not mismanage them . . . she must see that as her duty, watching over the frailer ones.
Herself, she was seeing how all those years had been, falling behind her in ripples, fading. In a rush she heard what Hal had said to her on the telephone from Belize. He was sorry for forgetting her, he said, so taken up with Casey, and he regretted that, regretted leaving her alone. It was true that she had often been alone, but not always; and she had left him too, obviously, for the theater of other men and the straining distraction of vanity. But that wasn’t what gripped her now, that wasn’t a new recognition. She had left the children also, when she turned from teaching to the coldness and orderliness of what she did now, the procedural neutrality of office work. She had decided to be anonymous in her public life and flagrant in privacy—anonymous except to the few people she selected. She chose the sly exhibitionism of her new slut vocation and turned away from the openness that she used to have, once, with children.
Not their openness but her own. That was what was missing.
She had left them behind because she was a coward. It was clear. Only a fool could have missed it.
She had missed it herself and so she must be a fool—or if not a fool, then a person without self-awareness, though she’d always flattered herself otherwise. But there it was: she had looked at her little first graders and seen Casey and seen, after childhood, everything else that would happen to them. Everything that could, and would, and never—not even at the furthest limit of possibility—the single thing that should, that they should remain this way forever, the way of being children, the way of eagerness, sweetness and hope. The hope she used to have for them, the warm hope you had to have for each child once you had a child yourself, was lifted like a thin veil and replaced with cold certainty: they would feel pain and die, some of them before they even found out who they were. Others would soldier on and meet defeat in everything they did, the joy of that first thrill of life falling away, disintegrating. She saw them in their futures, pitted and bowed down.
This was what Hal had known, how she had been captured by dread. He hadn’t known the other part, how she pursued a certain state of being known—sex as a form of fame, wanting to be instilled in other people’s memories. She’d wanted to make herself stay with them, an image in a great hall of figures. She’d thought she would live more that way. But Hal had known she was running, in the end he’d seen: in the fell swoop of the accident she’d been gripped with a fear of children, of them and for them. The sadness of the future had dazzled her. She turned her face away.
But at least they could have the present, its heat and light. Weightlessness! The lightness of now, the infinity. The children had no past, so all they had was in front of them. Not far in front but right in front, now. You could get a glimpse of it yourself—what it was to be unencumbered. She wanted to be there with them.
Then she would have the past in her house and the present in her work—she could dispense with the future, she could stop wishing for what she’d never have.
•
For some minutes she rested with the old women around her, while outside in the backyard the backhoe ground and creaked and, in reverse, emitted a harsh warning beep that went on and on and penetrated the eardrums. She sat a few feet from their card table on a couch, in a daze until Angela came over and arranged herself on the cushions nearby. It was Oksana’s day off and Susan had said they could do without a sub, knowing the ladies would be there. Now they’d taken Ellen Humboldt aside and were holding a glass of water at the ready, prying her assortment of pills out of a long white-plastic tray whose compartments were marked with the beginning letters of the days of the week.
“There are small elevators that are quite affordable,” started Angela. “You can order the whole thing, they put it together at the factory. I saw it in a brochure. Or they also have the kind that lift wheelchairs. They put them