Hummingbirds (11 page)

“I
think I want to kiss your brother,” Dixie Doyle says conclusively to her friend Beth as they sit in the front of the classroom awaiting Binhammer’s arrival.

“Dixie!” Beth scolds. “That’s gross.”

“She’s right, Beth,” Caroline says. Then she holds up her palm as though she were cupping a small, trembling animal. “He’s
so cute.”

“He’s just a little kid,” Beth says.

“Does he have a girlfriend?” Dixie continues. “Does he want me to be his girlfriend?”

“Dixie just likes the way he looks,” Andie interjects lethargically, leaning forward over her desk. “Pocket-sized, hairless. And from what I hear, he can even multiply fractions.”

Earlier that morning Beth’s mother dropped her off at school with her younger brother Charlie—sixth grade, Bardolph Boys’ Academy, voice unbroken—in tow. The presence of the puppyish boy right outside Carmine-Casey caused such a commotion among the students that it took an administrator and a janitor to round them all up and herd them into the building. The crowd was so dense, though, that for a while they misplaced the boy—and eventually found him, blushing, in the middle of three concentric rings of girls who were touching his hair, pinching his cheeks, holding his hands, and asking him about his position on girls vis-à-vis cooties.

To Dixie, he is the most adorable thing she has ever seen. He is little for his age and has long eyelashes, soft round cheeks,
and glistening red lips in the shape of a bow. His skin is so smooth that she now hates her own in comparison, and he has the sweetest, softest voice—like something downy and blossomy that you would want to feel against your face. Beth has told them that because of his size he is sometimes picked on in school, and Dixie swears with witnesses present that she will personally castrate any boy who picks on little Charlie.

“Snip, snip,” she says. “I’ll do it, too.”

“Can we not talk about my brother anymore,” Beth pleads.

“Come on,” Dixie says. “Let me kiss him at least. He doesn’t have to be my boyfriend, but at least let me kiss him,
d’accord?”

Madame Millet-Johnson, the French teacher, complimented Dixie on her accent last week, so Dixie has been peppering her conversation with French phrases ever since.

“Don’t be gross.”

“I need to practice for the play.”

“No.”

“Why don’t you practice with your costar?” Andie asks. She is now slumped over her entire desk, looking like she wants to fall asleep.

Dixie makes the line of her mouth flat. “Jeremy and I have already practiced. We’ve practiced enough. I’m tired of practicing with him.”

“Really?” says Caroline.

“Already?” Andie mumbles.

“I mean, he can still be my boyfriend. But it’s just that—he’s everywhere. You know? I think he has four tongues. I swear, at certain points he’s had a tongue in my mouth, on my neck, and in both my ears at the same time. It makes me want to throw up. And then I have to go into the bathroom and towel myself down.
Quel dommage!”

“Too many tongues.” Caroline shakes her head as if in experienced commiseration.

“Does he seem to be enjoying himself?” Beth asks.

Dixie considers this and then says, “I guess so. He usually
looks pretty satisfied with himself. He pats his stomach, like he’s just eaten a big meal.”

“Is that all you’ve done with him? I mean, you haven’t done anything else, right?”

Dixie grimaces. “With
him
? Come on.”

When Binhammer comes into the room, Dixie turns to face front and all the girls arrange themselves in their seats. Dixie folds her hands on the desk in front of her in what she imagines to be the posture of eager studenthood.

But before her teacher has a chance to start the class, Dixie states, “Mr. Binhammer, Beth won’t let me kiss her brother.”

The class laughs. Dixie, the consummate performer, stares straight ahead and ignores her audience.

“Huh,” Binhammer says, nodding his head. “Did you ask nicely?”

“Mais oui.
I did. I’m being a perfect lady about the whole thing.”

“He’s
twelve,
Mr. Binhammer,” Beth says.

“But,” Dixie says, “he’s wise for his age.”

“Twelve, huh?” Binhammer puts on his best Solomon face. “Have you tried candy?”

The class enjoys the exchange. That is, all of them except for Liz Warren, who, like a beacon of sour grievance flashing from the back row, sits there rolling her eyes. Binhammer wonders what’s wrong with her—why she has to be so serious all the time. He likes smart girls, but sometimes they’re hard to entertain. All she is is correct answers and disapproving looks. Her arms crossed, her face a stony crag, she’s like the silent voice of his moral conscience—always telling him that it’s time to get down to business. Enough nonsense. Enough playing around.

He wonders, if she’s so dissatisfied with the way things work in his class, why she continues to come at all. She’s a senior, after all. Most of the senior girls have already earned or bought their way into college and do what they want. But no, that’s the other problem with smart girls. They just keep coming to class—long past when they have to—just out of spite.

