The English Teacher (29 page)

“I could tell,” Vida said. Was Tom at the house now? What was happening?

“How about Peter stays with me for a while?” Gena said. Her round cheeks were red as apples.

It wasn’t Tom. It was all about them, all the excitement in the air.

“Gena says there’s a good school just a few blocks from her house.”

Everything was a just a few blocks from her house, it seemed. In Peter’s eyes, in his voice, was the same enthusiasm he’d had just before she’d married Tom. She’d misinterpreted it then. Now she understood. Getting away from her had always been the goal.

“That’s fine with me.”

They had been ready for a battle; their list of reasons twitched on their fingers. She needed to be away from them, in the bar through the beaded doorway.

Stools turned when she came in. She looked each one in the eye, the blond in flowered shorts, the old guy with the pink cap, the two college kids hoping she’d be someone else. They might not have seen many gaunt English teachers from New England, or turtlenecks, but
she knew them, each one of them. She knew the feeling that brought a person to a strong drink at noon on a Thursday.

The bartender raised his eyebrows and slid a coaster her way.

“I’m just—” She glanced up at the TV in the corner. A bearded, blindfolded hostage was speaking into an old-fashioned microphone. It was Day 43. “I’m just looking for the bathroom.”

“Right through there.”

It was a dark little hallway. She looked back at the glasses pyramided on the bar, then rushed to the door with the W and bolted it shut behind her.

The soup came up yellow and bitter. She spat it into the sink and wiped her face slowly in the mirror. She didn’t know how to fight for him. She’d never fought for anything in her life.

On the way back Gena and Peter veered into a store. Vida stayed outside, looking at the books in the window. There were a few classics in paperback.
Daniel Deronda,
which she’d never read. But she wasn’t tempted. Gena and Peter came out with Parcheesi. They opened it as soon as they got home, hunkering down on the floor on their stomachs like little kids. The phone rang when they were into their second game. Gena went into the kitchen to get it. She spoke in a low murmur, her back to them. Peter was left alone on the floor, Vida on the brown chair. It was the first time they’d been alone since the car. He was sitting up now, sideways along the board, one knee bent, one arm straight as a pole to the ground. With the other arm he rolled the dice over and over, unsatisfied with the numbers. His sprawled body seemed enormous, the dice and the board tiny beside him. He was done with her. Every thud of the dice told her that.

Gena held out the receiver. “It’s for you.”

Vida shook her head but Gena shook her head right back at
her. “I can’t put him off any longer, Vida.” She wouldn’t back down. Vida could see that in her face.

Maybe it was Brick, she told the blood rising to her face. It was just before five back there. He’d have come home, made himself a cocktail, put himself in the mood to deal with teacher truancy.

But it wasn’t Brick. “Are you really all right?”

She remembered the sound of his voice from their first phone calls. Her heart would be slamming just like this and she’d wrap the ringlets of cord around her finger and half of her would wish he’d cancel the date they were making and the other half wanted to talk to him all night long. His voice was deep and always a little hoarse, like an old reed instrument hitting the low notes. “I think I’m okay.”

“Vida, I—”

“I imagine you’ve spoken to Brick.”

“I told him you’d call when you were ready.”

It felt like a rug burn, the tight heat in her chest. A calendar hung by the phone and Gena had made a diagonal line through all the days that had passed, just as their mother used to do. It had always depressed her, that habit, as if each day were a task to be crossed off a long list.

“I want you to do exactly what you need to,” Tom was saying, and she thought of that night in June when, after having dinner with the family of Tom’s goddaughter, they’d split off from the rest, taken a walk to the Norsett town landing, then back to Tom’s car. Nothing had happened between them on that walk; she couldn’t remember what they’d spoken of, and Vida had decided that if he asked her out again she’d say no. But on the way home, for no good reason, her whole body began to shake. It was a warm night in June but she was shaking and couldn’t stop. He didn’t ask why. He just turned the heat on for her. When she didn’t stop trembling,
he turned it up higher, even though he’d begun to sweat in his suit and tie.

“I’m here,” he was saying. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll come to you and Peter the minute you say the word.”

She thanked him and then, unable to form more words, hung up.

“How did that go?” Gena asked from the doorway.

She pushed down all that was rising and found her usual flatness. “About as well as one might expect.”

A guinea pig scuttled out from beneath a chair, paused, and kept on toward Gena, who scooped it up and cooed into its ear.

“Aren’t they supposed to live in cages?” Vida said.

“Oh no. They grow much bigger and stronger if they’re given room to roam.”

“But they’re not house-trained.” She pointed to the small yellow puddle it had left behind.

“No more than a squirt of liquid here, a pellet or two there.” Tucking the creature under her armpit, Gena folded a paper towel into a square and pressed it with two fingers into the urine. The whole thing saturated quickly. She tossed it into the trash and returned to her game with Peter.

She’d always believed Gena was the stronger of the two of them, the sister who was meant to flourish and thrive.

Vida went back to her room. She drew more palm trees. At night she slept. She awoke early, well before dawn. December 17. The date had been traveling through her dreams. It was a familiar date, a date printed somewhere. On flyers. At school. She had it now. The spring musical tryouts. Helen.

She picked up the pad and charcoal pencil by her bed. It didn’t take her long to remember which of Jerry’s girls corresponded to which year, as if her mind had been keeping a careful inventory without her knowing it.

1973 Janet Blake
1974 Audrey Beale
1975 Beth Zaccardi
1976 Nancy Goff
1977 Amelia Crane
1978 Bonnie Steadman

It felt good to match the names with dates, as if she were tidying up a small part of her brain. She wrote the letter out three times, one for Brick, one for Lydia Rezo, one for the board of trustees.

