At which point her mother, Mercy Amado, began to cry.
There were women who refused to look at the truth. Celeste had borne it, faced the implications of her pregnancy head on. Celeste thought of her sister Sylvia and stilled her interior rant. As she had told Sylvia, she could only find transfers and withdrawals of funds. Legally, those funds were all Jack’s, and he could do with them as he pleased because that inheritance had been bequeathed specifically to him. Although—and this is what Celeste did not say—what kind of marriage is it where the husband hoards it all for himself?
Celeste already had a sense about what kind of marriage it was. Early in their marriage Jack had pinned her in a closet, then apologized for thinking she was Sylvia. Sylvia had laughed when Celeste told her —what else could she do? Jack was just a little drunk, a little toasted, Sylvia said.
Since their chat at the bar in Laguna back in February, Sylvia hadn’t told Celeste if she had found out or done anything further about the money. Here was another woman, her Sylvia, she was going to have to shake some sense into, very very gently.
Sylvia had graduated from the University of California at Irvine with honors in Comparative Literature. That literature had included Russian, French and ancient Greek. Raised Protestant, she joked to her Catholic friends that she had given up Spanish for Lent—and had forgotten it completely.
Her degree had prepared her for a wide variety of jobs, all of which were unpaid internships. Sylvia knew there were adults in this world whose parents would subsidize their self-actualization for any number of years, but she was not one of those. Without drama or self-pity, she went out to find a job to cover her student loans.
She worked briefly for her father as a hostess in the restaurant he managed. She went home nightly cursing the fact that her parents had never taught her Spanish. With the intensity she had reserved for Anton Chekhov and Stéphane Mallarmé, she pored over vocabulary books and 1001 Spanish verbs. After a few months, even the dishwashers understood her.
But the commute inland was gritty, the pay absurdly low. At this rate she’d still be living with her parents when she retired. And it was getting very odd at home, the phone rang and rang and when Sylvia picked up no one answered—then it was tense between her parents, Nataly was in Pasadena racking up mountains of debt at CalArts. So she shifted gears and followed her mother’s example: she applied as a substitute teacher and was quickly hired as a full-time teacher on an emergency credential and placed in a structured English immersion classroom in Anaheim.
This Lincoln Elementary looked a little like the elementary school in Compton Sylvia had attended before her family moved to the city of Orange. The classrooms were filled with blacks, Mexicans—although she was supposed to call them Hispanics—Filipinos, Asians, mixed-race kids, white kids.
She began her teaching career in January in a third-grade classroom that had had five previous substitutes.
If the mysteries of a cash register had perplexed her, its technical complexities were silly putty compared to a class of thirty-five third-graders and their exponential demands.
Sylvia would arrive at seven in the morning and leave at five-thirty in the afternoon. At home, she read wretched compositions filled with illiterate spellings and painfully formed printing. Her red pen flew across pages and pages of worksheets.
Sylvia realized a few things:
She didn’t know how to teach spelling.
She didn’t know how to teach writing.
She didn’t know how to teach math.
She threw away her red pencils. Apparently teaching was a lot more difficult than it looked.
While the students—oh my God, the beautiful students, they all looked like they could be her or her sisters or her uncles or her cousins—chased each other in the classroom, Sylvia pored over her teacher’s manual, looking for the correct phrasing.
“Maestra, maestra,” the students would say, the parents would say, with their admiring eyes, their needy eyes.
Sylvia knew she was an imposter. An imposter! And what was the point of Victor Hugo or Dostoyevsky or Anna Akhmatova or de Maupassant if she couldn’t help a classroom of eight and nine-year-olds, for God’s sake?
For the unit on Columbus, she asked her students to tell her about the longest trip they had ever taken. When she was in third grade, the longest trip her family had ever taken was an hour drive to see relatives.
She called on Robert, a slim dark boy with lightly muscled arms who had earlier demonstrated his terror of spiders.
“Two years,” he said.
“Two years, Robert? Where were you going?”
“When we walked here from El Salvador.”
Pause. Well, Columbus’ three month cruise was going to have a hard time following that. Sylvia shared the story in the staff lounge.
“You didn’t believe him, did you?” a stridently gray-haired teacher scoffed, dipping her herbal teabag into a mug. “El Salvador’s an island, for heaven’s sake, he couldn’t have walked.” Perhaps Sylvia wasn’t as underqualified and incompetent as she had feared
Carrot, stick. Carrot, stick. Carrot, stick. Carrot—stickers, praise, candy. Stick—missed recess, detention, standards, late to lunch. But still the children spilled out of their chairs, tripped each other, ran wild through the hallways and onto the playground.
“All right,” she said one Wednesday in March. “If we can get through the next two days with you following my directions, we can have a class party.”
If they had spilled out of their desks before, now they were bouncing on the table tops. Sylvia raised her voice, “And if we have a party, you can bring treats, music—”
Lena, a little girl Sylvia had seated in the front row, a little girl who never finished her work but who betrayed such powerful neglect that Sylvia rewarded her with candy anyway, said, “Ms. Amado? Ms. Amado? Music? We can bring music?”
“You betcha,” Sylvia said.
Lena’s eyes became slits as she glowered at Sylvia. Now what had she done?
She found out Thursday afternoon when the principal asked Sylvia to come to a meeting after school. Lena sat outside the principal’s office, accompanied by a woman so huge she appeared inflated.
The little girl sucked on a piece of candy Sylvia had given her just as school had ended. The principal, Ms. Marroquin—a Latina Sylvia found incredibly beautiful and incredibly intimidating—smiled at the parent, asked her into her office, then looked at Sylvia. “Come in here,” she commanded Sylvia.
Sylvia felt two sets of eyes glaring at her.
“Now,” the principal said. “Would you please explain to Lena’s mother, Mrs. Wilkinson, why you called her daughter a bitch?”
After the meeting Ms. Marroquin said, “You are warned.”
In April her toughest kid, Saul, the eleven-year-old in a class of eight and nine-year-olds, listened, rapt, as she read The Little Match Girl.
“That’s a true story, ain’t it, Ms. Amado?” he said, as Sylvia finished.
Sylvia stammered. How did Malamud put it in The Assistant? How could she translate that here? It IS the truth, it IS the truth.
“It could be,” she said. But in elementary school, you taught them that nonfiction is truth and fiction is pretend. It’s pretend.
“It’s nonfiction, ain’t it, Ms. Amado.”
“It’s fiction, Saul.”
The light in Saul’s eyes clicked off.
Days later, weeks later, Malamud’s line ran through her head: “I lie to tell the truth.” Teaching was the hardest thing she had ever done, and she was terrible