In the teachers’ lounge after class Binhammer finds Ted Hughes bent over a stack of papers and chewing on the end of a ballpoint pen.

“What’s wrong?” Ted Hughes asks by way of a greeting. Binhammer has noticed that the man has this uncanny ability to read his emotional state with a single glance. Like some kind of empath. Maybe that’s what makes him so attractive to women. There is something appealing about being interpreted by him, your mind a manuscript under his eyes.

“It’s nothing. It’s this girl in my class. Liz Warren. She—”

“Oh, Liz. She’s in my class too. She’s wonderful, isn’t she?”

She has never mentioned to Binhammer—in the few brief conversations they have had—that she was taking another English class.

“She’s smart, I suppose. But don’t you find her a bit humorless?”

Ted Hughes thinks about that. “Maybe at first,” he concedes. “But she was laughing at something the other day in class—what was it? Oh, sure, it was Chaucer. She was hysterical about it.”

“Chaucer?
The Canterbury Tales?”

“Not
The Canterbury Tales.
She was doing a presentation on one of the minor poems. ‘The Book of the Duchess.’ She thought it was hilarious.”

“Really.”

“Sidesplitting.” Ted Hughes shakes his head as if sympathizing with Binhammer, but Binhammer doesn’t feel like he’s being sympathized with. “And then she came up to me afterward and gave me this twenty-minute lecture on how Chaucer was the prefiguration—that’s even the word she used—the prefiguration of the TV sitcom.”

“Uh-huh. But don’t you get tired of the eye-rolling?”

“The eye-rolling?”

“Never mind.”

Yes, Binhammer thinks now, it’s true. That Liz Warren is a great kid. He has been thinking of her as superior, self-righteous
and joyless. But now it seems obvious to him that she is just the opposite. She is a great diviner of joy—dowsing for it among the dead, arid plains of commonness and vulgarity. She is a leader, an aggressive intellect, a bright orbiting light of clarity and reason—for anyone who would bother to look up—and now she is the prize student of the dashing and obviously more insightful Ted Hughes.

Liz Warren. He should have cultivated that seed long ago. Now it’s too late. He cannot recover her. She is too used to scowling at him from the back row. And besides, she is now a Hughes girl.

What more can the man take from him? It would be easier if Binhammer could simply hate him. But when he looks at Hughes, he knows why Liz Warren likes him. He understands why his own wife would be attracted to him. The man burns like an ember.

Then he thinks of his own prize student, Dixie Doyle, glowing tepidly from the front row of the class like a low-wattage bulb gathering moths. She and the rest of her alliterative friends: Caroline Cox, Beth Barber, Andie Abramson. Why does he have to have the students with names like cartoon characters? Talking about shaving their legs and kissing each other’s brothers. Admiring each other’s scented highlighters. Sharing lipstick. Chewing gum.

Instead of laughing at Chaucer, they treat him with misplaced seriousness. Dixie Doyle looks at the woodcut illustration on the cover of the Penguin edition of her
Canterbury Tales
and asks with tremendous gravity, “Was Chaucer fat? He looks fat,
n’est pas?”
And then, “Why is he wearing a dress? Was that the style in Old English?”

“Old English is a language, Dixie. And this isn’t it anyway. This is Middle English.”

“Bien sur,”
she says happily, drawing a picture of a sunflower in her notebook.

Now it occurs to him that even this room-temperature quartet of girls may only like him because he lets them get away
with things. He doesn’t say anything if they come into class late, and he silently tolerates the eating of rice cakes. And the putting on of mascara. He has even been talked into giving them extensions on papers because of the sicknesses of family pets. “Mr. Strawberry was throwing up all night. He’s got worms.” And he imagines that, if he were ever actually to say no, his little cadre of faithful followers would dissipate in a cloud of outraged harrumphs. There is no loyalty there. There is no permanence.

He spends the rest of the morning in a funk, and later he sits down at a table with Lonnie Abramson, Andie’s mother, during lunch.

“Let me ask you a question, Lonnie,” he says.

“Someday I’m going to eat real food again,” she says, holding up a forkful of dry greens. “This is no way to live.” Then she pokes her fork in the direction of his stomach. “You’re lucky. Always looking so svelte.”

“So—”

“You could even stand to eat more. I’m concerned about your diet.”

He looks at his hands in near defeat.

“I’m sorry, honey. What did you want to ask me?”

“About the girls. The students. They talk about other teachers, you’ve heard them talk.”

“Sure.”

“What do they say about me?”

