Saying Grace (29 page)

They were talking so loudly that others in the restaurant were beginning to stare.

“You’re talking nonsense,” said Chandler rudely.

Rue was wondering why she shouldn’t plunge a fork into his heart.

“Will you please call a faculty meeting and explain the new policy?”

“No, I will not. I can’t ask my faculty to take an hour a week Saying Grace / 209

extra from the time they need for grading and course preparation, and I certainly can’t ask for more of their own time. Is there some way we can compromise?”

“Let me put it this way. If you cost the school thousands of dollars in legal fees by firing a student who swore on a bible he was inno-cent, I’ll tell you what part of the budget it’s going to come out of.”

“You
can’t
hold the faculty hostage, we have lawsuit insurance….”

“With a ten-thousand-dollar deductible. You cannot have your way on every issue, all the time. You’re the one who brought up compromise.”

They stared at each other for a long time. When the waiter appeared, Chandler ordered dessert, so Rue ordered black coffee. The negotiation began.

R
ue had two shocks before bedtime that night. The first was administered in the parking lot of Tagliarini’s mall, where she had walked after school to get a couple of inches of smoked salmon as a treat for Henry. When she came out into the parking lot it was the last light of the short winter afternoon. In the far corner, in front of a yogurt shop that was always empty at this time of year, she saw the dark green Maserati convertible that belonged to Margee Malko.

It was the only Maserati in town, as far as Rue knew, certainly the only one with license plates that said GR8HIPS.

In the driver’s seat was a man who looked, from the back, like Terry, but Rue couldn’t be sure because he was locked in a kiss with a woman who was definitely not little blond Margee. Rue was almost jealous…imagine being so in love you would neck in your wife’s car in a parking lot the size of the Tagliarini mall, in a town the size of Seven Springs. She had less than no desire to kiss Terry Malko, handsome though he was in a sort of meaty way, but it had been many years since she had been out of-her-mind in love like that. She hoped she didn’t know the woman.

She wanted to step backward into the store and into the moment before she saw them. It was such bad news for Margee, for Terry too, for little Chelsea, and for Glenn, who was making a rocky beginning to adolescence.

But having not stepped back fast enough, she found out in the next instant what bad news this was for her too. The woman kissing Terry was Ann Rosen.

Ann Rosen, former president of the Board, was perhaps the smartest person on it, and had for years been Rue’s staunchest ally.

Mr. Rosen never came to school events, but Rue believed he was an artist of some kind. Ann was a lawyer, as was Terry. And she was running for mayor.

Saying Grace / 211

“What can they be thinking of? Do they
want
to get caught?” she asked Henry. She wished she’d gotten twice as much smoked salmon. Life was too short to do without, if it was going to be full of this sort of shock.

“I doubt it. In my vast experience, when people do that kind of thing it’s because their apertures have closed down to about here,”

he made a tube with his hands and looked through it at Rue’s face,

“and the only thing that is real to them is each other.”

“You certainly can’t choose a place like that to park and imagine no one will see you, unless you’re fairly impaired. What am I going to do?”

“Nothing. You’re going to pretend you didn’t see it and hope it goes away.”

“Does that kind of thing go away?”

“I think it can. If you can give it up, and if you have nerves of iron.”

Rue thought about Margee, about Terry, about Ann, and felt terribly sorry for what was coming.

The second shock of the evening arrived by telephone. Though shock is the wrong word. It was at first just a curiosity, mildly disturbing, but soon forgotten.

The phone rang during dinner. She reached behind her to the phone on the kitchen wall, as she never would have done when Georgia was at home, and answered it. Although Henry was in the middle of a description of the young father whose brain he had tre-panned that morning.

Rue held up her hand apologetically. It might be Georgia, the gesture meant. If it’s anyone else, I’ll get rid of them.

But when she said “Hello?” no one answered.

She said “Hello?” again, and listened. After a time she said, “If you can hear me, I can’t hear you. If we have a bad connection, please call back.” Then she hung up.

“Nobody there?” Henry asked.

“I thought there was. I could hear breathing,” she said. He looked up from his plate.

“Who would do that? Any candidates?”

