Miss Subways: A Novel Read online

  EMER’S EVENINGS HAD BEEN PRETTY SET before Corvus had thrown everything out of whack. She did yoga twice a week, and she did a spinning class at Soul Cycle one night a week and on Sunday morning. On other nights, she might run on the treadmill or do the Versaclimber at Equinox. In good weather, she might run the loop around the reservoir. But she favored the gym. The gym functioned like a church in some other life. She had superficial acquaintances there, people who knew her by name, seemed pleased to see her, and kept her from feeling too invisible in this city.

  She didn’t know why she worked out so much. She didn’t think it was to attract a man, or a more generalized vanity; she had vague notions of health about it, not letting her old lady bones decalcify, and an oblique belief in both the meditative power of yoga and the rah-rah ethos of spinning. The mélange of approaches worked for her and kept her from feeling or appearing too obsessed with any one physical activity. She flitted, hummingbird-like, from one life-changing health fad to the next—from vegan to paleo, from no fat to lots of fat, from statins from heaven to statins from hell. The science behind all these trends seemed iffy, temporary, and possibly manipulated by Big Pharma, swinging like a pendulum. She therefore tended to stick longer with what tasted good. Right now she was into megadosing vitamin B12, which was supposed to protect the aging brain (spooked by her dad’s genes running wild and replicating ceaselessly within her), and bulletproof coffee—a high-fat ritual out of California or Hawaii that consisted of adding butter, coconut oil, and cream to her morning joe. It ended up tasting something like liquid buttered toast. She gave her father a sip of hers once and he literally spat it out on his chest like she had tried to poison him, screwing up his face and saying, like it was a last straw in the culture wars, “For the love of Mike, Bill! Let coffee be coffee.”

  After Corvus’s departure, she quickly resumed her untroubling OCD leanings and her “healthy addictions,” which she also filed under the broader phylum “obsessive activities that don’t hurt anyone”—such as cleaning, the Sunday crossword puzzle, and making sure her vibrator and emergency flashlight always had batteries. In her closet, at any given time, there were at least twenty AAs and Ds standing at the ready like a tiny reserve army, and she didn’t even use the damn things that much.

  Though in the last week or so, since the train ride with Con, she might’ve been throwing herself into her extracurriculars more intensely than usual. She still hadn’t called him. Not because she was playing it cool or anything, she just didn’t know what to say, did not know how she would fit the event into her life and square it with her character, did not know that she could continue.

  It reminded her of a being she had seen in one of her old notebooks, called a Gancanagh—an Irish folkloric entity whose kiss was addictive, or rather a toxin he secreted through the skin was addictive. He kind of slimed you. With opium resin. When the Gancanagh departs, his lovelorn and detoxing victims waste away to nothing for want of his companionship. Some even fight to the death for his love, which, of course, they can’t really possess. She wondered if Con was somewhere feeling the same way about her kiss, her addictive toxins.

  This Tuesday, she would miss her yoga because Sidney had set up the mea culpa teacher-parent meetings. The incident had quickly become a low-key cause célèbre at the school, so Sid wanted it handled and tucked away asap before it snowballed into legend.

  Emer was, in fact, in danger of losing her job. It was “out of character” for her to have acted thus. Was it? Her job depended on that interpretation of events. She was prepared to sit contritely and swallow her medicine the way she had made the girls swallow theirs. One set of parents “got it,” and thought it was fine the way Emer had responded, and didn’t need to take the meeting. Actually that was a mom, whose first husband, a firefighter, had died in 9/11. The woman had remarried and had more children, and her daughter, Maya O’Connor, was the one weird sister who actually had the most intense physical reaction to eating the mess. So that left only two meetings tonight, with the parents of Ashia Waters and Shoshanna Schwartz-Silberman, back to back.

