Miss Subways: A Novel Page 6

  Ms. Emer Gunnels’s classroom was on the third floor of the old building that stood near where Brevoort’s orchard once had. When they were expanding Broadway, circa 1815, they were aiming straight through his orchard but Brevoort didn’t want to sell. That’s why Broadway hooks west between what is now Tenth and Fourteenth Streets. Emer knew a lot about Manhattan history because of an abandoned project she’d worked on for years about foreign gods in New York City assimilating with their assimilating immigrant communities. She had begun to write a sort of quasi-fictional or semi-factional spiritual history of the city, and then decided she didn’t have the goods; she was a reader, not a writer. That subject matter, though, reminded her of the dream. Yes, her dream seemed to outline hazily all that old research she had done. Funny that. The brain, like an attic, has only so much room, the poet John Ashbery had written, and yet it accommodates everything.

  “Good morning, Ms. Emer!” the children called out in ragged unison. She was the type of woman who wanted her kids to call her “Emer,” but St. Margaret’s was the type of school that wanted the kids to call her “Ms. Gunnels,” so they had struck a compromise.

  Ms. Emer was a master teacher, treasured at the school and in the neighborhood, with graduates, now grown, often coming back to thank her; or ones that she ran into on the street. It was weird to see a former first grader, now in her early twenties, pushing a stroller and calling out, “Oh my god, Ms. Emer!” The former pupil had a baby and a husband and had been transformed into an adult, a parent, while Ms. Emer was essentially the same, merely older. These occurrences, which happened infrequently, but often enough to be a thing, Emer would have to gird herself for, would induce a kind of time-warp vertigo on her. She didn’t feel pressure to marry and have a baby, but when she saw the pride in a former student, the transformation—it was just weirdly unsettling. She was happy for the kid, it wasn’t that, and she wasn’t jealous, it was more like identities had been so rearranged, there was no time to adjust—that twenty-two-year-old six-year-old girl had had sex and given birth, that child was a mother. Trippy thoughts like that jumbled her head.

  Emer had been pregnant a couple of times with an old boyfriend, and the second abortion had left her so badly scarred from the D&C that she was told it would be “very hard” to get pregnant again. So that wasn’t going to happen, at least in this life even if she did find a suitable partner under the wire, and besides, Emer had plenty of kids to “mother” at the school. She taught them how to read. She gave the kids her favorite thing to do in life.

  And it all began with the “Vowel Song.” Emer began to sing it: “Ah Eh Ee Oh Eu, Ah Eh Ee Oh Eu—now we say our vowels, now we sing our vowels.” Emer had made the little tune up when she found that the written way of teaching reading was counterintuitive to the way it sounded to the kids phonetically. She didn’t sing “A E I O U (And sometimes Y),” she sang “Ah Eh Ee Oh Eu,” as spoken, not written. Over the years, she had found the phonetic approach, not to mention the little ditty, very effective. When a child started to read aloud for the first time, Emer still cried. It was like she had enabled the child to enter the human race and the life of the mind, stamped their passport to grown-up humanity.

  Even though, last year finally, in a belated concession to the times, she had delivered a “rap” version of the “Vowel Song,” the memory of which still made the back of her neck hot with shame. Had she really sung “Ah Eh Ee Oh Eu, and sometimes Yo Yo Yo”? She had. Good lord, she had. A debacle in her own mind. But the kids had loved it.

  She began to sing the “Vowel Song,” and noticed immediately that a recent transfer, a pale little blond girl named Lucy, was grimacing and squirming in a telltale expression of needing to go pee. Emer paused a moment and asked her, “Lucy, would you like to use the restroom?” Lucy bit her lip and shook her head no. Emer nodded and they went ahead with the song. About twenty minutes later, as the kids were splitting into groups and working on their projects, Emer again asked Lucy, seeing her continuing to shift in her seat, if she needed the bathroom. Lucy again said no. It was then she saw the puddle of pee beneath Lucy’s seat and the yellowish urine dripping down her pale white legs to the floor, her blue uniform socks and Mary Janes darkened. Emer smiled, walked over, and took Lucy’s hand. “C’mon,” she whispered, “let’s get you cleaned up, okay?” The child, wet eyed and mortified, silently nodded, took Emer’s hand, and allowed herself to be led down the hall.