She puts down her fork as if astonished. “Are you kidding me? Honestly, are you kidding me? They
adore
you. I swear, my Andie won’t listen to a word her father says, but you—you’re like a rock star. And the same with her friends. Everyone knows that that Dixie Doyle is in love with you. Where’s this coming from anyway?”

“Well. They’re nice girls.”

She guffaws. “Nice girls, hell! Listen, I’m the mother of a teenage girl. And I was a teenage girl once myself. In the bygone days. I mean, if I had a teacher like you when I was in school, well!” She raises her eyebrows and nods meaningfully. “In fact,
I’m always telling George, that most dull of straight arrows, I’m always telling him, ‘There’s nothing wrong with a little sex appeal, George.’”

“Anyway, I—”

“I tell him, ‘Look at your daughter, George. How do you think she’s doing so well in English? She’s feeling inspired, if you know what I mean.’ That’s what I tell him,
inspired.”

“That’s nice of you, but I think I have to—”

“In fact, I was going to ask you something. I wanted your advice on this young man Andie has drudged up from the mire of a performing arts school downtown.”

“Well, I—”

“The thing is, I think she’s…going a little too far. You follow me? And even though I’ve told her she can talk to me about it, she doesn’t confide in me the way she confides in you. And what I was wondering—”

The rest of her sentence, much to Binhammer’s relief, is cut off by the sound of the period bell. He bolts up from his seat while she’s still talking.

“Oh, yes,” she continues, “I suppose we’d better get back to it. We’ll talk about this some more later. But don’t tell Andie I talked to you. She would kill me. This is for your ears only.”

And she actually reaches out to pinch the lobe of his left ear.

For the rest of the day, Binhammer moves quickly through the halls trying to avoid entanglements. Some girls call out to him, but he pretends not to hear them and eventually ducks into the teachers’ lounge. Walter is in there, but Walter is a fixed quantity. He knows that Walter dislikes him. He understands that. Their rapport has that percentage of dislike built in, a solid bulwark against the possibility of intimacy.

After the last bell of the day rings, he gathers himself into his coat and pushes his way through the swirling mass of girls in the lobby to the sidewalk outside. He is almost to the corner and beginning to feel certain of his escape when he spots Dixie Doyle coming toward him with a huge paper cup from the corner coffee shop.

“Ou est-ce que vous
going, Mr. Binhammer?”

“Home, Dixie.” He tries to keep moving, but she has stationed her silly little body directly in front of him.

“What are you going to have for dinner? Is your wife a good cook? Do you ever cook her dinner? Women like that, you know.”

“Thanks for the advice. I’ll see you—”

“Where does your wife shop, Mr. Binhammer? For clothes, I mean.”

He gives her a look. “Dixie, did you finish reading the Doris Lessing stories?”

“The what?”

“For class.”

“Oh, sure. I mean, mostly. Some.”

“Dixie, why can’t you try to do some work for a change? It’s
education
that we’re concerned with here.”

“Geez! What’s wrong? Was some student giving you a hard time? Because I can take care of it, you know. They listen to me around here.”

“Forget it. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

And he leaves her standing there, reaching down to adjust the strap on her shoe, holding her steaming cup high as a torch that heralds something awful, and crying,
“Bon soir,
Mr. Binhammer!
Bon soir!”

O
f all his responsibilities as a teacher of English—the report cards and the faculty meetings, the roll-taking and the conferences with irate parents—there is no duty more objectionable to Binhammer than the grading of papers. The thing about papers is that they accumulate in the most tyrannical of ways. They stack up in unruly piles with torn corners and awkwardly stapled edges hanging out everywhere. They are always too many to carry around as a single quantity, and so it is necessary to break them into smaller piles—knowing as you finish grading each pile that this is only one small part of the whole. And most of them, in Binhammer’s experience, offer little more than plagiaristic sentiments by the paragraphful. All in neat little trains of black letters on endless leaves of white.

He always thinks about the plural quantity of papers as a “brick of papers,” and uses it in the same way that you might talk about a brace of fowl or a herd of buffalo.

“What have you got there?” Walter asks this morning, leaning over the table in the teachers’ lounge where Binhammer is holding a ballpoint pen—in frozen potentiality—over one such brick of papers. He has read the same line five times. He has memorized the words, but he can’t seem to make them stick together or make sense in any way—and down they plummet through the gutter of his consciousness.

“Papers,” he replies.

“Papers, sure.” Then, after a pause: “That’s a lot of papers you’ve got there.”

Walter takes a unique pleasure in Binhammer’s suffering. If he were an old soldier, he would be the kind to want new recruits hammered and humiliated into shape just as he once was.

Binhammer reads the line again. He underlines it to help him focus. But now he has to write something beside it to justify the underline.

