Play Dates Page 6

  And I can’t afford not to have one either, but Zoë takes precedence over everything. I tell Mrs. Hennepin I’m on my way, snap the phone shut and rip my partially completed test into strips, dumping it into the waste paper basket on my way out the door. Oh, well. So much for knowing what avenue was once known as “Swedish Broadway.”

  Chapter 4

  To save some money, I take the subway up to Thackeray. A cab from the Battery would have cost me well over ten dollars. We need that for groceries. A monthly Metrocard is a godsend for people on a tight budget. You buy the card, then ride all you want for the next thirty days.

  I anxiously stride in to the school’s administrative offices, all clustered at the end of one corridor on the first floor of the building. The parent-teacher conference room is a small, uninspiring rectangle, adjacent to the principal’s office. It looks the same as it did years ago. The same maple wood doors, the same musty smell, the same inset frosted glass windows lending the false appearance of accessibility, that look like they haven’t been cleaned since Eleanor Roosevelt went here for one semester.

  Just as I am about to rap on the glass—I know from experience if a small hand knocks on the wood, you won’t be heard—the door bursts open, nearly knocking me across the corridor. Nina Osborne, her tanned skin flushed, her eyes aglow like some mythological beast we might have studied in Miss Imberman’s fifth-grade class, bears down on me for the second time in as many months.

  A teacher passes us, prompting Nina to alter her demeanor and lower the volume on whatever it is she plans to say to me. “You’re a heathen!” she spits through gritted teeth. “I’ve heard that about the Marsh girls. You’re legends in this school. And obviously, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree!”

  Oh, God, does she have to resort to clichés? My father would be appalled. He used to forbid us to use them, saying that well-educated people can choose their own words; they don’t need to stoop to shopworn phrases.

  “You should be ashamed of your daughter’s vocabulary,” Nina continues.

  I wonder what happened that caused this…this tempest in a teapot. I try to suppress a smile. Where’s the fire? The big emergency? Did Zoë finally slip and call her teacher Mrs. Heinie-face? But how would Xander Osborne be involved? Maybe she encouraged him to do it, too.

  “You think this is funny?” Nina challenges.

  Frankly, I’m relieved. If this whole hullabaloo is about words, then I can breathe easier. It means Zoë’s okay. I can stop thinking the worst.

  “Oh, good, Ms. Marsh, you’re here.” Mrs. Hennepin pokes her head out from behind the door. Nina stalks down the hall without another word. “Ms. Marsh, do you have a minute?”

  How passive-aggressive can a person get? “I have as many minutes as it takes,” I say, trying to sound calm; and as soon as I step inside the room, my anxiety returns tenfold. Suddenly I’m Zoë’s age, and in trouble for one thing or another. The faces of my teachers with their myriad little vendettas over the years waft through my mind, an army of invading specters from my childhood. Okay, I was not the best behaved student in the history of Thackeray, but that’s sort of relative. I didn’t destroy property or draw blood. Suddenly I realize one reason why I never considered graduate school. The academic atmosphere. Instructors as punishers instead of nurturers. The narrow behavioral expectations. The tsk-tsking whenever a child asserts her independent nature and colors outside the lines.

  I’m shaking. And I don’t know whether it’s from anger or from fear.

  The parent-teacher conference room is arranged to appear informal. There’s a mahogany credenza but no desk. Two chairs and a sofa are arranged “conversationally” around a low coffee table decorated with a simple vase of cut flowers and a few magazines, ranging from Highlights to Psychology Today. I scrunch into a corner of the sofa, where I feel safest. Across from me, the two armchairs look as though they’ve hosted a lot of butts over the decades. I’ll bet my parents wore their own dents into the cushions.

  “Ms. Marsh,” Mrs. Hennepin says, simultaneously addressing me and appraising my body language. “Do you still chew your hair?” I’m too stunned and humiliated to offer an answer. Apparently, the hag has a memory like an elephant.

  “So,” she continues, her thin lips pressed together between phrases, “Do you know why I asked you to come in this afternoon?”

