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double-booked:a Christmas concert and basketball championship back to back. The stern choir director wanted her students on time. “So I said I would offer up the party bus and I would drive the girls from the game straight to the school to the choir concert.”
    But the game went into overtime. When it finally ended, Norma threw the girls into her van and took off for the concert. “In the meantime, there’s a bunch of them in the back of my car. They all start changing their clothes.” The choir director required them to all wear white shirts, black skirts, and black shoes. Norma looked at her daughter and asked, “Where are your clothes?” To which her daughter replied, “They’re at home.” In that case, Norma told her, she might as well forget the concert. Her daughter started to cry. “So I’m flipping out and driving,” Norma said. “All of a sudden, she looks at me and she goes, ‘Mom, you have on a white shirt, a black skirt, and black shoes today.’ I had just come home from work . . . I look down and sure enough, I did.”
    So Norma began to strip.
    “At every stoplight, I’m taking my clothes off. She puts on my outfit, and I’m down to my bra and underwear. . . . But there was no way in hell I was going to put on her sweaty basketball uniform.”
    Norma pulled up to the school, shouting at them to get out of the car before someone spotted her. “And I’m half-naked. In the car. In December. So I’m, like, okay, I’ll just drive down the block, go into the house and put on clothes, and go to the concert. So I pull in, and sure enough there’s freakin’ Chris with that dog. . . . I jump out of my car in my underwear, and I’m fumbling with my keys to get into the house.”
    By the next day, practically the whole block had heard the story of the naked professor running around outside her house in the snow, Norma said, chuckling at the image of herself.
    Norma did not mind if people thought of her as ironic or eccentric. But fragile or wounded? That was a different story. She carried herself as if following the mantra of a therapist 24/7: I’ll listen to your issues, but you don’t need to know mine. Trying to understand her sometimes made you feel like the nosy kid with hands cupped around both eyes, peering through the curtains of a neighbor’s window on a bright day. You had to tiptoe real close if you hoped to stand the slightest chance at seeing what wason the inside. When asked personal questions by her students, or by me, she sometimes responded with a joke: “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”
    One day—more than a year into my following Norma around—her curtain parted a little. We were sitting on a bench in Raritan Bay looking toward Staten Island on a warm Saturday afternoon, after a balloon-releasing ceremony that Norma had just conducted at a cemetery with three former students who had been enrolled in her classes at different times: a mother and two daughters all grieving the death of the same man, the daughters’ father.
    The professor’s story, as she told it to me that day at Raritan Bay, had started when she was still in her mother’s tummy, a fist-sized fetus that nobody even realized was there, nobody except her seventeen-year-old mother, who seemed to wish she could strangle the weed growing inside right out of her belly with every girdle she layered over the next. The girdles suctioned her mom’s midsection like a tourniquet, strings yanked tightly, creating an illusion of a stomach so flat that her grandmother couldn’t even detect there was a baby under there.
    “She never took a prenatal vitamin,” Norma said, recounting what her grandmother, who was now dead, had told her years before. “She never had a doctor’s appointment. It’s, like, a miracle that I have all my fingers and toes.”
    Her mother, who had since died too, was named Linda, and the way Norma understood it, the woman back then had places to see, her own life to lead