Saying Grace (2 page)

So they went to the movie and ate popcorn even though they had already had tacos, and when they got out it was cool and dark and you could see Venus and the Big Dipper.

“Why don’t we find a motel with a pool?” said Emily, and this had met with wild enthusiasm, so they had stayed in Seven Springs for the night. The children splashed and shouted until the manager turned off the pool lights at nine o’clock. Emily could only watch, since one of things she’d forgotten was her bathing suit.

The next morning, over breakfast at a House of Pancakes, they took a poll and decided this town seemed as good a place as any to light and settle. Emily suspected that excess sugar and bread and circuses were behind the choice, since everything they had done since they arrived was an out-of-the-ordinary, somebody’s-birthday kind of treat. But the choice was made, and Emily stopped at the office of the first real estate company she saw.

The Coldwell Banker lady, Sylvia French, was a “people person.”

That, translated, meant she had been out of the job market for fifteen years and had no professional skills, beyond being an extremely nice woman. Fortunately, in Seven Springs there was a market for that. Sylvia had two children in a local private school for which she had run endless cookie sales and book fairs and drives to collect winter coats for the homeless. She was a fountain of enthusiasm for the town, for her school, for her belief in the widely available bounty of goodness life had to offer, and she loved accumulating details about other people’s lives. Sylvia was not the sort of woman who needed much privacy. In fact, she abhorred a vacuum, which is how she perceived silence. She sat at the wheel of her big Saying Grace / 7

sedan, her glossy cap of dark hair shining, her large brown slightly bulging eyes even bigger behind huge square-framed glasses, chattering as she expertly drove.

“I don’t know if this is in your price range but I must just show you these homes because they are
so
affordable, for what they are,”

she burbled as she pulled into a crescent drive on which stood five or six monstrosities, on parched clay in which not a shrub or field daisy grew, only the odd blade of onion grass and some blackened stalks of what might have been milkweed. The houses were in a half-timbered Tudor style with a soupcon of French chateau thrown in. “Two master suites, two guest rooms, dining room, living room, family room, two-car garage, full basement…it’s all basically the same floor plan, but they’re flopped in this one and that one. So you can choose which way you want the view. Would you like to see inside?” Emily could see through the window of the nearest one that they also had nasty low ceilings, gaudy brass fixtures, and skip-troweling on the walls, like a pretentious motel.

“I think you better tell me the price,” said Emily.

“They’re asking a million six. It would be closer to two, but so many developers went belly-up in the last three years….”

“Ah,” said Emily.

From the plush back seat of Mrs. French’s car, Malone caught sight of something promising in the yard. “Mom, are we going to have a hot tub?” Emily didn’t answer. She was thinking that at these prices, Malone would be lucky to have her own bedroom.

“Mom,” said David from some zone of his own, “Where’s Ralph?”

Something in his odd little brain had at this moment come across the memory of his gerbil.

“I’m afraid that’s a good deal out of my range at the moment,”

said Emily, knowing that she was wearing a very expensive watch and shoes, and that cars like her Volvo station wagon, which was currently parked in front of Sylvia’s office, didn’t come in Crackerjack boxes. How to convey that things were not what they appeared with them, that their circumstances had changed rather suddenly.

“It’s…” Emily began, and then stopped. Inadvertently she glanced in the rearview mirror at the children.

8 / Beth Gutcheon

“I understand,” said Sylvia. And amazingly, she did. Sylvia glanced sideways and suddenly understood, from something fugitive in the smile or perhaps from the uncertain way Emily’s hand moved to push her hair back, that this very put-together, self-assured, and glossy human had suffered a recent and frightening crack in her foundation, and was trying to keep it from spreading. It wasn’t hard to guess the rest.

“Let’s try down here in the Lake District,” Sylvia said, turning the car away from the parched heights she had been ascending. “It’s an older neighborhood, very quiet and safe. I call it the Lake District, of course there’s no lake. There’s a street called Lake, and a very pretty pond with a playground, and a dog run. Do you have a dog?”

“No.”

“Mom,” said David a little more insistently, “where’s Ralph?”

“We have a gerbil,” said Emily. To David: “He’s in your bedroom in his cage.”

