“My little prince is very strong,” his mother said. “He’ll be okay.” She smiled again, looked at me, really looked at me—I felt she saw me—again. I wanted to say, “Do you know me too, then?” to make sure it wasn’t just me. But who could say such a thing?
“Good to meet you, Mrs. Shahid”—and we shook hands again, at her instigation, and her hand was smallish, but strong and warm and dry—“and I’ll be sure to let you know at once how things unfold as we look into this. I’ll call you. Here’s my home number in case you need it. And I’ll look forward to seeing you and your husband at Back to School Night next week.”
“Next week. Of course,” she said, demure and amused and reserved all at once. “Of course. Good-bye.”
Of course. Of course. It felt inevitable, this meeting, like a chance, like a door opening. I didn’t know yet that she was an artist, an installation artist, bereft without her Paris studio. After they’d left, I sat back down at my desk, my eyes not on the apple-picking paragraphs but on the branches, turning, outside the classroom window, the Norwegian maple in its crimson-tinged ball gown, ruffled against the spotless 9/11 sky. How could the leaves stand out so distinctly? Why was the sky such an impeccable blue? How could this ordinary afternoon suddenly fill me, not with the indignation I’d felt earlier, but with elation—yes, elation. Sitting at my desk, pencil in hand in the dimming light, in the long angles of the afternoon sun, I had butterflies, like a child. Nothing moved in the room but the inside of my stomach.
5
Shauna McPhee sat down with the three bullies the next morning to discuss sharing, tolerance and the importance of words. I’m sure she spoke to them about making good choices, about their own safety, and then she called in Reza and had the boys apologize one by one, and shake his hand in front of her, and only after he’d gone away again did she tell them that they wouldn’t be allowed on the playground, either at recess or after school, for a week. Their parents were also informed of this, and Shauna rang Sirena to reassure her that the incident had been, as she put it, “resolved.”
Don’t get me wrong, I admire Shauna, who is five years younger than I am, also single and childless, but unlike me a star of the city’s public school system. She’d already been the principal for three years then—she’d been running Appleton before she was thirty. But I do think that the only way you get on as an administrator is by understanding grown-ups better than you do children. You make a show of understanding children, but it’s a show for the grown-ups. If Shauna actually got kids, she would have known that the three bullies weren’t smart enough to appreciate the good sense of rules of tolerance and acceptance, they were smart enough only to grasp that these were, it seemed, the rules. And everybody knows that the point about rules—if you’re a dull, naughty boy, with a sly glimmer of animal nous that is your greatest pride—is not to obey them but to avoid getting caught breaking them. And if Shauna understood, she’d have seen that the boys saw those ritual handshakes in her office as their humiliation, which only made them despise Reza the more. By ostensibly “resolving” the issue, Shauna was encouraging guerilla warfare, and I knew to be on watch.
Sirena, no fool, knew too, and she called me that night at home. I had that strange high-voltage thrill when I realized who it was.
“Miss Eldridge, I’m sorry—”
“Nora, please.”
She paused on the line. A wonderful, mysterious thing, a pause on the line. Who knew what it signified? “Nora. Yes. I’m sorry to bother you at home, but I wanted your opinion.”
“About the boys?”
“Yes, the boys.” She had a habit of repeating the last words you said to her before going on, as if a conversation were a relay race. I could never decide whether this was cultural—an Italian thing—or to do with living in translation, making sure she’d gotten it right, or just a Sirenian idiosyncrasy. “I wanted to know if you think the boys”—she said “boy-se,” in a lovely, slightly comical Italian way—“will be okay now?”
“Because you don’t?”
“Because I don’t? I don’t know. Sometimes, it looks all okay, but the children, they’re angry. They don’t like to get