Ms. Hempel Chronicles

Bump

MANY YEARS LATER, SHE WAS on her way to see some trees. A magnificent London plane tree, more than sixty-three inches in diameter, and an allée of horse chestnuts, somewhat sickly and tattered but still of interest. Of interest to her, who now spent her days thinking about such things. Gradation, drainage, compacted soil. Canopy coverage. The secret lives of city trees. They grew shadily at the perimeters of her imagination, and along the blocks she now walked to the park entrance from the station. Beautiful and various and unavoidable, trees: and yet working in the urban forest she still found great wide-open spaces in her mind where no trees grew at all. On this day, for instance, as she walked from the station to the park in a neighborhood she had no reason to visit, except for the horse chestnuts, she was thinking about something else entirely.

A girl with a wonderful butt was walking a few feet ahead of her. She didn’t even know how to assemble the phrase in her head — ass? bottom? There was no comfortable way of describing it. But seeing the girl from behind made her happy. She had first noticed her climbing the stairs from the station — her white flip-flops looking improbably clean against the grimy, gummed-up steps. Neat little ankles, lean calves. A cheap silky skirt — also white, with orange swirls — that ended just at the back of her knee. All of this moving crisply up the dirty stairs, as deliciously as a new pair of scissors biting into a sheet of paper. At the top the girl turned left and crossed over to the bright side of the street. In a stroke of fortune, she was headed toward the park. There were four whole blocks in which to wonder at her high, brisk bottom and the charming way it undulated beneath the thin material of her skirt.

Undulate? Oh help us. The word was practically dripping with oily intent. It really was impossible to walk behind a girl with a pretty butt — in objective appreciation — and not sound hopelessly slimy, even to oneself.

But a pregnant woman couldn’t be slimy. She might be constipated or gassy or luminous, but not slimy. And in her case, she was pregnant, objectively pregnant. If she found herself studying girls on the subway and the street, her gaze was not envious — she had never had neat ankles to begin with — but acquisitive. Collecting traits for the small body she was, to her deep bemusement, cultivating. She wanted nail beds that were long and narrow, shoulder blades that flared like wings. She liked freckles, thick eyelashes, feet with strong arches. On her way to see some significant trees, she was walking behind a girl and thinking, I hope its butt will look just like that.

The girl turned around.

“Ms. Hempel?”

It had been ages since anyone called her that.

“Sophie?” she asked, shocked that the person she’d been following was in fact a familiar one. Hard to imagine that this blithe creature was once stuck in the seventh grade. Sophie Lohmann. She would never forget their names, even years and years later; they were carved roughly and indelibly somewhere. “Oh, Sophie! Look at you.”

The young woman — she was not a girl anymore — smiled and retraced her steps. She held out her lovely arms for a hug.

“How are you? What’s going on? Tell me everything!” said Ms. Hempel, laughing joyfully and nervously, awash in Sophie’s lollipop perfume, surprised that even as grown-ups her girls still offered the same diffident, bony embraces as they did when they were children.

And how unexpected that Sophie Lohmann, of all those girls, should excite in her this rush of affection! Sophie with her unsettling doll-tiny features and huge kewpie eyes, now smoky with makeup. Not a soul that Ms. Hempel thought about much anymore, though at the time she had made enough of an impression. Sophie was new to the school, a new girl then. In the first few days she gave an elaborate performance of shyness and hesitancy that was later revealed to be purely perfunctory. She knew she’d be fine. How could she not be? She was cute and thin and blond and clever. Universal currency, accepted everywhere. But there was something in the pertness of her looks, or maybe it was her manner, that struck Ms. Hempel as uncanny, antiquated, as if Sophie were a resuscitated bobby-soxer with a little bit of freezer burn around the edges. On some days she would even take a curling iron to her ponytail. “Good morning, Ms. Hempel!” she’d say with a surplus of sweetness that made her blond ringlets bounce crazily about.