“Not really,” she said, not truthfully. It could certainly be 212 / Beth Gutcheon

Kenny Lowen. But it could be any copycat in the school community, since the Leila story was all over town. What she thought of was the look of frustrated rage she’d seen on Jerry Lozatto’s face when their suit was heard, earlier in the week, and the judge ruled against the Lozattos.

“You haven’t heard the end of this,” Jerry had snarled, looking directly at her, as they stood at the bank of elevators after the hearing.

When an elevator arrived, Jerry Lozatto had refused to ride down with her and Ann Rosen, who had defended the school.

“What more can he do?” Rue asked Ann.

“Nothing. Forget it,” said Ann. “He’s a macho asshole.”

The phone rang again. Henry rose to answer it for her, but Rue had already picked it up, and this time it was Georgia.

I
don’t understand you,” said Henry. They were staring at each other over the coffee cups. They did not yet know—although they would by two in the morning—that Rue was so upset she had accidentally made caffeinated coffee. “She’s joined a band called Stool Sample and you think it’s great?”

You’re right, you didn’t understand me.”

“I
heard
you say, ‘That’s great, dearie.’” He imitated her phrasing, deadly accurate.

“She has not joined the band, she’s singing back-up vocals for them in the studio. She’s being paid a hundred and twenty dollars an hour, that’s what I said was great.”

“Why didn’t you say this whole thing is infantile, which is the truth?”

“Because it’s not what I think.”

“Stool Sample? You think that’s funny?”

“I think it’s a
little
funny…”

Henry picked up a magazine that was lying beside his place, rolled it into a cylinder, and hit the table with it. Wham! The coffee cups jumped, and Rue flinched.

“She could have sung at the Met! She could have sung
Tosca
, if she just had the…the…character, the maturity…you think you put enough sugar in that?” he asked suddenly.

Rue stopped what she was doing and was surprised to find a spoon in her hand, halfway between the cup and the sugar bowl.

How much had she put in? Her hand didn’t seem connected to her brain.

She put the spoon down. “You have a mean streak, you know it?

It’s not as wide as your father’s, but it’s plenty bitter to the person who bites into it.”

Henry got up and began clearing the table. After a while he said,

“You didn’t know my father. When you met him, he was dead.”

214 / Beth Gutcheon

“I know what you’ve described.”

“Maybe I lied. Maybe he was an old sweetheart, and I was just a whiny little wuss, complaining.”

“I doubt it.”

“Why am I the only one who has to apologize for his parents?

What about
your
mother, with her cooking sherry bottles full of vodka, too hung over to be polite half the time and everyone pretending she has the flu?”

“Be careful, Henry. There are things that shouldn’t be said.”

“Like what? Like I’m lucky it’s sugar with you and not vodka?”

She looked at him steadily for a long beat. He held her gaze. “Yes,”

she said. “Like that.”

“She tells you she’s singing for a group called Stool Sample, and you…what is that? What
is
that, Rue, except saying ‘Up yours’ to you, and to me, and to everything we’ve tried to do for her?”

“It’s life! It’s an adventure! She’s full of hope, and full of a sense of the ridiculous, and I’m glad she’s finding work doing what she wants to do. I’m grateful she’s being paid so well. If I got a hundred and twenty dollars an hour I’d be a billionaire.”

“You’re grateful that you don’t have to decide whether or not to send her money, because that’s the deal breaker.”

“I didn’t realize it was a deal breaker, Henry. But now that I know it, I’m very grateful. Yes.”

“You know what’s wrong with illegal drugs? You know what the real hidden cost is? Twelve-year-olds
…ten
-year-olds can make a living on the street, dealing drugs, working for drug dealers. If you have a kid in trouble who can say, ‘Fuck you, I’m gone, I’ll make my own living,’ you can’t help them! You have no control, you can’t keep them home until they can grow up enough to make decent decisions….”

“Henry, I love you,” said Rue wearily. Though there was not much love in her voice.

“I know you do. So what?”

“I think you’re having some kind of midlife crisis, and I don’t know why. Georgia is not ten, she is not dealing drugs, she is just making decisions for herself that you wouldn’t make for her. But it’s her life.”

