You Are Free: Stories Read online

  “This isn’t about politics.” He stepped to the window and looked out at the street, his back to her. “Have you ever noticed how boring and stupid kids from the fancy private schools are? Have you ever met one of those saps? They’re like overbred puppies. They have no grit. Their limbs are all rubbery. Public school kids are scrappy, like pound mutts.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “No. Not yet.” He sounded sober and calm. “I just don’t want my kids going to the Institute—”

  “What’s the Institute?” It was Cody. He stood at the door, honey-colored, with a mop of shiny black curls.

  “It’s a school,” Cassie said, squatting down to look at him eye to eye. “You’re going to go to school soon, like a big boy, and your papa and I are trying to decide which one would be best for you.” She paused, then said, “The big one or the little one.”

  “Which one has swings?” Cody asked.

  “Both,” Duncan said behind her. “They both have swings.”

  The girl, Tasha, the one with the burned scalp and the crooked pageboy wig, ate her lunch alone every day. She was tall and bigboned and wore a strange assortment of clothes—sequined disco shirts during the day, sweatshirts with snowflakes on them in the spring, huge white no-name sneakers that the other kids called “bobos.” They were clothes that Cassie learned at some point, she didn’t know how, had come from charity. The other kids said Tasha smelled bad. Cassie got to test this theory once, when she was paired up with Tasha in English class. They were supposed to write a story together, using adjectives and adverbs, as part of a new program that paired advanced students with remedial students, rather than splitting them into separate classes. Cassie’s friends laughed and pointed at her when they saw who she had been paired with. Up close, Tasha didn’t smell bad, but when she bent over the desk to write a sentence, Cassie saw a patch of burned skin at the nape of her neck, pale and glossy and webbed, leading up to and underneath her wig.

  Duncan sat at the kitchen table across from her, watching as she made the call.

  She jiggled her leg under the table. She felt nervous, angry, forced into it.

  “Penny Washburn,” answered a peppy voice.

  “Hi, this is Cassie Rogers. My husband and I—”

  “Cassie! Of course. I remember you and Duncan. Congratulations, you made it.” She laughed. “I guess you know how difficult it is to get in. A lot of people would give their eyeteeth to be in your position.”

  “Yes, I know. We’re so honored to have been accepted.” Cassie looked at Duncan, winced, unsure all over again. This morning it had seemed clear, she’d woken and seen the light, remembered the play she was supposed to be writing—but now she was having second thoughts.

  Duncan nodded his head and gestured for her to carry on as planned.

  “So what’s up?” Penny said.

  “I’m really sorry, but we’ve decided Cody won’t be able to accept your offer. It’s, well, it’s just that the schedule of the toddler program doesn’t work for our, our lifestyle.”

  Duncan whispered, “Thank you and good-bye.”

  Penny was silent on the other end for a beat. “Oh. Well.” She sounded surprised. “Are you sure?”

  Cassie swallowed. No, she wasn’t sure. But she felt Duncan’s eyes boring into her and carried on. “Yes, we’re sure. I’m so sorry. Perhaps we can reapply in a future year.”

  “Would financial aid help out? Would that change things for you? We have quite a generous financial aid program, as you know.”

  “I don’t think so,” Cassie said. “I don’t think we’d be eligible.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Penny said. “You’d be surprised at the range of income levels that are considered eligible here.”

  Cassie had not expected the conversation to go on so long. The school had a wait list a mile long. She had expected an icy thanks and good-bye.

  “Thanks, Penny, but there are a number of factors influencing our decision. We’re so sorry to have to pass on the offer this year. But I hope we can keep in touch.”

  There was silence. Cassie frowned at Duncan, who was sitting across from her, drumming his fingers. “Hang up,” he whispered.

  She raised a hand to shush him. “Hello? Penny?”

  “Yes, I’m here.” Penny’s voice sounded strange—taut, as if she were holding in a cough. “So you’re sure about this.”

  “Yes,” Cassie said. “I’m sure.”

