the CLIMBER ROOM The sign in the Sweet Apple kitchen declared it a nut-free zone, and every September somebody, almost always a dad, cracked the usual stupid joke. The gag, Laura, the school director, told Tovah, would either mock the school's concern for potentially lethal legumes or else suggest that despite the sign's assurance, not everyone at Sweet Apple could boast of sanity. Today, as Tovah leaned into the fridge to adjust the lunch bag heap, a skinny gray-haired man in a polo shirt, old enough to be the grandfather of the girl who called him "Papa" as he nudged her toward the cubbies, winked at Tovah, pointed to the sign. Here it came, the annual benediction. "Nut free!" Papa said. "Oh, no! Guess I'd better scram!" He looked at Tovah as though expecting some response, but what? Tolerant smile? Snappy retort? Hand job? These older fathers with their second, "doing-it-right-this-time" families were the worst. This version stuck out a large, knuckly hand that seemed locked in a contest for supremacy with his heavy platinum watch. "Randy Goat," the man said.
Tovah figured she had misheard. "Tovah Gold," she said, and shook his hand, or, rather, a few of his supple fingers. "And this is Dezzy." "Dezzy!" Tovah said, recognized the girl now. She sank to a knee, which was not only the proper way to address children but a nifty evasive maneuver vis-à-vis their crypto-creepy progenitors. "Hi, Dezzy. Do you remember me? I tagged along with Laura on the home visit a few weeks ago. You showed me your new sparkly shoes.
" "Sparkle shoes," said Dezzy. "Sparkle, of course." "Right," Randy said. "I was out of town when you guys popped by." The place had been enormous, dizzying, a living (well, not quite living) embodiment (not embodiment, precisely) of the aspirational sconce porn that Tovah sometimes indulged in online or at magazine racks. "We met your wife," Tovah said. "She was so nice." Tovah still blanked on the family name.
She was stuck with Goat. "I remember with my older children," the man said. "You guys like to do a little recon. Find out if we keep our kids in filth while we boost skag all day. But I guess we passed. We good, God-fearin' folks, I swears." Tovah stared at him, unsure of Laura's preferred reply to such a performance. She was new to the pre-K world, and just part-time, temporary.
Tovah had been an administrative coordinator at an East Side prep school for years, until the school brought back the retired headmaster to replace her. The crash had made crumb snatchers of the toniest. The headmaster had run the school. Now he ran the office, and Tovah, at home, ran a lot of hot water for non-revitalizing soaks. The offer from Sweet Apple, managed through a distant family friend, had saved her. "Sorry to shock you," Randy Goat said now. "Just funnin'." "You didn't shock me," said Tovah, though the word "skag," the old-timey TV creak of it, intrigued her.
"A tightass," Randy Goat said. "Good. It means you'll be careful with my kid." Now other children tore past, monogrammed backpacks jouncing. Laura jogged up in an outfit she'd recently described as "business yoga casual." "Mr. Gautier," she said. "Wonderful.
" "You know to call me Randy, Laura. You look radiant. You must have bloomed with love this summer." Laura blushed. "Not quite." "Just a fling? Sounds fun." Tovah pictured another universe where, without hesitation, she could slap Randy Gautier's smug, maybe once sensual old-man mouth. Laura was annoying, but she didn't deserve this spinster baiting, especially from a geezer.
Tovah wasn't that far from cat ladyhood herself, though she believed-had staked her life on the belief-that everything always changed at the last minute. The right man, or even woman (what did it matter, really?), would just appear and, for goddamn certain, the right baby. Which meant any baby, within reason. Race or gender didn't matter, but spine on the inside would be nice. Now an unknown force, perhaps the man's shimmering wrist piece, whipped her back through conjectured space-time, far from the cool, lavender room where she cradled her perfect newborn. She stood with her hand on Desdemona Gautier's silky skull while the girl's father bent down to address her. "It's going to be a great day, sweetie. The first of many great days.