On her way out, she passed Peter sleeping on a narrow mattress in the living room. He’d kicked off his blankets and curled one leg up to his chest while the other stretched out straight behind him, as if he were taking a great leap into the sky. He’d slept in this position all his life.

She found envelopes and stamps in a drawer in the kitchen. Then she put on Gena’s canvas shoes and left to find a mailbox.

THIRTEEN

HE AWOKE TO THE SOUND OF THE TRUNK OF THE DODGE SLAMMING SHUT.
Was she leaving? He waited for another sound. Nothing.

When his mother finally left, he’d move into her room, to the double bed. He’d never slept in a double bed. And palm trees out the window. He wanted to see the beach again today. Gena wanted to take him over to the school. The idea of a new school was only good in theory. Look how badly he’d fared with kids he’d known all his life. What would happen when he was a complete unknown from the opposite end of the country?

He fell back asleep.

“Peter.” It was his mother, whispering. “Are you awake?”

“Kind of,” he said.

“Shhh.”

“What’s going on?” He wasn’t going back, if that’s what she wanted.

“Let’s go on a picnic.”

“A picnic? What time is it?”

“A breakfast picnic.”

He pushed himself up to sitting, his head still thick with dreams. Beside him sat a wicker basket with a wooden lid. The stalk of a banana kept it from closing all the way. Beside that squatted his mother. She’d combed her hair and put on a dress.

“Come with me,” she said.

The dress was yellow with short sleeves and a full skirt that lay in folds on the floor. His mother, even in the summer, didn’t wear tiny sleeves like that. She didn’t wear yellow, ever. The whole thing—the dress, the basket, the secrecy, even the word “picnic”—was far stranger than any dream.

“Okay,” he said, too curious to feel like there was a choice.

She waited for him out by the car.

“It’s not far. We could walk,” he said.

“I’ll have to leave these behind then.” She tossed Gena’s shoes into the bushes by the door. “They’ve shredded my skin.”

The dress could not have been Gena’s. It was the exact shape of his mother. She walked, as she always did, a little ahead of him, her upper body tipped into an imaginary wind. The morning was overcast but warm, and the plants and trees had resumed their exotic, unmenacing aspects. The picnic basket swung on her arm like something from a fairy tale. He offered to take it but she shook her head. It was very light, she told him.

Soon this road would be his road, this sky his sky. He thought he should buy a notebook and write some of it down. Up ahead a car with surfboards strapped to the top pulled into a driveway and honked, then honked again. A kid in a red wet suit—the body was pressed so flat he couldn’t tell if it was male or female—came out, shoved another board on top of the pile, and got in back.

The ocean was a softer shade of blue today beneath the clouds. His mother cut straight through the tall sharp grass to the edge of the cliff. Her hair and her dress blew in the same direction. She stood there for several minutes and if he didn’t know better he would have said she was praying.

The path down was so steep you didn’t really have to take steps; you just slid on your heels through the sand. The cliff seemed far larger from down here. Peter bent his head up the enormous rock face to where his mother had just been standing. It was probably
sixty feet high. They were protected from the wind down here, and the clouds had begun to burn off.

His mother chose a spot on the dry sand a few feet up from the tide line. They sat and did not speak. Waves broke in great thuds and splatters against the rocks, and the foamy water rushed through the narrow passages to shore, then jerked back into the pull of the next wave. Peter was hungry but his mother had tucked the basket up in her lap, stretched her arms through the handles and around its sides so that it was now part of her belly. She was looking at her toes, or maybe a few inches beyond them. He’d never seen her sit still before, without a book or a stack of essays, without some purpose. When she raised her face to his, it was as if she’d pulled back the air itself, like a curtain he’d never known was moveable.

“Here,” she said, unthreading her arms and hoisting the basket off of her. “Open it.”

He raised the lid. On the top, beside two bananas, was a charcoal drawing of a man. It was elaborate, with shading in the cheeks and around the eyes, the cross-hatching Miss Conley was always trying to teach them.

“I thought I owed you a better likeness.”

He recognized him. Even from the hasty sketch he’d demanded of her so long ago he recognized him. The thin hair, parted on the right, the small eyes, the uncertain mouth. It was an angry face, but whose anger was it, his father’s or his mother’s? He could hear his mother breathing unevenly through her nose. He figured he had one question, maybe two. What was most important? He knew he should ask the man’s name, but something stopped him. It was both too little and too much. He held the drawing out to her—he didn’t want those narrow eyes watching him anymore—but she flinched back and would not take it. He couldn’t think of the words for what he wanted. Not another fucking drawing. He crumpled the paper and tossed it at the sea. It landed in the wet sand. Within seconds he
regretted it and wanted to get up and grab the picture in case the water came up and carried it away, but it remained stubbornly in place. He heard her breathing and knew that he didn’t have much time. One question maybe two, right now or never again.

“Tell me.” It barely belonged to him, this voice from the clenched depth of his stomach.

She recoiled, pulling up her legs and wrapping the yellow dress over them. She rested her chin in the dip of fabric between the knobs of her knees.

“Tell me who he was and why you married him and where he is now.”

“We were never married.”

He waited for her to go on but she didn’t. He felt like shoving her right over into the sand. “Tell me.”

“I lived with my mother then.” Her voice was so faint he had to lean toward her, but imperceptibly; too much interest and he’d scare the words away. “She was a …” A wave smothered the rest.

“I can’t hear you!” he yelled into the sudden hush of the water peeling back.