  “Okay,” came a small voice. “Okay.”

  Cassie waited for Penny to say good-bye first, but when she said nothing, Cassie said, “Well, thanks, Penny. Bye.”

  Again, nothing. She hung up the phone.

  “Jesus, that took ages,” Duncan said. “What the hell were you discussing?”

  “She was just making sure I meant it, I guess. I felt like she really was disappointed Cody wasn’t coming.”

  “Oh, come on,” Duncan said. “You saw the auditorium. Packed. She is calling her next set of parents right now and offering them his spot.”

  At two in the morning she lay beside Duncan, listening to his breathing. The light coming through the window was gray, half lit by streetlamps. She could hear crickets humming. She had a pain in her stomach, a gnawing of regret.

  Duncan Dickie was a black sheep; he was the only artist in a family of doctors. When she’d married him she’d been attracted to his strong opinions. She’d liked how he’d chafed at groups, anything smacking of mob mentality. He was what her mother called an iconoclast. But he had grown up in the bastion of the black middle class. As far as she could tell, the most traumatic thing that had happened to him as a child was being teased about his name. A bully named Eddie used to lead a playground chant. When the weather’s hot and sticky, that’s no time for dunkin’ Dickie. But when the frost is on the pumpkin, now that’s the time for Dickie dunkin!

  He’d told her the story once, in the dark. He said she was the only person he’d ever told, as if the humiliation was still fresh.

  Cassie had grown up poor, the daughter of a struggling single mother and a deadbeat father who showed up at some birthdays, drunk. Once in fifth grade, at recess, she’d been surrounded by a group of retarded boys, escapees from the special education class, who’d groped her. All her life she’d wanted to belong, to have, to possess what the other side possessed.

  She sat up and stared down at Duncan’s sleeping face. He was the problem. He was the barrier to her getting what she wanted—the perfect life. His face, even in sleep, had a kind of arrogance.

  His eyes blinked open and he jerked, startled. “What are you doing?”

  “Thinking.”

  He glanced at the clock radio. “About what?”

  “About the school. The Institute. Did we just make a huge mistake?”

  “Oh Jesus. Not this again. No, we made the right decision. Now can we drop it and get some sleep?”

  “But it’s the school everybody wants.”

  “Who the hell is ‘everybody’? The ladies of Larchmont Village?”

  “Nobody will believe it if I tell them we turned it down.”

  “So don’t tell anybody.”

  She turned to her side and hugged her pillow, her cheeks warm with rage.

  Duncan got out of bed. “Now I can’t get back to sleep,” he muttered. “I’m going to work in my studio.” He left, sighing dramatically, and she lay there in the dark.

  The problem with modern marriage was that everything had to be a consensus. Each choice had to be something they both wanted. For a moment, fear gripped her, a physical sensation—cold wetness under her arms, a dry mouth, a quickening of her heartbeat. They had turned down the Institute. She struggled to breathe. She felt as if she were falling into a long dark hole. She felt as if something large and warm and malevolent was pressing down on her, crushing her under its weight.

  The next night while Cassie was sautéing garlic, the phone rang.

  “Cassie,” the voice on the other end of the line said wh
en she answered. “It’s me, Penny.”

  For a moment, she was confused.

  “Penny Washburn,” the woman clarified. “At the Institute.”

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you sure there’s not something we can do to, well, make the offer more attractive?”

  Cassie felt a momentary thrill. She turned off the heat under the saucepan. Duncan was out on the lawn reading a book to Cody. The Sneetches again. She remembered the arguments, the money. Duncan’s position.

  “It’s so nice of you to call,” she said, flushed, flattered. “Thanks for, well, for double-checking.” She stared out at Duncan, her jaw clenched. “But yes, I’m afraid we’ve made up our minds. For this year anyway.”

  Penny went on. “It’s just that I was about to offer your spot to somebody else, and I thought, let me just double-check. One more time. I’d hate for Cody to miss out on the opportunity, and I can’t guarantee a spot next year.”

