Ann decides Esker is poignant. Poignant: profoundly moving, touching; also agreeably intense, stimulating; also keenly distressing, sharp; from poindre, to prick. Esker pricks. She is prickly (prickly pear, thinks Ann), but also she pricks, and it is the opposite of when Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spinning wheel and is cast into sleep. Spinner. Spinster. Ann lies on the couch, clad in her casts, relentlessly awake at 2:00 and 3:00 and 4:00 A.M., and her mind goes to Esker.
Esker is poignant because (a) she always sits on the ottoman, (b) whenever she does break into a smile it’s always as though she’s lost a little internal struggle, (c) she whistles Beethoven’s Ninth while plotting parabolas, and (d) she does so nothing with her hair. This doesn’t exactly say it, but it’s the closest Ann can come to pinpointing it.
She had tried conveying this to Denise Escobar earlier in the week. Ann had been—where else?—on the red couch, doing butt exercises before her entire ass atrophied, and Denise, who had dropped by after school with a history assignment and the prize from a box of Cracker Jacks (a rub-on dinosaur tattoo), had been in the wheelchair, trying to figure out how to steer (“I can’t believe people play fucking basketball in these things!”). Denise didn’t get it. “Poignant like what?”
Ann ran through her little compiled list of Esker’s poignant traits, but Denise remained unconvinced. “She’s just eerie.” “Eerie” is a big word this year at The Prospect School, where its connotation is not derogatory; it’s a catch-all for anything enigmatic or unplumbed. “What kind of a name is Esker, anyway?” asked Denise, bumping squarely into the coffee table.
“German? Finnish? How the hell should I know?”
“No, fool.” Denise laughed. “I mean is there any more to it or what? You think that’s the name she was born with: Esker?”
That dissolved Ann so thoroughly she couldn’t speak.
“What? What’s your problem?”
“You’re not born with a name, idiot.”
Denise coughed. “You’re the idiot, moron.”
“Ahhh . . .” Ann wiped her eyes and picked at the stegosaurus on her arm. “Anyway, it’s her last name.”
“So what’s her first name?”
“Oh, do I look like the FBI?”
“Oh, snap—I don’t even think you want to be asking me to tell you what you look like. Anyway, she’s . . . she’s . . .” Denise searched for the precise adjective and drove the wheelchair lightly into a post. “You know what it is?” she said, with the energy of sudden insight. “She’s got a little Malcolm Choy thing going on. Without the physique.”
“Ow,” said Ann.
“What?”
“Nothing, I bit my lip.”
Naturally, her mind goes to Malcolm Choy, too, in the middle of the night, the small of the morning. Everyone on earth but her will be deep into rehearsals for Winter Concert by now. Ann and three other girls were to have performed a modern dance using a variety of fans as props; Malcolm had agreed to accompany them. The dance was incredibly cool (at one point, Ann had a pas de deux with an electric box fan), and she is disappointed not to be doing it now, but she is more disappointed to be missing rehearsals with Malcolm Choy. She had looked forward to the idea of spending all that nonverbal time together; that, she had decided, would be the key to their connection: proximity and oblique collaboration. Now it’ll just be the other three girls twirling and arcing in their leotards to the rhythm of his hands on skins. Denise, one of them, has reported back uneventfully on rehearsals thus far. “He’s in his own world. I’m telling you, the guy’s a monk. Friar Choy.” Ann recalls the hot sprouting in her chest that had levitated her off the bleachers, and says nothing.
As for Denise’s observation about Esker, Ann finds herself unnerved. Obviously, Esker couldn’t be more unlike Malcolm Choy. And yet. Despite her initial offer, Esker has come three times in the past week and a half. She says Ann could use the extra help. This is doubtless true, but Ann notices she has been able to distract Esker from mathwork a little more each time. By now she has been able to compile a short compendium of random assorted facts about her teacher: she doesn’t like to dance, has never broken a bone, has no siblings, no pets, no car, no subscriptions, doesn’t play an instrument, doesn’t like talking on the telephone. She keeps, surprisingly, a tin of crystallized ginger in her briefcase, which explains why her breath always smells distinctive, and what that distinction is. She misses canoeing. She knows which birds sing which songs, and what kinds of plants were on earth when the dinosaurs were around. And she worked one summer as a maid and wore a pink dress uniform. All of which adds up, Ann thinks, to surprisingly little: that much more evidence of Esker’s essential eeriness.