“Don’t tell me one more time whose life it is. It’s
our
life. All Saying Grace / 215

three of us. I’m tired of being talked to as if I’m out of it. I feel as if I have two teenaged assholes in this family instead of one.”

“Thanks, Dad,” said Rue.

It was the second night in a month that they slept in separate bedrooms.

M
argee Malko, usually so little and trim and perky, was weeping in Rue’s office. She had come in to school in an old turquoise jogging suit, as if she hadn’t the energy to get dressed. Her face bare of makeup, Margee looked older than usual, with crow’s feet and laugh lines and a little sag along the jawline all on view. Rue, feeling a hundred years old herself and as if her insides were made of lead, waited for Margee to stop crying. Rue had slept a total of five minutes the whole night, after the fight with Henry. She didn’t know if Henry had slept; he had dressed and left the house before she came downstairs.

Glenn Malko, age thirteen, was being suspended from eighth grade for the afternoon. He was sitting in the outer office now with Emily, reading a back copy of the yearbook and fooling with his shoelaces. He had drawn an obscene cartoon in the lab book of a new girl, Louise Chang. Louise had complained to Rosemary Fitch, the science teacher, that she was being sexually harassed, and rather than give him a lecture or detention, which would have made him more glamorous to his peers, Miss Fitch had made Glenn clean out the guinea pig’s cage. This greatly amused Kenny Lowen and Glenn’s other pals. At recess, passing Louise and Leila Bathhurst near the volleyball court, he reportedly had said, “It’s just like you bitches to get me in trouble.”

Margee, far from defending or justifying Glenn, as Rue half expected her to do, had more or less imploded.

“I don’t know why I can’t seem to keep a grip on myself these days,” she said, shaking her head, blowing her nose, and making an unsuccessful attempt at a girlish laugh. “I’m the proverbial Water Works.”

Rue, feeling like an assassin, finally managed to ask what she always did in such situations: “Is there something going on at home I should know about?”

Saying Grace / 217

Margee shook her head no. “I just can’t cope with Glenn.” And she wept again.

“Is he difficult with you?”

“
Awful
. It must be my fault…he says terrible things about women.

He teases Chelsea all the time. He goes into her room and hides her stuff, just to upset her. He took twenty dollars from my purse last week.”

“How do you know?”

“The maid saw him do it. When I confronted him, he said he hadn’t and that Gladys probably did it herself. I tried to tell him this is a woman who’s supporting four children, I tried to tell him that it was cruel to blame her for something that could cost her her job.”

“Did he understand?”

“No. At least, if he did he didn’t let me in on it. I wish you’d expelled that damn Kenny Lowen, Rue…we all do. There’s a petition going around.”

Rue sat silent. “How is Glenn getting along with Terry?”

“He’s better with Terry. He doesn’t dare be rude to his face, anyway.”

Rue wished she could think faster. She knew she should be making an articulate speech at this point about actions and consequences.

She couldn’t comfort Margee, she couldn’t even offer the sop of suggesting family therapy. Terry would refuse…what could he do?

Go into therapy and lie to the therapist about having an affair, with his wife and children looking on? That would help a lot.

Finally, she said, “When Glenn gets home, he is going to spend the afternoon writing me a letter, describing what he must do—and not do—to make it through the rest of the year. With the understanding that if he can’t live up to the standards he describes, he will be expelled.”

“I think that’s a great idea,” said Margee.

Oh no you don’t, Rue thought. Or at least, you won’t once you’ve thought about it. And even if you do, Terry won’t. You’ll be back here within the week feeling that I’ve betrayed you. One way or another, this will end up being my fault, because I didn’t expel Kenny Lowen, because Ann Rosen is a friend of mine and I suggested her for the Board….

218 / Beth Gutcheon

“I’m glad you do,” said Rue. “Margee—if I could suggest, no television this afternoon or tonight?”

“Oh right,” said Margee. “Of course.” She got up and went out to collect her criminal.

Reluctantly, Rue put in a call to Chandler to explain why Glenn was on probation, and ask for his support, especially important since the child was the son of a Board member.

R
ue had been working on the budget for the upcoming year all through the long weekend of Martin Luther King’s birthday.