  Sometimes, looking for a Train of Thought, she told herself, This one will be an omen. Straight from the subway gods, meant for me and me only about right now. She was feeling a little nervous tonight, a little in search of succor, yet she was hopeful when she spied this:

  Long Years apart—can make no

  Breach a second cannot fill—

  The absence of the Witch does not

  Invalidate the spell—

  The embers of a Thousand Years

  Uncovered by the Hand

  That fondled them when they were Fire

  Will stir and understand—

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  Dickinson was like that Witch to Emer, that uncanny and disorienting. She was able to perch in a twilight world between sense and nonsense, full of dread and hard truth, yet still retain an essence of the mundane, a whiff of her uneventful life, spent as a conscientious objector, hiding in plain sight in Massachusetts, to an establishment not yet ready to read her. Do not venture into her desk drawer unless you have balls of steel. She accessed the simple, natural horror, speed, and beauty of an actual lightning strike. Dickinson had no voice in her own time, as a woman, so she stuffed her silent screams, more than eight hundred of them, in a drawer and waited for eternity to hear. And eternity did hear. As did Emer.

  The spinster of Amherst was both a cautionary tale and a role model; she, too, had believed in God, for a time. Dickinson once said, “I never enjoyed such perfect peace and happiness as the short time in which I felt I had found my savior.” Short time. Eventually, her sense of eternity grew too large to be constricted by the one-named God.

  A short time. Was that what was happening with Emer? Perhaps that’s all the time we get with God. Why do we ask of him, as we ask impossibly of a romantic lover, to last forever? But it’s the memory of that oneness with the holy that persists, even from childhood, and forms the template for all subsequent romance. Come to Jesus. There was Con and his kiss creeping in again. She deflected thoughts of him, consigning them to the distracting rumble of the tracks.

  So Dickinson was the true underground woman, an authentic Miss Subways, and Emer aspired to her own grace and truth as a woman in and out of her own time. “Meet Emily, a native of Amherst, Mass. Our May Miss Subways spins a horror at death and nothingness into jewels of insight on the loom of her soul. She also enjoys baking, wearing white after Labor Day, and oblivion.”

  Thank you, MTA. The subway had again been her oracle. She took a deep breath. She would bow down when need be and rise up when need be. She would scribble in “Godsforsaken,” and file it away in the unpublished drawer of her desktop screen. Con had been a goad to her, and a rod—she would take the reins and write her own story, of her own gods, planted in her head, as she envisioned it, by her very own tumor or ghost of a tumor. She would see him again, and make love to him again. Or she wouldn’t. The tumor was growing again, or it wasn’t. She would publish her thoughts on gods, or she wouldn’t, and it would be left to future generations to find nourishment in her corpse like mental carrion, or not. Oh, that’s pleasant, she thought, but also knew from the Witch that “after great pain a formal feeling comes.” This is the feeling of form beginning, the word moving across a chaos of waters and making waves. It was all gonna be okay.

  THE SCHWARTZ-SILBERMAN EFFECT

  EMER GOT TO HER CLASSROOM a good half hour early to set up two chairs by her desk. She wanted to maintain the space between her and the parents and preserve her position of authority. There were no big person seats in her room besides her own. The parents would have to sit in the kids’ little chair/desk combos. No matter how tall these adults were, Emer would be taller.

  Of course, she had met the parents before. At the beginning of the school year, and at a regularly scheduled parent-teacher conference mid-year. But it was the mothers of these two kids, not the fathers, whom Emer remembered. The mothers had b
een strong, had taken the lead in conversations about their children, while the fathers had hung back. Ashia Waters was an African American kid whose mother, Emer recalled, had a vague connection to show business, and Shoshanna Schwartz-Silberman’s mother was a lawyer who worked in the DA’s office.

  First up were the Schwartz-Silbermans. As soon as the couple walked into her classroom, Emer knew it was going to be a rough ride. Shoshanna’s mom, Debbie, tossed her an ironic smile and refused to shake Emer’s hand while the father, Ron, looked almost apologetic about his wife’s unbridled anger, yet also relieved, as if he was happy to share the brunt of it with someone else for the evening. Emer smiled and said, “Thank you for coming in tonight. I’m sure you’re both very busy and the last thing you wanted to do was—”

  Debbie cut her off. “The last thing I wanted to do was see about the welfare of my child?”

  “Of course not,” Emer said. “I’m sorry if you heard that. I didn’t mean to imply … I just am sure that you are very busy…”

  “This is like something out of the Middle Ages.”

