The English Teacher (7 page)

By the end of the ceremony he’d worked his way to her row of seats and was the first to congratulate her on her award. He was the godfather of one of the graduates, he told her. Could she join them for dinner? She didn’t like thinking back on this day and the breaks in her voice at the podium. What could he have seen in her then?
Perhaps it wasn’t her at all but that crazy senior class whom she’d loved, who’d risen and hooted and whooped as she walked to the lectern, as if she were not a teacher but a stripper in nothing but high heels and tassels. Was it simply the energy of that moment, such a contrast to the wake of death he found himself bobbing in? Here was life, he might have said to himself; seize it now. Oh she would disappoint him. She was not life. They were all wrong about that.

Assembly had already started. On stage, Greg Rathburn, the history chair who took every world occurrence personally, was explaining the events in Iran. Vida remained in the doorway instead of taking her seat with the juniors across the room. Greg asked for a moment of silence for the ninety Americans being held at the embassy. Vida bent her head but did not shut her eyes or think of the hostages. It was hardly silence with the irrepressible hum of four hundred and twenty-four students who had been separated for a whole weekend. It lasted a long time. After a while, she raised her head in impatience. As always, Brick Howells and Charlie Grant, headmaster and sidekick, stood at their podiums bathed in their own private spotlights. When Greg solemnly thanked the school, Brick jerked his head up like a choirboy feigning prayer while Charlie kept his head bowed for a second too long, as if the interminable moment had not been quite long enough for all of his good thoughts. Phonies to a man, she thought.

“On a much happier note,” Brick said, glancing down at his notes as young Greg, heartthrob, former Fayer swimming star, swung himself off the stage. “A little bird has told me that our very own Mrs. Avery was married this weekend.” Bursts of applause as surprised heads craned toward her usual seat and then, after a struggle, found her at the door. The applause was stronger now, accompanied by repetitive grunts as if she had made a touchdown. Vida endured the attention, wishing she could see through the heads of the upperclassmen to the front where Peter sat with the
rest of the tenth graders. What expression would he have on his face? Why had he been so angry this morning? Brick spoke through the clapping: “You will be courteous enough to call her Mrs.
Belou
from now on.” More cheers, as if replacing your identity were some great achievement.

The presumptuousness of Brick Howells. What right had he to change her professional name without asking? And here, before the whole school, when she hadn’t even thought to mention her marriage to her students, let alone present them with a new label for her person. “Have a fruitful day,” the old git concluded. Vida spun away from the auditorium before anyone could catch her.

Her classroom was the only one on the third floor of the mansion. Brick had put her up there nine years ago to teach an unruly group of eighth graders, and the next year she’d insisted on teaching all her classes in the room. Her students made a fuss about the steep climb, but Vida loved those old uninstitutionalized back stairs that carried her from the loud reverberating blend of instruction, curiosity, and resistance that could be heard down the long hall of former bedrooms on the second floor to the musty silence of her attic. All they’d had to do to make a real classroom for her up here was punch out a wall. The ceiling was high, and the series of long lean windows at the far southern end brought in so much light Vida rarely had to switch on the fluorescent bars they’d installed.

The rest of the mansion, despite the sweeping front staircase and many fireplaces, no longer looked or smelled like anything but a school. Up here, however, Vida felt the old house. She could hear the rustling haste of the servant girls as they dressed in these rooms before dawn, just seconds ahead of the summoning bell of her mother’s impatient ancestors. Other teachers did not understand her insistence on remaining on the third floor, especially now since the science wing was finished and there were classrooms to
spare. She didn’t understand how they could bear the distractions of first- and second-story teaching: people idly peered through the eye-level window on each door, interrupted for chalk or Kleenex, or delivered thoroughly unurgent messages, all as if forty minutes were not already a totally insufficient amount of time in a day to plant a few new ideas in the heads of these students. No one barged in on her classroom up here unless it was dire. If one of her colleagues ever made the journey up, they would inevitably complain about the smell. It was so moldy, they all said, like a wet wool blanket left for about a hundred years. But Vida loved that smell. It smelled the way Texas never could. And most important, she had her own private bathroom with a dead bolt she installed herself.

It was a dark morning and Vida reluctantly turned on the overhead. She pulled out
Tess
from her bag, set it on the desk, then went to the board and wrote

Sir John
green malt in floor.
blighted star

It was all completely rote. This was her thirteenth year of teaching the book. The bell rang. Up here it was more a vibration than a noise, followed soon after by stronger tremors as every student in the building headed to their first class. Soon she could hear her tenth graders heckling each other up the stairs.

“Nice boots, Frizz.”

“He parked his Harley out back.”

“Walk much, Lindsey?”

“Eat much, Tank?”

“Jesus, Michael. Quit touching me.”

Slowly they began to fill the room with their insults and self-consciousness, their collective hours at the mirror, and all their elaborate, transparent airs. They exhausted Vida with their attempts at self-possession, the boys and their cynicism, the girls and their shiny smelly lips.

She heard a girl whisper to another, “‘Green malt in floor’?”

The second bell rang and by the time it had finished the great mass of them had divided like cells into individual seats.

Harry Knox, an earnest young man with a feeble frame and large head, addressed her. “Forgive me, Mrs. Avery, but I’m not sure I under—”

“Mrs. Belou!” someone bellowed beside him.

This gave Harry pause. He looked at Vida, then down at his notebook. He seemed to have forgotten his point. Then he flipped his head back up at her. “How do you spell that?”