  Cassie felt a surge of doubt again. Was she sure? She saw Duncan rising and walking toward the house. “Yes, we’re sure,” she said. “But it’s so nice of you to call. I realize how coveted these spots are.”

  This time the silence went on for so long that she thought Penny had hung up.

  “Penny?”

  “Yes, I’m just thinking. Listen. How about this: I’m not going to give your slot away tonight. It’s too late. I’m going home. But let me give you my home number. If you change your mind, just give me a ring. I won’t do a thing until tomorrow, say, after lunch.”

  She rattled off her home number before Cassie could find a pen. But she knew she’d committed it to memory.

  Duncan came in the door just as she was hanging up.

  “Who was that?”

  She paused. “Nobody. I mean, just a prank call. Kids.”

  She told the lie automatically, without knowing exactly why.

  “Kids still make those?”

  “Apparently,” she said, turning her face so he couldn’t see her expression.

  Duncan picked up a wine bottle and pulled the cork out. “It’s gotta be five-thirty somewhere in the world, right?”

  The next morning Cassie brought Cody to his music class. She went through the motions of singing along to the folksinger with him on her lap, then chatting with the other mothers afterward, but her mind was elsewhere. She looked up at the clock ticking on the wall and thought of her chance ticking away with it. When she got home it was already noon, and she felt a wave of sadness, as if something precious and irretrievable had been washed out to sea. She imagined Cody twenty years from now, in prison for grand auto theft, imagined herself leaving the jail after visiting hours. She thought about how she would look back to this decision as the cause of all his troubles. She imagined Penny Washburn picking up the phone to call the lucky parents of the child who would go to the Institute instead. Her mouth tasting of metal, she imagined how they would celebrate.

  The phone broke into her thoughts. She picked up, expecting Duncan.

  “It’s me, Penny.”

  “Oh. Hello.”

  “It’s past noon,” Penny said.

  “I know.”

  “I was waiting for you to call.”

  “I thought I was only going to call if we changed our minds.”

  “And did you change it?”

  Cassie felt a bug crawling on her arm and slapped at it, but nothing was there.

  “I’m so sorry, but no.” She felt strange, suddenly, unsettled by the woman’s phone call. “We didn’t change our minds. That’s why I didn’t call.”

  Penny sighed. “You know, a lot of families would give their eyeteeth to go here.”

  “Yes, I—I know that.”

  “So what’s the hitch? The diversity issue? We’re almost forty percent nonwhite.”

  “That’s—that’s great. That wasn’t the problem.”

  “Then what was it?”

  Cassie shifted uncomfortably, looked over the counter at Cody playing with his cars in the living room. She tried to remember Penny’s eyes, her face, from their one meeting, but all she could remember was the picture of smiling Barack Obama on her desk. “I can’t explain it.”

  She heard Duncan’s car pulling into the driveway.

  “Thank you,” she said quickly, “for calling. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

  She hung up without waiting for Penny to say good-bye.

  She went onto the porch to greet Duncan, but once again—for some reason she couldn’t articulate—she didn’t tell him about Penny’s call.

  The phone rang early the next morning, a shrill screech that cut through her morning haze as she set a bowl of cereal in front of Cody. Duncan was still asleep.

  She looked at the caller ID. It was Penny’s home number. She remembered it.

  She didn’t answer. She sat at the table, Cody slurping his cereal beside her, and watched the phone until it stopped ringing. She breathed out relief.

  But a moment later it began ringing again. She went to it and stared down at it, as if it were alive.

  Later that morning, Duncan took Cody to swim class. It was a rare moment of aloneness. But just as Cassie sat down at her desk, the phone rang. She picked it up without checking the caller ID.

  “The spot is still open,” Penny’s voice said. “We’ve been holding it for you.”

  Her voice sounded strange, muffled, and behind it Cassie could hear traffic, a car horn, distant mariachi music.

  Cassie was frightened now, and didn’t speak.

