The English Teacher (17 page)

“Stuart, that’s enough,” Tom barked.

Stuart looked at his father and finished: “shit-faced. Is that the height of existence, of consciousness?”

A teacher needed at all times a face impervious to shock or insult, but twice in her career, a student had done or said something so unexpectedly awful that her skin reddened. Each time was a surprise—the prickling in her cheeks, then the pulsing heat—and she had resented it deeply. She felt it now; within a few seconds her face would be a flaming carnation. Far more than his words, what angered her was that he was going to make her blush.

“You’re not going to find your mother this way, Stuart,” she said.

True to his convictions, Stuart seemed perfectly detached. “I’m not trying to
find
her, Vida. I’m trying to let her go.”

She watched Tom close up the white boxes of leftover rice and lo mein and carry them by their perfect wire handles to the fridge. He slid her plate out from beneath her without a word. He was pursing his lips, a sure sign that he was upset. She wondered why he didn’t go have a talk with Stuart. He usually scampered so quickly back to the children’s hallway if there was any tension at dinner. She hoped when he did that he wouldn’t be too hard on the boy. An apology to her would suffice.

He was at the sink now, scraping and rinsing. She heard a huge plop into the garbage disposal. Someone had hardly touched the food. She wondered if it was her. Or Peter. Where had Peter gone? She couldn’t even remember him sitting at the table. She collected what remained on the table and brought it to Tom. He dropped the forks he was rinsing and wheeled around to her.

“Where does all that anger of yours come from?” He grabbed the bottle from the pantry closet. “From inside here?” He shook it at her. She was surprised by how little was left. “Or is it in here”—he poked her in the bone between her breasts—“all the time, crouching, waiting?”

Vida was stunned. The scene was like the nightmare in which one of her best-behaved students hurls obscenities at her. The poke on her chest stung and spread.

“The boy is simply trying to cope.”

“But he’s filling himself with illusions.”

“We’re all filled with illusions.”

“No we’re not.”

“Taoism is one hell of a lot less harmful than practically all the other ways of dealing with grief he could have latched onto.”

“I’m not so sure. Actionless action. Blankety blank. He’s negating himself from his own life. He’s disappearing.”

“Why does it upset you so much? It’s just a way of looking at the world.”

“It’s a way of
not
looking at the world. You heard him. He wants to detach. You might as well give him a shotgun so he can blow his head off.”

“Jesus Christ, Vida.”

There it was finally, the glare, the tone of voice he’d been denying himself. He saw her now for what she truly was; he saw the waste within. She needed to get out of the house. She threw on a coat and whistled for Walt.

“I don’t know why you’re trying to push us away. All of us. Ever since you agreed to marry me, you’ve been—”

“Pinched and thin?”

“I don’t understand what happened. I thought you were—”

“Someone else?”

“Stop it. Stop finishing my sentences. Stop looking at me with that smirk like you can see all around me, like I’m a character for you to analyze. You don’t have to be a goddamn
English
teacher all the time. Just be
yourself.
”

“And who do you think that is?”

He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “I don’t know. I think it’s the woman I first saw at a podium, in tears, clutching a little silver cup. It’s the woman, the first woman, who let me talk about Mary without feeling threatened in some way. God, what’s happened to her? You’ve gotten so hard and closed and—”

“Let’s leave our sex life out of it.” She couldn’t resist a little humor. And these memories of his—where did they come from? She certainly wasn’t
in tears
at the podium.

“I’m not joking, Vida. I don’t give a flying fuck about the sex. It’s our marriage I care about. You have to work at marriage. It doesn’t
come easy to anyone. But it’s like you’ve already given up on it. Before you even gave it a chance. You’re like that student of yours who decides he hates the book before he’s opened it.”

“I’m going to take the dog for a walk.”

“I’ll come,” Tom said.

He actually believed they could talk their way through it. “Screw you,” she said, and slammed the door, nearly catching Walt’s tail.

She wished she’d glanced at Tom’s face. He’d probably never been spoken to like that in his life. “Little goody-two-shoes,” she muttered, then laughed at her childishness.

It was freezing out. Walt looked up at her as if asking her to reconsider, then he bowed his head into the wind and they set off. The cold felt good; escape felt good. She was trapped, trapped like Dorothea with Casaubon, like the new wife at Manderlay.

“Ma!” Peter called from the front steps, yanking a sweatshirt over his head. “Can I come?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s cold,” he said, his breath hanging white between them. The sweatshirt added bulk to his frame. His shoulders never seemed so wide to her before.

They followed Walt as he trailed a smell down the strip of grass inserted between the sidewalk and curb, carefully shifting his nose for oncoming trees and poles, then shifting back again. Her arm began to ache and she let go of the leash. They had to move swiftly to keep up with him.

“You’ve got some beans in you tonight, old man.” Her voice was distant and unnatural. Nothing seemed recognizable out here tonight. She wasn’t sure which street Walt had led them onto. Had they turned right back there, or left?

But Walt knew where they were going. He swerved into the same driveway they’d stood in that morning. The house was just a house being fixed up. The smell had retracted in the cold.

Peter stood beside her, too close. He had something to say.

“He asked you to come with me, didn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is that?”

“He was worried, I guess.”

“Worried that what, I’d hang myself on a tree with Walt’s leash?” She hadn’t meant to be so specific.

“Worried you wouldn’t come back.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake where am I going to go?”

“Ma—”

“I don’t want to be called Ma. Stop calling me that.”