Ann knows she has been, increasingly, a brat the past few weeks—which she has every reason to be, her father keeps saying every time she apologizes for having snarled at him again, until she is so irritated with his understandingness and patience that she stops apologizing altogether, and still he is tolerant and kind, although perhaps a little more than usually detached. And then she resents him for that. But the thing is, Esker is the one person these days who doesn’t annoy her. Maybe it’s because Esker herself is such a prickly pear. If Ann snaps, Esker snaps back, and then they are off sparring, up-tempo, and it’s fun, and Ann’s on her toes craning her neck to see what’s around the next bend. In any case, Ann finds herself anticipating tutoring sessions impatiently. During them she never thinks about her stupid lame feet. And for a long time after Esker leaves, she remains on edge in a glittery, trembling way, like an October leaf grown gold and loose on its stem.
So, by Friday afternoon, day fifteen of Ann’s fractured calcaneas or whatever their stupid plural is, when Esker has failed to arrive forty minutes past the appointed time of their scheduled session, Ann is feeling foul-tempered, foolish, and self-pitying. The apartment this day is unneglected-looking. Ann’s junk no longer dominates the red couch like evidence of invalidism; she’s adapted to the wheelchair and no longer requires all of her important possessions to reside in a single heap. Lovely old Carla came by yesterday and washed Ann’s hair in a basin, and today it’s gathered in a single silver barrette, the rest of it hanging shiny down past her shoulders. The building won’t allow Christmas trees (fire hazard), but Ann’s father has hung the potted grapefruit tree by the center post with ornaments and white lights. The area lamps have been switched on, the rugs vacuumed, the woven metal garbage cans emptied. Ute Lemper is singing Kurt Weill in German on the stereo.
But the wall clock cuckoos the half-hour: forty-five minutes late, and Ann feels ready to machete something. She wheels herself over to the kitchen table, cuts a blondie from the pan Carla brought over, and crams the whole thing into her mouth. The phone rings: the doorman: her teacher is here.
“Shend her up, pleash.” Then she has to chew fast to get it all down by the time the elevator arrives.
“Did you get mugged?” greets Ann, opening the door herself, wheeling backward as she speaks.
Esker stamps in smelling like the cold and the subway. “There was the faculty party, and a last-minute makeup test, and the train stopped between stations, blah-blah-blah, sorry.” She unwinds a dun scarf from her neck, removes her tan coat.
“Oh yeah, today was the last day.” The Prospect School always closes a full three weeks for the winter holiday. Ann feels a little pang hearing about the party, which is stupid, since she wouldn’t have been there anyway, nor would she have wanted to. But she pictures, for a moment, Esker animated and flushed, cup of punch in hand (all faculty parties serve punch, don’t they?), being scintillating. Like a sparkler. Ann hasn’t had one of those since she was a child, one Fourth of July out at her parents’ friends Willette and Emil’s house in Amagansett. Anyway, this is stupid, too: Esker is undoubtedly as much of a pill at the faculty holiday party as she is the rest of the time. Ann threads herself a little recklessly around red posts toward the living area. “So does that mean you’re not coming anymore after this?”
“Not necessarily.” Esker pulls off a dun knitted hat, stuffs it down the sleeve of her coat, and hangs everything on the cherry coat-stand. Her hair statics out like a burry electron cloud, and she flattens it absently. The potted grapefruit tree twinkles, and she peruses it as she passes, taking in the homemade walnut-shell-and-cotton-ball Santas, the clove oranges, the Popsicle-stick-and-yarn God’s eyes. “Did you make these?”
“Some I did,” says Ann. “Some my mother.” And she glances at the rectangle over the bricked-up fireplace. Esker’s eyes travel with her.
The canvas is large, maybe three by four feet, lit today by a small light affixed to the bottom of the frame. It is a portrait, but not the sort a person might commission. Up close it looks like a collage of fabric swatches and oil paint. Ten feet away, these meld into a not entirely flattering likeness of a nevertheless unmistakably beautiful woman’s face. Strong mouth, navy eyes. Wide cheekbones, wide brow, freckles. Honey-brown widow’s peak: a blonder version of Ann’s. “Is that her?” Esker, noticing it for the first time, takes it in at length.
“My mother’s friend did it. I mean, a friend of my father’s, too.”
“You’re a lot like her.”
Ann has heard this before; she shrugs. She sees Esker puzzling; people who know always think it’s odd that her father still has the portrait up. People who don’t know automatically assume her mother dead because of it; what man keeps a portrait of his deserting wife over the mantel? “It’s just that he still loves her,” Ann imagines explaining. “It’s just that he loves her better now in absentia.” Absence: the state of being away. A want, a lack. A hole filled by a ghost. Instead, she forestalls any questions Esker might put (Esker, being Esker, would probably ask outright) with an act of physical bravado: she flings herself out of the wheelchair and pitches forward onto the couch, all hands and knees and a tidal wave of red velvet, and then, with dexterity and cockiness, flips around into sitting, the bulky blue parcels of her feet propped on the coffee table. She is wearing plaid boxers and a giant pink fleece thing.
