In the Land of the Living by Austin Ratner Read Free Book Online

that dreams were dangerous. There was no escape in September, as she went to school in Boston too, at Brandeis.
    So he drove his brother Dennis’s rusted Eldorado to the day care center where Laura worked. He knew just how to say it, gently and firmly, so she’d know it might be good-bye forever at the end of the summer—and after all, it really might be. He wouldn’t have to say more. She was too perceptive a girl not to get it.
    When he opened the front doors to the white brick building at around three o’clock, she was right there in the dark front hall kneeling down before a boy of three or four whose face was splashed with tears. She had made a cartoon on a piece of notebook paper with a ballpoint pen, a little storybook of saying good-bye. The boy watched intently, as she explained it to him.
    “See, this is your mommy in the coffee shop across the street, waiting for you,” she said. “And this is you seeing your mommy again!”
    She said to the mother, “He actually did much better today. Sometimes the feelings come out when they see their moms.”
    The mother looked at Laura with such relief on her face, she looked like she’d just received a verdict of “not guilty!”
    “You see, this nice lady Miss Neuwalder is here to look after you!” the mother said. “She says you can do it! So you can do it!”
    Isidore held the door open and the boy walked out with his mother.
    “I’m never going back in there,” the boy said, but still he clutched the story in his small hand like a treasure map.
    “Oh, yes you are!” the mother said as the glass door swung closed again.
    Laura smiled at Isidore as if she knew what he was thinking, and what the mother was thinking and what the boy was thinking. He helped haul her up from her squatting position.
    “It’s hard to get back on your feet in a skirt,” she said.
    “You’re pretty valuable around here,” Isidore said. “How much are they paying you?”
    “Come on, this is social work,” Laura said, and she tried to smooth the wrinkles in her skirt as another mother came out of the hallway, dragging a little girl behind her.
    “Susan did not eat lunch,” the woman said hysterically. “Look at this!” She held up an open lunch box full of glassine papers.
    It seemed there might be a confrontation, but again Laura stood there calmly in her wrinkled skirt, as though she had glassine papers waved in her face every day of her life—as though she didn’t even mind it, like a surgeon doesn’t mind a gall stone. He just removes it.
    “Carol, Carol,” Laura said, “it doesn’t matter if she eats her lunch.” She said it so compassionately and authoritatively that the mother seemed to be soothed by it, even while she kept staring into the disaster of the lunch box, which indicated that day care and everything that had necessitated it would be the death of the child. “Susan is doing great,” Laura said.
    The mother listened with a squished look on her face like she was trying to evacuate something from her colon.
    “Her job is really just to get used to the place and to separate. And she’s doing that. Believe me, she won’t starve. The food is there when she decides she wants it.”
    The mother went away not exactly with gratitude but without the squished look on her face. In fact, she looked as if she’d heard something that had improved her like gospel in church—because Laura seemed to know by intuition all the numberless, nameless idioms of worry in the souls of children and adults and it didn’t matter if the child cried and didn’t eat lunch. It didn’t matter if the moms were still upset that the child cried and didn’t eat lunch. There was someone to call, and someone to talk to, and that was all anybody ever wanted anyway.
    What was wrong with these Neuwalder people? Why weren’t they a mess like everybody else?
    When Isidore and Laura had sat down in the decaying sky-blue Eldorado, Isidore said, “I really like you.”
    “Well,