She sucked in a breath and wrote Tom’s name on the board. BELOU. Then she put a MRS. in front of it. It seemed to stare back at her, mocking her in some way.
What had she done?

They were all looking at her, not as their teacher but as a woman who had just gotten married.
Married.
She felt heavy and mealy, like there was wet sand beneath her skin.

“Hey, now you’re like Vida Blue, the baseball player.”

“She’s V
ee
da, not Vyda.”

“Why aren’t you on a honeymoon?” someone in back asked.

“Let’s talk about Tess. She’s far more interesting.”

“So far in this class I’ve liked what we’ve read.” Amy said.

“Everyone struggles with
Tess
at first,” Vida said.

“When do people start liking it?”

“Around page four hundred and sixteen.”

Amy flipped through the fat paperback. “I knew it. The very last page.”

“
Tess
is a rite of passage,” Vida offered, and they wrote it down in their notebooks. Only a few would know what she meant, but she felt impatient with them for stepping behind the curtain of her private life. They could look it up themselves.

“Why do they have to describe everything so vociferously?”

“First of all, Andrew, who is ‘they’?”

He looked on the front of his book. “Thomas Hardy.”

“One person, singular. And do you really mean vociferously, or might you be referring to another word in the
V
section of your
PSAT
study guide?”

Vida could see the long lists of words twisting around in Andrew’s head. The class offered him other choices.

“Verbosely.”

“Voluminously.”

“Vacuously.”

Andrew nodded. “All of the above. They go”—she gave him her eye—“
he
goes on forever.”

“Example, please?”

“Here. Page twenty-two. ‘The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor aforesaid’—if he already said it why’s he saying it again? ‘The Vale was known in former times as the Forest of the White Hart, from a curious legend of King Henry the Third. …’ Oh my God, the guy can’t stop himself.”

“Okay, Hemingway, I want you to remember that paragraph when you get to page four hundred and sixteen.”

“I can’t conceive of getting to page four hundred and sixteen in this book.”

“You will, because you’re going to need a good grade in this class to balance out your abysmal verbal test scores. And when you get there, I want you to go back and read that passage and you’ll see
Hardy has managed to stuff most of the plot of this novel into that description of Tess’s hometown.”

“Does Tess die like the white hart?”

You couldn’t get much past Helen Cavanough. You could only throw her off with a flat-faced lie. “Of course Tess doesn’t die. Now take out a piece of paper.” The class groaned. “Not for a quiz. I want you to write four interesting detailed sentences about your hometown.”

They liked this kind of exercise, and began writing immediately.

Vida moved to the other side of her desk. She sat in the uncomfortable captain’s chair with the school’s insignia stamped in gold at her back, and opened her own notebook to a blank page. Lydia Rezo, who also taught the creative writing course, always did the exercises she assigned her students and even read what she’d written aloud to them. Vida never did, but she felt agitated today, and the act of sitting and holding a pencil was soothing.
Norsett.
Though it had been her town for less than forty-eight hours, as she began writing the word she felt she had a lot to say; but once it was there on the page her thoughts evaporated.

“Don’t think, Mrs. Belou, write,” said Brian, mimicking her when she caught her students staring into space for too long during essay tests.

Vida wrote.
I got married yesterday. I am married. Hello my name is Vida Belou.
She stopped again. She was a hopeless writer who taught writing. She was like Joe Cox, Fayer’s beloved lacrosse coach, who’d never heard of the game when he took the job. Like Mitch Calhoun, who taught
Moby Dick
year after year having only read the first page.
I am a fraud.
She wanted to try and write one beautiful sentence. What to her was beautiful?
This morning the bridge stretched out over the Atlantic like a
… Some kind of bird? A diver? Something more abstract like a promise or a long-awaited answer? Her mind burned in frustration.

Michael cleared his throat and Vida looked up to find every student watching her. How long had it been? She had no idea.

“Okay,” she said, closing her notebook, rising. “Let’s hear a few.”

No one raised a hand. She was used to this. She scanned the room for a solid start. Danny had his head tucked into his neck, which meant he liked what he’d written. She nodded at him. “Let’s hear it, Dan.”

The boy looked stricken, as if he never imagined having to share these words. He wasn’t the kind of student who would ever dare refuse, though his eyes begged her to choose again. On another day she might have relented and shifted her request to Helen beside him. But today she did not. Danny was from Norsett, too, and she was curious to know what he’d say about the place. “Go ahead.”

His face splotched red and he inched closer to his page. “Norsett is an old fishing port from which in the nineteenth century sailors traveled as far as the Bay of Fundy to bring back tuna and cod. Behind the old white church lies the graveyard, the flattest patch of land in town and enclosed by iron gates with iron roses on each handle, where the town’s seafaring dead are buried.” He took in a wobbly breath. “My mother’s body is an anomaly there, a thirty-two-year-old woman who never learned how to swim.”

She had known this child since he came to the school in fifth grade. She had taught him three years in a row. How did she not know that his mother had died? Had she once known, then forgotten? She was aware of the spreading length of her silence.

“It’s only three sentences,” he said.

“Three incredible sentences,” Helen said.

Nearly everyone in the class grunted their agreement. Vida knew something more was needed, something that recognized the quality and sophistication of the writing. She felt incapable of those words. She hated it when students got so personal, and she never
expected it of Danny. She hoped Fran and Caleb weren’t writing things like this in their English classes, tying up the tongues of their teachers. “Most of those fishermen didn’t know how to swim either.” she offered.