Tinderbox Page 3

  When her mother first told Caro about her project, Caro had to ask for a definition. “Teleology,” her mother answered, “is the study of the purposes or goals in either nature or history. You know that I don’t believe in such ideas: that we are part of a deity-created design, that history is unfolding toward an end. I’m stealing the word for my own purposes.”

  “Which are?”

  “To understand human desire.” Her mother smiled shyly. As a girl, she has told Caro, her shoulders had hunched with chronic embarrassment. She was nearly thirty before she stood sufficiently tall for it to be noted that she has the neck and carriage of a Russian dancer, something she has not yet lost, as though her late blooming has been compensated for by a delayed demise. Caro can understand entirely why her father fell in love with her mother, and how devastated he must have been when she was willing to throw herself on the rocks, body and soul, time and again, in her effort to have a third child. Why he had to cheat so as not to feel enthralled or crushed.

  “I don’t mean this in a grandiose, absolutist way. I’m not talking about universal truths, just the commonalities in experience between people due to our shared biologies and histories. I’ve reached the age when the end seems nearer than the beginning, when reflection is a stronger impulse than fantasy. You’ll see, or perhaps you’ve already seen”—she paused to check Caro’s face—“what one wants changes. I’m trying to understand the evolution of that change. I’m using myself, not because I’m exemplary, but rather because I’m the case I know best.”

  While Caro was in high school and college, her mother had written half a dozen papers on quirky subjects, such as secret-keepers, gossip, arrogance as an expression of sadomasochism, papers that without fanfare gathered an audience. The teleology is her mother’s first long project. The idea, her mother has told her, was inspired by a conversation they once had over dinner at an outdoor café in Riverside Park. They’d fallen into one of their familiar riffs, remarking on the dichotomies among the four of them. Her father, a doer, a fixer of clogged hearts, screened doors, horse bits. A fact junkie—a filing cabinet of information on diplomatic and military history, pharmaceutical and surgical cardiac interventions, medical practice economics, the care and breeding of horses. Adam, his opposite, a thinker and imaginer, a translator of stories into images—and yet also a collector of arcane knowledge. Her mother, an intellectual from the era before specialization and technology and career pigeonholing trumped the ambition of a thinking person to be sufficiently broadly informed so as to reflect on current affairs, history, the full spectrum of human experience.

  “In a way,” Caro said, “my work with preschoolers is the applied version of yours with your patients. I try to engineer for my children the outcomes—self-esteem, self-control, a love of learning—that when missing send adults running to you.”

  A few tables away, a man and a woman were trying to coax a toddler into a high chair. The child squirmed, landing an impressive punch to the man’s jaw before she was forcibly strapped into the seat.

  “Ten seconds,” Caro said, “until that kid flings her plate onto the ground.”

  Her mother glanced at the embarrassed and exasperated parents. “I had Adam and you before the bring-your-kids-with-you-everywhere ethos. When your father was in medical school, the fifties’ imperative of maintaining a baby’s schedule still ruled. He would never have allowed either of you to go out to dinner with us at that age.”

  The plate crashed to the ground.

  “I don’t think of you as an engineer,” her mother continued. “That’s a bit Orwellian for my taste.”

  “I’m exaggerating. But don’t we need a vision of what we think would be optimal, me for my three- and four-year-olds, you for your patients?”

  Her mother leaned back in her chair and inhaled slowly, a sign, Caro has learned, that she is mulling something over. “I hope I do better with my patients than I did with you and Adam.” She glanced sideways, as though gathering her thoughts. “That sounds terrible. I mean that I failed both of you in so many ways, not through lack of love, but because I stifled you. Like all parents, I suppose, it was impossible not to want for my children things I could not achieve. Because I don’t love my patients in the same way, I can see them more clearly, let them unfold with less imposition.”