All that simpering — she never faltered. And she never once let her spine droop; she never slouched. Having abandoned her ballet career, she still kept a strict eye on her posture. During all-school assemblies, Ms. Hempel always knew where Sophie was sitting: the one child perfectly erect among the bodies hunched on the gymnasium floor. What else? What else came floating up out of the strange, drifting sediment? The sugary perfume made her dizzy. She couldn’t remember a lick of Sophie’s schoolwork — though maybe she did fancy covers for her book reports. There was a younger brother, in the fifth grade, who had starred in a peanut-butter commercial. A free trip to Hawaii, thanks to a magazine contest the mother had won with a photo essay about her kitchen renovation. Ms. Hempel couldn’t remember ever meeting this mother, or the father for that matter; she had no recollection of them at all. Which only heightened her sense of Sophie’s slightly concocted quality. What else. What else? Nothing more came to mind, except of course the fear: the embarrassing feeling of fear this girl had kindled in her.

“It’s so weird,” Sophie was saying. “I was just talking about that Constitution thing we did. Remember? When we went to that big courthouse downtown and everybody dressed up in jackets and ties? And we pretended to be lawyers in the Supreme Court? I was a justice; I wore a choir robe you got from Mrs. Willoughby. I think you gave me a B on the decision I wrote, which I didn’t quite understand, seeing that I worked really hard on it. But this is the important part: the whole case was about anthrax! Do remember that?”

“I do,” said Ms. Hempel, nodding rapidly, already marshaling silent arguments in defense of the ancient B. “I remember all of it.”

“So don’t you think that’s weird? Here we were, talking theoretically about anthrax. I didn’t even know what it was before then—”

To be honest, neither had Ms. Hempel. She thought Anthrax was a band who played their guitars demonically fast. But thankfully the Constitution unit came equipped with an instructor’s guide, which out of vanity she kept hidden inside a bland and unincriminating notebook.

“But we became experts on it! We spent a month talking about nothing but anthrax. That little island they infected during World War Two, and then in Russia when it got out by accident and killed so many people and they covered it up.”

“We also talked about the Pentagon Papers. We talked a lot about those,” Ms. Hempel pointed out, as if for the benefit of a parent standing nearby. “And other relevant cases. Precedents…” She couldn’t summon up any of them by name, the teacher’s guide long lost by now. But look what surfaced from the murky depths! The red plastic binding, the jaunty little logo with the flag. Sophie’s appearance had really set things astir. “National security versus freedom of speech,” Ms. Hempel said triumphantly, reading the heavy block letters on the title page. “That’s what we were talking about.”

“I guess so. But what I remember most was the anthrax,” Sophie said, and glanced down at her opalescent toenails, which wiggled back at her from the flawless white flip-flops. “And that’s why I completely freaked out. You know, when it really happened. The letters with the spores, and people dying. I knew everything already, everything they were talking about on the news.” She lifted her huge smoky eyes to Ms. Hempel. “And I know this sounds crazy, but the whole thing felt psychic. Or maybe prophetic. I had this feeling that we had made it happen somehow, by getting dressed up and taking it so seriously, going to that courtroom and pretending like it was real. Not like it was our fault, exactly, but more like it was something we had brought into the world by talking about it so much.”

She laughed suddenly, a pretty sound.

“So I was telling this to my friend the other night, and he says that either I’m paranoid or a total narcissist. He’s still trying to figure it out.”

Sophie couldn’t help smiling slightly to herself at the mention of this unnamed friend, this friend who was contemplating her personality disorders. Ms. Hempel knew that happy, inward look. That buzzy feeling. And she knew that if Sophie was gazing so softly and fondly at her now, on this sunny, dirty block lined with its malodorous ginkgo trees, it was only because Sophie had spoken of her to this friend, and that she and anthrax and the United States Constitution had all been graced, made golden, by his skeptical attention.

“But seriously,” said Sophie. “Didn’t that freak you out?”

