Hummingbirds (3 page)

Then she wonders why he thinks she and Liz should be friends. Does he really think she is the kind of person who would be friends with Liz? She doesn’t like the way he kept glancing at Liz in the back of the room while he was talking to the class. She followed his eyeline and found the girl sitting there like a patch of weeds. This is the girl he thinks she should be having lunch with?

She used to like to imagine that Binhammer had really figured her out—that he knew her even better than she knew herself. Now she just feels frustrated. As she leaves for her next class, she looks behind her and sees him staring at the back of the room as though Liz Warren were still there.

What she’ll do, she decides, is stop him in the hall later to say something casual. She’ll say, “Oh, Mr. Binhammer, I wanted to ask you when the first paper is due.” A little thing. She’ll put herself in front of him so he’ll have to look at her. And then he’ll walk away having had two encounters with Dixie Doyle that day, while all the other girls will have only been able to claim him for one.

Later, during lunch, she finds Andie Abramson sitting at the same picnic table under the sugar maple where the two convened earlier in the morning. After a while they are joined by Caroline Cox and Beth Barber. There are only a few other groups of girls scattered about the yard—which is not a popular place because of the chilly air and because of the dingy squirrels that scurry down from the trees.

Caroline stuffs a cream cheese and jelly sandwich into her mouth, but the others seem reluctant to eat. Beth climbs on top of the table and lies down.

Everything seems fanciful.

Dixie looks straight up in the air and makes herself dizzy looking at the deep blue sky. Then she says, “In September for a while, I will ride a crocodile, down the chicken soupy Nile.”

“What’s that from?” Caroline says. But nobody answers her. Caroline is the kind of girl who does not always require a response.

“Oh god,” Beth moans. “Don’t remind me it’s September. I can’t think about September. I almost didn’t wake up this morning at all.”

“Wait, what’s that from?” Caroline says again. “That crocodile line?”

“It feels like I’ve been here my whole life,” says Beth, who now lies flat out on the tabletop with her hands folded on her stomach as though entombed in a sarcophagus. Then she puts her palms together over her chest and closes her eyes in imitation of prayer. “And it’s only the first day.”

Dixie, in her pigtails, unwraps her second lollipop of the day and begins to suck on it. The crocodile rhyme seems to be her only contribution for the time being.

Andie sits hunched over the table with her shoulders pulled in toward each other, drawing intricate filigrees in ballpoint pen in one corner of her notebook. Without looking up, she says, “Who do you have for biology?”

“I mean it,” Caroline goes on, “I’ve heard that crocodile thing before. But I can’t remember from where.”

“Meyers,” says the praying Beth. “I’ve got Meyers again. She hates me so much she wanted me two years in a row. She loves to hate people.
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo—”

“Stop it, Beth,” says Andie. “That’s creepy.”

“I have Ms. Doone.” Caroline has given up on discovering the source of the crocodile poem. She cannot sit still and instead walks in circles around the table, sometimes pretending she’s balancing on a beam. She is not as pretty as the other three girls, but she does not seem to know it—which gives her a fumblingly seductive quality. “Was the summer shorter this year?” she asks.

“Oh god, I feel like I was
just here.”
Beth twists her hands out of the palm-together position and does a little trick with her fingers. Then she puts her hands over her face and sighs. “Doesn’t it feel like we were
just here?”

Behind them, a door opens and from inside the school comes the itinerant bustle and chirping of students on their way to and from the cafeteria. Beth raises her head and sees a miniature-looking girl—obviously a freshman—come out into the yard toward them. When the door closes behind her, the relative quiet of the yard reasserts itself.

“Hi,” says the freshman cheerily. “Do you know where the cafeteria is? Someone told me I could get to it this way.”

The four girls look at each other, trying silently to decide who should be obliged to answer. Finally dark-haired and silly Caroline, still pretending she is balancing on a beam, speaks. “Only if you’re coming from that side of the building,” she says, pointing. “You have to go back in and down the hall all the way to your right.”

“Oh, okay,” the girl says, not yet moving. “I don’t know
what
I’m doing. I’m new here. My name is Sally.”

Caroline nods and smiles faintly.

“Introduce yourself, Caroline,” Beth scolds from the table and lays her head back down.

“Oh…sure. I’m Caroline. Nice to meet you. That’s Beth.
And this is Andie,” she says, putting her hand on top of the head of Andie, who is still drawing elaborate curlicues. “And over there is Dixie.”

