Tim Horvath - Understories

It’s a really good class overall, Dobbins continues, a good mix, balanced, and without making eye contact with Bethany, Pete suspects that they are thinking the same thing.

“And her ? Individually, I mean?” Bethany asks.

Dobbins drops her voice. “The kids are just finding their places, figuring out what to pull out of their knapsacks in the morning, learning my quirks. Sasha can be territorial. When she wants something, it’s ‘What do I have to do to get that?’”

“So, really independent?” tries Bethany.

Dobbins squirms, as though Bethany has reached over and tried to jam the words in her mouth. “That would be an overly rosy picture to paint.” She taps one corner of the tablet’s screen with her pen, and text pops out. “Let’s see. She had some difficulty with the directions on the corn-husk puppet project. Oh, and she didn’t bring in something orange or yellow, which was fine — we had some things here, but she seemed to really want a classmate’s basketball, and when Sasha wants something. .”

Bethany looks mortified. “I felt terrible that day. We had a yellow blanket her grandmother made, and it got left—”

Don’t, don’t,” says Dobbins. “There are good signs, too. Great with the crab. Self-directed for extended periods. Exhibit A.” She indicates the Amazing Stacking Girl. “And copying numbers and letters. .”

At the mention of “copying,” Bethany looks as though one or more disks have spontaneously herniated, shoots Pete an accusatory look. Not only pushy but her forte is copying —her father’s legacy and vocational fate pitifully intertwined. Pete shrugs, and there’s a crash from the other side of the room. They all look up, struck by the noise, its timing.

“Especially consonants,” declares an unfazed Dobbins.

When he bumps into Hanh and his mom again, it is at the Halloween parade. Pete has been joking that he is a high-dpi replica of himself. Sasha is a Gypsy princess. Bethany completely got her ready but then had to go teach. “On Hallow een ?” he said in disbelief, as if it is a sacrosanct holiday, during which the holding of classes was inconceivable. The upshot is that Pete gets to march with Sasha, and when he spots Ms. Hanh he’s sure glad Bethany couldn’t make it.

“Hey, it’s Hanh!” he yells to Sasha, as if she’s been asking about him nonstop. “Remember Hanh?” She’s scratching her head, probably only to shake out the Gypsy glitter that has glommed there.

They make their way over through the crowd. Hahn is a stingray. He looks pretty realistic, his tail rendered out of something spindly and sharp, maybe a coat hanger wrapped in fabric.

“Awesome costume, Hanh!” he says, giving the kid a high five.

“And look at you, a darling Gypsy!” Hanh’s mom says.

Sasha backs away shyly and conceals herself behind Pete’s leg, and he feels a pinch of shame that they have merely dressed Sasha as the latest developmentally appropriate gender cliché instead of being, like Hanh and his mom, fiercely original. Unless, of course, there’s some popular cartoon stingray out there that hasn’t been brought to his attention yet, a goofy but irresistible stingray who is always getting into trouble for poking everyone inadvertently and gets exiled or saves the reef from some external environmentally devastating force, skewering nasty oil riggers and winding up a hero, domesticated and garlanded within the undersea community.

“Sasha, you remember Hanh and. .”

“Ariana.” At last.

“Pete,” he says, relieved, wanting to write it down but not needing to because it seems obvious now that this has to be her name. He adds, “Sasha’s not usually shy. Honey, what is this?”

A woman Pete remembers from playgroup calls out to him from the crowd and makes her way over. He can’t recollect her name, but the daughter is Esther, and now there’s a beet-faced being in a carriage, but Pete can’t quite tell whether it’s a boy or a girl. Esther was always shier than Sasha, retreating, you might say, and secretly when they’d go to playgroup, he was proud that his own daughter was more a risk taker, attaining greater altitude and veering near but not in the road and every so often taking things away from others. Esther still looks prim and proper, her costume expressing her essence sartorially. Pete can never remember the names of any of the parents, but it doesn’t matter — like the owners of sports teams or music producers, they barely exist.

“Esther, are you a completely elegant lady?” he asks in his sweetest Dadese, and she blushes, nodding, and for once he’s said exactly the right thing. Now Ariana introduces herself to Esther’s mom and he gets the mother’s name and then loses it because he’s focused on Ariana’s lips, and then comes the blare of megaphone. The parade lurches forth, past the tiny Unitarian church and the giant white-stuccoed Presbyterian church, which for some reason makes him think about the person who painted it and, in turn, makes him wish that he had a job like that, lobbing fresh glop on the side of something, anything. They go by the Montessori school, hang a right at the world’s smallest graveyard. The whole time, he and Ariana are talking, and every few minutes she has to grab Hanh and retract his stingray barb from someone, a ninja and a robot and a belligerent carton of orange juice. Sasha, meanwhile, has bonded with Esther and the two of them are skipping along like lifelong playmates. This affords the chance, kind of, to actually talk to Ariana. She and Hanh live in those new Riverbelt Apartments. She moved here to be with a boyfriend, whom subsequently she left. Hanh, she adopted from Hanoi before she met the bf, and she has no qualms about raising him alone. Right now she is working at the vintage clothing store, hence the fantastic fabric that comprises Hanh’s stingray suit.

In turn, he finds himself touching on his own struggles — the divorce, its effects on Sasha, that it’s tough to get seed money these days if you’re starting up your own company. A tough time to raise a child, no easier for a brainchild. He says this as if it is true for him, not just Angus, and in the marching he starts to believe it, no more dubious than skeletons walking and zombies shuffling. An older guy, a bird-watcher, dresses every year as an obscure bird; this year he is the Mauritius fody. They stride next to the high school and in an age-old town tradition the older kids are there also in costumes, more grown-up costumes, a slew of boy-wizards and some wit who’s a blackberry bush except sporting the handheld devices in lieu of plump, juicy berries.

They get so wrapped up that it takes Sasha to wander back and point out that Hanh’s protuberance is completely tangled in Esther’s skirts, and she is struggling to pull away. Esther’s mother says sharply, “Can the parent or guardian of this stingray please remove him from my daughter?”

Pete rushes in, still high on conversation, swirling, something real, like he’s just been gathering morels, communing with fecund things of the earth. He steers them to the sidewalk, out of parade traffic, kneeling with hands on their shoulders. “It looks like we’ve got ourselves a situation,” he announces. “These stingrays,” he says, patting Hanh on the head, “have been washing up near the shore and bothering — not bothering, bumping into swimmers. And these lovely ladies in their fancy old-fashioned swim outfits have been getting hooked on these stingrays. No body’s happy about this, right?” He can see Hanh’s eyes through the flaps of brown vintage fabric and Esther’s expression, and the crazy thing is that they’re buying into it, nodding along like he’s an emergency marine biologist, there to rescue them. Hanh pulls back with a rip, causing Esther to cry out, and Pete says, “Yikes! Those stingrays can cause a little damage.”