Hummingbirds (2 page)

T
he girls move up the stairs in anxious and gaudy pageants, each one of them a carnival pier at midnight, brightly lit, intricately mechanistic, with an electrical heartbeat that turns the dark air around them a color of white that is like the negative of dark—but not light, not quite light, never just light. Each one of them is a flash along a black shoreline, and there is something laughingly obscene in the display, something decadent in the strings of teardrop bulbs that resist encroachment by the landscape around them. This one has Ferris wheels dangling from her ears. That one has a carousel in her eyes.

They brush by him with their awkward broad gestures and their attitudes of coy instability, saying Good morning to him and How was your summer? and Guess what, Mr. Binhammer, I’m in your class this year. Aren’t you excited?

He smiles and gives a distant, all-encompassing nod that serves as a response to all of them at once. He learned a long time ago that they do not expect much—that they are insectlike in their ability to pollinate an entire building with their gushing affections by alighting on each individual for only a second or two at a time. All that is required of him is a nod. To do more is to risk the embarrassment of a sudden and baseless intimacy. So he does not meet their eyes, keeping focused on the backs of the knees of the girls in front of him on the stairs, trying to wedge himself between the clots of bodies pushing their way up on the right and the steady trickle of the ones tiptoeing down on the left.

And he thinks, What is that smell? Is that lilac? It must be shampoo. I smelled something else like that once…. Or some girl has lilacs in her hair. I wonder what boy might be burrowing his face into her neck later…. I don’t like to look at the backs of their knees. Sometimes there are little accumulations of dirt in the creases. They look unclean….

But now one of the girls coming down on his left, a sophomore with an armful of books, trips on her own shoes and begins a slow-motion tumbling dance down the stairs, twisting her body this way and that, beginning to run despite herself in order to keep her legs underneath her as the gravity of the fall presses her downward, the panic evident in her eyes and in her hands that clasp tightly to the books. She shrieks quietly.

Fortunately, Binhammer sees it coming and sticks his left arm out to stop her fall, bracing himself for the weight of her small body. When they collide, his arm cuts across the upper part of her stomach, pulling the shirt out of her skirt and exposing a little white strip of belly. Not only that, but, as one of her books goes flying forward to strike another girl in the back of the head, he finds that his forearm is wedged up underneath her breasts—

Oh god.

—and that her whole weight is on him now, so he can’t let go. The only thing he can do is lift his arm even more and push her back upright where she can regain her balance.

“Sorry, Mr. Binhammer,” she says as she sets down her books on one of the steps while the other girls maneuver around them. She seems unbothered by the recent commerce between her breasts and his arm. Her hands fly up to fix her hair, clicking and unclicking barrettes.

So many fasteners they have! So many little metallic snaps and zippers. These girls are held together with clips and buttons.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Just be careful.”

He continues up the stairs to the third floor, where the teachers’ lounge is. When the door closes behind him, the noise
of the hallway grows distant and muffled. The only other person in the lounge is Walter, who has been a history teacher at the school for twenty years. He’s knocking straight a stack of copies on the table in the middle of the room.

“I just saved somebody’s life,” Binhammer says.

“Good for you.”

“Good for me.”

“Anyone I know?”

“One of the girls.”

“Hm.” Walter doesn’t like him. He thinks Binhammer isn’t a serious teacher, that teachers don’t reach their prime until at least age fifty.

The bell rings.

Walter gathers his things and heads for the door. He looks back. “Aren’t you teaching first period?”

Binhammer is now standing by the window, looking out over the tops of the Central Park trees across the street. “I’m just letting them get settled.”

As Walter goes out, Lonnie Abramson, another English teacher, comes in looking splendid.

“Well, well,” she says. “Binhammer. How was your summer?”

“I just saved somebody’s life.”

“I don’t doubt it.” She comes over and gives him a kiss on each cheek, putting her hands on his shoulders to lift herself up. “You’ve saved my life lots of times.”

She throws herself down on the couch dramatically and lets out a sigh.