  I shake my head. “Well, not two seconds ago Nina Osborne tore into me for my daughter’s vocabulary. I try my best not to use swear words at home, and Zoë knows she needs to be more creative with her language. Her grandfather is a poet, you may recall…”

  “I remember your father very well, Ms. Marsh. This is not about the use of foul speech.” Her lips press together more tightly; her mouth has become a thin slash, rimmed white with determination.

  “I’m so relieved,” I reply, wishing I had a net for the butterflies in my stomach. My past and present meld uncomfortably; the lines between Claire the child-up-shit’s-creek and Claire the parent-called-on-the-carpet-for-it have blurred completely. “It’s…nice to hear that my daughter is incorporating the lessons she learns at home into her behavior at school.” As I look at Mrs. Hennepin, I realize that she has nothing of the divine spark about her. No sense of warmth or humor. What the hell is this woman still doing molding the minds of six-and seven-year-olds?

  “As your father is a writer, you of all people, Ms. Marsh, must be perfectly aware that words don’t have to be swear words to inflict lasting damage,” Mrs. Hennepin says. Then she tells me what transpired during the class recess period at the playground in Central Park that morning. Zoë and Xander Osborne were playing “house” in the sandbox, making “hamburgers” with sand they had dampened with water from the nearby drinking fountain.

  “What’s wrong with ‘house’?” I ask Mrs. Hennepin. “Kids have been playing it since the Ice Age. And if you do it right, it can be a lot more fun than hide and go seek!”

  Clearly, my nemesis does not appreciate my nervous attempt at levity. “They weren’t married.”

  “Huh?”

  “Zoë and Xander weren’t married.”

  She’s got me totally confused. I try to channel my mother. What might Tulia have said? “Of course they aren’t married, Mrs. Hennepin. They’re still six years old. I’ve told Zoë she has to wait until she turns seven, at least. I still don’t understand where the problem is.”

  “Xander and Zoë were playing ‘house’ in the sandbox, but they weren’t married. They weren’t husband and wife.”

  I think about this for a moment, trying to suss out what Mrs. Hennepin seems to be telling me. “Well, I’m recently divorced, so I can understand why my daughter might have wanted to play the game that way. In the past several months she hasn’t had such a great experience of husbands and wives playing ‘house’ for keeps.”

  “I appreciate your efforts at pop psychology, Ms. Marsh.” Mrs. Hennepin steeples her fingers and gives me a long look. With her blonde bob and her puff-sleeved dress, she looks like the world’s oldest Sunday schooler. “Here’s the situation.” She makes the word sound like a code red emergency. “Zoë said something to Xander. In the sandbox.”

  I shrug. “What could my daughter have said to the little boy that was so terrible?”

  “She asked him to elope.”

  I let this sink in. Then I begin to laugh, nervously at first because I don’t quite know what to say, and then my laughter changes tones, morphing into a relaxed hilarity because of the situation’s sheer silliness.

  “I really don’t find the humor in this, Ms. Marsh.”

  “Of course you don’t,” I say, stifling another giggle. “It’s very serious.”

  “It is very serious,” Mrs. Hennepin says. “After Zoë asked him to elope with her, Xander Osborne tossed sand in her face—”

  “Is Zoë all right?” I interrupt, jolted back to earth.

  “She got a little sand in her eye, but we rushed her to the infirmary and Nurse Val rinsed her eye
s. She’s fine.”

  Nurse Val—Betty Valentine—is another Thackeray mainstay who has been at the school since the dawn of time. She is universally beloved, cheerfully aware that scads of kids over the decades have faked illnesses—particularly during gym classes—just to enjoy her tender ministrations (we loved it when she put wintergreen-scented towels on our stiff necks), her soothing voice (more like a chirp, actually, as though there was no problem too big for her to solve), and her affable companionship. I briefly wonder if she still smells like cinnamon-flavored Dentyne.

  “What kind of morals do you have and what sort of words are you teaching your daughter?” Mrs. Hennepin wants to know. “Where does Zoë hear words like ‘elope’? And more to the point, how does she happen to understand them?”