  Once in the bathroom, Emer helped the girl remove her soiled underwear, and asked her to stay put as she ran to the lost-and-found to get a fresh brown uniform jumper. On the way back to the bathroom, she popped her head into her classroom to make sure hell wasn’t breaking loose. What she saw stunned her.

  The children must have sprung into action as soon as teacher and student left. They had cleaned the floor and desk, dried it with paper towels from the art section of the classroom. They were still so busy eradicating any evidence of the accident that they didn’t see Emer in the doorway. They worked wordlessly and separately, but in utter harmony, like a hive. Emer took a step back into the hallway so the kids didn’t hear her gasp and then stifle a sudden sob. She was so moved by the generosity of these little people, their natural empathy. Sure, these kids were often brats, too, but this moment of undirected compassion broke Emer’s heart in two.

  When she got back to the bathroom, the little girl had forlornly balled up her dirty uniform. Emer simply reassured her that all was okay. “That’s okay, Lucy,” she said, “I used to do that sometimes myself, everyone does.” The little girl changed into the clean jumper and they went back to the classroom like nothing had happened, and by the looks of things, nothing had.

  At lunch, Emer told her good friend Izzy Morgenstern, the school psychologist, what had happened, and Izzy, harder than Emer, saw less the compassion and more the collective shame. Izzy called it a “cover-up”:

  “You see the little programmed robots’ advanced sense of shame already instinctive—horrible—you had a teaching moment there, Mrs. Chips, and you blew it.”

  “Come on, Izzy, it was a thing of beauty—a beautiful, communal act.”

  “It was them acting like body-hating, repressed bourgeois adults, sweeping ugliness, the real, under the carpet, looking the other way.”

  “It was sweet.”

  “Airbrush dicks and cunts and piss and shit.”

  “I’m eating.”

  “They lost their innocence today.”

  “I feel like they grew up a little, in a healthy way.”

  “And what of this girl, who pees herself and then sees it miraculously disappear? What of her shame, her silence?”

  Emer pointed to another table in the lunchroom where little Lucy was eating with a nice group of friends, all of them laughing and talking over one another, not a hint of what had happened this morning.

  “She does look miserable, doesn’t she?”

  “I hate it when bourgeois values win. Nice job, by the way. Can we talk about Girls now?”

  Izzy was serious in her condemnation, but only by half. She liked to play at being the Marxist firebrand, but it was more like a role she enjoyed because she knew how good at it she was. She knew Emer enjoyed the performance. Emer felt brave around Izzy, or she felt in touch with her own ability to transgress and break rules in her presence, even though she never followed through with any actual transgressions.

  “Hey, listen, Izzy,” Emer asked, “did I call you last night?”

  “Like on the phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Huh.”

  “Huh?”

  “I had the most lucid dream—where it wasn’t just that the world was changed or obeyed different laws, but that I was changed, I was a different person with a different life. I’ve never had a dream like that.”

  “Alert the media.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing more deathly boring
than having to listen to someone else’s dream. Let me guess, there was a unicorn, what, vomited a rainbow and shat Starburst? Fascinating…”

  They laughed.

  “I had a boyfriend in the dream.”

  “Do you mind if I kill myself right now?”

  “You know, you’re not a very good psychologist.”

  “I can be a good shrink or a good friend. Not both. Choose.”

  Emer chose. “Friend.”

