Hummingbirds (18 page)

D
uring the winter, the courtyard of Carmine-Casey is barren and miserable and inspires thoughts of death in the minds of the students who sit staring out the windows, deaf to their history lectures and their French recitations. Gazing at the leafless branches of the sugar maple (they look like the pictures of ganglia in their biology textbooks—exactly like frozen ganglia) and the rutted, hardened mud, each girl imagines that she knows the best way to die—the most dramatic, the most meaningful. And each can picture the parades of mourners weeping loudly, regretting the things they had done or not done to her.

Ganglia,
they whisper to themselves, as though the word were magic—and a little sinister smile creeps onto their lips.

But the winter also brings the semester’s drama performance, which is without question the faculty’s favorite school function. The teachers, standing proudly at the back of the auditorium, like to smile and comment upon the marvelous individual talent there is to be found among their girls. They even go so far as to snicker modestly to each other, “Don’t you wish you could take credit for that brilliance up there?”—when, in fact, they do privately take credit for it, each teacher swallowing warmly the thick, molasses-sweet belief that he or she is the secret inspiration behind the performance onstage.

As the sun begins to go down sooner and sooner each day, this semester’s dramatic offering,
Salmonburger,
written and directed by Liz Warren, patterned after the
Oresteia,
starring Dixie Doyle in the role of Clarissa, is in final rehearsals that go so late into the evenings
that some of the girls who live outside the city have to sleep over at the homes of other girls who live closer to the school. Arrangements are made over the phone with parents who are beginning to recognize that their protective function has become, somewhere along the line, a casual formality—and the girls order sandwiches, without mayonnaise, from the deli around the corner.

And one evening, even after all the other performers and stage crew have gone home, there are three figures left in the cavernous auditorium, their voices echoing off each other against the tangle of lighting overhead. Two of these figures are standing together onstage, and one of them sits far back, almost against the rear wall, watching the action.

“I can’t hear you,” calls the figure at the back. “Remember, we’re not using mics. Be louder. But still intimate. Don’t lose the intimacy.”

This is Liz Warren. She wears jeans and sneakers and a T-shirt that advertises some product that hasn’t existed in thirty years. Her hair is pulled up away from her face and held with a simple silver clip, and she wears round tortoise-framed glasses that, if you look closely, reveal fingerprints resulting from her habit of removing them and using them to point at things.

Everything about Liz Warren is designed to call attention to the absurdity of everything around her. The impression one gets when speaking to her is that of constant embarrassment—not for herself, or not always for herself, but more for the inane circumstances into which we have managed to stumble. Look around you, she seems to say with her eyes. Can you believe this? Don’t think
I
had anything to do with it.

Her teachers respond to this in one of two ways. They either shrink from her, calling her arrogant and lamenting the fact that she is among the top students at the school (“And she certainly knows it!”), or they find her self-consciousness intriguing, believing that embarrassment is a sign of intelligence, since only fools are honestly comfortable with themselves. The latter reaction can be found more frequently in her male teachers, who like to believe that their conversations with her are enriched by
the subtext of her crush on them—a subtext that they further believe she is playing like a coy game of chess. Clever thing!

But the fact is that, with the exception of Mr. Hughes, who sometimes looks at her
hard
and makes her chest feel warm, Liz Warren rarely thinks about her teachers in intimate terms. Even when Mr. Binhammer approached her in the hall earlier that day with a rather personal remark, she thought that he must be criticizing her work.

“I met—Mr. Hughes and I met someone in Atlantic City who reminded me of you.”

He was reticent—more like a high school boy than a grown man—and almost apologetic, as though he were waving a white flag in truce. But she could not figure out what battle he could possibly be conceding, so she determined that he must be feeling guilty and trying to criticize her without hurting her feelings.

“Was she a bad writer?”

“No, no. She was a photographer.”

“A bad photographer?”

This is Liz Warren. And now she sits hunched over on a chair with a script on her knees, biting her nails and watching her two actors sweat under the stage lights. It’s only two days after her date with Jeremy Notion, and now he is up there with Dixie Doyle licking his lips nervously because he knows what’s coming next.

“There’s the whistle,” Dixie says. “Get on the train, Ivan.”

“Come with me, Clarissa.”

“No.”

“Will you be here when I come back?”

“I don’t know.”