Well, yes, it freaked her out. Sure it did. It freaked her out to remember that the most terrible things in the world had once been her handy tools for the sharpening of critical-thinking skills, the assigning of argumentative essays, the fostering of middle school debate. Frequent visitors in her classroom, the theoretical terrorists — they dropped in all the time. Her innocence (stupidity?) was astounding. About everything — dangers outside and in. To think that she once found Travis Bent’s misanthropy endearing! His gloomy looks, his jittering leg, his bloody works of fiction. Now she’d have to report him. When he was put on medication, he took to signing his name as “Travis Bent, 50 mg”—and she thought it droll. But everything had changed. A kid couldn’t be left to his own odd and unsociable ways; a teacher couldn’t call upon the phantom terrorists to illustrate a point. The delicate, treacherous scrim was torn. Three parents from her school had been lost. And what an oblivious twit she’d been for all those years, leading her little ducks on picnic outings along the brink of the abyss. From the great distance of her thirties, she peered down and saw the tiny figures playing kickball while behind them opened up an immense and roiling pit of darkness. It made her sweat, that picture in her head. Then again, a certain well-scrubbed sort of blue autumn morning gave her pause, too.

What was she doing, procreating? Looking at trees? What in the world was she doing….

Before her stood Sophie Lohmann, survivor: of the seventh grade, of Ms. Hempel’s innocence, of the hazardous times that had befallen everyone since then. Sophie, searching through a dainty handbag for her phone. Standing there pristinely on the sidewalk, she looked indestructible and full of secrets. The phone kept humming, humming, humming until she pinched it savagely and it stopped. The little strap was hoisted back up onto her shoulder, the purse tucked beneath her armpit like a football. Its color was pale orange, like the swirling patterns in her skirt.

“Sorry about that,” said Sophie, frowning. It wasn’t her friend who had called; someone else. She swept back her hair, shaking off an invisible dusting of filth. “So, Ms. Hempel,” she said seriously. “You’re done with graduate school? You’re teaching college now?”

Ms. Hempel hesitated, half pleased and half chagrined. For how kind it was of them, her former students, to remember these things, to keep track of her muddled goals and aspirations! “No, no. Not at all. I sort of changed direction.” And how complicated it was for her to explain where she happened to find herself now. “The program wasn’t really what I’d expected. We didn’t spend a lot of time reading actual novels.” Just slim little volumes of theory — and not of the congenial French variety — as well as religious pamphlets, etiquette manuals, ship manifests, broadsides, classified advertisements. Who knew that the definition of literary text had become quite so all-encompassing? It was her own fault. When Mr. Polidori left the science department to earn his master’s in — of all beautiful things — music composition, she had thought, Aha! School would save her. A noble exit, provided by her lifelong commitment to learning. She made a dash for the escape hatch. “And I was a redundancy. Nobody wants to see another dissertation about the Bronte sisters or the Shakespeare romance plays or Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”

“That’s terrible!” cried Sophie. “I love Shakespeare.”

“I’m a dropout!” Ms. Hempel announced good-naturedly.

Sophie found this perturbing. Her eyebrows twitched. “Do you think they’ll let you back in?”

“I found something else to do,” said Ms. Hempel hazily, reluctant to trudge up her unlikely path again: the temporary job that turned without warning into a real job, the classes at night, the slow acquiring of a new vocabulary, not to mention an entirely new way of seeing. “I don’t want to go back. You shouldn’t look so worried. It’s something I like.” She then said the words that usually cheered people up: Planning. Conservation. Design. But Sophie’s tiny eyebrows refused to relax.

“Good for you,” she said finally.

“I’m on my way to the park. Isn’t that where you’re heading?”

“I live here, Ms. Hempel,” said Sophie with dignity, nodding at the long glowing row of brick fronts and brownstones, worn and well loved, in uneven states of repair. “I’m just coming home.” Oh yes; Ms. Hempel remembered. A flushed, tearful discussion in English class — what were they reading, The House on Mango Street? — about good neighborhoods and bad. But Sophie had nothing to be ashamed of now: There was a wine shop! And a sushi place. A store devoted to baby clothes made of organic cotton. Her maligned corner of the world — just look at it now. And Sophie herself had been the harbinger of all this.