  JIMMY GUNNELS

  ON THE WAY HOME FROM WORK, Emer stopped by to see her eighty-one-year-old father. The old man was suffering from incipient dementia and in an assisted-living home on Riverside and Eighty-sixth. It was pretty damn nice there, with views of the river and twenty-four-hour nursing, paid for mostly by insurance and her dad’s dwindling savings, but it was still depressing. The staff tried to keep the shuffling, doddering occupants occupied as much as possible, scheduling movies, walks, trips to the museums, performances by grade school orchestras. The sloth-like frenzy of activity in the place had the opposite effect on Emer of hammering home the fact that these people had nothing, absolutely nothing to do. When she walked in the doors, the world felt like it ran down into slow motion. Eighty-sixth Street was the last stop on the mortality train, the Oblivion Express.

  She found her father lying in bed as usual, watching Fox News with his Filipino nurse, Ging-ging (Evangelina). Emer said in mock anger, “Fox? Ging … why?”

  “He like,” said Ging-ging. “He can follow.” And this was true, the old man liked to watch Fox and professional wrestling. Emer thought there wasn’t much difference between the two, you knew who the good guys and bad guys were at all times.

  Emer preferred to read to her dad, as he used to read to her when she was a child. She had spoken to doctors who dealt with aging about how activities like music or dancing, deeply encoded in muscle memory and sheathed in the myelin of youth, were more easily retrieved than other knowledge, and that participating in these activities momentarily and intermittently made them young again. Like in an Oliver Sacks book. A Flowers for Algernon moment. A woman whose mind and personality seems gone dances a waltz in perfect form and timing and suddenly returns to herself for an instant while she moves, while she dances, while she sings. She hoped for that as she read to her dad. But most often his response was to turn the hectoring Fox volume up further.

  The other alternative to Fox News was a Ging-ging monologue, which consisted of a hallucinogenic combo of General Hospital and other soaps with a healthy dose of Filipino folklore thrown in from Little Manila in Woodside, Queens. She remembered once walking in on a discussion of the Manananggal between her father and Ging, her father taking part and animated like he rarely was anymore. It was doubly strange because James Gunnels had been a devout Catholic for most of his adult life. It was to Jim Gunnels that an eight-year-old Emer announced one night at dinner that she was going to become a priest. Her mother got up from the table, leaving it to her dad to tell her that was a job avenue closed to women.

  “You can become a nun,” he had said.

  She then researched and realized that, indeed, the priesthood could not be for her, so she decided to become a Presbyterian minister. Her father had not laughed at that. “Over my fucking dead body,” he had said.

  And that’s what had injured Emer deep in her soul, this rupture with her dad, in the black and white of her young mind, where she was not good enough for him or God because she was a girl, and she had turned against God in some private, irrevocable, obstinate way. She would not serve, and her non serviam took the form of her dog-eared, yellowing paperback of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, which replaced her Bible.

  It was this same dogmatic Jim Gunnels who would rather die than see his daughter embrace Protestantism, who was now aflame with Ging-ging’s pagan folklore. It appears the Manananggal is an evil, man-eating monster capable of severing its own torso and sprouting huge bat wings to then go fly in search of victims in the night. Its prey is mostly sleeping, pregnant women, using a proboscis-like tongue to suck out the heart of the fetus. Emer was gratified to learn that the Manananggal, like the Balkan vampire, was vulnerable to garlic and sunlight. Hence the cloves dangling above her father’s headboard.

  She bent down to kiss her father and said, “Hey, Pops.” He craned around her head as if there were something urgent happening on TV, not just that pinched-faced thumb in a real-hair toupee, Sean Hannity. She browsed through her Kindle library to see what she might read him, hoping to catch her dad out before some dreaded inflated talking head appeared.

  Without acknowledging Emer, her dad said, “I can’t remember. I can’t…”

  “Can’t remember what, Pops?”

  “I can’t remember the last time I got laid.”

  “Whoa, hey, Pops.”

  Ging-ging giggled like a debutant. “Oh, Mr. Gunnels.”

  “Don’t be such a pussy, Bill.”

  “I’m a woman, Pops.”

