Uptown Girl

‘So aside from a recently deceased mom, what’s bugging Brian?’ Elliot asked.

Kate felt too brittle for their usual badinage. ‘You have mustard on your chin,’ she told him, but as Elliot reached up to wipe it, the glob fell onto his shirt.

‘Oops,’ he said and dabbed ineffectually at his shirtfront with one of the hard paper towels from the school’s bathrooms. The yellow splotch looked particularly hideous on the green of his shirt. Watching Elliot eat, Kate often thought, was a spectator sport.

‘He believes that magic can bring his mother back,’ she sighed wistfully.

‘See? See what I mean? They’re all obsessed with witches and wizards. Damn that Harry Potter!’ Elliot said, then took another huge bite of the sandwich. ‘So what’s your prescription?’

‘I want him to give up the magic and get in touch with his anger and pain,’ Kate answered.

‘Oi vey!’ Elliot said with the best Yiddish accent a gay man from Indiana could ever manage. ‘When will you give up on this quest to get every little boy at Andrew Country Day in touch with his true feelings? And why discourage magic in his case? What else does the kid have?’

‘Oh, come on, Elliot! Because magic won’t work and he mustn’t think it’s his fault when it fails.’ She shook her head. ‘You of all people. A trained statistician. A man who could trade this job in, triple your salary and become chief actuary at any pension fund. You’re telling me to encourage magic?’

Elliot shrugged. ‘Haven’t you ever had magical things happen?’

Kate refused the bait. Elliot, raised in the Midwest and stoic to the bone, had told her ‘the unexamined life is the only one livable’. He often challenged her about the efficacy of psychology. Now, just to annoy her, he was going to take a perverse stand on magic. ‘If you think you’re going to start an argument today, Elliot,’ she warned him, ‘you’re out of your mind.’ Then, to annoy him – as well as for his own good – she added, ‘I didn’t think corned beef was good for your cholesterol.’

‘Oh, what’s a few hundred points one way or the other?’ he asked cheerfully, swallowing another mouthful.

‘You’ve got a death wish,’ Kate said.

‘Ooooh. Harsh words from a shrink.’ Elliot winced mockingly as he opened a Snapple.

‘Look, I’m leaving,’ she told him, gathering some notes from her desk and putting them into her file cabinet. If she left now she’d be able to do a bit of shopping before meeting her friend Bina. She took a lipstick and mirror out of her purse, dabbed the color over her mouth and smiled wide to make sure she didn’t have lipstick on her teeth. ‘I’ll see you for dinner.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘None of your bee’s wax.’

‘A secret? Come on. Tell! What if I threw a tantrum like Brian did?’ Elliot reached into the toy box at his feet. Then he hurled a stuffed bear in Kate’s direction. ‘Would you tell me then?’ The plush missile hit her squarely in the face. Elliot curled up in the chair, held his hands in front of his own face and started to beg rapidly. ‘It was an accident. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

‘I’ll show you sorry,’ Kate warned as she threw the bear back at Elliot, but missed.

‘You throw like a girl,’ Elliot taunted. Then he picked up another animal and threw it at Kate. ‘Duck!’ he called as he reached for yet another toy to throw. It was indeed a duck, yellow and fluffy.

‘Duck this, you math nerd,’ Kate almost shouted as she grabbed a fuzzy rabbit and pummeled Elliot’s head. It felt good to blow off some steam.

‘Abuse! Abuse!’ Elliot screamed in delight as he rolled off the chair to protect himself. ‘Teacher abuse! Teacher abuse!’

‘Shut up, you idiot!’ Kate told him and rushed to close the office door. She turned from it just in time to get a stuffed elephant right in the face. Stunned for only a moment, Kate grabbed the pachyderm and lunged at Elliot. ‘I’ll show you abuse, you sniveling cholesterol warehouse,’ she threatened as she fell on top of Elliot and beat him repeatedly with the toy.

Elliot fought back with both an inflatable flamingo and a stuffed dog. He might be gay, but he was no wussy. When he and Kate were both exhausted (and – sadly – the flamingo’s leg was punctured), they sat panting and laughing together in the big chair, Kate on top. The door opened.

‘Excuse me?’ Mr McKay asked, but despite his words he wasn’t the type to excuse anything. ‘I thought I heard a ruckus in here.’

Mr McKay, the principal of Andrew Country Day lower school, was a hypocrite, a social climber, a control freak and a very bad dresser. He also had a knack of using words no one else had used for several decades.

‘A ruckus?’ Elliot asked.

