Judy Budnitz - Nice Big American Baby

At least, we had never suspected anything of him until he brought home this child bride, who must have weighed half of what he did, who sometimes wore her hair in two long braids. Then we had to wonder. Before, we liked to hear him talk about his students. Now there was something off about it, a sour note. “My kids,” he would say. “I love those kids. Do you know what they did? Stephanie Riser and Ashley Mink? Listen.…”And we would listen, but there was something tainting it now, a thin black thread.

“Don’t you think she’s a little too young?” we said.

“Nadia? No! She’s thirty-three.”

“No!” we said.

‘Yes,” he said, looking pleased.

“She must be lying,” we said. “She can’t be.”

“It’s right on her papers,” he said.

“As if that proves anything,” we said. But we said it nicely.

They bought a house together. What does that mean? He bought the house. It was his money. She contributed nothing. What did she do with herself all day? “She makes me happy,” Joel said. Her?

“She’s trained as a doctor,” he said. “She has to pass a test before she can practice here.”

“What kind of doctor?”

“It’s a source of great frustration. She has to relearn things she studied years ago, chemistry, anatomy, in a new language. You should see the size of these books.”

“Are you going to have children?” we asked him.

“Of course,” he said.

But there was no sign of them. So we kept asking.

“Of course,” he said.

“Later.

“Maybe.

“I don’t know.”

Of course we were really asking something else. We wondered if she had her own bedroom in the new house. But of course we couldn’t ask.

“He seems frustrated,” we told one another. “Yes, definitely. Bottled up.”

One of our old friends was chosen to be on a televised game show. We had a party to watch her and invited Joel and Nadia. We screamed when we saw her, taking her place among flashing lights and boldly punching her buzzer. But by the third question, a sweaty sheen had broken out above her upper lip. She faltered, mumbled, and in seconds she had disappeared forever. It was hard to work up any kind of real feeling; it was just dots on a screen. Only a game.

Joel seemed distracted. Nadia stared at the wall and then got up to use the bathroom.

“You have no idea what she’s been through,” Joel said, apropos of nothing. “You have no idea.”

Which is unfair; we have all known suffering, we have all known loss. Certainly I have, and Joel should have known that better than anyone.

The sun going behind clouds, trees creaking in the wind. The house Joel bought was all windows, making it easier for the weather to force its mood upon them. That’s how I explain the gloom. It was a sunless winter. She decorated the house herself, everything backward: hung rugs on the walls, stood dishes on their rims on the shelves, set table lamps on the floor, left the windows bare but hung curtains round the beds. She used a lot of red for someone so lacking in color.

Whenever we visited now she’d be listening to her own music. She’d found a station, way at one end of the AM dial, that played her type of thing. She’d play it for us if we asked her, to be polite. Horns and bells, nasal voices, songs like sobbing. More often, she’d listen to it on the headphones he’d given her, and he’d talk to us. It was easier this way. She sat among us with a blissful look on her face, and we could talk about her without worrying that she’d hear us.

We saw her country on the news sometimes. Shaky camera, people running. Trucks. Shouting. Crowds of people pulling at one another. Are they using black-and-white film, or is everything gray there? She refused to watch.

“Is she afraid she’ll see someone she knows? Does she want to block it all out? Does she still have family back there?”

“I don’t know,” Joel would say. We could no longer tell when he was lying.

“She doesn’t talk about her family?”

“No.”

“Maybe she’s angry at them. Maybe they sold her to the mail-order people and took the money.”

“Maybe,” he said, in the way that meant he was not listening at all.

We could not get the picture out of our heads: Nadia ripped from the arms of … someone. By … someone. That part is hazy. We see the hands reaching out, Nadia crying silently. Women with kerchiefs on their heads weeping, men with huge mustaches looking stern, children hugging her knees. Nadia’s chin upraised, throat exposed, martyr light in her eyes. Her shabby relations counting the money and raising their hands to the heavens in thanks, the starving children already stuffing their mouths with bread. It would make a nice painting, Nadia standing among shadows and grubby faces with a shaft of light falling on her, the way it always does no matter where she stands.

Then again, maybe we’ve seen too many movies. “How do we know her family got the money?” I said. “Maybe she came here to get rich. Maybe she’s the gold digger. Maybe she thought high school teachers make a lot of money.”

I thought he’d be more willing to talk about it alone, without the others. I left work in the afternoon and went to his high school. I found him grading papers with a student sitting on his desk. She was sucking on a lollipop, swinging her legs, looked like a twenty-five-year-old pretending to be fifteen, her tiny rear just inches from Joel’s pen (purple; he said red was too harsh). She knocked her heels against the desk and he looked up.

“To what do I owe this?” he said. He took off his glasses and pinched the inside corners of his eyes. Heavy indentations marked the sides of his nose. His fingers left purply smudges. Ink and exhaustion had bruised his face like a boxer’s. The classroom had the sweaty gym-socks-and-hormones smell of all high schools. On top of that there was an aggressively floral smell that was coming off the girl and a stale, musty, old-man sort of smell that, I realized, was coming from Joel.

“Sondra,” he said, “go wait for your bus outside.”

“Okay, Mr. J,” she said, and slowly got up and fixed her skirt and sauntered out. Her bare thighs left two misty marks on the desk.

“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” I said, tracing them with my finger.

“You have to know how to handle these kids,” he said. “Sometimes they’re just trying to get your goat, and the best thing to do is ignore them.” He wrote an X on a student’s paper, then scribbled over the X, then circled it, then wrote sorry in the margin.

“I still think—”

“They get bored in five minutes and do something else. Half these kids have ADD. They have the attention span of a fly.”

“I wanted to talk to you about—”

“What? What was that?” He’d gone back to his grading.

If you looked at those few square inches of skin on the nape of his neck, the backs of his ears, you could almost imagine little-boy Joel. A vulnerable angle, looking down at his hunched shoulders and thinning hair. On the desk in front of him, next to a jar full of pens and highlighters, was a tiny snapshot of Nadia set in an oval ceramic frame. The picture was too small and blurry to make out her face. A gesture, that’s all it was, having that photo there, nothing more. Joel’s hands stopped moving. A flush moved along his scalp. He waited.

It’s not a good time, I said, or thought, and left.

Clearly, he was upset. I was worried. We were all worried about Joel. His clothes were limp. He drooped. He yawned constantly. “Is it Nadia?” we said. At first he ignored us. We kept asking. Finally he nodded.

Just as we thought. She was abusing him, demanding things, running him ragged. We knew she had it in her. It’s the quiet shy ones who are the hardest inside. And Joel was too kind; of course he would give in to her. All she had to do was find his sensitive spots and pinch him there. We knew where they were. She could probably find them. They were not hard to find.