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Authors: Myla Goldberg
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as soon as they judged her to be irrelevant. One wall of the waiting area was given to posters eschewing drugs, suicide, and sex, the other to glossy college photos. Celia wondered if there was significance to the girls’ position beneath the wall of vice.
“How can I help you?”
The guidance suite secretary asked the question in a way that did not leave Celia feeling as if she was being appraised for gossip or entertainment value, a quality Celia suspected had impressed her mother when Noreen was deciding who to hire for the job.
“Wait a minute, you must be Celia!” the secretary revised. “You’re just a perfect grown-up version of your yearbook picture. I’m Beverley. You’ve got your mother’s eyes.”
On hearing the word
mother
, the heads of the girls turned.
“This lucky woman is Mrs. Durst’s daughter,” Beverley explained. To Celia’s mortification, she found herself blushing.
“For real?” one of the girls said. At first glance, Celia thought her baby doll T-shirt spelled NUBILE in gold across the front. Celia had forgotten how pristine teenagers were—their bad habits still nascent, their bodies still indefatigable. Celia blinked. The T-shirt read NUBIAN . The girl could just as easily have been freshman or senior. Somewhere in the intervening decades, Celia had lost the ability to tell.
“Is she guiding you, like, all the time?” the girl asked.
“Not so much anymore,” Celia said. She tugged at the hem of her shirt, pulling it smooth across the front, but Nubian’s attention was already elsewhere, one less witness to the reappearance of Celia’s high school self.
The office door that read NOREEN DURST, M.A ., opened onto a room about the same size as one of the parking lot’s larger SUVs. A bookcase along one wall contained the run of yearbooks marking Noreen’s tenure, a collection of college catalogs,and a shelf lined with titles like
Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul
. Celia’s mother sat behind the same desk Celia remembered from the cubicle era, on which rested the same framed photo of herself and her brother from 1981. The only obvious new addition was a sealed glass cylinder containing small liquid-filled glass globes, submerged at various levels in what looked like water.
“Do you like it?” her mother asked. “It’s a Galilean thermometer. Your father gave it to me I don’t know how long ago, after I complained for the zillionth time about working in a windowless building. It’s supposed to help me appreciate my marvelously climate-controlled environment, but mostly I just like the way it looks. Read the temperature on the lowest globe, the red one: it says sixty-eight degrees. Winter, fall, or spring—unless there’s a broken duct or something—it’s always sixty-eight degrees in here.”
“That’s good, I guess,” Celia offered. She closed the door behind her and sat in the chair opposite her mother’s desk, its defeated vinyl cushion collapsing beneath her.
Noreen nodded. “Different things work for different people. Ms. Tompkins actually keeps a full-size photo of a window on her wall. She’s got four photos, all of the same view, one for each season. She usually changes them when you’d expect, but sometimes spring will be up when it’s fall, or winter when it’s spring. A few years ago when she and Dick almost divorced, it was winter for quite some time in April. She’s a little cockeyed, but they all are—therapists, I mean. She’s good at what she does, better than most we’ve had. And she doesn’t justwork with adolescents—she runs a private adult practice on the days she’s not here.” Celia’s mother made an encouraging face that Celia chose to ignore.
“Mommy, when we were talking about Djuna yesterday afternoon, you mentioned how my being so young made it hard to know what to do.”
Celia paused, conditioned by yesterday’s postponements to be stopped as she had before, but Noreen sat at her desk, waiting.
“What did
“How can I help you?”
The guidance suite secretary asked the question in a way that did not leave Celia feeling as if she was being appraised for gossip or entertainment value, a quality Celia suspected had impressed her mother when Noreen was deciding who to hire for the job.
“Wait a minute, you must be Celia!” the secretary revised. “You’re just a perfect grown-up version of your yearbook picture. I’m Beverley. You’ve got your mother’s eyes.”
On hearing the word
mother
, the heads of the girls turned.
“This lucky woman is Mrs. Durst’s daughter,” Beverley explained. To Celia’s mortification, she found herself blushing.
“For real?” one of the girls said. At first glance, Celia thought her baby doll T-shirt spelled NUBILE in gold across the front. Celia had forgotten how pristine teenagers were—their bad habits still nascent, their bodies still indefatigable. Celia blinked. The T-shirt read NUBIAN . The girl could just as easily have been freshman or senior. Somewhere in the intervening decades, Celia had lost the ability to tell.
“Is she guiding you, like, all the time?” the girl asked.
“Not so much anymore,” Celia said. She tugged at the hem of her shirt, pulling it smooth across the front, but Nubian’s attention was already elsewhere, one less witness to the reappearance of Celia’s high school self.
The office door that read NOREEN DURST, M.A ., opened onto a room about the same size as one of the parking lot’s larger SUVs. A bookcase along one wall contained the run of yearbooks marking Noreen’s tenure, a collection of college catalogs,and a shelf lined with titles like
Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul
. Celia’s mother sat behind the same desk Celia remembered from the cubicle era, on which rested the same framed photo of herself and her brother from 1981. The only obvious new addition was a sealed glass cylinder containing small liquid-filled glass globes, submerged at various levels in what looked like water.
“Do you like it?” her mother asked. “It’s a Galilean thermometer. Your father gave it to me I don’t know how long ago, after I complained for the zillionth time about working in a windowless building. It’s supposed to help me appreciate my marvelously climate-controlled environment, but mostly I just like the way it looks. Read the temperature on the lowest globe, the red one: it says sixty-eight degrees. Winter, fall, or spring—unless there’s a broken duct or something—it’s always sixty-eight degrees in here.”
“That’s good, I guess,” Celia offered. She closed the door behind her and sat in the chair opposite her mother’s desk, its defeated vinyl cushion collapsing beneath her.
Noreen nodded. “Different things work for different people. Ms. Tompkins actually keeps a full-size photo of a window on her wall. She’s got four photos, all of the same view, one for each season. She usually changes them when you’d expect, but sometimes spring will be up when it’s fall, or winter when it’s spring. A few years ago when she and Dick almost divorced, it was winter for quite some time in April. She’s a little cockeyed, but they all are—therapists, I mean. She’s good at what she does, better than most we’ve had. And she doesn’t justwork with adolescents—she runs a private adult practice on the days she’s not here.” Celia’s mother made an encouraging face that Celia chose to ignore.
“Mommy, when we were talking about Djuna yesterday afternoon, you mentioned how my being so young made it hard to know what to do.”
Celia paused, conditioned by yesterday’s postponements to be stopped as she had before, but Noreen sat at her desk, waiting.
“What did
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