was both relieved and surprised—it certainly didn’t mirror the silent fury Eliza was exhibiting with her. She realized then that Eliza would put on her best face in public, much as Sarah did. They shared a stubborn pride, an unwillingness to show fault lines, survivors both. But they would end the day worn out from the effort and in the safety of their own apartment collapse, no longer feeling the need or possessing the energy to pretend anymore. They saved the worst of themselves for each other.
Sarah was no longer allowed to kiss Eliza. In fact, she was not allowed to touch her. Whenever she approached her, Eliza made an angry groaning sound and pushed her away. It was as if she had decided that she could not risk needing anyone ever again.
Deep in the night, Sarah sneaked into Eliza’s room and kissed her head, her neck, her arms, her touch illicit, unwanted, but not, she believed, unneeded. Their love had gone underground. She called Deirdre Gerard to describe this latest development.
“Was she a physically affectionate child before this happened?” Deirdre asked.
“Yes,” Sarah replied. She remembered how Eliza used to crawl onto her lap every morning for what they called a “love fest,” how when Sarah told her, “I love you this much,” widening her arms, Eliza widened hers more and said, “I love you this much,” each trying to outdo the other until Eliza finally proclaimed triumphantly, “I infinity love you.” Was that child gone for good?
“Tell Eliza she has to let you kiss her,” Deirdre recommended, “but let her decide when and for how long, five seconds, ten. Tell her you’ll give her a gold star every time you kiss her and agree on a reward at the end of the week, a toy she wants, an ice cream sundae.”
This is what it had come to, then, bribing her daughter, coercing her into accepting love again.
“If that doesn’t work, we’ll try something else,” Deirdre assured her.
Sarah agreed to try it and report back.
The gold star system was not an overwhelming success, but she accidentally discovered another way to hold on to Eliza. Two nights later, they were watching a documentary on dinosaurs that turned suddenly scary, all gaping jaws and enormous teeth. Slowly, wordlessly, Eliza crept closer to Sarah, their thighs touching, a thin stream of warmth between them. As the dinosaurs grew more ominous, Eliza slid onto her mother’s lap. Sarah carefully wrapped her arms around her, hoping that if neither of them acknowledged it, it could not be rejected.
Sarah rented scary movies every night for the rest of the week.