Just do whatever Laura and Tovah tell you." The Goat Man winked at Tovah again. Tovah treated him to the smile she once bestowed upon the creative writing professor who told her that some people were meant to write poetry and others, like Tovah, to treasure it. She'd proved that incontinent toad wrong, for a few years, anyway. * * * Tovah's D'Agostino's card wouldn't beep her the rebate. She feigned a pressing appointment, offered to pay full price for her crackers and sodium-free vegetable broth. The woman at the register looked at Tovah as though she'd chucked a diamond brooch into the Hudson. "I can just swipe for you," she said, slid an extra card from beneath the cash drawer.
"Save it for somebody worthy," Tovah said. "Hey," the woman said. "We need the wood." "What's that?" "You didn't die for my sins, lady. So don't go building a cross for yourself. We need the wood." Tovah gave a feral grin. By midnight tonight, fueled by soup and crackers, she would have her first verse in years.
"Thank you," Tovah said. "You don't even know." "I know you need crazy bitch pills," the woman muttered, but Tovah, lost in private, triumphal noise, did not catch it. * * * By midnight Tovah lay on the couch with a stomachache. A miniature swordsman flensed her gut with his foil, or so went an intriguing image that had come to her as she puked up the crackers, the soup, and the Chinese entrées she'd ordered after the crackers ran out. She never ate like this. She kept her slim figure with a subsistence diet of iced espressos, store-cut cheese cubes, and a few dry salads a day. But she remembered that back when she really wrote poetry, she ate a lot of greasy food, with no gastric regret.
The extra weight had just made her voluptuous. She'd been so young. Now she was thirty-six and in one eating spree had become a vile sack of fat and rot. In her vision of herself she was not even obese, but more like a bloated carcass gaffed from a lake. There on the couch, her belly flopped over her jeans, the new chin she'd acquired in about five hours damp and rashy, rank scents curled from her pores and, especially, from her crotch, whenever she tugged at her waistband to ease the ache. It was all so awful, evil, so unlike the Tovah of recent years, of modified appetites and reduced expectations, that her corpse-body surged with something revoltingly, smearishly pleasing. She felt slimy, garbage-juice sexy. Her hand jerked inside her underwear for relief.
She pictured the actual gaffer leaning over the gunwale: rugged, with kind, lustful eyes under a brocaded cap. Sparkle eyes. Tovah's legal pad, upon which she'd written only the title of her poem, "Needing the Wood," slid to the carpet. Her fountain pen, caught against an embroidered yellow pillow, impaled it. Morning light woke her, but Tovah's half-closed eyes bent the rays back into a dream about a sun-stabbed land of which Tovah was philosopher-queen. She could retain her crown only by mastering a vintage pinball machine set atop an onyx plinth. The flippers stuck, and the holes were the mouths of female poets. A silver ball plopped into the maw of Dickinson.
A voice in the head of her dreamself told Tovah not to "skin lip." She woke again, rose from the couch, saw the stained cartons of kung pao chicken, sesame chicken, sweet and sour chicken, and mystery moo shoo. She retched. She took a shower and made gunpowder tea and sat on the toilet and sighed. She had a date tonight. It would be odd to see Sean again. Her best friend in college, Callie, had a brother, and everyone had agreed that this lean black-haired wonder was bound for an extraordinary life. Sean might direct a morally resonant movie, or design a marvelous bridge, or climb a heretofore unscalable mountain both to prove his prowess and deliver medicine to a snowed-in camp on the far slope.
He had a keen mind, a daredevil physicality, a conscience. You could picture him leading large, semi-whimsical social movements. At his sister's party during one Christmas break years before, Sean's graciousness, even more than his charisma, had undone Tovah. Sean made the rounds, checked on everybody's drinks, lavished his attentions on the shy. When he walked up and handed Tovah a daiquiri and they spoke for a few moments about turtles, or tortoises of great size and longevity, Tovah felt something magical and formfitting slip over her: a tunic of light. This was the way Jesus must have worked, some petty wonder talk while revelation sunk its celestial needle. An artificial insemination of the soul. Soon Sean dr.