“You were really helping her,” I murmured.
“Numbers,” he said. “I liked numbers.”
When at last I spilled out to the sidewalk, I took great greedy gulps of air. Nighttime, and a borzoi was pissing on some chrysanthemums while the doorman wearily watched.
* * *
—
Then came test day, too soon, a flurry of last-minute texts, Good luck! and You’re going to kill it! and You got this! to which my charges mostly did not reply. Then the eager How’d it go?, also ignored, and then the waiting, and then the scores.
It wasn’t precisely that the scores hadn’t gone up, though from a strictly mathematical perspective, that was true. It was that the scores had gone up and down, up in some places, down in others, up for some kids, down for others. Eagerly I celebrated the gains to the parents. I reminded them that progress was never linear.
“What do you think is the average gain made by an Ivy Prep tutor?” Griffin Chin asked. It was the Tuesday after the scores had been released and he had asked me to “stop by” his office for “a chat.”
“A hundred points?” I asked hopefully.
“One would think, one would think,” he hummed excitedly. “But here at Ivy Prep, our average gain is two hundred points. Average, I’d say. And our top-of-the-line tutors, now, I’m not talking people like you, who’ve just joined, I mean folks who’ve been perfecting their craft for years…they can see upward of three or four hundred points. Rose? Do you see what I’m saying?”
I smiled without showing my teeth.
“So, Rose. Let me be frank. You’re a—you consider yourself an educator?”
“Um, I’ve mostly been writing—”
“All”—he held up his finger—“our tutors are educators. Because that’s the business we’re in. Education. But as I think I mentioned, we only want you to educate in the subjects you’re extremely good at.”
“Right, totally. That makes sense.”
“But I don’t want you to think of this like you’re getting into trouble, because the truth is that we actually have a really wonderful opportunity for you.”
Icy sweat slid down my back. It was so typical of Ivy, of every elitist institution, that the first hint that you’ve royally fucked up is the emphatic insistence that you have in fact not fucked up.
“I really do like the SAT. I’m beginning to develop a real soft spot for it,” I improvised, but Griffin was squinting and dabbing at his iPad.
When he finally found what he wanted, he swanned his fingers out and announced, “The Wests. Now. It’s a very tricky situation.”
“Yes,” I said ambiguously.
“Rose,” and his voice had an okay, you got me tone, as if I were driving a particularly devilish bargain, “I’m going to be perfectly frank here. I wouldn’t say this to everyone, but I’m saying it to you, because I like you. I trust you. Now. The Wests. They’ve let a lot of our tutors go. They’re picky. Not that I blame them. You know how these families work.” His voice warmed with indignation. “There’s the pretty daughter, and then there’s the smart daughter. Isabel’s sister is very smart. And Isabel is very beautiful.”
There was nothing I could say to this that wouldn’t be offensively sardonic or disgustingly creepy, so I stayed mum.
“They’re a good family,” he insisted, as if I had spoken. “A very good family. Ivy Prep has known them a long time. The sister goes to Columbia,” he gave Columbia a breathy hush, as if it were an obscure sexual act, “so, just do what you can do. The family has high expectations. They’ll want you to work with Isabel a lot. You know, it’s college essay time. So I think this will more than make up for…the adjustments we’re making here.”
* * *
—
The elevator down from Griffin’s office made me sick, dropping so fast, then bouncing to abrupt stops at random floors. Once outside, I nearly ran, furiously navigating the stalled ballet of shopping carts in front of Fairway, and then heading south on Second, a monologue ramping up in my head. I hated that I hated being bad at tutoring, though it wasn’t really being bad at tutoring that I minded; it was the money. I had a money problem.
When I had moved in, Lacie had said she “didn’t want to be an asshole” about rent, but introducing financial obligation into the web of debt between us didn’t exactly seem like a brilliant idea. But I didn’t have another one. The question was how to ask. With a joke? I couldn’t believe I was in the position of needing something from her again.
Whenever I passed the plate glass of a store window my footsteps slowed as I glanced at my pale, washed-out reflection. I hated how I looked, yet I kept looking, as if a different glass would give a different answer. But to my question Who am I? every store answered: just a pink slab of face.
Of all Lacie’s soups, I liked her curry-coconut one best, with its great chunks of butternut squash and leeks, its silken tofu and roasted peanuts, the pale wedges of lime and brilliant green sprays of cilantro served in bright ceramic dishes. This morning I had seen a bulbous squash on the butcher block, and all day—right up until my conversation with Griffin—I had thought longingly of the brown sugar and ginger, garlic and cumin, but by the time I got home Lacie had already eaten, and the soup was cold on the stove.
Lacie at the loom resembled a dedicated queen. For weeks boxes of carmine yarn had been arriving, material for the truly epic blanket she was making. I kept waiting for her to declare it done—by now the tightly stitched bloody shroud nearly covered the daybed—but like Penelope, she kept going.
With a bowl of the cold soup I curled myself into the couch. “What are you making anyway? I’m almost afraid to ask.”
She shook it out. Wispy red threads floated up. “A cocoon.”
I couldn’t tell whether she was joking. “Oh my God, that’s what I need. A cocoon. Somewhere I can just hide for the next six months.”
“Exactly. That’s the plan. I’m going to knit us both cocoons, and we’re just going to hibernate this winter. We’re going to be baby bears.”
“Perfect. You’re brilliant. This soup is delicious, by the way.” I sliced open a cube of butternut squash.
She held her stitching up to the light, squinting intently. “It’s really easy to make,” she murmured, lowering her arms and unraveling her last stitch. “How was your day? What’s going on?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Do you ever feel like the whole city grosses you out? It’s just like, I’ll never have kids here. It’s a cruel thing to do to a child.”