“Ugh,” Beth says, after the freshman girl has gone back inside. “Was she a cartoon character?
Sally.”

“Sally,”
Andie says.

“Sally,”
Beth says again.

“I don’t know.” Caroline reconsiders. “I guess she seemed like a nice girl. Maybe we should make friends with her.”

Andie looks up from her notebook. “She was kind of pretty. You can tell she’s going to be pretty. Can’t you?”

“Ugh,” Beth says again, sitting up sleepily. “It’s too early in the year even to think. I’m not ready to go back yet. What about you, Dix?”

“I don’t know,” pigtailed Dixie Doyle says, taking the lollipop out of her mouth with an audible slurp. It is the first she’s spoken in a while. “I’m actually kind of glad the summer’s over. I was getting tired of
doing
things.”

The other girls stop to think about this. The leaves of the sugar maple rustle thoughtfully.

“Everywhere you go there’s someone calling you wanting to
do
something. Let’s
do
something tonight. Why don’t we
do
something tomorrow. How come we always have to be doing something?”

Caroline looks concerned. “But not me, right, Dix? I mean, you never thought that when I called, right?”

“No, of course not, sweetie. Not you. Everyone else.”

“You’re not kidding, Dix,” Beth says. “Every day it was something else. Now that you mention it, I’m glad it’s over.”

“And my summer clothes,” Dixie says. “I can’t tell you how tired of them I am. We should just make a big bonfire of our summer clothes.”

“And then start fresh next year,” Andie says.

“I am
so
tired of my summer clothes,” Caroline adds, belatedly.

Beth looks back toward the school, which seems to swell
with a frenzy of girls. “Yeah, I guess it’s okay to be back. I mean, I guess it’s all right.”

“Sure,” Dixie says. “Look at it this way. If Carmine-Casey was a boat, like the Jolly Roger or something, then we’d all be pirates. You can’t deny it.”

And they can’t.

L
onnie Abramson is the first person at the English department meeting other than the chair, Mrs. Mayhew, who already has her plan books spread out on the conference table before her and is sitting, immobile, with her hands folded in her lap. For a few minutes the two women just sit on opposite sides of the table—the older gazing down at her plan books without moving her head, and the younger delivering sighs and clucks and chuckles that seem to indicate she has a story to tell if anyone is interested in asking.

“I reminded Binhammer about the meeting,” she says finally, as though everyone were his communal mother, sharing the responsibility of keeping him accountable. “So he should be here.”

Mrs. Mayhew nods.

For three more long minutes the two women sit in silence. Mrs. Mayhew is one of the matriarchs of the school—not only the chair of the English department, but also one of the three headmistresses, one of the triumvirate of broad-shouldered and hefty women who watch like perched carrion birds over the school. The three women are of the industrial age, their spines girded by steel and their faces ferrous with the ash and grime of harder generations.

No one is comfortable around Mrs. Mayhew, who, indeed, seems like an algebraic counterfunction to the theorem of comfort. The only exception to this rule is Binhammer. Many people have said that Binhammer is able to evoke, alchemist-
like, whatever half-smiling affection remains unincinerated in the furnace of her heart.

At this moment, therefore, Lonnie Abramson is beginning to wish she had not been so eager to be on time for this meeting.

“They’re quite some students I have this year,” she says, fixing her hair. When Mrs. Mayhew doesn’t respond, she repeats, as if remembering a distant dream, “Some students…”

Finally Pepper Carmichael shows up, and even though the two are not the most intimate of friends, Lonnie wants to get up and hug her. Pepper is the one who, after Lonnie told her about a student who had the nerve to characterize her earrings as “grandmother jewelry,” said, “Oh, let the girl vent. The poor thing—already feeling the fingers of age, no doubt. Creeping along her skin, like they do.” Pepper’s specialty is empathy. She grew up in California. That’s the way people are out there. Lonnie can never entirely clear her mind of the image of a young Pepper sitting on a beach at night, in a circle of long-haired boys and bead-wearing girls, passing some narcotic cigarette to the person next to her. For Lonnie, Pepper is one person who represents many—she stands in for hundreds of people whom Lonnie will never meet.

Right away the two fall to talking in hushed tones, as though they themselves are students and Mrs. Mayhew is the teacher waiting to begin class. They pull out their class lists and start comparing students.