“Here?” asked David.

“Honey, you know he isn’t in the motel room. He’s in your old bedroom in Daddy’s house.” Daddy’s house. That was the first time it had ever been anything but “our house.”

“Who will feed him?” David asked.

“I’m sure Daddy will,” said Emily, lying. She doubted that Tom even knew they had a gerbil. It could be weeks before anything caused him to visit one of his children’s rooms. She’d have to call a neighbor who knew where the key was, ask someone to take Ralph home till she could arrange to come back for him.

They were driving down a winding street with far more modest houses than the Affordable Homes, fairly close together, under arching trees. These were houses from the twenties, frame and brick, many needing a little paint, or a lot of yard work. “You’ll want to be close to The Country School,” Sylvia was saying. “The public school, I’ll take you by it, it isn’t actually a bad school, they’ve only had one incident, I think, of children in Primary bringing guns to school, but The Country School is so special.”

Pressing to hear all her options, Emily learned that the town also boasted a private elementary school run by Scientologists, an Ortho-dox Jewish school, which was probably the toughest of all academically but you had to take half your courses in Hebrew, and Saying Grace / 9

a wildly progressive school called Greenmere, where they did a great deal of “water play” and didn’t start to read until fifth grade.

Country’s most serious competitor was an ex-military school, where the children still drilled in patterned marching, carrying wooden rifles during PE. Sylvia said it was fine academically, but to her mind rather rigid and joyless.

“You better tell me about The Country School,” said Emily.

“It’s like a family,” said Sylvia. “That’s the most important thing.

You feel that every child matters, that there are no favorites. Every parent too. The Head is a woman named Rue Shaw, and she is really something special. She’s smart, she has a sense of humor, and she has principles. Your kids don’t just get into the best high schools, although they do that too, they also learn to be really nice people.”

I
have brains and a sense of humor, thought Emily, with a sudden flash of bitterness. I had straight A’s in my major, and all the right connections. Why am
I
not a school head? Why am I not sitting magisterially in a big office with a leather blotter, interviewing prospective parents, reading the latest books on learning deficits? Instead of driving around the middle of nowhere with my children in the back of some strange car because my husband has decided that he wants to boff his nurse-receptionist? A woman named after a fruit?

Why was I the last one on my block to learn to fear chaos at midlife?

The outer office of Home had once had a double-height door, so a man, or woman, could ride into the stable on horseback, and dismount in the center of the room, there to curry and brush his horse or wash it down, if it had been a muddy day. There had been a sloping cement floor, with a drain in the middle of the room, where Merilee’s desk now stood. The door to this room was now of conventional size, and the visitor walked in to be surrounded by trophy cases, sepia class photographs, and plaques painted with the names of each succeeding class of Country School graduates, including mementos from the days of the Miss Plums. Rue especially relished a photograph of Carla and Lourdes Plum in long white skirts and middy blouses, leading a ragtag little flock of scholars in fencing practice. There was also an autographed picture 10 / Beth Gutcheon

of Hedy Lamar, whose children had once boarded with the Miss Plums and gone to school here.

What had been the tack room, lined with English and Western saddles, including the Miss Plums’ sidesaddles, was now full of office equipment. One large box stall had become the faculty lounge cum sick bay. The other box stall, now enclosed to the ceiling, was the office of the business manager, Mr. Glarrow. Mr. Glarrow was a pale youngish man, quite long and thin, who existed on the edge of this bustle of life like a lost soul. He was brusque and clumsy with his grounds staff—he was
not
a “people person”—and he adored modern technology, although he had no talent for it whatever. Every summer when Rue went on vacation he drove her careful budget out of whack by buying new telephone systems that no one could work or networking software that couldn’t be installed because it competed with existing device drivers on the computers, and no one in the office except Rue knew what device drivers were, let alone config.sys files and autoexec.bats, all of which soon came into play when Mr. Glarrow had a new bright idea for making their lives simpler. He was, however, a crackerjack bookkeeper and a terrific steward of buildings and grounds. Rue had never known a manager who could do everything in the job description and was grateful Bill Glarrow could do as much as he could. The fact that he didn’t much care for children was not exactly a plus, either, but he worked terribly hard in early morning and evening hours, and rarely left his office during class times.