  “Of course you are, Bill, whatever turns you on. That’s the end of America right there. Bruce Jenner. I refuse to say ‘Caitlyn.’”

  “That’s okay, Pops, you don’t have to say ‘Caitlyn.’”

  Ging giggled again. She giggled a lot, but was tough as nails. Sometimes Emer would cry at a back-and-forth like this and sometimes she would laugh, and then reprimand herself for laughing.

  But everything out of her father’s mouth could be a clue to some lack she felt; she would hang on to her dad’s few words and worry them like a dog trying to lick the marrow out of a broken bone, trying to tease out the significance, to find the man she once knew in the mostly wayward garbage that came out of his mouth. She hadn’t gotten enough of him when she was a child; she wasn’t done with him, she wanted more, and this want brought an uneasiness between them, even as he was now. He did not want to be asked for something. He did not want to feel like he was coming up short. Sometimes she would try to lead him somewhere.

  “Hey, Pops, do you have a daughter?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “What’s her name?” Out of the corner of her eye, Emer saw Ging-ging raise her hand like an eager kid at school.

  “Ging! Don’t help him, now…” Kindhearted Ging-ging would often supply the answers from the other side of the room like this might be a game show where you could ask a friend for help.

  Her father said, “Emer.” Ging-ging clapped and looked like she expected confetti and balloons to descend from the ceiling.

  “Am I her?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Where is she?” Emer had his attention now. This happened less and less frequently, so she pressed on.

  “I don’t know, brother, she’s missing in action.”

  “I’m Emer.”

  “Bill, this is no time to come out of the closet.”

  “So what about this Emer? What’s she like?”

  “What are you getting at, Bill?”

  “I don’t know … was she a failure? A disappointment to you?”

  Emer didn’t know where that came from. Ging-ging sighed.

  Her father focused on her and said, “No, but she thinks she is.”

  This brought a sob from Emer. She wasn’t expecting that. She’d been going for Alzheimer-lite and got hit with Alzheimer-heavy.

  Her father had often been her champion. A floaty child, Emer had sometimes mistaken her dreams for real when she was young. Her mother hated this, as if it threatened her own tenuous grasp on the real, and had even brought Emer to a psychologist at the age of seven so she would “stop dreaming.” Like it was something she was doing on purpose to annoy her mother. Emer enjoyed talking to the psychologist and liked doing the Rorschach tests that he laid out in front of her, but even then she knew that this dreaminess made her a little different.

  They ran needless tests. Emer kept on her lucid dreaming and even had a couple of seizures late at night in bed that she never told her mother about. She continued having th
ese mild mini-seizures to this day, and privately referred to them as “my time-outs.”

  Little Emer was shown an X-ray of her brain, her mother pointing at it, and saying, “Look, perfect, beautiful.” But then the doctor had said, “Actually, no,” and had gone on to point to a tiny shadow on her temporal lobe by the left ear that he wasn’t overly concerned with, but that they would need to biopsy nonetheless. Emer had been fascinated by the photos, the black-and-white symmetry of the organ, like a halved honeydew melon, the left and the right hemispheres, and she had asked what that connective tissue was between them. She focused on that. The connection. Told it was the corpus callosum, Emer diagnosed herself to her mother, saying, “The left part is awake and the right part is for sleep and dreams, and in most people this bridge is closed usually, but mine is open. So few people walk back and forth. My bridge is open.” Even though there might be something terribly wrong with her, she watched her mother cry in gratitude at this wondrous little self-diagnosis.

  And biopsy they did, finding nothing, but leaving Emer with a lifelong scar that was soon covered by her hair growing back. The “fits,” the visions, stopped for a while after the removal of the shadow, but over the years, they returned, though no shadow was ever caught by the doctors again. There must be a shadow of a shadow, that’s how Emer thought of it, as a child, and she thought of it as hers, moreover, as the part of her that made her her and made her see the way she saw. She took to fingering the hidden scar in times of duress as someone else might twirl hair. To touch the shadow of the shadow was to bring her back to herself.