The English Teacher (3 page)

He and Gena plunged into a serious discussion. Their voices dropped to exclude him. Peter feigned disinterest and slowly turned his back on them so that gradually their voices rose again.

“I don’t know about that,” Dr. Gibb said. “Youth is very resilient. But it’s true that there are easy declines and difficult declines and this was a very very difficult one.”

“Slow?”

“No, relatively speaking, it was swift. But she fought it with her bare hands. This was a woman who did not want to die, who did not believe she
could
die.”

“My father always told us no matter what, die with dignity.”

Dr. Gibb took a deep breath as if to stop himself from saying something more acerbic. “There is not a lot of room for dignity with cancer of the brain.” He said “cancer of the brain” like it was a French delicacy. Peter felt a sudden hatred for this man who had brought death to his mother’s wedding.

Why did people have such a fascination with death? Once they’d found out Tom was a widower, everyone at school wanted all the details about how his wife had died. Wasn’t it wonderful, they all agreed, that Tom had found Vida. Like a rose in winter, his English teacher had said.

Peter had stopped himself from thinking about dying long ago. When he was much younger, for no good reason that he could remember, the reality and certainty of death struck him all at once. He went through a long scary stage of believing he would die in his sleep like in the stupid rhyme Jason’s mother always said before bed. Sleep itself began to feel like death, and he would jerk himself awake whenever it came over him. He felt, late at night, the pull of his father, the mystery of him that was as large as the mystery of death itself and all tangled up with it. He began to wonder if his father was dead, dead and wanting Peter to join him in death. It was the winter of fourth grade, with its short bleak days and long nights and everything snapping and cracking outside his window. Finally spring came, with its softening and loosening, and his mind loosened too, relinquished its grip, and he began sleeping again.

He tuned out Gena and the doctor after that, and looked around the dreary room for distraction. This restaurant they’d rented out was one of the summer shacks in Fayer right on the water. It would be a great place to go on a hot August night when you wanted to feel a breeze against your skin. It was not a great place to go in November when all the windows were covered with thick plastic which billowed out and collapsed back in loudly with the wind. He was filled suddenly with a familiar loneliness, and he stood up quickly, desperate to shake it, anxious to find his mother among all these strangers.

There she was, weaving her way slowly back across the room. She looked like another person today, all that hair everywhere and
a faintly pink dress swirling down to her ankles. She lifted a flute of champagne gently from a passing tray.

Peter’s French teacher, Miss Perry, asked Dr. Gibb to dance and Peter was surprised to see how eagerly he accepted her, leaving Gena’s side without another word. His aunt turned back to him without a trace of injury.

“When are you going to come visit me?” she asked. When he didn’t answer she said, “I’m not worried. You’ll come. Someday, when you’re a little older, you’re going to get in the car and not even know where you’re going, and five days later I’ll see you pull up into my driveway.”

“I’d call first.”

“No you won’t. You’ll just show up. And I’ll be real glad to see you.” She gave him a rough hug, clubbing him on the ear with one of her thick upper arms.

What he had wanted to say was that every fall his mother promised they’d visit Gena during spring vacation, but when the vacation drew near his mother always had some excuse for not having bought the tickets—that senioritis was going to be bad this year, that not one junior was going to get into college at the rate they were going, or that it had been years since she’d taught
King Lear
and really had to do some thinking. That was her most frequent excuse for everything they didn’t do—she had to do some thinking. Peter understood that they didn’t have a lot of money compared with most of the kids at Fayer, since they lived off one teacher’s salary, but they’d never taken anything but the same three-day vacation every year. On the first weekend after school ended each June, they drove north to York Beach to stay at the Sea Spray Inn, an aquablue, three-story motel across Route 1 from a gray beach and gray water. During the day he would swim, going back and forth between the pool and the beach, while his mother sat upright reading on a towel near the rocks. They shared a room
and if he woke up in the night there was often a bright orange circle of ash floating above her bed. He felt comforted by her wakefulness, the smell of her smoke, and the rattling wheeze of the ice machine down the hall. He always wished the trip was longer.