Emily had been thoroughly taken with The Country School when she visited, although it was still in summer session and she met only the staff, one teacher, and the assistant head, a Mr. Dianda. She had loved the air of the place, which had none of the prim sense of self-importance of the girls’ school she herself had gone to in Cedarhurst.

But when Emily stopped in two days before school opened, she knew something had happened. The hum of life, the smiles of welcome she had seen all over campus the day she had brought the children to be interviewed, were gone. Faces looked blank, or hurt.

People walked together in twos and threes, talking intently. Something was wrong, a family thing. No one looked at the outsider.

Saying Grace / 11

In the office, Emily found a plump woman in her mid-forties dictating a newspaper ad to Merilee. She was wearing a long loose jumper of some soft stuff, and she had strong red hair, piled on her head in a haphazard knot. Her eyes were gray, wide, and intelligent.

If she wore any makeup, Emily couldn’t see it; she had beautiful skin and a fine acquiline nose, and carried herself as if to say that if that wasn’t good enough for you, too bad.

Merilee said in her sweet chirping voice, “Oh hello, Mrs.

Dahl—this is Mrs. Shaw.”

The paragon, the woman with brains and principles. Rue had turned to smile Welcome, and her smile was extraordinarily warm.

“Hello, how nice to meet you,” said Rue, taking Emily’s hand.

“You were still on vacation when we first arrived….”

“Of course, Mr. Dianda told me. I understand you have a son with a brain the size of Montana.”

Emily was pleased. “He tests well. He’s a little shy, though. He has trouble making friends sometimes.”

“Mike told me that too. But there’s another little boy in David’s class who has some physical problems, so he doesn’t play sports and he’s mad for dinosaurs. Pterodactyls are his particular field, I think. Mike says David goes in for tyrannosaurs.”

“He’s interested in pterodactyls too,” said Emily.

“Good. No point in specializing too early. Colin’s a dear little boy and we’ve been worried about his being lonely. The class was full, but Mrs. TerWilliams said she couldn’t resist David. And in Malone’s class, we happened to need a girl, so this has worked out well.

Welcome to Country.”

“Thank you….”

“Mrs. Dahl,” piped Merilee, “did you bring me the health forms?”

Merilee had a bright smooth face like an apple, and she spoke with a high-pitched lilt that was so full of good will that no one could say a cross word to her.

“I did, but Mrs. Shaw?”

“Rue.”

“…Rue, thank you. Did I hear you advertising for a Spanish teacher?”

“You did.”

“Could I apply for the job?”

12 / Beth Gutcheon

“Do you know Spanish? I mean forgive me for asking, since I was about to offer it to Manuel who’s out mowing the soccer field. Have you taught?”

“Not recently, but yes…” Well actually, not in twenty years, but.

She’d been good at it, she felt, and had once meant to go on with it.

“Come into my office,” said Rue.

Rue’s office was in the low-ceilinged back of the building, beside Mike Dianda’s. It too had heavy square beams and small windows.

Rue had filled it with soft-blue furniture on a pale green carpet, and on her desk there was always a bowl of flowers from Merilee’s garden. Today they were roses. The effect was of a haven, like a favorite book-lined room under the eaves, or a cross between a cave and a garden.

What Emily noticed first, when she followed Rue in, were the boxes of Kleenex everywhere.

“People must cry a lot here,” said Emily.

Rue smiled. “They do.”

The second thing she noticed was there were no diplomas on the wall. She had a feeling Rue Shaw had some impressive degrees under her belt; she had looked forward to knowing exactly what, from where. She was hoping there might be something a little second-rate, so she wouldn’t need to feel one down. She herself had gone to a good but not great women’s college, from a very famous Eastern boarding school where she had received a very middling preparation from a faculty superannuated to the point of coma in some cases. It was a school, she liked to say, where girls were supposed to be awash in sentiment and have silver spoons for brains. Still she felt more secure after she’d managed to drop the name. It helped people place her, told them something true about who she was and where she had come from.