  Caro walked her mother home. When they reached the brownstone, her mother took her hand. “Coming back to your idea that you are the engineer, do you really think we can do anything more than respond, encourage, discourage, what is already unfolding? As I look back on my life, it seems like this series of tectonic plates, one layer shifting into another, so that what I wanted at twenty hardly touches what I want now. It makes me wonder if there’s some inevitability to it, something greater than my own personal history.”

  Her mother kissed her cheek. The kiss rested like dew. Two months passed before her mother said anything about her project, which by then, with a little self-deprecating smile, she described as the study of desire from conception to death.

  11

  At seven, Caro walks to her mother’s garage. Waiting for the attendant to bring down the car, she studies the picture her mother left, which looks as if it was taken in a photo booth. In it, Eva has dark recessed eyes, angry and scared, like an animal encountered at night.

  She crosses Central Park and drives north on Third Avenue. Beyond 100th Street, the city changes, the surprise of a hill, the signs and voices all in Spanish. She parks outside the building that houses the school, handing five dollars for watching the car to Simon, the homeless man who, years ago, she tried to help get into a shelter but who prefers his squat behind the steps of the bakery where every morning she buys him a café con leche and a roll with melted cheese.

  “Love, they have to take me out before anyone touch your car.” Simon makes a little boxing move. It is already seventy degrees, but he is dressed in several layers of clothes, one a hooded Harvard sweatshirt that was once hers.

  When she first came to work at the school, twelve years ago, it was housed in the basement of a church a block away. There were rats in the tiny yard where the children played and peeling paint in the two classrooms. It took her a month to realize that what she needed was a crash course in community politics and a grant writer. She invited the city councilwoman and a friend who worked for the Ford Foundation to visit the school. Minutes before they came, she opened the garbage cans in the courtyard so the place stank and unscrewed two of the ceiling’s fluorescent lights. The city councilwoman covered her nose and then told Caro about a nearby fire station that was being shut down. The Ford Foundation friend offered to help Caro write the grants that led to the station’s transformation into six light-filled classrooms with water tables and sand tables and cozy book corners and an award-winning indoor playground in the former fire truck garage.

  Now, 120 children, ages three and four, attend the school. Hot lunches are served family style. Because so few of the children have a pediatrician, Caro has organized a liaison with Mount Sinai Hospital so that every week pediatric residents come to the school. Vaccinations and flu shots are given on-site. Last year, Caro managed to have the program extended to include the siblings of her little students. For five years now, psych interns have run parenting groups for the mothers—groups that remained empty until Caro thought to provide free coffee and doughnuts and to hire two college students to watch the babies in tow.

  Her father teases her, calling her East Harlem’s Jane Addams. In one of the many articles that have been written about the school, a radical education professor from Teachers College was quoted in a way that implied that the school is a Band-Aid in the community, something politicians can point to and say, See how much we’re doing, when in fact it is just a drop in the bucket.

  “What knee-jerk baloney,” her mother responded. “It’s a line of reasoning that can be used with any good deed. It reminds me of one of my patients who gets enraged when her parents do something nice for her because it�
��s evidence contrary to her theory about what brutes they are. You could make the same argument about my work. I treat perhaps thirty-five different patients in a year. But if half those patients truly change, who knows how many people they’ll touch.”

  Her mother brushed her hair from her eyes. “Hard to accept that we can’t part the seas or turn water into wine.”

  12

  Walking into the light of the airport, Eva seems only scared, a girl dressed in nappy black pants and chunky boots with a fake leather jacket and an L.A. Lakers duffel bag. She stares straight ahead so that Caro has to tap her on the shoulder to get her attention.

  “Eva? Are you Eva?”

  The girl stands perfectly still. When Caro first heard that Eva came from the Amazon, she imagined a hut surrounded by toucans and monkeys. She was surprised when Adam informed her that although Iquitos is landlocked, accessible only by boat or plane, with a jungle market where you can buy everything from crocodile meat to the hallucinogenic ayahuasca, it is, nonetheless, a modern city with Internet cafés and banks, the avenues teeming with motorcycle-driven rickshaws.

