Hold Still Page 3

  Once in Manhattan, she heads south on Broadway to the bottom of the island, to the seaport where boats are docked and sloshing in the Hudson and the smells are strong of rotted fish, then west and through the steep slate of the memorials in Battery Park. This stretch along the Hudson is usually filled with runners and tourists in line to take the ferry to Liberty Island, but she’s so early she has the whole thing to herself: the space of cobbled concrete and small parks, the sailboats, the volleyball nets lined up on rubber courts.

  Just past a set of docks with sailboats in a row, Maya stops and slips her shoes off. The wind bites through the tights she’s wearing, gnawing sharply along her skin, and her bare face smarts; small drops of water reach her as she walks closer to the edge. She wears no gloves, and the fence that separates her from the water is cold and sticks to her fingers as she holds on and climbs up over the top. The water’s gray slate, with tiny whitecaps forming out closer to New Jersey. She can see Liberty Island, boats knocking against their moorings another hundred feet away.

  She settles herself carefully onto the other side of the fence, half hanging over the water, her hands holding tightly to the metal bars. Cold drops splash up onto the balls of her feet and around her ankles. The water feels warm at first compared to the whip of the air. She looks out toward New Jersey, the Statue of Liberty almost completely obstructed by the early morning fog. The ledge is brick and the edges catch against the bottoms of her thighs and she feels her tights pilling. She has to alternate the hand she uses to hold the fence behind her, as the sting of it is only bearable for small stretches of time.

  Her whole life she’s been a strong swimmer. She thinks: if it weren’t for the nearly inevitable hypothermia, she’d be able to get to New Jersey before the sun is up. And, just for that moment of going under, those few seconds after the initial shock of the cold, when the water has reached just above her neck and she’s about to pull her whole self under, it might be worth whatever else might come as a result.

  Ellie, seventeen: Maya would peek over her shoulder. She would grab Ellie’s phone and checked the text messages when Ellie went into the bathroom or once she’d gone to sleep. She would hack into Ellie’s email and her Facebook. There were rules and boundaries about trust and fairness and giving children space that she believed in, right up till she didn’t anymore. Until trust felt like a silly word that was just standing in the place of actually doing something to save her daughter, a privilege reserved for people with lives much less complicated than theirs.

  She knew Ellie was at a party. She had an address, on Fourth Street and Eighth Avenue (Dylan’s, she’d learn later; both his parents traveled for work, and he was, like Ellie’s dad, an only child; he often had the house all to himself), not far from where they lived. She thought she’d have to knock, but had no real plan for what she’d say or do when someone answered. Except, when she came up to the door it was ajar and she could hear people talking and the thrum of music knocked her brain against her skull. She walked in still not knowing what she’d do. She expected to see him, maybe find him in some back room with her daughter. She steeled herself for the possibility of catching her daughter fucking someone while a party raged outside the door. It didn’t take long to find Ellie, though, and she wasn’t fucking anyone. At least not right then. And Dylan was quiet, the only one in the room who didn’t seem to be enjoying himself. Maya stood in the hall looking into a great room and watched her daughter. There was nothing preventing someone walking past and seeing her, this middle-aged woman—hair tied in a knot, bare-faced, in jeans and a fraying Harvard sweatshirt—snooping on these kids. But she stayed still because she had to. Once she saw her daughter, she didn’t care who found her there.

  Ellie was drunk, something worse than drunk. She was in her underwear, beige and laceless, simple, something Maya had probably bought on sale. There were two other girls who stood with Ellie, but it was clear, based on their posture, based on the shock of her daughter’s beauty laid out so bare before her: Ellie was in charge. When it came to the commodity of beauty, her daughter was so rich with it she could parse it out to anyone who chose to look. Maya watched the other girls, confined by the need to be self-conscious. They shaped their faces and twisted and turned in ways they hoped might complement their best attributes. But there was no part of Ellie not worth showing off. And Maya wished for the millionth time that her daughter might be slightly less attractive. The eyes, the hair, the way the legs shone as Ellie dipped down to the floor—it was a dangerous commodity to bestow on anyone so reckless and so young.

