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"You gave me such a shock," the woman said.
She wiped her hand on her apron. "Sorry about the
flour. I'm Catherine." She raised her voice. "Feather,
you come out here. It isn't polite to bring a guest
home and then run off and leave them before they've
even been introduced."
Sue heard running feet and an apology.
"Come in." The old lady beckoned Sue into
the kitchen. "Are you from the orchestra?"
"No," Sue admitted. "We met on the subway."
"Oh." The woman gave her another look, more
careful this time.
Sue wondered whether to mention the man on the train.
On balance she decided against it. "She kept me
company."
Heather ran into the kitchen and spied a dozen cakes
cooling on a wire rack.
"Heather was sitting next to me and we got talking.
She mentioned that she needs to replace her tutor and,
well. . ." Sue tried to smile sweetly but it didn't
quite work. "One thing led to another."
The grandmother seemed rather taken aback. "I
see." There was no hint of disapproval in her tone,
just deep surprise. "Do you tutor?"
"I used to. I'm working on my Ph.D. right now."
"Oh." She used this word a lot, Sue noticed,
changing the inflection to make it mean different things.
This time she sounded impressed. "What's your subject?"
"Philosophy."
"Oh."
Heather turned away from the cakes. "And she knows
all about verbs and I like her. Can she be my tutor?
Please?" As she said the last word she bent her
knees a little. Sue wondered why people do that.
The woman smiled. "How much patience do you have?"
She seemed nurturing, full of love and fun and gentle
mischief. "This young lady can be quite a handful."
"I have plenty," Sue answered. She was rarely
sure of anything but she was sure she had been hired.
* ----- *
As she hurried to her job at the store, Sue marveled
at her good fortune. It emerged that Heather's departed
English tutor had been charging $65 an hour, and when
Sue offered her services for only $50 Heather's grandmother
required minimal further formality.
Fifty dollars an hour? Sue would have been happy with
half that. Less. This was incredible. For the first
time in her life she saw a way to make enough to live
on. And these were nice people, not the mean spirits
she usually dealt with who explained that, although
it seemed as if the pay was below the minimum legal
wage, it only looked that way because of tax deductions
and benefit contributions.
Sue glanced at her watch. She had less than a minute
to get to the perfume counter and she knew what would
happen if she arrived late again. No longer tired now,
she took a deep breath of the cold air, checked that
her pockets were all zipped shut, turned herself invisible,
and launched herself into the air.
After her first week with Heather she found the confidence
to look for other children to tutor. In the small expensive
supermarkets uptown she left notices on the bulletin
boards. At the bottom she cut vertical strips with her
telephone number on each one, and she went back every
day to check how many had been taken.
While business did not boom, it grew at a satisfying
pace. One student became two, and then four, and then
ten, and soon she had to carry a notebook with her so
that she could remember the names of all the parents.
Most of them paid cash, and a thousand dollars, while
not enough to settle her arrears, was more than enough
to placate her landlord. In fact it surprised him.
It was fun to look for interesting ways to teach struggling
children. Sue had no training as a teacher so she made
it up as she went along. She tried to explain verbs
to Heather but that simply didn't work. She tried other
experiments but they didn't work either. Persistence
finally lead to a solution.
"Do you like to read stories?" she asked
one day.
Heather shuffled in the chair and Sue remembered, across
half a lifetime, how the frame of a chair digs into
your legs when your feet don't reach the ground.
"Not really." Heather seemed almost apologetic.
"I like to write stories." She threw Sue a
hopeful smile.
"You do? That's great!"
"It is?"
"Of course."
Heather looked unconvinced. "But I thought I needed
to practice my verbs," she said, as if the chance
to do something more interesting was slipping through
her fingers.
"Are you kidding? Writing stories is great for
your verbs!"
And so Heather wrote her first story for Sue, about
a kindly ghost. The spelling was erratic and the grammar
poor, but the storyline was heartwarming and delightful,
the structure very much more accomplished than Sue had
expected. Perhaps the part of Heather's brain that understood
music also understood storytelling. Most children her
age grappled with an etude but Heather could handle
whole symphonies.
The next time they met they read the story together,
discussing the grammar as they went, and it proved easy
to sneak education under Heather's radar in the guise
of fun.
Sue actually enjoyed working like this, by sheer, seat-of-the-pants
instinct. The experience changed her, made her feel
like a new person. At first she did not recognize what
was happening, but the epiphany came in their Broadway
office, one morning shortly before Christmas, when she
found herself listening to her partners spill their
hearts. It was a new and deeply unfamiliar role.
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