Esker squints. “Is that part of your physical-therapy regimen?”
Ann flashes a cereal-box smile. The distraction has been successful. “I can do a pop-a-wheelie.” She indicates the wheelchair. “Want to see?”
“Some other time.” Esker draws up the ottoman and extracts textbook and graph paper from her briefcase. “What’s with the guttural ranting?”
Ute on the stereo is in full swing: “Du hast kein Herz, Johnny, und ich liebe dich so!” Ann snatches the remote and cuts her off. The silence comes back at them. “You never like my music,” she complains.
Esker contradicts her lightly. “No, I told you, I can’t listen while I work.” She pulls out a pencil, a straightedge, a calculator.
“Limited.”
Esker gives her a look. “Testy.” Removes a final pink rhomboid eraser and tucks the briefcase away with a certain briskness.
Ann, meanwhile, is blushing because of the word’s similarity to “testes.” It’s a terrible thing being sixteen and having everything sound like sex. Of course, then she has to think of Malcolm Choy, and then Denise’s remark about Esker. “Can I ask you something?” she says, amid the heat.
Esker exhales. Her face is a calmly impregnable fortress.
“Can I?”
“Shoot.”
“What’s your first name?”
“Iphigenia,” she says flatly. “Today we’re going to do some graphing.”
“Are you putting me on?”
Esker looks at her.
“No way. Is that, like, a family name?”
“No. Are you interested in passing the mathski?”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Glad you think so. Today we’re going to do some graphing.”
“God. That’s the name I always wanted.”
Another look.
“Not necessarily that exact one, but that kind.”
A little smile is rising. Ann can see it tremble in Esker’s throat.
“I hate my name. Ann. Ann. Not even an ‘e’ at the end. Ann.” She squeezes it out of her throat like a flat beige crumb. “You’d think my parents were stockbrokers.”
Esker’s eyes crinkle. “Ann James,” she intones, making a megaphone of her hands. “Today we’re going to work on graphs.” And then, differently, “What’s the matter?,” because Ann’s eyes have welled up.
“Nothing, I’m just sick of graphs.” Ann croaks a laugh at that, and a tear falls to her cheek. She swipes it, and her face goes sad again, and Esker is patient, but Ann says nothing. Outside, it is dark. No snow is falling. The streetlights make the dark look dull, incomplete.
Esker says, “Do you remember when you told me how you broke your ankles?”
“Heels.”
“Do you remember what you said?”
“No.”
“You said you felt nudged from the inside. I asked Buddy, and he told me you just said you fell. But when you told me, you said something else. Do you know what I’m talking about?” Ann, looking at her boxer shorts, nods. “Do you think it’s something to worry about?”
Ann looks up and looks Esker in the face and says, “No.” The tea eyes hold hers. “I’m just bratty right now because I’m sick of staying in, I’m sick of not walking. That’s normal. Plus hormones. Did you want to graph?”
Esker, without letting her feel off the hook, slowly opens her book.
They graph word problems for close to an hour, mutually swallowed in the peace afforded by the discipline. When the clock cuckoos half past six, instead of promptly gathering her things Esker gives Ann a little present: she shows her how to make a Cantor dust. Start with a line, remove the middle third. Remove the middle thirds of the two resulting lines. And so on. Eventually yielding a dusting of clumped points, infinitely many yet infinitely sparse. Esker watches Ann closely, sees her face goes soft with excitement. She gets it.
“What’s it for, though?”
“Nothing,” says Esker, a little more harshly than she intended. “It was devised by a nineteenth-century mathematician named Georg Cantor. It’s an abstract construction.” She begins to repack her pad of graph paper, pencils, straightedge, eraser.
“You mean it’s for fun.”
“Well, all right.”
“Are there any more like it?”
Esker gives a considered nod.
“Can you show me?”
“Next time.”
“Are you coming again even though now it’s the holiday?”
“I could. What would you like to do?”
“Yes. I mean, keep studying.”
Esker closes the clasp on her briefcase and stands. “You know you’re going to do well on the mathski,” she says.
“You think so?”
Esker nods.
“Yay.”
Esker smiles a smile composed of pressing her lips together so that the ends of her mouth actually dip down; on paper it would be a frown.
She takes such pains, thinks Ann. “But you can still help me study?”
Esker shrugs. “I can.”
They make a date for the following week. Ann hoists herself into the wheelchair, rolls to the kitchen, and cuts another blondie, which she insists Esker take “for the subway,” and then Esker gets her scarf and coat and hat and briefcase and goes home, leaving her appointment book behind on the Jameses’ cherry coffee table.