She could smell the wood now, the new doors and floors. But it was mild, unmenacing. Now she could follow Walt up the steps, stand here and look at the sawhorses, breathe in the dust from all the new floors. None of it provoked any reaction. It almost felt like she was remembering someone else.

Walt disappeared through a doorless opening. Peter called to him, but not with the urgency Walt responded to. They waited for him on the porch. The street was quiet, with only the thin hum of a streetlight and a faraway squeak of a car frame going over a speed bump. She had a mind to tell Peter right here, tell him everything. Tell him about the porcelain sink and the fresh boards on the floor and the sound of the football game across the street rising and falling and rising again and how all the other teachers and even the workmen had left their work to see the last half of a close game, left their tools scattered in the hallway, the only witnesses to her steps from the classroom to the bathroom, her last fearless steps in life, one two three four five and her thoughts on the toilet as simple as hoping that her mother would be making chicken for dinner and the water running warm now from the sink—before the renovations there was only cold—and she kept her hands under it too long. At first she thought the lights had gone out, the way in
the mirror the room darkened behind her. He brought her down quickly, smashing her chin to the sink, her lower teeth cutting clean through her tongue in two places. She heard a grunt as he turned her over, the clang of his belt buckle, the rip of fabric, then skin, her own gagging on the blood in her mouth, and a horrible boarlike snorting—but she never heard the sound of his voice. In some memories she is clawing, hitting, writhing, but in others she is perfectly still, save the blood pouring out of her mouth. Her dress was badly stained. I bit my tongue, she told her mother, who had in fact made chicken, when she got home.

“Walt!” she called, and he came immediately, head lowered by the sharpness in her voice.

Peter knocked the railing with his sneaker. “Tom loves you, you know. If you could just lighten up a bit.”

So this is what he had to say to her. That she should lighten up.

Walt pushed the side of his face against her thigh, then, finding her hand, nudged his way in against her palm. The shape of his head beneath her hand was the most familiar object in her life.

Peter waited for her to respond but she didn’t. That there was a burning hole in her chest was all she could have told him. He walked ahead of her and Walt, his gaze following the smoke rising from chimneys, following people as they flickered past their windows. He peered hopefully into every house, as if he were looking for someone he knew.

SIX

THE PARTY WAS OUT IN SUTTON, A FORTY-MINUTE DRIVE NORTH. IT WAS
the first senior party Peter had ever been invited to. The entire upper school had been invited—Scott Laraby’s parents had gone to St. Croix for a week.

Jason’s sister Carla drove them. She was back from college and had brought her roommate with her. They were listening to the worst music Peter had ever heard, more breathing and talking than singing, with one screeching instrument in the background. When Peter looked up front to see what radio station would play such awful music, he saw that the two girls were holding hands.

Jason told Carla to drop them off at the end of the Larabys’ long driveway. As they walked toward the light flickering through the trees, Peter asked about Carla and the roommate.

“Neither of them have boyfriends,” Jason said, “so they practice with each other. That’s what my dad says.”

They continued in silence up the road. Peter could smell the stain on his hands, and he was glad. He’d spent most of the afternoon with Tom in the garage, helping him work on a table he was making for one of his assistants who’d recently gotten engaged. Peter had taken shop at school; he’d made a napkin holder and a stool the shape of a turtle. He’d never found any pleasure in the dry noisy room with Mr. McCaffy. He didn’t like being around wailing machines that could cut off fingers or fighting with his classmates over
the best scraps of sandpaper. He felt like stuff was always in his eyes. But with Tom it was different; it was peaceful. Fresh air came in freely through the open garage doors. People driving by saw them working together and waved. The brand-new sandpaper came in large sheets. They started with the coarse brown squares and finished with the soft black ones. The whole table felt warm and velvety smooth when they were done, more like skin than wood.

Tom threw out the used pieces of sandpaper and brought out the stain. He pried open the can, stirred it with a wooden stick, and placed two brushes beside it. There was a certain tenderness to each gesture, and Peter understood that he was in the presence of someone doing something he loved. He wasn’t sure he’d witnessed that before. Most of his teachers had probably once loved their subjects, but their passion was hidden under layers of frustration, years of repetition.

Staining, it turned out, was even more satisfying than sanding. Stain had none of the stress of paint, which Peter remembered glopped and streaked and never went on as evenly as you hoped. It was hard to make a mistake with stain. Sometimes they talked; sometimes there was just the sound of their brushes. He’d never really been comfortable with a grown man before. Nothing was worse than being stuck alone with Jason’s father, who stood with arms crossed over his broad chest and stiff black hair coming out of his nose as he assaulted Peter with questions. He felt awkward around all his male teachers and coaches; perhaps it was his less than stellar performances, or perhaps it was their knowledge of the absence of his father, their fear that he was looking for a substitute, or Peter’s fear that they had this fear. He even felt uncomfortable in the presence of his great-grandfather’s bronzed head in the vestibule. But with Tom after a while he just felt himself, the self he was when he was alone. Things just came out of his mouth; he didn’t rehearse his lines first, as he often did with Stuart or before speaking in class.

“Peter,” Tom said into one of their comfortable silences. “Did you ever meet your grandparents? You know,” he added hastily, “your mother’s parents?”

“No.”

“Has she ever told you about them, or told you about her childhood?”

“She didn’t like them much. They moved around a lot and my mother read in the backseat of the car. That’s all I know.”

Tom waited a while, then asked, “What was your mother like when you were little? Do you remember?”

“I don’t know,” he stalled. He knew Tom wanted him to say she was different somehow. “She played more games, maybe.” He wished they didn’t have to talk about her. He wished he just lived with the Belous without her getting in the way.