“Can you believe the summer’s over already? Can you believe it? I can’t even tell you how unprepared I am to teach this year. It seems like every year I get a little more unraveled. So what did you do over the summer? Anything interesting? Oh—have you seen Pepper? What about Sibyl? They were looking for you this morning.” She lowers her voice and winks. “I think Sibyl wants to tell you about her marriage situation. You didn’t hear it from me, but I think things have taken a turn. If you follow me.”

“How’s George?” he asks to divert her attention, sitting down next to her on the couch.

“Oh, George. Well, you know. Husbands.” She rolls her eyes back. Then she catches her breath as if reminded suddenly of something. “Oh, do I have a story to tell you. You should see this character Andie brought home over the summer. I don’t know where she found him. I mean, he’s a cute boy—charming, and bright, I think—but there’s something about him. Something a little off. I want to ask your advice about it when you have time for the whole story.”

“Sure. Sure. I have a class now, but—”

“You know how the girls adore you,” she says, leaning forward and putting her hand on his knee. Her breath smells faintly of peppermint. “And I just can’t talk about it with her father. You know George—he can only think in the extremes. Either he wants to cut off their you-know-whats or he wants to make them junior partners in his firm. My husband lives in the 1950s. No subtlety.”

The hall outside has gone quiet. The clock on the wall reads five minutes after the hour. He points to the clock and stands, and she stands too—stretching her whole body with a feline fluidity, as though she has been lounging for hours.

“I can’t wait to hear about it,” he says. “Maybe at lunch?”

“That would be great,” she says, giving him a hug that lingers. “It’s good to see you again. And I’m dying to hear about your summer. I want all the details.”

“I’ve written them down,” he says, extracting himself from her embrace and crossing the room to the door. “Just for you.”

She giggles. Then, as he steps into the hall, she calls out, “Oh, Binhammer! Don’t forget the department meeting after school. Mrs. Mayhew will kill you.”

Down the hall he peeks into his room and sees the girls of his senior class sitting in packs on the tops of their desks, giddily reacquainting themselves.

They’re fine.

So he goes around the corner and into the nurse’s office—
where she says, “Already? It’s only the first day”—then into the faculty men’s room a few doors down, where he swallows the two aspirin the nurse gave him, scooping a handful of water from the sink into his mouth. From outside in the hall, he hears a girl whistling—or trying to whistle, her breath getting in the way of her tune.

He leans with his hands on the edges of the sink and looks into the mirror. The face looking back at him is still young and dark, gaunt in a way that would be unsettling if it weren’t for the soft features that give the blurred impression of movement. The eyes contain something: a gaze that weighs a ton and requires a crane to move it from one place to the other, a sackful of crumbled concrete attention that pins you to the ground. Sometimes people ask him what he thinks he’s staring at—who does he think he is? Other times people, frequently women, seem to warm themselves under his gaze, as though the weight of boulders makes them feel safe and assured.

He looks at himself with lazy interest and thinks, That’s the face that used to get me called a boy by the other teachers, that used to make the girls wonder how someone so young could actually be teaching literature. And what now? All their chirping girlvoices. What do they want from me next? What can they be asking of me now that I will have no strength to refuse them?

In the classroom the girls are picking at the hems of their skirts, putting their hands in each other’s hair, lifting it into various configurations, saying, “Look, what about this? Here, give me a clip.” When Binhammer finally comes through the door, they drop everything and swarm to him. Almost all of them have been in a class of his before, and now they surround him as though he were a mysterious but favorite relative they haven’t seen in years.

“Aren’t you glad I’m in your class, Mr. Binhammer?”

“What did you do over the summer, Mr. Binhammer?”

“Mr. Binhammer, do you want to see pictures of me in Saint-Tropez? But you can’t look at all of them, because over there you’re not supposed to wear a top on the beach.”

“How is your wife, Mr. Binhammer?”