“So it’s your park! How lucky you are,” Ms. Hempel said. “You must know it inside and out.”

“I don’t think I’d be much help,” Sophie said, misunderstanding. “It’s not like I hang out there. I don’t have a dog or anything. I mean, we go there sometimes, but only when…” She trailed off suggestively, then offered a little grin.

“Oh please,” Ms. Hempel said. “I’m not your teacher anymore.” And the two of them tried to laugh.

But herein lay their problem, precisely — if she wasn’t Sophie’s teacher, then who was she? And who was Sophie now, if not a bright-eyed seventh grader? A girl in too much makeup, a girl with a perfect behind. A girl who was taking an undetermined amount of time off from college and manning the front desk of a health club, where she offered up towels to busy people in ties (and the teacher felt a sure prick of disappointment upon hearing this). But they couldn’t let each other go; they couldn’t pass with just a startled wave and a smile. Though that would have been the gentler way! Instead of all the anxious pawing, the sniffing around, as each tried to dig up what was dearly buried in the other.

Ms. Hempel wished she could summon up the old, fearful, Sophie feeling. That slight tightening in her stomach, as if at the sound of a distant alarm, an invisible trip wire set off by the batting of Sophie’s eyelashes or the rolling of her enormous eyes. The fluttering eyelashes were on display all the time; but the eye-rolling she would catch only fleetingly, on rare occasions, just as she was turning back to the blackboard or ushering her class out the door. Those tricky looks! They made Ms. Hempel afraid. As if Sophie’s coyness and fawning were merely her flimsy disguise for a violent, barely controlled contempt. At any moment this derision might be unleashed — and her teacher would be dead meat. Her drooping tights; her hysterical hand gestures; her insistence that everyone, everyone, finish their outlines by Friday! In other words, Ms. Hempel was just begging to be laid out, flattened — no, obliterated — by Sophie’s rolling eyeballs. Remember you’re the grown-up, Ms. Hempel would reason. All the power is yours. You give out detention, you give out grades, bathroom passes, chocolate bars — you’re in charge! While she, she’s only a child.

Monologues that were of little help or solace.

True, Sophie was a child; but she was also a person, a young one but a definite person nonetheless. This was the feeling that Ms. Hempel couldn’t shake: a conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they were most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all of those thrumming, radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced at dissembling. Even Sophie, consummate performer, was as transparent as glass. The terror, the thrill, of encountering such superiority in its undiluted form! Those baby-doll eyes just shimmering with scorn. Ms. Hempel was regularly undone. But any other encounter proved no less shattering: in Cilla Matsui, with sympathy; in Emily Radinsky, with genius; in Jonathan Hamish, with wildness and beauty and torment.

“Does this mean I can call you Beatrice now?” Sophie asked, and Beatrice said yes, thus ending the search. The dimpling and disdainful child — the person — was nowhere to be found. This clean young woman was standing in her place. “Finally! Beatrice. It’s funny, because I always kind of thought we should call you that, and now that I can, it sounds completely strange.”

“You thought of me as a kid?” Beatrice asked, brushing off some bagel crumbs that had found their way to the front of her shirt. “Inexperienced, maybe? Or just lacking authority?”

And as much as it might have sounded like a question she would have asked in her past — a question frankly in search of assurances or compliments — she was asking it now because she was simply interested, and felt nothing but a cool curiosity, as if she were inquiring about a person quite separate from herself.

“No,” said Sophie, “you were like a real teacher. That wasn’t why.” She paused to think. “I guess I felt that way because we were close to you.”

Beatrice looked up, stunned by this kindness, but Sophie appeared to have taken no notice of it.

