Other People's Lives by Johanna Kaplan

slacks, long Mexican serape pushed over a turtleneck Irish fisherman’s sweater, a child’s bright red furry earmuffs half covered by a multicolored, flower-filled East European peasant kerchief, Rebecca looked, as Louise stared, like a package that had been sent on from one wrong foreign address to another, receiving at each mistaken customs office its country’s distinctive stamp.
    â€œYou’ll have to forgive me, Maria—I know you’ll forgive me, with you I don’t even have to say it—but everything is in such disorder. I’m half here, I’m half still in the city, sometimes I don’t even know where I am. Everyone always says to me, I don’t know how you can bury yourself in the country like that—you of all people. But I don’t feel buried. And that’s what’s important! Here, it’s beautiful, the air is beautiful, I can take walks wherever I want to—and I don’t have to be afraid. Of course it’s true, I loved the city, for me the city was everything. I loved my neighborhood, I taught in a wonderful school—for thirty-five years, Maria. Did you know that? Thirty-five years! Everyone cried when I retired—the janitor, the principal, the elevator man. Cried? Wept! They used up more Board of Education tissue boxes because of me that last week— I got back at that God-damn Bureau of Supplies! And the letters—you should have seen the letters I got! From students. From alumni. Begging me, pleading with me not to leave. Young people are wonderful.”
    Turning toward Matthew, Julie, and Louise, Maria said, “Rebecca was a history teacher.”
    â€œHistory? Maria! Darling! I was a French teacher—you know that! Of course you have so much on your mind now, don’t think I don’t understand. Although lots of people think I was a history teacher, it’s because I know so much about it, I’ve always been so involved. And I’ve lived through so much of it, I’m practically a part of history myself. Leon’s always teasing me about it, he says that’s why I’m so interested in antiques, I’m practically an antique myself. Although I’ll tell you something, Maria, I’m not so old that I can’t be flexible. And that’s why young people always gravitate to me, they feel it, I’m on their wavelength. I’m like a mother to them, but a mother they can actually talk to. That brilliant little Carla Saltzman, she’s a hematologist, she calls me long distance from Denver. She’s working on an Indian reservation, I’m so proud of her. And when I walk outside here, I don’t have to worry about being mugged; I don’t know how you stand it, still living on the West Side! With all the druggies and the junkies and with what went on at Columbia. And the way they look! Not that I disagree with them—they’re brave and they’re wonderful and I could never stand to sit in school myself. But they don’t know anything. They think they invented everything. Everything! What do they think we did in the thirties? Do they think we didn’t also have bodies? Or beds? And sometimes not beds, because, believe me, then parents didn’t just hand over money and apartments and houses. I’ll never forget—right in the middle of the woods in that broken-down camp, Leon thought I looked so innocent, was he in for a surprise… We called it free love, it had to be free. It was still the Depression. And politics, too—the Spanish Civil War! They weren’t even born yet.”
    Rebecca’s arm was still around Maria; they had reached the house, but continued standing outside it. In her cold and discomfort, Louise concentrated on the odd quality of Rebecca’s voice: she had quacked French verbs at students for so many years that now, without knowing it, she could not stop the quacking. Worse, she plowed down on words and consonants with