“We got along. For a while.”

“Did we?”

“You couldn’t stand to be without me.”

“And now you’re the last person in the world I want to be with.”

“Look around you, you pretty little fool. I
am
the last person in the world.”

Dixie stops and unrolls the script to examine it.

“Now what?” she says, looking into the back of the auditorium and shading her eyes with one saluting hand.

“Read the script,” Liz says from the darkness. “Now you kiss him.”

“We don’t have to rehearse that,” Dixie says with a superior glance at Jeremy. “We know how to kiss.”

“This is a certain kind of kiss,” Liz asserts.

“All kisses are the same,” Dixie says knowingly. “But whatever you say. You’re the boss. If you want me to kiss your—” She cuts herself short and waves it off.

Liz is thankful for her discretion—her whole body would have cringed, shrunk up like a tightened fist, if Dixie had used the word “boyfriend.” In truth, she is unbothered by the idea of Dixie kissing the boy that she herself has kissed. Instead of jealousy, she feels something like malevolent curiosity. The two of them forced to kiss each other at her command—the idea is almost delightful to her.

So they reread the scene. Jeremy says, “I
am
the last person in the world,” and Dixie leans over and kisses him sardonically.

“No,” Liz says. “You like him, but you don’t like him. That kind of kiss. Try it again.”

They reread the scene.

“I
am
the last person in the world.”

She kisses him, sneeringly.

“Try not to sneer. And don’t roll your eyes. You’re not just irritated by him. You hate him—and you love him.”

They do the scene again and again. Sometimes, during the kiss, they can hear the groaning of some machinery behind the walls of the school.

“I
am
the last person in the world.”

She kisses him, aggressively this time, like she’s trying to beat him up with her mouth. He touches his lips after, as though they are tender and bruised.

“No. Too rough. The hate is good, but you lost the love. Think about this—think about being exhausted. You love him
and you hate him, but you’re too exhausted to tell the difference. Exhausted.”

She herself feels exhausted and taut as she says this, perched on the edge of her seat. Now she stands and begins to walk slowly toward the stage.

By this point Dixie has lost all her humor and simply looks embarrassed and ravaged. She and Jeremy don’t look at each other at all, and she chews on her lower lip when they’re not acting.

They do it again and again. They do it until Liz is standing at the edge of the stage, leaning over it—until there is no acting left in the two actors.

Once more: “I
am
the last person in the world.” They
are
the last people in the world. And this time the kiss is different. It has a quality. There is something in it that makes all three stop dead. For a few seconds the only sound is fatigued breathing and the low rumbling in the school walls.

“That’s it,” Liz says finally, and all at once everything hits her—a lead ball dropping in her chest. What she sees in Dixie Doyle is everything she has put there, the authenticity, the exhaustion, the girlishness; the simple, unaffected loneliness; the honest, brutal truth of everything, the blinding horrible truth—everything that she herself has collected in a little tin box inside her own aching chest. “That’s it.”

She feels like crying, but she won’t let herself. Instead she says:

“Do it again.”

“Again?”

“Again. Just the kiss.”

They kiss.

“Do it again.”

They kiss again.

“Again!”

At this moment, opposite the auditorium where Dixie Doyle and Jeremy Notion are kissing by order of Liz Warren, Mr. Doran, the chemistry teacher, opens the heavy wooden
doors and enters the quiet marbled lobby of the Carmine-Casey School for Girls.

Everyone knows Mr. Doran, the chemistry teacher who speaks very quietly like a mouse and has front teeth like a mouse and wears round glasses that make his eyes look like a mouse’s eyes. He scuttles around the chemistry lab and is associated in the girls’ minds with the tap-tapping of a rack of test tubes being carried about. Also known to the girls is the fact that Mr. Doran’s wife spends many weekends away on business trips, which they firmly believe are really an alibi for an affair she is having with another man. This makes the girls feel protective of Mr. Doran because they like him, even though you can’t really talk to him about anything but the way sodium will explode if you add water to it.

As it turns out, his wife is currently out of town for four days, and tonight Mr. Doran, who lives in Westchester, has stayed in the city after school to see a foreign movie that he once saw long ago in college. Coming out of the theater, he remembers the first time he saw it, the vibrant tautness of his life back then—the thundering forward motion of things, like a train on a track that can go as fast as it wants because there’s only one direction to go: the inevitable and always receding horizon. He thinks about this and wrinkles his mousy little nose. It is only then that he realizes he has left his briefcase at school and, looking at his watch and thinking about the empty house awaiting him, determines that it’s not too late to go fetch it.