He likes the attention—this flurry of femininity stirred up solely because of his entrance into the room. And the fact that it takes so little to appease them—a simple smile, a raised eyebrow, an obligatory chuckle. He is reminded of hummingbirds, their delicate, overheated bodies fretting in short, angled bursts of movement around a bottle of red sugar water.

Once they are quiet, their voices running down like little wind-up toys, he passes out to each girl two pages of text—explaining to them that they are the opening passages of two different books. Then he sits at the desk in front of the room and leans back in the chair to watch them read. Miriam likes to pinch her lower lip when she concentrates. She has to reapply her lipstick after every class. Judy twirls a strand of hair between two fingers. Sometimes she draws the strand across her upper lip as though it were a moustache.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” he says after a few minutes. “I want you to figure out if you can tell which one was written by a woman and which by a man.”

He wonders if they appreciate the irony of the situation, that the Women in Literature senior seminar is being taught by the only man on the faculty of the English department. In truth, they seem to take it in stride, as though it were perfectly natural—if you want to learn about women, you have to ask a man.

They have too much faith in men, he thinks. They believe too easily.

The class is one of six themed English seminars offered to the Carmine-Casey seniors in preparation for their college courses. Each class is taught by a different English teacher and is built around that teacher’s individual interests. When he came on the faculty seven years ago, Binhammer suggested that someone should teach a course on gender theory—deferring, as he imagined was only right, to the other members of the department, who were all both senior and female. But none of them wanted to do it. Pepper was too deeply entrenched in her Other
America course, which focused on minority writers, and Sibyl said simply, “I’m tired of women.” So it fell to him.

“I think this one is the one by the man, Mr. Binhammer,” says one of the girls, holding up a sheet. “I mean, who cares about fishing?”

He says something to make them laugh. They are a willing audience; they are ready to be amused. They sit and listen to his voice and watch his hand gestures. At one point a girl yawns inadvertently and makes a silent gesture to him that it’s not his fault—she’s just not used to getting up early. They are nice girls.

Except for Liz Warren. She’s sitting in the back of the room, and about halfway through the class period it becomes apparent that she’s not going to let herself laugh at any of his jokes. Realizing this, Binhammer finds it more and more difficult to distract himself from her sullen, hunched shape. She’s paying attention, there’s no question about that. But she stares at him from under eyelids drooping with apathy.

She was in his class before, last year, carrying with her the same dour indifference, and he was sure she would never elect to take a class with him again. But now there she sits, like a dead battery. Worse still is that she is a bright girl, one of the true intellects in the school, a fulminating insight stirring behind that severe, immutable expression, and it was with a begrudging antagonism that he had labeled the top of each of her papers with an A.

He can feel himself getting nervous, jittery. He wonders what it is she wants. Does she want him to get down to business? Does she think he isn’t serious enough? Does she believe her time is being wasted? He can feel her intractable presence pricking behind his eyes like a burr or a stinging bee.

When the bell rings at the end of class, he watches her gather her things silently and walk to the door, her limbs seeming to resent any superfluous movement.

“Great class, Mr. Binhammer,” says a voice at his side.

It’s Dixie Doyle. She’s gotten up from her seat in the front row and is now standing over him, leaning her hip against his desk.

“Really. It was really interesting.”

“Thanks, Dixie. It seems like a good group, doesn’t it? With Mary and Judy. And Liz—did you see Liz over the summer?”

“Liz?” She lowers her voice confidentially. “You think I hang out with Liz?”

Dixie and Liz despise each other, he knows that. But he also knows that Dixie is a rich soil in which to dowse for information. She rarely suspects her resources are being tapped.

“I always wondered about that,” he says, leaning in toward her. “How come you and Liz aren’t closer friends?”

Her face coils up in distaste. “I don’t know,” she says. “She’s just…I don’t know. She just thinks she’s so
smart.”

What she’s thinking about as she says this is that Binhammer’s tie is a little crooked. She feels her hands wanting to reach out and straighten it for him. She would straighten the tie and then smooth her hands down the front of his jacket, as though he were her mannequin husband.