to go out so much, you know. When Skandar isn’t traveling, then three, sometimes four times a week—it’s terrible. I hate it.” She sighed. “And Reza hates it most of all. He weeps, often. He clings to me—we have fights—can you believe it? Or worse, he sulks. He goes into his room and shuts the door and won’t come out to say good night, or let me in.”
“That doesn’t sound like him.” I heard my teacher voice come out of my mouth. “Have you tried talking to him about it? He’s old enough, really—he’s eight.”
“And seven, as they say, is the age of reason. I know. So yes, I’ve talked about it with him; and so now I ask your help.”
“Mine?”
“Because he says that it’s only bearable, these evenings, if you come.”
“If I come? Come with you to the events?”
“Come to him, of course! Not every time—that would be ridiculous …” She laughed, and it was not the same kind of laugh as before, and I knew that she knew that what she was asking wasn’t quite right. Even when it was couched as Reza’s request rather than her own, it was strange. It put us on a different footing, a different trajectory. I must have looked hurt.
“It isn’t a business proposal, my friend.” She had her hand on my arm and seemed even to stroke it, as if I were a cat. “It’s a family proposal … Oh dear, is it a cultural difference we’re having here?” Much eye movement. “In Italy, it’s only the closest people that you can ask in this way, as if you were his zia, his auntie. You can picture him, can’t you? So solemn and furious, and I said, ‘What would make it okay for Mummy and Daddy to go out and leave you? What could possibly make it okay?’ And his face lit up, with the joy of asking an impossible dream; he said, ‘It would be all right if Miss E would come.’ Then, he said, it would be much better than all right—it would be better even than having you at home. And I looked sad, so then he said, ‘Well, it would be just as good.’ You know his face in such a moment—who can deny him? I promised him I’d ask you, because it would be his happiness … and you mustn’t feel you have to say yes—but the idea that you’re upset when I ask, this I can’t bear—my friend?” And as if the reach of her arm had been but an introductory tentacle, she rose and embraced me, one of her absolute, enveloping hugs that I found so unnerving.
“Of course,” she went on as she released me, “we will pay you. That goes without saying.”
This made things even worse. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I love Reza. I love you. I wouldn’t hear of it.”
“But Nora—I insist—think of it, the amount of time—”
“Are you joking? Either I’m family or I’m not family. You wouldn’t pay his auntie!”
“Ah, Nora.” Sirena shook her head. “You are an extraordinary woman. And yes, of course you are family. Give me another hug.”
By which time I felt a fool, an uptight fool, for my boundaries and my rules. She honestly made me feel that I was honored to be chosen; that I was, in this role, irreplaceable.
In those next couple of months, everything and nothing happened. You could say, from the outside, that Miss Eldridge, a third-grade teacher in her late thirties, broke one of her cardinal rules and babysat, not once but numerous times, for one of her pupils. So what? You could say that she made unexpected progress with her artwork, launching not one but two room-boxes at once, in a general spirit of expansion; and you could add, accurately, that she became actively involved also in the creation of her friend Sirena’s installation—in all sorts of small, practical ways, from sewing to soldering assistance, to the wiring of tiny lights and the placement of video cameras. And third, you could mention that during this stretch of manic unfolding—of wanton disinhibition—this same Miss Eldridge experienced, in conversation with her friend Sirena’s husband, Skandar—or perhaps, more accurately, over time, with her own friend Skandar—a sort of awakening, a type of excitement about the wider world that she hadn’t thought, in midlife, still possible.
You know those moments, at school or college, when suddenly the cosmos seems like one vast plan after all, patterned in such a way that the novel you’re