  Emer decided to nod her way through. She didn’t want to apologize too early or too much, she wanted to let Debbie tire herself out, if possible.

  “This is no different from spanking or hitting a child,” Debbie went on. “I don’t know why we are even sitting here tonight, I don’t know why you weren’t summarily fired. It’s out of respect for Sidney that we are even here at all.”

  “I understand your concern.”

  “My concern? You assaulted my child in the safe space of a classroom.”

  “Assault is a powerful word.”

  “Yes, assault. Sho is traumatized. She’s a gifted kid with a strong imagination, so she’s willful, and because you can’t handle that, you try to break her?”

  “Nobody was trying to break anything or anyone, Mrs. Schwartz-Silberman. I can assure you. Shoshanna is highly intelligent, with all the energy that comes along with that. I value high-spiritedness in my kids, believe me, and I try to give it free rein as much as I can until it starts to interfere with the cohesiveness of the classroom.”

  “This was at lunch.”

  “That’s right, it was at lunch.”

  “Lunch has to be cohesive?”

  “This had been going on for a while. Sho, Ash, and Maya can get pretty powerful when they join up. They’d been at it for much of that day, and, in fact, much of the year. That’s not to excuse what I did—mine was a failure in judgment and patience, and I sincerely regret it, and apologize from the bottom of my heart, and can assure you and promise you that neither it nor anything like it will ever ever happen again.”

  Finally, the passive father, sensing an opportunity to divert his wife’s attack on the teacher into an attack on the other kids, and by extension the parents of those other kids, chimed in, hoping to make it more fun for everyone.

  “Yeah, we’ve been hearing that Maya is the ringleader, the instigator.”

  “Please, not now, Ron.”

  But Ron was rolling—“Well, poor kid, her dad died in nine-eleven—that house must be like a morgue.”

  His wife shut him down. “Not her dad, not Maya’s dead, Ron, I mean not Maya’s dad—fuck me—Maya’s mom’s previous husband.”

  Ron persisted limply, “I still think it’s a valid read on the situation.”

  Emer all but asked permission to speak. “If I may, I’m trying not to assign more blame or anything to any one of the three girls.”

  Debbie’s eyes flashed again. “I agree. I don’t think one of the girls gets blamed more than the other, thank you very much, Ron, I don’t think the girls get any blame at all. The blame is yours, the adult here, the teacher.”

  “She apologized, Debbie.”

  “If you’re gonna sit there and take her side, why don’t you just go the fuck home and watch Maddow, Ron.”

  “Fuck you, Debbie.”

  “And you,” Debbie said, zeroing back in on Emer, “don’t be calculating in your head that because Shoshanna’s parents speak like this to each other, she is now ‘acting out’ at school.”

  Emer had just been thinking exactly that and replied, “I was thinking nothing of the sort.”

  Ron, injured now and humiliated, stood. “She apologized, Debbie, more than once, she said it would never happen again. I don’t know what else we can achieve here. Thank you, Ms. Emer, we appreciate your time. Let’s go.”

  “You can go,” his wife said. “Go.”

  He went.

  Once again Debbie Schwartz-Silberman turned her full ire on Emer, like the prosecutor she was. Emer began to pity Shoshanna. She began to know the girl. This meeting was actually helpful to her, as a teacher, she thought. She mustered an incipient sense of gratitude for the whole episode.

  “I just can’t imagine,” Debbie said, gathering up as much courtroom mock sympathy as she could, “how you treat your own kids.”

  That stunned Emer. That level of attack. She steeled herself not to cry, she wouldn’t give this woman the satisfaction. Debbie Schwartz-Silberman saw the tears behind the steel, and while that wasn’t enough—nothing would ever be enough, no amount of contrition or prostration or penance—it would do for now, this little bloodletting, and save Emer’s job.

  “I don’t have any children,” Emer said, wanting to but not looking away.

  Debbie nodded angrily. “Maybe that’s just as well.” With that, she left to join her husband, who’d been audibly shuffling his feet and sighing impotently just outside the door. When Emer was safely alone, she gave herself over to a few tears, trying not to hear the Schwartz-Silbermans going at each other as they retreated down the hallway.