“Oh,
her,”
Lonnie says. “You’re going to have a time with her.”

“Needy?”

“If you can call it that.” Lonnie herself would call it being a melodramatic little overachiever. But she suspects that Mrs. Mayhew favors the grade-grubbers, that Mrs. Mayhew sees them as industriously pounding away at the door of the American dream—and so she keeps her mouth shut.

Then she puts a finger on another name in Pepper’s class list and has begun to frown expressively—as though this one, well, this one needs no comment—when Sibyl appears in the
doorway and starts apologizing in a way that makes everyone look at her at once.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says. “I wish I could say that it’s not my fault. But I’m just such a goddamn mess today….”

“What’s the matter, honey?” Pepper says.

“Oh, it’s nothing, really.” Sibyl lets her handbag drop on the table, and it sounds like it’s filled with marbles. Her colleagues imagine that the inside of her purse must look like a cosmetics counter when you bring it all out into the open—even though Sibyl never seems to have a moment to put any of it on. Lonnie has observed her applying lipstick as though it were a timed event. Especially now that Sibyl has been separated for half a year and her divorce is imminent, as her colleagues know, she sometimes looks at the makeup in her purse with a smirk of resentment, as though the rouges and eyeliners themselves are responsible, at least in part, for the elaborate masquerade her marriage has been for ten years. “I’m just being silly. That’s all. The first day always sneaks up on me.”

“Sure, of course,” Pepper says, shifting into demonstrative concern. “But you’re okay, right? I mean, it’s nothing to do with…”

This is the first time that Mrs. Mayhew raises her eyes, setting her hammered gaze upon Sibyl. Everyone, even Mrs. Mayhew, knows that Sibyl’s relationship with her husband has been disintegrating for a long time.

“Oh, Christ, no. Bruce is one thing I can count on. He’s the most consistent jackass I’ve ever met.”

Mrs. Mayhew hmphs in satisfaction and looks back down at her plan books.

In the pause that follows, Sibyl begins to sift through her bag. She’s not looking for anything in particular, but she doesn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes at the moment. So she stares into the shifting tangle of objects and thinks about the woman in today’s newspaper who was shot in the head by a mugger because she wouldn’t give up her purse. There must be something important in here, she thinks. There must be some important wedge of my
identity that I would be willing to die for. But from here it just looks like so much confusion.

Then she looks around the room and says, “So where’s our boy?”

“Not here yet,” Lonnie says. “But I reminded him earlier, so he knows about it.”

Pepper glances at the three other women, saying, “It seems so much smaller now. I mean without Maureen. Our department is
perishing.”

“How
is
Maureen?” Sibyl asks. “Have you spoken to her?”

Pepper nods. “She called me last week. She seems to be doing fine.”

“But she’s gotten into the habit,” Lonnie adds, “of using her baby and her book as metaphors for each other. She told me the baby’s growing a lot faster than the book. And that the baby is producing more dirty diapers than she is producing pages.”

“But it
is
an adorable baby,” Pepper says. “Did you see the announcement?”

“Oh god yes.” Lonnie’s hand flutters up and presses itself to her chest as though she has just had the first bite of some sumptuous dessert. “That baby is one in a million.”

“Gorgeous,” Sibyl agrees, and then she tries to remember what the baby looked like. She is sure she received the announcement, but now she can’t recall. Did the baby have a lot of hair? That’s something people usually admire in babies.

“And the
size
of that baby!” Lonnie marvels, which brings the conversation around to childbirth—Lonnie and Pepper sounding like the younger CC girls who come back from camp and want to compare their experiences.

Then Lonnie turns to Sibyl and starts to say, “So when—” and realizes too late that it’s not the appropriate time to be asking Sibyl about her plans for children, now that her marriage is in the dumps. So she stumbles and checks herself, looking to the door and starting over with, “So when is Binhammer going to show up?”

And it is at that exact moment that he comes around the corner and into the room, looking distracted. For a second he doesn’t seem to see anyone, and then he looks at the four women around the table and smiles. “Am I late?”

“No, no,” Pepper says automatically, even though he is, in fact, quite late.

“Just your regular,” Lonnie says.

Each of the women has left a place open beside her at the conference table, and Binhammer has to decide who to sit next to. He does some quick calculations in his head and picks the seat next to Lonnie, who leans over and confides to him that he just missed a great conversation about childbirth.