But Gena probably didn’t want to hear about almost-visits, and Peter was glad when his mother joined them. He leaned closer to her, ashamed of his need of her, that secret ache he kept expecting to grow out of.

“How much longer are we going to stay?” he asked her.

She turned to him but didn’t answer.

“Mom?”

She was looking right at him, with that smile that had been fixed on her face all day, but she still didn’t reply.

“Mom!” He waved a hand at her. “I said, how long are we going to stay?”

“You can stay as long as you like.”

“But how long are
you
going to stay?”

“I don’t know, Peter.”

“Are we going to have dinner all together when we get home?”

“We just ate.” She spread out her arm at all the round tables still covered with dessert plates and coffee cups.

“Wasn’t that lunch?”

“It’s past six.” She was irritated with him and looked off toward Tom, who was making his way to her. He passed a table of Fayer teachers, all women, and Peter saw them admiring him.

When Tom reached them he said, “I feel like Lindbergh in Paris the way people are carrying on.”

“You smell a little better,” his mother said. “He was soaked in urine.”

Peter noticed how Tom’s fingers, like organisms separate from the rest of him, folded into his mother’s as they spoke. It was weird, much weirder than he expected, to see his mother standing there
holding hands with a man, a husband. And she had an unnatural expression on her face, like she knew the whole thing was weird, too. He wondered, for the first time, if his mother was in love with Tom, really in love, the way he was with Kristina. She couldn’t be—she’d only known him since June and he’d known Kristina since sixth grade when she was new at Fayer. They sat together at study hall. They became partners in earth science. Neither was popular; they didn’t get asked to meet at the beach on weekends where their classmates smoked cigarettes and made out behind the rocks. In the spring, Peter tried to kiss her when they were alone in the woods, collecting salamanders for their terrarium. He’d caught one, fluorescent orange like a bike reflector, and she bent over to watch it scramble in his palm. Her hair was loosely woven in a braid, strands curling free in the damp air. Even now he could remember how he wanted to press his lips to the pale skin beneath the braid as she stood there so still. But he thought you were only supposed to kiss a girl on the lips so he buried that desire and tucked his head around to find her mouth. She screamed in fright. She said she’d thought he was a bird, a crow come to snatch up the little glowing salamander. She seemed really sorry for the confusion and Peter knew that if he tried again she would have kissed back, but he’d used up all his courage in the first attempt, and they walked back with their salamanders to the science wing in silence. He never got another chance that year, and by the next fall she’d cut off her braid and grown breasts and became the most popular girl in their grade. She still was, and he still loved her.

Peter remained beside his mother and Tom, though they were as far away as stars. Even if they had both been shorter and spoken audibly, he wouldn’t have understood half of what they said to each other. It was like that with couples. Kristina was like that with Brian Rossi now. Gena had gotten pulled into a conversation with three tiny old ladies Peter didn’t recognize. Beside him, their backs to him,
Miss Rezo and Mrs. Shapiro, two of the other English teachers at Fayer, were talking quietly.

“No, I never did. No one did. When she interviewed she said her husband would be joining her, but then he never came. I don’t think anyone dared mention him after a certain point.”

“It’s like Lena Grove showing up in Jefferson looking for Lucas Burch. Where’d she come from exactly?”

“Texas, I think. I can’t recall for sure. But there was never a mention of him, not even to my cousin Lucy who sat for them for years.”

“Really? The one with the wired jaw?”

And then they launched into a long discussion of jaw-related dentistry. It seemed to him teachers often did that, picked the least interesting angle of a story and pursued it like bloodhounds, leaving behind all the more promising trails. It’s why he hated school, history in particular. The past had to be more intriguing than what they were given to learn.

