reading at bedtime connects to your astronomy lecture, connects to what you heard on NPR, connects to what your friend discusses in the cafeteria at lunch—and then briefly it’s as if the lid has come off the world, as if the world were a dollhouse, and you can glimpse what it would be like to see it whole, from above—a vertiginous magnificence. And then the lid falls and you fall and the reign of the ordinary resumes.
And if this happens, in youth, slightly more often than the passage of a comet, then in age it seems to happen not at all, or not at all to ordinary people like me. So that if I tell you that over the months from February to May of that year, 2005, it was as if a series of little explosions were being detonated in my brain—if I tell you that I had this lid-lifting experience of the world not once but more times than I can properly count, like some extraordinary prolonged cranial multiple orgasm, an endless opening and titillation of my soul—then you will perhaps understand why, for years afterward, I thought that saying “yes” to the babysitting had without question been the right thing to do.
It became a ritual. And again, as my time with Sirena was kept almost a secret from Reza (in that it was never spelled out to him that we were together), those afternoons when I’d slip away in double time from Appleton to Somerville, to the studio in winter, blanched and window-steamed against the darkening light outdoors, a newborn-ness in its bright light—so too were my evenings with Reza a secret, and part of their wonder was their secrecy, as of a strange sort of almost affair, if that analogy can be imagined uncorrupted by the flesh. I mean that on those days when I’d be going in the evening to their town house by the river, Reza would know it, and knew also, from his parents, that he shouldn’t make public reference to it. We played a dance of glances, of surreptitious significant smiles, that might have perturbed anyone who saw them, exchanged as they were between a boy of eight and a woman who might have been, but wasn’t, his mother. Probably on average twice a week, I’d go from school to the studio, and from the studio home to drop my car, and then would walk—sometimes almost run—directly to the Shahids’ house; and in this way, in the course of a single day, would enjoy each of the flavors after which I pined: Sirena-time, Reza-time and then—because he always saw me home to my door—Skandar-time.
My job, which for some years had loomed so large in my life, shrank, in my mind, to a shadow of itself, as these other employments took its place. You might have thought, talking to me, that I was barely teaching at all, a morning or two a week—but the truth is that my kids somehow made room for my need to let go: they made no trouble, or almost none, that winter and spring. The remedials struggled valiantly, and didn’t lapse into truancy. The families, like dormant volcanoes, shed no molten rock upon their young: no breakups, no violence, no disappearing parents, no catastrophic illnesses. The boy in the second grade—not strictly my purview, but still—who was diagnosed with a brain tumor had the infinite luck for it to be benign. The gods were smiling.
You’re thinking, “But this poor woman, this middle-aged spinster, from where could she have conjured the idea that she had a family; or rather, that she had any family besides her father languishing in his ointment-pink apartment, and her Aunt Baby encrusted in her Rockport condo among the memorabilia, and, like a remote galaxy, Matt and Tweety and their kid out in Arizona?” But families have always been strange and elastic entities. Didi is much more my family than Matt could ever be. And I knew it, with each of the three Shahids, intuitively. I needed them, sure, and we can all argue about the moment when the balance tipped and I needed them so much that I would be hurt. But you can’t pretend they didn’t need me too, each in his or her way. They wouldn’t necessarily have admitted it—except Reza—but you can’t tell me that they didn’t love me. The heart knows. The body knows. When I was with Sirena, or Reza, or Skandar, the air moved differently between us; time