“I don’t know why I even asked. As if I could ever get used to calling you anything but Ms. Hempel. That’s ironic, isn’t it? We still think of you as Ms. Hempel and we’re almost the same age you were when you started teaching us.”

Could that be possible? Was she really that young? Of course, at the time she had felt washed up, nearly ruined. Her first birthday in the faculty lunchroom: staring dolefully at a little tub of rice pudding and sighing, “I can’t believe I’m turning the big two-four,” and Mrs. Willoughby, upon hearing this, hooting with laughter.

“Not quite the same age,” Beatrice said. “In a few more years.”

“Well, close enough. We’ll be there soon. The point is I was over at Jonathan’s and we were all sitting around talking—”

“Jonathan?” Beatrice said. “Jonathan Hamish?”

“I know. Weird. There’s sort of a group of us — Elias, Roderick, Julia Rizzo — how random is that? And Robert Levy-Cohen. He goes by Bob now. Remember how quiet he used to be all the time? Well, it turns out he’s crazy. Completely hilarious…” Sophie smiled to herself, and began drifting once again toward that dark, blank space that Beatrice realized she did not in any way wish to see further illuminated. Whatever they were up to in their newfound adulthood, she did not want to know. The dusky parks, the shifting neighborhoods, the old bedrooms and kitchens, emptied of parents…. She found herself wrapping her cardigan more tightly around her in some sort of feeble precautionary measure. Meanwhile, Sophie made her way back to the bright sidewalk. “You know, when everyone graduated, it was like we couldn’t wait to get out of there, to meet actual new people. But then after the first year or so, the first few years, we all started coming home and hanging out again. It’s not as pathetic as it sounds. Did you know that his mom got remarried? Jonathan’s. Their place is huge.”

When was the last time she had laid eyes on Jonathan Hamish? Years and years ago, as he was being carted away by the police. No, she shouldn’t even think that, not even jokingly. But that was the look he had about him — slouching, defiant, richly amused — as Mr. Peele escorted him back inside the school building. He’d been causing trouble in the courtyard.

Eighth period, American history. Whap! Whap! The sharp sound of cracking, of something possibly being broken. Ms. Hempel wheeled around from the blackboard and glared. “Brad…,” she said ominously, and the boy held up his hands with the indignation of someone who for the first time in his life has been wrongly accused. The class was gazing at the window, the one next to the dusty air conditioner, and Lila put down her pencil and pointed. “It’s coming from out there.”

Ms. Hempel went to investigate. Whap! She flinched. The window shuddered. Down in the courtyard, the varsity track team were milling about as they waited to board the school bus, fuming at the curb, that would deliver them to some faraway campus for their meet. Draped in their glossy warm-up suits, the boys loped elegantly about the yard, their long bodies leaning to one side, weighted down by their voluminous gym bags. Some were pulling cans from the soda machine, others stretching themselves across the steps. Occupied and blameless, as far as she could tell. Then, whap! A face squinted up at her from below. A hand hung suspended in the air.

She slid the glass open. “Jonathan?”

He gave her a lopsided smile. “Hi.”

“Enough with the window-breaking,” she said. “We’re trying to do manifest destiny up here.”

He looked at her blankly.

“Cut it out, okay? It’s dangerous.” She was too far away to see what was happening in his eyes. “Okay?”

She drew back into the room and tugged down the sash.

No sooner had she closed it: Whap! The class, hunched forward in their desk-chairs, ecstatic with the distraction, let out a breathless little laugh. Whap!

“Jonathan,” she sighed, and reopened the window.

She saw that he had an endless supply: the pool of gray pebbles out of which a sad, spindly tree had been trying for ages to grow. Jonathan’s one hand was cupped, heavy with ammunition, while his other hand had found the deep pocket of his tracksuit.

She gazed down at him. “What.”

“Is it true that you’re leaving?”

“Are you serious?”

He shrugged. “I was wondering. I just wanted to know.”

“And it couldn’t wait.”