  A look of confusion passes over the girl’s face. For a moment Caro wonders if Eva speaks English, as her mother was assured by Ursula. Or perhaps Eva is experiencing the shock Caro can still recall from her first weeks in Paris, when her college French seemed unrelated to what she was hearing, the words stuck together so she couldn’t tell where one started and the next ended.

  “I’m Caro, Myra’s daughter.”

  Slowly, Eva’s face clears. “I know. I know the whole family. Mrs. Ursula explain everything to me. There is your mother, Doctor M., and you and your brother. His wife is also a doctor, and the child is Omar.” Eva smiles when she says Omar’s name, revealing a front tooth with a little chip. “I love children! I have a present for him.”

  She drops the duffel bag at her feet and digs inside. When she stands up, there is a red stuffed animal that looks like a monkey under her arm.

  “Mrs. Ursula tell me the child is six. When I work at the jungle lodge, I babysit many children five, six, seven years of age.”

  “That’s adorable. I’m sure he will love it,” Caro says, though, in truth, it is hard to imagine Omar, whose phone conversations at four were about the extinction of dinosaurs due to the climate change caused when a meteorite crashed into the earth, playing with this toy.

  “We have these monkeys nearby where I come from. They are called howler monkeys because they scream all night. Me, I am used to it, but the Americans, when they stay in the lodges, sometimes they complain they cannot sleep from all of the noise.”

  “I’ve seen photos of them.” One of her teachers had come back from Belize with slides of howler monkeys, no larger than cats, hidden in the upper branches of a thicket of trees—too unlike the picture-book monkeys the children knew to capture their interest. “Let’s get your luggage.”

  Eva points at the duffel. “I have everything in here. Mrs. Ursula buy me two jeans and this jacket. My friend, he give me the suitcase. You know the Lakers?”

  “I’m not much of a sports fan.”

  “You know Shaquille O’Neal? He is my favorite player.”

  “I’ve heard of him.” Caro picks up the duffel and slings it over her shoulder. “With traffic, it’s about an hour’s drive back to the city. Do you need to use the bathroom, get a snack before we go?” She points at the food court ahead. “We could stop and get a sandwich if you’d like.”

  The frightened expression from when Caro tapped Eva’s shoulder returns to the girl’s face. Eva lowers her chin, covering her nose and mouth with her hand. Caro can see the oyster color of her scalp. “Are you okay?”

  “I smell something burning. There is something burning over there.”

  Caro inhales. There is the slightest scent of cooking meat. “I think that’s hamburgers on a grill. Would you like to get something?”

  Eva bolts ahead so that Caro, weighed down with the duffel, has to struggle to catch up with her. There is a bead of sweat at Eva’s hairline. Caro shifts the duffel to her other shoulder and takes Eva’s elbow. “Slow down. You’re going to lose me.”

  “I don’t like the smell…”

  Caro points to the coffee stand on their right, the candy kiosk on their left. “There are plenty of other places. Are you hungry?”

  “Hungry?” Eva tilts her head. It is hard to tell if she is contemplating the meaning of the word or the state of her gut.

  “Yes,” she whispers. “I am very, very hungry.”

  13

  By the time Caro arrives at the brownstone with Eva, her mother has finished with her afternoon patients. She double-parks as her mother comes down the steps. Eva reaches in back for her bag and opens the car door. She stands still as Myra holds out her hand and then, not receiving a hand in return, touches Eva lightly on the arm.

  Myra leans over to kiss Caro through the open window.

  “Will you be okay?” Caro asks softly.

  “Of course—and thank you.”

  Caro returns her mother’s car to the garage, and then walks home. Reaching her building, she gives a half smile to her doorman, who, after seventeen years at the job, can distinguish the residents’ personalities and moods: who wants to chat, who wants to pass through the lobby without intrusion. A man who knows that during the twelve years she has owned her apartment, she has never brought anyone home or unexpectedly failed to return for a night.

