WHEN STELLA WAS A LITTLE GIRL, THEY HAD GONE TO A swimming pool, and her mother, who couldn’t swim, had walked in the water carrying Stella draped over her arms as though she were a princess or a bride. Stella had never felt such peace. The water was cool and her mother’s body was warm and soft. Her brothers played with an inner tube; her father swam a slow sidestroke in the deep water.
After she left off Cat and the car, all the way walking home, Stella had felt like that: soft arms were cradling her; the universe loved and protected her. She was safe and happy. She deserved to be coddled. Of course the Negroes were resentful: she understood that. She had done her job.
At the swimming pool the PA system had played the Schumann “Träumerei,” and later, though she was only five, she’d played it on her little cello, sliding effortlessly into fourth position for the soaring note that made the piece formidable. Her mother had accompanied her on the piano with slow chords.
As a very young child, she had seemed terrifically talented, a wunderkind. After her mother’s death, she had seemed less talented each succeeding year. She hated to perform; she wanted to do only things that were personal and private. At the end of high school, she ceremoniously locked her cello in its hard case.
Lying in bed, Stella felt happy to be alone, out of the bright heat of the classroom. In the summer long ago before the accident, the sash beside the bed would be up and the bed nestled beside the window to catch the breeze. The attic fan sucked in the cool of the night. Once her light was out, she spied on Mrs. Kolowski in her kitchen doing the supper dishes after her husband had gone to bed. It was magic, the way the dark of the bedroom concealed Stella. Utterly fascinated, she watched Mrs. Kolowski passing a dishrag over the stained plates. That’s her life, little Stella had thought. I’m getting to see her life. Sometimes Mrs. Kolowski walked across the linoleum, a checkerboard pattern, red and black.
Stella thought of the Negro teachers she had met. Christine Taylor would be home now. At break time, Arcola had told Stella that Mrs. Taylor had three children, that she’d been married three times. Stella wanted to know their stories.
At her home, was the forceful Mrs. Taylor angry? Was she happy?
And what of Don on the other side of the world? He was just waking up as she was drifting off to sleep. We can stop this anytime, he had said the night of their engagement. But why should she? And why shouldn’t she build something new in the meantime?
She felt tucked into multiple stories now. No longer the center of the universe. Sleepily, she stretched her bare toes against the clean sheets. She stretched herself the way “Träumerei” stretched toward sleep. The slide, with vibrato at the top. She felt happy.
She could drill new phrases into them—he doesn’t, they don’t—until the phrases sounded right; or she could go back to basics, so they understood. Not mere rote. She would do both. She would need to teach the concepts of subject and verb, of nouns and pronouns, of singular and plural. Tonight we learn to conjugate, to put together subject and verb in a certain conventional pattern. What is a convention? She would explain it all.