“So it’s true, then. You’re leaving.” With a softly spilling sound, he released his handful of pebbles back into their small enclosure. Then he glanced up, as if struck by a sudden thought. “You shouldn’t leave,” he said.

“I’m going back to school.”

“School?” he asked, incredulous. “What for?”

“I’m not going to yell it out the window!” She could hear the happiness in her own voice. “Couldn’t you have asked me in the hallway? Or some other place where people have conversations?”

But he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. His attention had already roamed elsewhere, and here she was leaning halfway out the window, hollering. She straightened at once, hands back on the sash, and as she declared, “I’m trying to teach right now,” she saw the mass of bodies in the courtyard part neatly along the middle, and Mr. Peele come bearing down on him.

He would be missing his meet that afternoon. And if he was still anything like he used to be in the eighth grade, she knew this was the one punishment that devastated him. Absurdly, she felt the fault was hers. And though she was certain there must have been other sightings before the year ended, this was the last time she could actually remember seeing him — his brave, shuffling walk up the steps in the shadow of tall Mr. Peele.

“So the man his mom married,” Sophie continued, “makes bank. He started a company and then he sold it. Technically I should call him Jonathan’s stepdad, but seeing that he came kind of late into the picture, it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of parenting left to be done. So we just call him Jeff. Or sometimes Jefe, but really only Bob calls him that.” Beatrice felt grateful as she half listened to Sophie’s sweet and inscrutable chatter, grateful that Sophie was the stranger she happened to be following from the station, and not another child, not Jonathan. “Jeff’s very interested in technology,” said Sophie, “and he subscribes to all of those magazines, and they’ve turned the whole garden level into — his word — a media center. It’s completely gorgeous. It’s like being inside a movie theater. But he won’t let you go down there holding even so much as a soda. Can you believe that? It’s criminal: an entire media center gone to waste. So we’re stuck up in Jonathan’s room, everybody trying to fit on his bed, and there’s nothing to do except watch the guys play Grand Theft Auto on the little beat-up TV that used to be in his old house.”

“That is criminal,” Beatrice murmured.

“Julia will play sometimes, but I can’t stand it — those games make me sick. They give me headaches. So I have to entertain myself. And the other night, I’m poking around and looking at all these pictures he has taped up on the door of his closet — and I shriek, literally, because there is a photo of Bessie Blustein!” Oh, Bessie Blustein — Beatrice winced — that tortured soul whose name was as wrongly bovine and placid as her appearance. She had left the school after the eighth grade to reinvent herself as a gothic Elizabeth. “It was a picture from that day at the courthouse — she was wearing her choir robe, too. And whoever said that black is slimming — well, they never saw Bessie Blustein dressed up as a Supreme Court justice. I know, that’s really mean of me. I bet she’s lost a lot of weight by now. But in the picture she’s this big black smudge in the middle. To be fair, the photograph is pretty blurry. And I say to Jonathan, ‘What are you doing with a picture of Bessie Blustein on your wall?’ and he says, without even looking up from the game: fuck Bessie Blustein, it’s a picture of you. Meaning you, Ms. Hempel. And he says it with this voice like, you idiot. Meaning me. So I look more closely, and sure enough, there you are! Up in the corner, way in the background, trying to fix Ben Vrabel’s tie.”

A slow warmth suffused Beatrice’s face, her body — she felt as if she’d been set alight.

“And that’s when we started talking about the whole Constitution thing we did. Which is why it was still on my mind when I was talking to my friend. Don’t worry, you don’t know him, he didn’t go to our school. But here’s what I was trying to say: we still called you Ms. Hempel! We sounded like a bunch of little kids. Right in middle of a serious discussion about the war, presidential powers, civil liberties, all that stuff Completely incongruous. But that’s what I mean: you’re Ms. Hempel forever. At least to us.”

Beatrice was smiling uncontrollably.

“I know! Incongruous. You taught us that word,” Sophie said. “I still use it all the time. That, and precarious.”