“Oh,” he says, “my favorite subject.” Then to everyone else, “Who doesn’t love a good childbirth story?”

Pepper chuckles and makes a swatting gesture at him. “We were talking about
Maureen.”

“Oh, sure,” Binhammer says. “How is she doing? Do we have a replacement for her yet?”

“That’s one of the things,” Mrs. Mayhew says, emerging from her rigid silence, “that we’re going to talk about today.”

When Maureen left at the end of the previous school year to become a stay-at-home mother and novel writer, it was unclear whether it was just a temporary leave of absence or whether she was going to rely on her husband’s considerable income to leave teaching for good. Then, a few weeks before this current year began, she decided that she wouldn’t be coming back, leaving Mrs. Mayhew a very short period of time to find not only a temporary substitute but a permanent replacement.

“We have found someone,” Mrs. Mayhew says now. “He couldn’t start today because we didn’t give him very much notice, and he’s out of town at a conference. But he’ll be here starting next week.”

“He?”
Binhammer says.

“Uh-oh, Binhammer,” Sibyl says maliciously. “Looks like you’re not the only cock in the henhouse anymore.”

Lonnie recoils from the vulgarity. Mrs. Mayhew appears not to have heard.

“I think he’ll fit in just fine,” Mrs. Mayhew continues. “He hasn’t taught high school before, but he’s highly qualified.
Highly
qualified. And I think he has the characteristics the school is looking for.”

The way Binhammer looks right now—Sibyl wants a picture of it—it’s obvious he’s looking right through Mrs. Mayhew and into his own future, looking ahead to the next faculty meeting where his won’t be the only male voice echoing through the room. Little by little, he’s shivering to pieces on the inside, she can see that. It’s a serious blow to his identity. If he’s not the only man on the faculty of the Carmine-Casey English department, then what is he? Just another teacher.

Yes, this is a picture she wants to keep. Maybe that’s what she would like to find at the bottom of her purse, underneath all the confusion. The poor suffering boy. The little soldier, knocked over like the slow-moving king in a game of chess. There’s something beautiful about him when he’s damaged. Men are like phoenixes: their tragedies are gorgeous because everyone knows how lovely they will be when they rise. When he rises.

She has seen him run his hand through his hair, when he thinks no one is looking. She has seen him lean against the window frame in the teachers’ lounge and rub his eyes until they are red and tired-looking—desperate and private. So small, his shoulders hunched against the cold glass of the windowpane. His gaze sunken into himself with the gravity of distant, objective despair. As though he were watching a film reel of his own past. She has seen his hands, knotting themselves together, disclosing things he would not like disclosed.

Times like this, she would watch him until he would notice her gaze and straighten himself up with immediate and smiling rigor. Clicking back into place, click, click, snap, ready again to tell everyone his stories.

“Hey,” he would say. “You wouldn’t believe what I just saw.”

“What? What did you just see?”

“Down on the sidewalk, these students…” Then, shrugging, fixing himself, soldering up all the seams. “It wasn’t anything, really. Listen, you want to get out of here for a while? I need some coffee.” That’s what he would say.

Now, she thinks, looking at him across the conference table, now I will watch his hands. What will he tell me with his hands?

He leans back in his chair, putting the weight of his upper body on his left elbow against the arm of the chair. He leaves his right arm extended and resting on the table, his long forefinger casually following a scar in the wooden surface. He never writes on the board in his classroom, so his hands are never dry and chalky like the rest of theirs. Then she sees Lonnie staring down at his hand, and she knows that the other woman wants to reach out and cover it with her own, to pat it softly with maternal affection.

And so Sibyl looks away, hating herself.

But Mrs. Mayhew has said something to her and seems to be awaiting a response.

“I’m sorry,” Sibyl says. “What was that again?”

“Mentor.
I wonder if you could mentor him. It would simply involve your being available if he has any questions.”

“Oh, sure. Of course.”

“Well,” Binhammer says, raising himself to his full seated height and leaning forward across the table. With the look of brave determination in his face, it might appear as though he were going to scale a mountain. “I’m looking forward to meeting him. It’ll be nice having another man on the faculty. Maybe we’ll go hunting together. Or work on his car.”

Lonnie smiles and swats his forearm.

“What’s his name, anyway?”

“Well,” Mrs. Mayhew says, and her eyes squint as though in distant memory of girlishness. “That’s something you’re not going to believe.”