  She unlocks her front door and takes off her shoes. She finds it comforting that when she comes back in the evening, nothing inside her apartment is ever altered. It is the panorama outside her windows that changes: a cityscape of water towers and rooftops with the Hudson River beyond, steel gray and white-capped in winter, a palate of blues in summer. At night, the lights of Edgewater across the water; mornings, the buildings brushed with pink from the eastern light.

  Eva’s disorientation this afternoon had brought back her own experience as a foreigner during the semester she’d spent in Paris. Eager to save money to travel, she’d eschewed the dorms offered by the study program, taking instead a job as an au pair for two children, five and seven. The mother had been a concert pianist who wore her hair severely pulled back from her face and did not hesitate to pinch either Caro or the children when she was displeased. Her chubby engineer husband escaped the pinches by strategic retreats to a little workshop off the kitchen where he made birdcages. The children would torment Caro by bounding ahead of her in the street and pulling their mouths horizontally until their eyes looked as if they would pop. She had been so miserable she lost her appetite, unable to swallow the celery rémoulade and boeuf bourguignon the pianist made each Sunday, the buttery gratins and smelly cheeses she served in the evenings. For the first time, her collarbones emerged. Misery gave her a waistline. No longer overshadowed by belly and hips, her breasts seemed enormous. The engineer took to watching her as she leaned over to tie the children’s shoes.

  One night, she was awakened by a sound in the keyhole of the maid’s room where she slept. The chubby engineer stood over her bed, an enormous erection pointing at her face. She wanted to scream, but she was afraid of waking the children and receiving a vicious pinch from the pianist. The engineer smiled at her. Even in the dark, his teeth appeared brown. He offered her a chocolate truffle. Too scared to refuse, she put it in her mouth. He locked the door and gently pulled back her covers. He massaged the crotch of her white cotton underwear. She felt humiliated that her pelvis arched toward his fingers and the crotch of her underwear grew wet. Chocolate drooled out of her mouth. It was her first orgasm, though she’d not understood that at the time. The engineer laughed. Afterward, she felt something warm and sticky on the tops of her thighs. In the morning, when the children had left for school and the pianist had disappeared behind the glass doors of the salon to practice, he handed her an envelope with two thousand francs and told her to leave before le déjeuner.

  Ma petite putain, the engineer had called h
er. My little whore.

  14

  The first morning Eva is in the house, Myra wakes, as usual, at four-thirty. Opening her bedroom door, she nearly hits Eva’s sleeping body, curled on the hallway floor. Eva is wearing yellow pajamas and sucking her thumb.

  Myra gently rouses Eva, guiding her into the front bedroom, to the twin bed that was Adam’s and that Myra has now designated to be Omar’s. She pulls the south-facing blinds and covers Eva with the blanket folded at the bottom of the bed. The girl turns onto her side and puts her thumb back into her mouth.

  The kitchen is still dark. Myra makes a pot of coffee and brings a mug downstairs to her office. Her desk faces the French doors leading to the garden, invisible at this hour. She tries to settle down to work but cannot focus on her writing. When they first moved into the house, Adam, then nine, had also rebelled against the sleeping arrangements, refusing to stay in his room one floor below hers despite Caro’s offer to keep her door open so he could sit up in bed and see her. After two nights of having him in her bed, Myra relented and moved his things to the room down the hall from hers, a room she had intended to be a television–guest room.

  Then, there was no need to look for an explanation. Adam’s insistence on sleeping nearer to her was part of his package of phobias and fears, foreshadowed by the clutching, easily startled temperament he’d shown as a baby and toddler, his poor appetite, the ectomorphic form he’d inherited from her, and then cemented when his father had left the house. With Eva, though … She stops herself. The girl has been here less than a day.