  There were a handful of boys, some men, around the girls. Music played and the girls danced and the men watched them. Dylan sat back on the couch close to the kitchen and sulked as Ellie held court.

  Maya’s daughter’s hips jutted out from underneath the satin string that connected the front and back stretch of fabric that still covered her. She stood up on her toes and dipped down nearly to the floor. She walked over to one of the other girls and placed both hands on her shoulders. She came in very close to her and their breasts touched and Maya held her breath. Ellie took one hand off the girl and ran her fingers down the length of her, lingering once at her breasts and then her belly button, dipping her body farther and farther down. She bent her head back once she reached the girl’s knees, her hands wrapped around the girl’s thin hips. Maya took her eyes briefly from her daughter and watched the men around her. Their eyes stayed wide and rapt. They were quiet, sipping beers and smoking but hardly moving otherwise, as Maya’s daughter dipped and twirled.

  Summer 2011

  “I’m sorry,” Joseph says after, though the whole time he was careful, kind. He’s the smallest, skinniest boy she’s ever fucked.

  “I just.” She wants to ask him quietly to please not touch her. She wants to be outside again, sitting a few feet away with her arms across her chest, talking about his student loans.

  Winter 2013

  Maya drives up to campus, which she rarely does. She loves the subway but does not feel up for all that interacting and is grateful instead for the hour she spends in the car. Over the bridge, the water, she watches a tugboat slip underneath as the traffic inches toward the FDR.

  The building’s empty when she gets there. It’s classic university brick with tall windows on every floor. Out front is a small lawn where, in summer, kids throw Frisbees, and some of the more intrepid girls lie out in swimsuits. Now the lawn is covered in a small film of snow, and the three trees that cover it almost completely in swaths of shade in spring and summer are all bare empty branches that look sharp to Maya and too thin to hold the wealth of leaves she knows will return soon. There’s a café on the bottom floor that’s not yet open. A small man with a perfectly trimmed mustache mops the tile, with the silver metal chairs propped on the matching silver tabletops. He smiles at Maya and nods as she walks past and up the three flights of stairs to her department office. There are papers and books—Mrs. Dalloway, Lydia Davis, a collection of Keats’s poems, Barbara Johnson’s A World of Difference, and an old copy of Being and Nothingness she borrowed from Stephen a couple years ago—spread across the desk.

  Maya’s just sat down and opened the Barbara Johnson when she hears shuffling in the doorway. “Lollione was in today,” says Laura. She’s Maya’s oldest, closest friend: French literature, Duras, de Beauvoir, Cixous, all curves and those sort of floral flowy dresses that Maya felt too old to pull off at twenty-two.

  Laura wears maroon lipstick; besides that her face is bare.

  They’ve been friends for twenty years, lumped together early. Maya, the Woolf scholar, and Laura with all those Frenchwomen and their feelings, all that sex. It seemed everyone in the department was hoping the two of them would keep each other occupied. And they have, mostly. There are few people in the world with whom Maya would rather sit and talk.

  “She’s not even taking my class!” Laura says. She has a student nearly every year who maddens her, whom Laura whispers about even as the gir
l (as she always is) follows Laura doggedly around. Laura sits on one of the chairs opposite Maya, slips her feet out of her shoes, and crosses her legs. “I think she changed her name from Jessica while she was an undergrad.” She twirls her right foot in slow circles as she talks. “I heard her talking to a boy before class the other day, a young one, very bright. He was asking her how old she was when her family left Korea.” Laura fiddles with her earrings as she speaks. They’re silver, long layers of leaves that reach the length of her neck. “They mistake her lisp for an accent,” she says and laughs a little, leaning her head back; her hands cup her neck now and her eyes roll up into her head. “The girl grew up in Queens.”

  Maya nods toward the door. “Either stop or close the door before she hears.”