Back at Carmine-Casey, he greets the security guard in the lobby and takes the elevator to the lonely lab on the third floor. The girls tell him it smells like chemicals, but he must be used to it because the room doesn’t smell any particular way to him.

It is on his way out that he hears the voices coming from the auditorium around the corner. He looks around and readjusts his round spectacles, and then opens the door a crack to discover Liz Warren, a student of his from last year, standing at
the foot of the stage and calling out loudly to Dixie Doyle and some boy who are kissing each other repeatedly.

“Again! Again! Kiss her again! Again!”

Mr. Doran lets the door shut quietly and stands looking at the wood grain, thinking about what he’s just seen. He thinks about it while sitting in the back of the taxi that takes him to the train station, and he thinks about it during his forty-five-minute train ride. And he thinks about it some more as he gets into his car, parked in the commuter lot, and makes the slow but short drive, coming to a full stop at all the stop signs, back to his home, where he has to grope down the hallway to find the light switch and where he stands at one end of the living room listening to the sound of the ticking clock with its big brassy chime—the only thing to listen to in the empty house.

He gets a glass of water from the kitchen sink and notices that it’s leaking again. The house leaks. It leaks water from the taps, air from the windows, sound from the walls. He wishes he knew how to stop them.

Unlocking the kitchen back door, he takes his water out to the little worn deck and looks at the suburban rooftops over the fence that circles his backyard. Sweeping some of the snow off the edge of the deck with his foot, he shivers—but he likes the look of his breath against the crisp dark night.

He and his wife have lived in this house for seventeen years. She is not having an affair with another man. She is a very successful financial consultant.

He thinks about youth and its rhapsodic tenacity—like an animal with a locking jaw that winds its way around your heart and squeezes. A persistent and beautiful parasite. Those girls he saw tonight, they come from a different place. They remind him of something, and he wants to try to nail it down in memory.

Fairy-tale little girls in blue puffy dresses…young streetwise girls with eyes like hard rubber beads. Biting their nails and rubbing their palms on the knees of their jeans. The teenage boys who bumble around and knock things over and push each
other into walls. The noise of the young—the great lost roaring ardor of the young.

They burn. He thinks about them burning like embers in the still houses around him, behind the masonry walls within their own hot little wildernesses of plastic confusion—their posters and their poetry and all their hidden things.

S
he remembers him the way he used to be, the way he is still sometimes when the mood takes him, when the wind blows just right and his eyes begin to dance like the curtains that blow inward weightlessly. Those bright amazing moments. She can remember them.

The crush of fabric against her skin when they were leaning over the edge of a ferry railing and he took her arm. Sitting on the hard bench in the airport and finding him in the crowd coming through the gate, the way he actually picked her up and she thought for a second that his being gone might have been worth it—might have been worth it for this moment. The sounds of his waking in the morning, an hour after she had gotten up to work in her office, the bedroom door opening and the creak of the wood floor beneath his feet, the yawn and the sniffle and the sleepy grunt when she called out good morning.

And not just before they were married. For a long time afterward too. Until the conference, her indiscretion with the man who had the impossible name. That changed things. Just a little, like a picture hung crooked—the skew unnoticeable at first glance but now she can’t stop looking at it, dismayed by her inability to tap everything back into alignment.

It was the way he looked at her sometimes in those years before. His gaze would fall on her with sudden intensity like a private wink that made it the two of them against everyone else. He was the kind of man—she knew them—who put on a show for anyone who might be watching. His performance for
the world, and sometimes his world was only her. All of this in a little room with dingy walls, just the two of them, he talking his magic talk and she holding her feet and rocking back with delight.

He would be sitting up on the bed, leaning his back against the wall, and he would say, “Tell me a joke.”

And she, “I don’t know any.”

“Come on. Everybody knows at least one joke.”

“I don’t. Besides, I’m a bad joke teller.”

“Why are you holding out on me? I know you’ve got one.”

“Okay, but it’s really not funny.”

“That’s all right. I laugh at everything. It’s a policy.”

