Today's Lesson
BY COPPER SMITH I FEBRUARY 10, 2009
There was a small cleft on the underside of Sophie's nose, a tiny weakness in the depressor septi muscle that revealed itself when her lips reached for the broad borders of her face to create a smile. The cleft would then curve slightly, eerily implying an independence from its host, only to nearly disappear when her lips retracted. It was her only flaw as a human.
Her remaining quirks could be described as odd-but-endearing (the way she would stoop to pick up strangely shaped rocks on any lengthy stroll); initially-troubling-but-ultimately harmless (her habit of addressing everyone—even grown men—as "bunny."); or too-silly-to-qualify-as genuinely disturbing (she had a "thing" about having the tips of her fingers kissed).
I teach science to middle school boys. We begin each year with basic anatomy and methodically work our way outward, connecting the body's inner workings to the world and universe at large in a way that can make a 14-year-old feel a part of the grand plan, a tiny but vital cog in the lovely machine of the natural world. Sophie—mother of a moon-faced introvert who meant well—met me after class to ask why we didn't begin with geology. The Neoproterozoic era came first in history, she insisted, shouldn't it come first in class? After much heated debate, I got her to laughingly concede that her objection really came down to a fondness for rocks. A few days later I was applying affectionate smacks to each of her fingertips as her small foot caressed my calf and she serenaded me in Hebrew, garbed only in an Eisenhower-era bullet bra and an amusingly placed after dinner mint. I don't know how any of this happened.
Years earlier the source of my bemusement was a small, sinewy bookstore clerk with sad eyes and unhealthily red lips. We didn't talk much; mostly we traded half-remembered lines of German poetry and shared soft glances as we sat in my car, the top of her head gently tucked under my chin. She'd look up and laugh, surprised I was still paying attention, then tap my temple as if laying claim to a prized piece of real estate and say, "Can I get a space in there? Please?" I'd chuckle.
Eleven years later she would leave me for a barrel-chested basketball coach with unfortunate facial hair who—I later learned—would comfort her on nights when I stayed late grading papers or staring into the night sky from the quiet confines of the school parking lot. I always thought she was right next to me, humming along to the tune in my head, gazing upward with me, pondering. But no; she was with her steel-shouldered coach, weeping herself dry, nails inadvertently piercing his forearm like misfired darts, wondering how this could happen and how they could make it stop.
Or maybe she wasn't so tortured by it; maybe they sat, limbs entwined, plotting an exit strategy, with only the cold drone of a nearby TV to shield them from a guilt-stirring silence.
It took her only a few hours to remove everything of hers from the house; there were no kids and thus no cribs, no toys, no regrets. There are images you can never really erase, like this one: Marcy struggling with the rusty rings of the shower curtain, cell phone cupped to her ear as she invited a friend to the new house, like an enraptured reader racing ahead to the next chapter before totally finishing the last one.
I remember thinking she never looked prettier as she jutted her jaw and battered me with her explanation of it all:
"Sometimes people just need somebody," she said.
And with that she was gone. Gone too were our memories; eleven years of wordless courting and teasing and ill-considered ballroom dancing lessons and three word arguments and door slams and re-heated dinners eaten alone. This vacancy rendered my mind a tabula rasa, which Marcy's final haunting words were only too happy to fill.
"Sometimes people just need somebody." I repeated, as if through repetition, clarity would come.
But even as the weird words staunchly lingered, Sophie offered hope. And so we clasped hands and raced through the waist-high weeds of a randomly chosen field because it seemed like the kind of thing lovers were supposed to do—even middle-aged lovers who knew it could all come crashing down with an awkward phone call. Miles away from my abandoned car, we found a shady spot and emptied our weary arms to set up camp for an impromptu picnic. Food and drink tumbled from our grip as we happily inhaled this counterfeit young love.
"This is the only thing that's ever felt perfect," she said. She could have meant the cloudless sky that bathed us both in stillness or the meatball sandwich in her hand or our relationship. She probably meant our relationship.
"How about you? Has anything ever felt perfect?" she asked.
"Not like this," I answered.
"Come on—an ice cream cone, a backrub, a dirty limerick? Have you ever felt the stars had lined themselves up just right for you?"
We then kissed and she told me of the closest she had come to perfection: she told me of a moment during the third grade talent show when she offered ("sung" wasn't really the right word for so paper-thin a voice) a version of "Send in the Clowns" and faces from the adoring crowd adopted a faintly gaseous glow. Half-imagined details intruded; did her father really nod his head to a nearby parent as if it say "yes, that's her—she's my girl alright."?
She went on, but I drifted away in time. She had spilled something (root beer?) and I had to watch the ants at work. There is a visual poetry to their sweet science of mechanized labor. Predictable isn't the word. It isn't just that one can divine what's next. It is that what's next is already happening, snapping into place with a musical fluidity, an immutable certainty that somehow makes sense of everything—even the accidents that usher those eusocial arthropods into majestic motion.
Night soon fell and she slipped into my wiry arms.
She didn't believe me when I told her I found her body beautiful—no matter how noisily I rode the waves of her warm ocean. But she did toss her head back to aim her throaty wail at the defenseless ceiling. She also reached out and took six, maybe seven clumsy stabs at the lamp on my night stand before finding the small chain and tugging it, ridding the room of its only illumination and forever erasing the shadows that danced so deftly on my wall.
In the breathless calm that followed we both somehow discovered that we had reached the summit. And there was nothing left but a downward tumble. We had done everything else: we had dined together, often with her moon-faced, well intentioned son—who would cheerfully endure my reminders of the next morning's lessons and his well-meaning mother's lectures on table manners. We had laughed at jokes that did not, in truth, amuse either of us. And we had shared too much of ourselves in that reckless way that makes a strange kind of sense while showering.
I had told her of Marcy's last words and how in one sense they stung and in another they didn't penetrate at all. Sophie wasn't the vindictive type and so she didn't dare repeat the words upon her tearless retreat, but she didn't have to. Her lifeless eyes—drained of all hope, all energy, all passion—said it all:
Sometimes people just need somebody.
What does that mean?
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