“He’s no longer in the picture” was what he remembered his mother saying the first time he asked about his father. Another time she said, “He was a man,” and he waited for her to go on because she liked talking about people and what she noticed about them. But she said nothing else and he knew by her changed expression not to ask more. The two times Gena had visited, he asked, when he got her alone, if she knew anything about his father. She said his mother had never confided in her about things of that nature.

Tom turned to him. “You ready to go home, Peter?”

It sounded so normal, as if Tom had been asking him that for years. “Definitely,” he said.

From the backseat of the Belou station wagon Peter could see the heads of his mother and stepfather in the Dodge ahead. It was strange to
see her in the passenger seat of her own car, the car she’d had all his life. She looked small. Tom’s head was turned to her and he was driving very slowly.

“We might as well get out and walk,” Stuart said, slamming his palms against the steering wheel again. “What’s wrong with him?”

This was the first time he’d ever been alone with the Belou kids without his mother. He’d imagined this moment differently, too. He thought their stiffness and reserve with him—and with each other—was due to his mother’s presence, but except for Stuart’s occasional outbursts, no one said a word, and Peter’s ears rang in the silence. Fran sat up front, her arms locked over her wool coat. Caleb was with Peter in back, turned away from him, breathing onto the window, then squeaking letters into the brief fog.

The Belous lived across the bridge from Fayer in Norsett. Fayer was technically an island, though no one called it that. Norsett was on the mainland, a bigger, poorer town than Fayer with abandoned processing plants blocking most of its water views. There were a few shabby summer houses on the southern edge, but the year-round residents lived in small capes along an inland grid of streets. To Peter, who had lived in the same cottage in the grass sandwiched between playing fields all his life, a normal road lined with houses was deeply exotic. Even the sidewalks were part of a dream come true.

As they crossed the harbor, Peter felt the same surge of anticipation of the wedding that he’d had each of the times they’d driven to the Belous’ house in the past month. But this time it was cut short by the recognition that it was done, no longer something still ahead but slightly behind. It was only now, in the backseat of the Belous’ car above the cold black water, that he let himself admit disappointment. Yet, as they headed inland, turning one unfamiliar corner and another, each street looking so similar Peter wondered if he’d ever find his way out, the realization of disappointment about the day (except the two dances with Fran, which he would treasure even if she never spoke
another word to him) had no effect on his anticipation of their arrival at 81 Larch Street, where he would begin his life as a regular person who ate his meals not in a cafeteria but in a kitchen, whose neighbors were not his teachers, and who on weekends would not find himself moving furniture or passing hors d’oeuvres to alumni. Most of all he looked forward to siblings, and even their withdrawal in the car now did not chase away his image of what that would be like. There was bound to be some awkwardness at first, but in a few weeks they’d look back and laugh at how shy they’d all been.

He wondered what Tom and his mother were talking about. She would be thinking about their dog Walt and how long he’d been left alone at a strange house. She would be thinking about all the papers she couldn’t grade this weekend. She didn’t like any disruption of her routine. Even their dinky three days at York Beach threw her. He could count on her being ornery (one of her favorite words to describe herself) for the rest of the month. But what she would be saying was a mystery. He’d never, before this summer, seen his mother in the company of a man.

Stuart pulled into the driveway behind the Dodge. Peter got out last, and waited a few seconds for his mother, but she and Tom remained in the front seat, windows rolled tight. He followed the others into the house.

Not to Peter, not to anyone in particular, Fran said, “Thank God
that
is over.” She collapsed onto the sofa in her coat. Stuart, who didn’t ever seem to wear a coat, went to turn on the TV. He turned the dial from channel to channel and when he finally stopped, he muttered, “Jesus, look at that,” but he was blocking the set and no one cared enough to ask him to move. Caleb snuck into the recliner in the corner, a chair so enveloping and puckered it looked like an enormous cupped palm. He picked up the library book on bats that had been left facedown on the arm, snapped on the standing lamp over his shoulder, and began to read.