‘We were just testing out a new therapy,’ Kate extemporized. ‘Did it disturb you?’ she asked innocently.

‘Well, it was certainly loud,’ George McKay complained.

‘From the little I know of it, AAT – Airborne Animal Therapy – can frequently be noisy,’ Elliot said, po-faced, ‘although it’s having significant measurable success in schools for the gifted where it’s being pioneered. Of course,’ he added, ‘it might not be right for this setting.’ He nodded at Kate. ‘I’m not the expert,’ he said as if he were deferring to Kate’s professional judgment. She smothered a laugh with a cough.

‘We’ll put this off until after three o’clock, Mr McKay,’ she promised.

‘All right then,’ he said primly. He left as suddenly as he had arrived, shutting the door with a firm but controlled click. Kate and Elliot looked at one another, waited for a count of ten, then burst into giggles that they had to stifle.

‘AAT?’ Kate gurgled.

‘Hey, straight men love acronyms. Think of the army. He’ll be on the internet in less than ten minutes searching for Airborne Animal Therapy,’ Elliot predicted. He stood up and began collecting the stuffed animals. Kate got up to help him. The irony of the situation was that Elliot had helped Kate get hired and since then George McKay had told several teachers that he suspected them of having an affair. Ridiculous as that idea was, the sight of the two of them in the chair was not one to instill confidence in George McKay, who had frequently announced at teachers’ meetings that he ‘discouraged fraternizing among professional educational co-workers’.

When Kate and her ‘professional educational co-worker’ finished laughing she smoothed her skirt and put her hair back up, this time with a barrette she found in her drawer. Elliot was standing still, looking down at the chair. He heaved a dramatic sigh.

‘Oh shit!’ he told her. ‘You crushed my banana.’ He held up the mangled fruit from his lunch bag which had slipped under them during the battle.

Kate turned, struck the pose of a femme fatale and rasped, ‘How times have changed. You used to like it when I did that.’

Elliot laughed. ‘I’ll leave all banana handling to you and Michael.’

Kate’s new boyfriend, Dr Michael Atwood, was going with her to dinner at Elliot’s place. Kate felt a little flurry in her stomach at the thought. She hoped they’d like each other.

‘If I don’t leave now, I’ll be late tonight,’ Kate told him.

‘Okay, okay.’

She picked up her purse to prepare for leaving.

‘So you like your work so far,’ Elliot said. Kate nodded. She loved it. ‘But even though I helped you get the job, you’re still not going to let me know where you’re going.’

Kate didn’t bother to answer. Elliot was what people in Brooklyn called ‘a noodge’.

2 (#ulink_abc5d9b0-e591-511a-934f-3af50aab768f)

In all the years Kate had known Elliot – over ten now – he’d always managed to cheer her up when she was sad and support her in her successes. Now, as they walked down the corridor to his classroom, she glanced at him affectionately. The stretched-out orange T-shirt, the ugly green over-shirt decorated with mustard, the slight love handles and the wrinkled chinos didn’t make him look like much but he had a keen mind and was a loving and generous friend. She felt a swell of gratitude toward him. As always, he had cheered her up and helped her make the break from school. Kate was proud of the work she did with the kids. She had learned a lot from them, too. For one thing, the school catered to the children of the rich and successful but Kate saw that money, privilege, and education brought as much misery as had her own deprived childhood. She had lost her resentment of those with money and she was grateful for that. She had not picked her calling for the money it earned; in fact, she regarded her work as a kind of vocation. It was one thing she never made light of, and she often found it hard to leave it behind at the end of the day. But tonight she had to, to help Bina prepare for her big night, and then, later, to introduce Michael to Elliot and his partner Brice at dinner.

She waited just inside Elliot’s classroom as he chucked the offending lunch sack in a bin and started messing about in his untidy desk.

‘You know, it’s very hard not to keep thinking about Brian. He’s so adorable, and has had a really difficult time. And I think the disappointment when his magic doesn’t work, which of course it won’t, could cause real problems later.’ Kate sighed. ‘Boys are just so much more fragile than girls.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Elliot sighed deeply too. ‘I’m still getting over the time Phyllis Bellusico told me I smelled.’

‘Did you?’ Kate asked, ready to be either his straight man or his audience. She was used to Elliot’s shticks. Since college they had been amusing one another with dark humor from their childhoods.

‘Well, yes,’ Elliot admitted reluctantly, ‘but I smelled good. I should have. I’d dumped an entire bottle of my mother’s White Shoulders into my underpants.’