Then she would tell her only joke. He would watch her hands as she did it. He always said that her hands got to places twenty minutes before the rest of her.

Then his stare. “You’re right,” he would say. “That’s a terrible joke.”

“I told you.”

“You shouldn’t tell jokes.”

“I
told
you.”

“Really. I’m being serious now. Don’t let me talk you into it again.”

And then she would clobber him and he would laugh, deflecting her blows the way he would shoo away gnats. There was nothing that could take that smile off his face.

When he got the job at Carmine-Casey, he was nervous. He couldn’t sleep the night before school started, and she remembers having never seen him that way before. But she knew he would do well. He was a man who adored women, and those girls would feel that, feel it in their armpits and behind their knees the way she herself had, feeling it in the very levers of her body. It was the perfect job for him. She liked to think of him—still does like to think of him—surrounded by all those little girls with their glistening eyes and their fluttering voices, dashing in circles around him, their hearts like tiny engines keeping them moving in quick blurs lighter than air. There they are,
when she occasionally meets up with him after school, a blushing chaos of feathery girlhood around him.

“Is that your wife, Mr. Binhammer? Is that your wife?”

Like hummingbirds, he once said. Well, then, she thought, so am I a hummingbird—older and slower and more skeptical, but my little engine of a heart the same as a girl’s, uncontrollable, easily won by men with funny names and magic speeches who touch my fingers or smile in just that way that separates me from everyone else in the world.

That’s what she remembers.

And now, as she folds her clothes into neat squares and layers them into her suitcase, she thinks, This is what it would look like if I were leaving for good. These same gestures, the same clothes, the same suitcase, the same sound of the refrigerator humming from the kitchen. But she’s not leaving for good. She’s only packing for another weekend conference, this one in Milwaukee.

And yet she would almost rather be leaving one last time than have to endure another of those awkward farewells, the two of them standing in the hallway, she with her coat on, her scarf wrapped tight around her neck like a noose, both of them saying things and meaning something else.

“Be careful,” he says, but what he means is, Promise me you’ll be good.

“Don’t worry, I will,” she says, meaning, I promise. I promise.

Because he’s too good to say anything. Too generous to say it in words. And she wants desperately to hear him talk about it, to hear his opinions, to hear his incantatory words cut through the situation like sudden sunlight—but she also understands that her desire is selfish. She is not in a position to ask for things.

Because what is even worse—what is almost too unbearable to think about—is that maybe he means something else entirely. He says, “Be careful, huh? Take care of yourself,” and she suspects sometimes that what he means is, Find what you want. Even if it’s not me. Find what you want, because I don’t like to see you unhappy.

And that possibility, the weight of it hanging like chains
around her lungs, is too much to think about. She will never leave him. She will stay with him no matter what. He is a lovely cracked thing. She cannot leave him.

It surprises her, when she thinks about it, just how binding a thing damage is. Bones mending rough and calcified—or scarred skin, thick and knotted. Yes, they are sewn up together in the scars of their marriage.

She takes a deep breath and looks around her as if surprised by her surroundings. She realizes she’s been standing in front of the suitcase for many minutes now, clutching a black sweater against her chest. She shakes her head and makes a mental list of all the things she needs to take with her to Milwaukee.

Later, after the good-bye in the hallway, when he seems different—distracted and even a little sweet—she’s in line at airport security and watching a young couple say good-bye to each other. She has become a great connoisseur of good-byes. An expert witness available for depositions on the flavor and bouquet of good-byes.

The young man adores the woman, that much is clear. But she is holding back a little—a tinge of playfulness masking distance. He believes it’s because she’s embarrassed by the public display of affection, but he’s wrong. She is thinking about something else, waiting to be alone finally so that she can shut her eyes and shift things around in her head to where they make sense again. That’s what the young woman wants. Quiet and darkness. For once.

After the plane takes off and she feels herself pressed into the seat like a flower in a book, she thinks about the young woman and decides to close her eyes herself and look at what shapes might form on the inside of her brain. But she can’t get the shapes to hold and gazes instead out the window, where the city lights are beginning to be obscured by clouds. Pretty soon there is nothing to see because the deep black of the night becomes reflective as obsidian. She squints her eyes and tries to see stars, but no matter how she moves her head or how close she brings her nose to the pane, all she can see is herself.