  “Oh, in my family, we’re very big on only using words we comprehend the meanings of,” I assure the teacher. “And when we don’t know the meaning, we either ask or look it up in the dictionary. My guess is that Zoë first heard the word elope when she asked her father and me to tell her all about how we met and got married. And if you’re interested in getting into a discussion of morals, you’ll have to excuse me, but I have better things to do with my time.”

  Mrs. Hennepin’s face turns ashy gray. “You Marsh girls have always been a handful,” she says, her voice constricted. “And, clearly, the past eighteen years has changed nothing. This is not a joke. Xander Osborne ran away from the class and climbed a tree. We had to call for the shop teacher, Mr. Spiros, to come coax him down.”

  I don’t quite follow the logic, if indeed there is any, of calling for the wood shop teacher, other than that he probably knows more about trees than any of them, with the exception of the grade-school science teacher, Mrs. Peabo. “Mrs. Hennepin, are you telling me that my daughter’s use of the word ‘elope’ is the cause of another child’s misbehavior? Because I refuse to accept that. I’ve met the boy in question, and in my experience, he’s not exactly what you’d call a model child. Did you scold Nina Osborne for being a bad parent, too?”

  “It is my responsibility, whenever there is an incident that involves my students, to speak with their parents individually,” Mrs. Hennepin sighs. “But we appear to be going in circles. I’ve said my piece and can only hope that you’ll speak with Zoë about what kind of behavior and vocabulary are appropriate to a second-grade classroom setting.”

  She starts to rise, as if she’s just made the decision that this little tête-à-tête is fini, but I stop her with my voice. “Hey! Zoë didn’t do anything wrong. She didn’t say anything vulgar or anything weird, except that the word elope is probably not on your second-grade vocabulary list. And I’m proud that my daughter is verbally proficient. Now, if Xander Osborne freaked out, that’s his problem, not Zoë’s. And his mother’s issues, not mine.”

  Mrs. Hennepin smiles. My argument is having no good effect. “You’re entitled to your opinions on how other parents may see fit to raise their offspring, but I strongly advise you to look to your own actions, Ms. Marsh. To teach Zoë what is appropriate behavior and what is inappropriate for a second-grade student.”

  She sounds like a broken record. “This is ridiculous!” I slam my hand on the sofa cushion and become momentarily distracted by the resultant motes trapped in a sunbeam streaming through the mullioned window. I have to go over Hennepin’s head on this one. “I want to discuss this with Mr. Kiplinger,” I say.

  “Mr. Kiplinger is a very busy man, Ms. Marsh.”

  I point to the phone on the credenza. “No doubt. Nevertheless, I want you to ring him and tell him to take ten minutes out of his hectic fundraising schedule to speak to an alumna and the mother of one of his students.”

  Reluctantly, Mrs. Hennepin dials two extensions in succession, requesting each party to join her ASAP in the parent-teacher conference room. After an awkward few minutes, during which neither one of us feels the slightest inclination to indulge in small talk, the principal enters the room with Mr. Mendel, the guidance counselor and school psychologist. Mrs. Hennepin cedes her chair to Mr. Kiplinger, a tweed-and-elbow-patches type who gratifies his vanity by preferring to be referred to as “Headmaster.” Thackeray Academy is steeped in anglophilic pretensions. As another example, they refer to grades seven through twelve the way the English do—as “forms” one through six.

  “So, what seems to be the fuss?” Kiplinger asks. His British affectation has grown more pronounced over the years. I happen to know he grew up in the Northeast Bronx. We rehash today’s Playground Incident. You would think we were discussing the Bay of Pigs. “Well,” the headmaster says, shooting his cuffs, “if Regina Hennepin found it an imperative to speak with you regarding your daughter’s conduct, and she feels there’s a question of morals to be addressed as regards behavior you seem to find acceptable from Zoë, I must accede to her judgment. She is, after all, your daughter’s teacher. She sees Zoë every day—”

  “And I don’t?!” I’m ready to explode, although I fear my fighting Thackeray’s equivalent of City Hall may do my daughter more lasting harm than good.