  Penny said, “You’re just the kind of family we’ve been looking for.”

  Cassie closed her eyes. She felt a pain like a mallet to her chest.

  “Was it your husband?” Penny said. “Duncan Dickie?”

  Cassie opened her eyes, breathed in sharply, and hung up the phone.

  The week went by without any more calls from Penny Washburn. She thought of telling Duncan about them, Penny’s odd, desperate tone, but every time she opened her mouth, she stopped. It would seem strange to him that she hadn’t said anything earlier, and she would have to explain that too, which she couldn’t. She decided to put the whole episode behind her, just like Duncan was doing. It was a problem she had—she always regretted a decision after it was made, no matter what. She never could leave things be. She decided not to mention the Institute or Penny Washburn again as long as she lived.

  She began work on her play. It was going slowly, but a character was emerging, the wife of a neurosurgeon. Nedra. Her name was Nedra. Pretty but woefully insecure Nedra. She was the type of woman who applied lipstick each night before getting into bed with her husband of fifteen years. Nedra was obsessed with her nose, convinced that it was the wrong shape and size. She would have several surgeries in the course of the play to “correct” it.

  In bed, Cassie chattered to Duncan about her work. “She’s going to be a sort of vehicle for me to discuss so much—race, sex, body dysmorphia. I see her as a kind of symbol of our times. Nedra. What do you think of that name?”

  Duncan didn’t answer. She looked up and saw he was fast asleep, his reading glasses still on his face.

  She read The Sneetches aloud to Cody one evening, snuggled beside him in his toddler bed. Outside was a rare heavy rain. The sound of it reminded her of her childhood, Philadelphia, real weather. She remembered her mother snuggled beside her on such nights, reading to her—the standard of happiness to which all other moments would be compared. Cody rested his head against her chest and brushed his fingers against her collarbone. She’d read the story to him so many times that she barely had to look at the page. The Star-Belly Sneetches were having a beach party, gorging themselves on hotdogs and marshmallows, while the sad Plain-Belly Sneetches stood watching, cold and bereft in the sandy gloom.

  She realized that she too was comforted by the story, perhaps because it was so very familiar.

  When she went to turn the page, s
he realized that Cody had fallen asleep. She could have slid him off her chest and turned out the light and left him there, but she was enjoying the feeling of his warm body pressed against her. Duncan was out back in his studio, working. Dinner was warming in the oven. She had only the salad to make. She closed her eyes. For some reason she thought about that girl, Tasha, the one with the burned scalp. Cassie’s mother had made her promise to be nice to the girl. In fact, she had made Cassie promise to sit with her at lunch. But in the cafeteria the next day, seeing Tasha sitting all alone, Cassie had balked. She had hovered beside Tasha for a moment, holding her tray, but then had moved on to her table of friends. Later she told her mother about sitting with the burned girl. It was her first lie, or the first she’d been conscious of telling, anyway.

  Distantly, she was aware of the sound of knocking. Somebody was knocking at the front door.

  She slid Cody to the mattress and rose carefully, switching off the light.

  Out in the front room, the knocking was hard and persistent. She went to the door and looked through the peephole.

  A figure stood on the doorstep, tiny and warped, head turned toward the street.

  Cassie opened the door.

  Penny Washburn stood on the steps. The rain had flattened her hair, making her look gaunt and ravaged. There was a puddle around her sodden loafers and she was hugging herself, shivering. The air outside was cold and rain blew in on Cassie.

  “Can I come in?” Penny’s voice was plaintive, beseeching.

  Cassie stared at her, unable, momentarily, to speak. She finally managed: “I’m sorry, but we were just about to sit down to dinner.”

  “Just for a few minutes,” Penny said, hacking into her hand. “See, we’ve kept the spot open, there’s still a place for you. I can give you a few more days to reconsider.”

  “We’re not interested,” Cassie said, sure of it now.

  “Why not?” Penny emitted a sound—half sob, half laugh. “Just give me a reason. I don’t understand. None of us understand.”