  Laura jumps up, and Maya watches her dress flutter, brown with reds and yellows, around her ass and ankles—then walks back to Maya’s desk and pulls the chair close. “Oh, she wouldn’t care if she heard me. She’d misconstrue it as a compliment.”

  Laura sits down and puts her elbows on the desk and then props her chin up on her palms.

  “She’s a child,” says Maya, leaning back in her chair and reaching for a book behind her, not pulling it from the shelf, just running her hand along its edge. “She’s just desperate for you to like her. They all are. They worship you. ”

  “Oh, and I pretend to like her,” says Laura. “I listen carefully to all the hackneyed things she says.” The earrings glint under the lamplight and weak swaths of sun come through the window as Laura shakes her head. “And I want to scream at her to please just go to law school like her parents want.”

  Maya leans forward again. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Please, Maya,” says her friend. “You can’t possibly not hate at least one of them a year.” Hands to earrings again, then back to neck. “They’re so entitled, some of them,” she says. “As if having an opinion is enough to make them interesting.”

  Maya smiles at Laura, shakes her head, and looks down at her hands folded on her desk.

  “I have some I wish came to office hours less.”

  “Oh, Christ, Maya! Tell me! Just one. Tell me one.”

  Laura leans forward farther and her shirt falls down to show the first few inches of her cleavage. The skin across her breasts folds, then quivers. Laura will be fifty-three this year, five years older than her friend. Maya wonders how either of them has managed to let herself become so very middle-aged.

  “Oh, God,” says Maya, sitting back in her chair, “Alexandra.” She breathes out as she says it. Both she and Laura laugh. “She did her undergrad at Brown and thinks she’s much brighter than she is.”

  “Please,” says Laura. “Please go on.”

  “She keeps raising her hand and telling us stories about the deconstructionists. She had a problem with the shifts in point of view in To the Lighthouse.”

  Laura laughs and puts her feet up on Maya’s desk.

  “Oh, they all have problems. They have problems with anyone who makes them work or think.”

  “That’s not fair,” says Maya. “Plenty of them think quite well.” The truth is Maya loves the lot of them. She loves their energy, their brains. Laura does as well. They’re both the sort to stay after class for students with questions, to take on extra advisees, to answer frantic emails late at night.

  “Boof,” says Laura. “Plenty.” She runs her hand up through her hair. “Some.”

  “Enough to keep you coming back.”

  “Money is what keeps me coming back,” Laura says, then shrugs. This isn’t true either. There’s money that comes from somewhere, whether it’s the ex-husband Maya knows was present briefly, or the family out in the Midwest that Laura almost never talks about. But she lives in a full-floor apartment close to campus that no one surviving on just the salary of a French literature professor could afford.

  “I’m just a sideshow act to all of them,” says Laura. “The crazy French one.” She sometimes seems to have an accent, but she’s from Minnesota. Though she did spend almost a decade in Paris just after she received her doctorate. “It’s exhausting,” she says. “Putting on the show.”

  She stops, her hands palmed at her mouth and her chin rising, angling her head down again and straight toward her friend.

  “But then, you’re so earnest all the time,” says Laura, “so fervent. You must be even more exhausted than I am.”

  Maya nods, not wanting to answer. They were doing so well too.

  Laura pulls her legs off the desk and sidles to the edge of the chair; her hands reach across toward Maya.

  “Honey,” she says.

  Laura had gone with them. Stephen still didn’t know. Maya had never meant to tell Laura Ellie was pregnant, but she’d been so relieved the minute her friend knew.

  El was sixteen: they went to a small brightly colored office on Fifty-ninth Street and Tenth Avenue, where they sat quietly in the too-tightly-packed-in chairs with plastic armrests and waited for their turn. Maya tried to hold Ellie’s hand, but Ellie freed herself of her mom quickly, so Maya had just leaned in very close to her, brushing up against her. There had been an initial screening to which only Maya and Ellie had gone the week before. The day of, Ellie let Maya stay with her as she changed her clothes and was prepped, and then she sent Maya back to sit with Laura, both of them staring at the yellow diamonds spread across the dark blue carpet, waiting for her daughter to return.

