Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen

groomed herself as painstakingly for this morning as I had the morning I got married. A drawl and Diorissimo, or something that smelled a whole lot like it.
    “First grade, he filmed Jason on his first field trip, Jason giving his report on alligators to the class, Jason trying out for peewee soccer, which, by the by, he’s not real good at. Last year he tried to film Jason taking some standard reading test they were giving. I figure that was the last straw. He’s not allowed inside the school with the camera anymore. Came close to suing, too, I heard, ’cause of infringement on his constitutional rights. Does the Constitution guarantee you the right to be a weenie?”
    Both of us looked toward the school. The sun made such a glare on the windows that they looked like one-way mirrors; we couldn’t see a thing. But I could feel Robert inside, feel him sitting at his new desk looking furtively around the room, trying to get used to this, trying to scope out who mattered and who didn’t, who it was safe to approach and who would backhand him with a word, a look. I could feel him watching the teacher, trying to pay attention to what Mrs. Bernsen was saying while every hair on his body was vibrating to the atmosphere in the classroom the waythe new kids’ did. Or at least the way mine had when I’d been the new kid. And, along with it all, he’d have to remember his last name as though it was fractions, or division, something difficult he’d barely been introduced to. I could see Robert taking a test, writing in his crabbed script a capital B to begin his last name. I could see him erasing the B , his tongue snagged between his front teeth, writing a capital C instead.
    Or maybe not. Maybe when you were a kid you were so unsure of yourself that every school year was a time of reinvention; maybe only adults were stupid enough to think they knew exactly who they were. “Hi,” I said over and over in my head sometimes in the morning as I was making coffee, or in the evenings as I fixed toast and eggs for dinner. “I’m Beth Crenshaw.” I practiced writing it the way I’d once written “Mrs. Robert Benedetto” in the margin of my notebooks in nursing school.
    “If a man who says he is Robert’s father comes to the school, you have to call me immediately,” I had said on the phone to the school secretary.
    “We already know that, Mrs. Crenshaw,” she said wearily, as though her entire life was made up of custody disputes and parents’ paranoia. And again I felt an invisible hand at work. It was a hand that made it impossible for me to ask questions, for surely there would be something peculiar about a mother who didn’t know who had given the school fair warning, about a mother who asked where her son’s school records had come from and who had sent them, about a mother who asked the office, “By the way, do you know our phone number?” “Guardian angels” Patty Bancroft always called the members of her invisible nameless network, and I was grateful. But at times it felt less celestial than intrusive, almostsuffocating, for other people to know more about me than I knew about myself. It was as though I existed in someone else’s imagination. I glanced at the narrow-hipped, narrow-shouldered woman next to me in the parking lot, and wondered whether our conversation was accidental or whether the clothes I wore every day, those charity size eights, had once belonged to her.
    “Beth Crenshaw,” I said a little irritably, sticking out my hand, watching for a reaction.
    “Oh,” she said, “sorry. Cindy Roerbacker. You new?”
    I nodded.
    “What grade is your kid in?”
    “Fifth.”
    “Which class?”
    “Mrs. Bernsen.”
    “Good. Mrs. Jackson is an idiot. The sweetest woman in the world, but my two-year-old could teach her social studies.”
    “What about yours?”
    “Fourth.” She sighed. “Her name’s Chelsea. My little one’s Chad.”
    “Your husband Charlie?”
    “Craig,” she said.