Beatrice didn’t know what to do with herself, with this ridiculous feeling of joy, so she threw her arms around Sophie for another hug. “That’s about the nicest thing anyone has ever told me,” she said into a curtain of slippery hair. All she wanted to do now was float away, or at least travel the remaining two blocks to the park, where in the shade of its enormous plane tree she could unwrap the story and gaze at it quietly by herself. What a reversal — usually it was the young person itching to get away from the old — and here was puffy, aching Beatrice, making polite excuses to the most beautiful of girls.

“I need to pop into the store, anyhow,” said Sophie, untucking her orange purse. “I know, don’t give me that look; I know that it’s a disgusting habit. But it’s mine now!” she said cheerfully as she pulled an almost-empty pack of cigarettes from her bag.

“Kisses,” she cried, and stepped away, while Beatrice panicked, not knowing what she could give in return.

“You look breathtaking, Sophie!” she called. “Did I tell you that? You look glorious. All the way from the station I was walking behind you and thinking, what a beautiful, beautiful person…”

“Oh. Thanks,” Sophie said vaguely, as though she’d received this tribute so many times that it had ceased to mean anything at all. “That’s really sweet.”

Now it appeared as if she were the one who suddenly longed to get away.

“And I meant to ask,” persisted Beatrice, “whatever made you turn around? Because I’m so glad you did. Otherwise I never would have realized it was you, and we never would have had this chance to talk. But isn’t that an unusual thing? I almost wondered if you could hear what I was thinking. Because that’s odd, isn’t it — to just turn around as you’re walking down the street?”

A short, brittle laugh burst out of Sophie. “I’m not going to bore you with the long version, but needless to say, there’s a guy involved.” Famously, she rolled her eyes; but this time there was more than just contempt in the gesture, there was also weariness, and maybe something else. “Put it this way: it’s my new habit. Being aware of my surroundings. You know what I mean?”

Oh yes, fear. That’s what it was. Beatrice weakly held up her hand in a wave. “Well, be careful,” she said pointlessly. She pulled her sweater closer as she watched Sophie disappear inside the grubby store.

The two blocks that separated her from the park now struck her as an impossible distance. This happened more and more often, the abrupt onslaught of exhaustion. If she were to sink right down onto one of those worn stoops, would they let her stay? She realized she hadn’t even told Sophie — who probably just assumed she’d grown fat. And she didn’t remember to mention that she had a new name. No one, not even the solicitors who bothered her on the phone, called her Ms. Hempel anymore. And other new names were likely to come, among them Mama, most strangely. Or Mom. Something her students would on a rare occasion call her when they were deeply lost in concentration — an accident, of course, and they would blush.

SHE HAD BEEN HAVING SUCH DREAMS — a common phenomenon, said the books — but how could dreams like these be considered in any way common? She’d wake up late in the morning, throbbing with surprise and pleasure, aghast at what her subconscious was capable of. It seemed a good argument for sleeping even more than she already was. And that particular night, as might be expected, she dreamt once again of school, not one of the fretful dreams that used to dog her, even long after she had stopped teaching, but a gentle dream, a beautiful dream. When she woke her face was wet, and there was only one fragment she could remember: the long hallway outside her classroom, and the eerie light coming through the mottled glass of the doors that swung at the end of the hall, and the feeling of moving down the passageway very slowly and deliberately. There was someone beside her, also moving. A child — no taller than her shoulder, half a step behind, breathing hoarsely — whom she loved. Together they were walking down the hallway, headed toward some bright, severe place where they didn’t really want to go. It was her role to take the child there and then return; she could hear the muffled roar of her classroom at their backs, and all the kids stirring around inside, waiting. But for now she was alone with the child she loved, walking farther down the hall, deeper into the silence, the strange glow ahead of them, the child slipping his hand into hers and she holding it lightly, the whole dream filling with her wish that their steps would grow slower, and the passage grow longer, so that they might never have to reach the place where they were supposed to arrive.