  After, Laura took them out as if this were all cause for celebration. They shared a bottle of wine among the three of them. No one carded. It felt like the last thing to worry about then.

  “I’ve had four,” said Laura. She was forty-nine then and regularly slept with men ten and fifteen years younger. There had been the wedding in Minnesota when she was still an undergrad that had lasted right up till she left for grad school at Yale. Laura had only ever said her husband had been too sweet to stay with past the age of twenty-two.

  Maya watched her daughter finger the rim of her wine glass.

  “I wouldn’t recommend that many,” Laura said.

  Ellie pursed her lips, then sipped from her wine glass. She wore jeans and one of Stephen’s sweaters. She looked twelve years old.

  Laura pressed her palms against the corners of the table and leaned in closer to Ellie. “Things stopped working after the last one.” She turned to face Maya. “Uterus like a pinball machine.” She shrugged.

  She was quoting someone, and it took Maya a moment to place it. She could tell, though, the way the words seemed wrapped up to keep Laura safe—they weren’t her own.

  “Sophie,” Maya said after a moment. Desperate Characters.

  Laura smiled and turned back to Ellie. She tipped her head toward Maya. “That’s why your mom’s the best.”

  Maya wasn’t sure if this was right. Should they be talking this way, smiling? But what else was there to do?

  “You wanted kids?” asked Ellie. Their food was set down before them and only Laura reached for her silverware. Maya fingered the napkin on her lap.

  “Who knows?” said Laura. “I’d probably completely fuck it up.”

  Maya laughed then, though she hadn’t meant to.

  Ellie shook her head. “You’d be really good.” She sat up a bit straighter in her chair and picked up a piece of asparagus with her thumb and forefinger, taking a small bite, then setting it back down.

  Laura smiled. She twirled pasta around her fork and swallowed seemingly without chewing. “Thanks, El. You’re lying, but you’re sweet.”

  Ellie tore at a piece of bread and rolled it with her fingers till it was small, smooth, and round, then dropped it. “No, I mean, you’re a little crazy. But I think that’s good. Less pressure on the kids.”

  Maya was trying to figure out what this meant about her as a mother. She was either crazy or not very good. Whatever she was, Ellie had told her, thankfully, about the pregnancy. Even if it had taken Maya begging. Even if El seemed to have been stoned when she’d finall
y come to Maya three nights before, Stephen out of town. She’d cried, crawling into Maya’s bed, only mumbling the lot of it, six tests to be sure and no mention of the father; after Maya had begun to cry as well.

  “Well, thanks, lady,” said Laura. “I think, though, my real talent is as the crazy aunt/friend.”

  “You’re incredible at that,” Ellie said.

  Laura’s teeth shone, stained slightly by the dark red of the wine, and she tipped her glass toward Ellie and then toward Maya. Maya reached across the table and tried to take hold of her daughter’s shoulder, but Ellie leaned out of her reach, fisted her wine glass with a tip toward Laura’s, and drank.

  Maya had felt almost smug walking back to Brooklyn with her daughter, over the bridge, and through Brooklyn Heights and Boerum Hill. It was awful, sure. But they’d made it to the other side. She’d gotten her a prescription for birth control and they’d talked about how irresponsible Ellie had been. But it hadn’t felt like the time for scolding. She wanted to be sure Ellie still felt Maya was someone she could trust.

  She’d thought then that they were coming out of something, that that moment had represented a sort of end. Crisis had come and Ellie had gone to her. She felt shaken by it, terrified. But also, she felt relief. This was the great awful thing she’d been afraid of happening to her daughter: It had happened. She had come to Maya. It could all start to get better after this.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Maya said to Ellie.

  And Ellie smiled, a wool hat pulled down over her hair, her great big eyes peeking out from underneath. “I know, Ma,” she said.

  “So,” says Laura.

  “So,” Maya says.

  “Ben still home?”

  Maya nods.

  “Holding up?”

  Maya shrugs. She looks past Laura toward the door.