  “Mrs. Hennepin is a valued member of the faculty, of the Thackeray family. She has decades of experience in evaluating the appropriateness of a six-year-old’s behavior.” Kiplinger insists on going to the mat for his teacher, as—I suppose, objectively speaking—he should. I resist the impulse to suggest that Mrs. Hennepin has been at it for so long that creeping senility may be a factor here. The headmaster gives the floor to Mr. Mendel, a balding, bespectacled nebbish in his mid-thirties.

  “Ms. Marsh, are there problems at home?”

  I blink a couple of times. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, there’s no way to put this delicately, but your family has gone through a sea change since last semester. Your daughter comes from a broken home—”

  This is too much. How dare this little creep! “Look, Mr. Mendel, I don’t know where you come off trying to psychoanalyze my life. Zoë is a perfectly normal, if somewhat precocious, little girl. She’s not the problem child, here. Why aren’t you asking Nina Osborne why her son has such a violent temper? Why he throws sand? Every toddler knows it’s wrong to throw sand at another child!”

  “But they do it just the same,” Mr. Mendel says, peering at me through his thick lenses. “And boys will be boys.”

  “Is that all you can say?” I’m appalled. And, evidently, friendless in this room. “How many of my tuition dollars go toward your salary?” I demand of Mr. Mendel. “So you can spout…aphorisms…instead of dealing with the situation at hand?” So much for Thackeray’s attention to discipline. I look Mr. Mendel right in the myopic eyes. “So. The way you see things, I’m an unfit mother with questionable morals because my daughter happens to have an advanced vocabulary for her age, while the class bully was just ‘being a little boy.’ Have I understood you correctly?”

  “Ms. Marsh, there’s no reason to become upset,” Mr. Kiplinger soothes, ineffectually playing the peacemaker.

  I turn on the three of them. “I don’t want you to tell me what I’m doing wrong as a parent. I want you to tell me what you’re going to do to keep a genuinely disruptive child in line. My daughter uses a big word. Xander Osborne throws sand at her. He could have blinded Zoë, for God’s sake!”

  The educators exchange glances and the two men rise. “You’re very emotional right now,” Mr. Mendel tells me in the kind of voice one would use when speaking to a mental patient. “Why don’t you go home and think about our discussion, and when you feel ready to talk to Zoë, remember, we’re credentialed and we’re here to help.”

  Yeah. You’re going to be a better mother than I am, I was thinking. They leave the room. I’m seething with rage and frustration. True, nothing has changed in eighteen years. It’s still all my fault.

  Mrs. Hennepin folds her hands primly in her lap and looks at me, cocking her head like a spaniel. “Now, is there anything else you would like to say?”

  The events of the day flash like the Times
Square news zipper across my brain. “Ermm…” I begin tentatively, trying to keep my hands from anxiously fluttering, “I guess this might be a bad time to ask you for a character reference.”

  Dear Diary:

  Mommy wasn’t mad at me after all. I was afraid she would be, because she had to stop taking the test to go come to school to talk to my teacher. But Mommy even let me watch a video after we went over my homework. She said Mrs. Heinie-face overreacted. When I asked her what “overreacted” meant, she said it meant that Mrs. Hennepin and Mr. Kiplinger and Mr. Mendel made too big a deal out of it and acted silly. Mommy made me promise to tell her if Mrs. Hennepin says anything more to me about when I asked Xander to elope. I think Xander overreacted.

  After my video, Mommy brushed my hair for me 100 strokes like her mommy did for her and Mia and like Granny Tulia’s mommy did for her. That’s one of my most favorite things. I’m glad Mommy wasn’t in a mean mood. I was afraid she would be after meeting with Mrs. Hennepin and that she would punish me. But she was like my old Mommy. She even told me a dumb knock-knock joke.

  Knock-knock.

  Who’s there?

  Doya.

  Doya who?

  Doya wanna hear another dumb knock-knock joke?

  The world of the gainfully employed would like to welcome Claire Marsh to its ranks. I passed the sightseeing-guide test the second time around, snagged my three character references, thanks to Happy Chef and a couple of old friends, including an art history professor I’d briefly T.A.’d for until he located a willing and qualified grad student. Regina Hennepin had declined to help me out, and I regretted my moment of desperation, as it left me in a position of weakness with the old bat.