Page 16 of Close Reading

Deenie catches my eye. Studies me. Something registers in her face.

“So,” she says, with the mild tone of a wildlife documentarian. “How’s the project?”

“The project is good. The work is developing in ways I didn’t expect. She has a mind that—” I stop. I hear myself. I have been about to say makes me better, and that is not a thing you say about a colleague’s mind.

“Go on,” Deenie says. “She has a mind that...”

“That complements the ecological approach.”

“Look at her.” Sasha says to Deenie, gesturing in my direction. “She doesn’t even know yet.”

Marcus, from across the room: “For the record, I identified this in September.”

“Nobody asked you, Marcus.”

“I’m noting it for the chart.”

I drink my Calloway. The morning continues. Gerald finishes his scone. Kim types. Marcus reopens his laptop. Marguerite falls asleep in Sasha’s lap, and Sasha looks down at her sleeping daughter with an expression that is tender and tired and complicated.

I think about Margot. The eight inches between our shoulders as we walked. The way she looked on the quad yesterday when something pressed forward for a second before she put it back.

I think about what it would mean to bring Margot here. Into this room. Into this Thursday morning fullness. Margot in the armchair. Margot with a tea. Margot listening to Gerald’s monograph updates with polite precision, and then—and this is the image that holds—Margot relaxing. The shoulders dropping half an inch. The jaw unclenching.

I don’t know if the structure she’s built permits it. But I want to find out, and the wanting is no longer something I can file under professional curiosity.

Bring her here, Miriam said.

I finish my coffee. I leave Lavender House. I walk to campus in the October mist with Miriam’s sentence in my chest like a seed.

9

MARGOT

Sophia is thirteen and a half, and at thirteen and a half she has developed a negotiating style that I recognize because it is mine, deployed with a fluency suggesting extensive observation, and I find it both impressive and deeply inconvenient. She has my facility for structured argument. She has my instinct for holding the strongest point for last.

She does not have my reserve. This is important. Whatever combination of observation and nature produced Sophia, it produced a child who has learned my frameworks and arrived with a warmth I cannot take credit for, a warmth that was present from her first hours in my life, that has grown over 13 years into something I recognize as both foreign and essential. She is not warm because I taught her warmth. She is warm because she is Sophia.

“Three friends,” she says. “Friday. 7:00 to 10:00.”

We are in the kitchen. She is standing at the counter, which she has recently begun to do during negotiations because at some point in the last year she observed that the person standing has a positional advantage, and she filed this away and began deploying it. I am sitting at the table with a cup of rooibos I made 20 minutes ago and have not drunk because the negotiation began before the tea cooled.

“I have grading.”

“You always have grading.”

“This is because grading is a continuous process, not an event.”

“We’ll be in the living room.”

“The living room shares a wall with my study.”

“We’ll be quiet.”

She will not be quiet. Three 13-year-olds with pizza will not be quiet. This is not a criticism. This is a statement about the acoustic properties of 13-year-olds.

The house is a few blocks off campus, brown brick, cottage-style, built in the 1940s. I bought it my second year at Ardmore, lucky in the timing. The market hadn’t come back yet, and for a brief window a person could afford a house this size in a neighborhood this close to campus, good bones and a crooked back step and all. I have spent twelve years making it exactly what it is: quiet, ordered, mine.

And that is what Sophia is really getting at. My evenings are organized with a precision I have spent years perfecting: the grading at the desk, the tea at 9:00, the quiet that descends after Sophia goes to her room. An evening with three additional adolescents introduces a variable I have not planned for. I do not do well with variables I have not planned for. I know this about myself. I have known it since the morning I stood in a quad with one earring in my hand and discovered that the largest variable of my life had been operating without my knowledge.