Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,68

some of that light, banked it somehow. Maybe there was a way to get it back? Some kind of soul rejuvenation that only the very, very rich knew about?

She left Matt to catch another few minutes of sleep, since he’d gotten home so late, and went to start getting ready for the day.

Laura usually walked the girls to the subway on her way to the school where she taught music. Though Marie sometimes complained about it, they all still enjoyed the ritual. Kayla and Marie walked slightly ahead of Laura, murmuring to each other occasionally with their phones in their hands, ready if they had to stop for any length of time at an intersection.

Though their building itself wasn’t beautiful, their neighborhood was objectively perfect, with its brownstones and tall old trees, everything dark and staid and calm. The air itself seemed filled with the soothing, softening presence of money. Gentrification wasn’t a messy work in progress here, as it was in all the other Brooklyn neighborhoods where Laura had lived prior to moving to Park Slope. The especially impressive brownstones had window boxes and tiny front gardens planted with marigolds and tufts of spiky grasses. Laura had thought she was inured to envy, after having felt it so often for so long. Today, though, she wished that she had the time and space to plant flowers. She thought of the planning and the annoying little tasks and micro-decisions required and soon she was exhausted by just the idea of the window boxes. Fourteen years ago, a version of Laura might have enjoyed the flowers’ beauty. Now all she could see was the work it had taken to grow them and plant them and keep them alive. Nothing took care of itself.

She said goodbye to the girls at the entrance of the F train. Kayla gave her a desultory hug, but Marie stood off to the side, refusing to make eye contact, pretending to be entranced in her screen. After watching them descend the stairs, Laura walked the remaining block to the school where she worked. Today she was leaving right after her last group of students to have a drink with Callie in Manhattan, and the thought of this would sustain her through the day of mild irritations underscored by a baseline thrum of worry about Marie.

The job was fine. Or maybe it was pretty bad. It was a job. In a way, Laura missed teaching the baby music classes, even though the pay had been chancy and the owners of toy stores were often awful and there was a frankly evil pecking order among the established musicians, who tended to get territorial as they competed to lock in new students. At least then she’d been performing. That had made up for a lot of time spent cleaning drool off of shaker eggs after each class was over.

In search of something more stable, she had first found a job at a music summer camp, and through that gig she’d landed a full-time job at a public elementary school. The rise of standardized testing eliminated the budget for her position at first one and then another public school, and she’d found herself faced with the choice of working at either a charter or a private school. She’d decided to split the difference and do both part-time. The charter school’s students were so disciplined they were almost animatronic, except when they could sense that they were in the presence of a teacher who would not enforce the ironclad rules, and then they were so unruly that Laura usually felt it was a victory if no instruments got broken and no one cried during class, herself included. At the private school, the students were nicer, though they were occasionally condescending. She sometimes couldn’t shake the feeling that they thought of her as kind of a servant. It was still better than being cursed at by seven-year-olds, though. In 2013 she’d taken a full-time position at the Briar Academy, teaching music appreciation to first through fourth grades.

The fourth graders were definitely the worst, and she taught them last, ending her day on a low note. It was amazing how one “funny” boy student could tip an otherwise okay group into chaos just by making a fart noise with his kazoo. She sometimes tried to remember why she’d initially thought she would be good around large groups of kids; it had been early in Marie’s life, when her love for her child had seemed