  Sidney popped his head in. He was not a part of these meetings, or even listening, but he was “around if I’m needed.” He shot her a big fake smile and did a little dance shuffle.

  “Two down, one to go. You okay?”

  She nodded.

  “I am here and not here, as the need arises.” He disappeared again.

  Emer grabbed for the Kleenex, omnipresent and within reach anywhere in a first-grade homeroom, blew her nose, and looked up at the big clock that she used to teach the kids time. She had five minutes to get her shit together before the next inquisition.

  THE WATERS

  ASHIA WATERS’S MOTHER, who went by “Mama,” was from Africa, though Emer couldn’t remember which country. She spoke in that singsong accent that Emer couldn’t help hear as cheerful. When Mama Waters walked into the classroom, unlike Debbie Schwartz-Silberman, she did not launch into an immediate attack. She shook Emer’s hand, and even kissed her cheek hello, and laughed as she struggled to sit in the child’s desk seat.

  “Shall we wait for your husband to get here to begin?”

  “No.”

  “How would you like to begin, then?”

  “In the beginning…”

  Emer laughed. “I was raised a good Catholic, so that’s fine by me.”

  Mama Waters did not laugh. She just nodded and repeated, “Catholic.”

  Emer decided that she couldn’t read Mama’s affect clearly, that there was a bedrock cultural difference between her smiles and frowns and Emer’s smiles and frowns. This is what it must be like to be a little autistic, she thought, to be unable to read faces, to not pick up on the social cues. She forged ahead.

  “Then I’ll just start, if you don’t mind. Ash is a great kid, smart and full of energy, as I’m sure you know.” If Mama Waters did know, she wasn’t letting on. Her quiet unsettled Emer further—was it anger or politeness? Emer began to miss the direct fight and hostility of Shoshanna’s Upper East Side parents.

  Truth was, little Ashia Waters was the ringleader of the weird sisters. The one who usually came up with the games the three would play and who had definitely started the witch’s brew that day in the lunchroom. The kid was a lot to handle—a trickster and inveterate liar, but charismatic and funny when she wanted to be. Emer thought she had the right amount of ego
and self-regard to become a surgeon, or in another future scenario, an actress playing a surgeon. Ashia was her favorite of the three, even though she caused the most trouble. The other two girls were like sheep. But Emer had decided, in conferring with Izzy, that the three would be treated as one in these meetings—they would all be equally culpable, all equally harmed, and all equally apologized to.

  “So, I am deeply apologetic about the way I handled the situation. It was out of character for me, and your daughter deserved better and will get better in the future. Has she said anything about it to you?”

  “Yes. On the day she did. But not since.”

  “Was she traumatized?”

  “This is a stupid word. This trauma. No, she was laughing about it.” Emer flinched at the word stupid. It was verboten in the school of the twenty-first century. It was the fuck or cunt of a bygone era. About the worst thing you could call someone was “stupid.” Emer chalked it up to Mama having grown up elsewhere, elsewhere being outside Manhattan or Brooklyn.

  “That’s good.” But was it? Emer immediately regretted saying that.

  “Was the whole stupid thing Ashia’s idea?” Stupid again.

  “No, no,” Emer lied, “not that I know of.”

  “Listen, Ms. Emer, when I was a child, Muslim in Nigeria, I was caned for being late to school, welts on my rear end. I was slapped for chewing gum, blood from my lip—and I realize we have different customs, we make changes, we adapt to our home, our circumstance. For instance, my family name is Wati, not Waters, but I got tired of spelling my name over and over and people fawning over my exoticism…”

  Emer squelched an urge to fawn over her exoticism and ask more after her name and origins.

  “I guess what I am wondering here tonight is,” Mrs. Wati/Waters continued, “what took you so long and how can you claim to educate my child unless you lay hands on her when she is bad?”

  Wow. That was a different perspective—“spare the rod, spoil the child”—Emer had not anticipated. She had a vague feeling she was in deep waters or that she was being entrapped. She decided to timidly pull back.