“Are they good?” Walter asks as he sits down in a chair across the table and leans back.

Binhammer looks up. “Not particularly.”

“That’s a shame.” Walter is glowing.

The other thing about this odious task is that it feels like work being dropped down a well. The comments are made, the grade is given—and the student’s next paper might as well be a photocopy of the previous assignment with the title of one book whited out and another scrawled in. It seems to make no difference what he writes—whether it is thoughtful, articulated criticism or half-conscious nonsense. Everything, he sometimes thinks, sounds like nonsense to teenage girls. The whole world is nonsense.

He kicks himself awake and, even though his eyes have been concentrating on it for a long time now, looks at the paper before him with renewed vigor. He has managed to get that line lodged securely in his head, now that he has underlined and starred it. The next few lines he reads at a breakneck speed to the end of the paragraph, where he lets out a sigh of relief. Nothing. The girl is saying nothing. Nonsense piled on top of nonsense. He circles a misplaced comma and moves on.

“When were they turned in?” Walter asks pointedly, still quite proud of himself.

“Couple weeks. Three weeks. Four.” Binhammer doesn’t look up—he’s running his fingers through his hair, trying not to express the desperation that the other man obviously wants to evoke.

“Four weeks. Hm.”

Walter is about to say something else when, thankfully, the door opens and Ted Hughes comes in. From outside in the hall,
Binhammer can hear the girlvoices, like little chirping birds, calling out “Mr. Hughes! Mr. Hughes!”—but Ted Hughes doesn’t seem to hear and lets the door close on them.

He stops in the middle of the room and puts his fingers to his chin, then turns and seems surprised to find Binhammer and Walter sitting there.

“Oh, hi,” he says. “There was a girl—I don’t know her—painting her nails. Sitting on the ground in the hall painting her nails. She would do one finger and stop and blow on it and then do another.”

Ted Hughes has a tendency toward the reverie that Binhammer admires. The absorption into an image, into a moment. The way in which he can seem knotted up in the tendrils of things. Binhammer knows he’s the opposite—sufficiently lucky if he can keep his mind on one thing for more than a minute or two.

“And all these other girls were walking by her in the hall, and I kept thinking sooner or later someone’s going to trip over her and that nail polish is going to go everywhere. But it never happened. You should have seen it. Like a dance—the way these girls move around each other without looking, as if they were blind. Some of them were even walking backward, but when they came to this girl painting her nails, they knew to step over her. How do they know that? It’s like a flock of birds—how the scientists can’t figure out why they all know to turn in the air at exactly the same time and avoid colliding with one another.”

Finally Ted Hughes looks at Binhammer and Walter. Walter has a deadpan sneer on his face. No one can shut Walter up like Ted Hughes, whose inadvertent poeticism seems to steamroll over Walter’s niggling meanness.

Then Ted Hughes shrugs. “Is that a new shirt?” he says to Binhammer.

Binhammer feels suddenly self-conscious. “No,” he says, his hand smoothing out the front of it. “I just haven’t worn it yet this year.”

‘It’s nice.’

“Thanks.”

Then Ted Hughes lets fall onto a chair what looks like a very heavy bag from his shoulder and draws out of it a brick of papers even larger than Binhammer’s. He brings them over and drops them with a heavy, corpselike thud on the table.

“They got you too, huh?” Binhammer asks.

“What? Oh, the papers. Yeah.” He brings out a second brick, the same size as the first. “It made for a rather dull weekend.”

Binhammer’s stomach sinks. “You already graded all of them?”

Ted Hughes nods. “It took me hours.”

“When did you get them? Friday?”

He nods again. “It’s the worst thing in the world, isn’t it? I can’t bear having them around staring at me.”

It’s another instance when Ted Hughes mistakenly believes he’s commiserating with Binhammer. So the man can grade the hell out of a stack of papers. It’s a skill, a skill like any other. But it’s a skill that Binhammer doesn’t have.

“How,” he asks with great sincerity, nodding at the stacks of papers in front of Ted Hughes, “how do you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Ted Hughes responds. “You just start doing it. And when you want to stop, you don’t. And then, after a while, you’re finished and you feel pure. Think of it like religious penance. I sure like that shirt.”

Binhammer shakes his head at the stacks one last time and then looks down at his shirt. “You want it?” he asks. “Is that what you’re saying?”

And the two men laugh. Walter, they now realize, is gone, but neither of them can recall when he got up from the table and left the lounge.

But when Ted Hughes has to go to a class the next period, Binhammer is left alone with those two stacks of Hughes papers weighing down the opposite side of the table with the density of supernovas, and he finds himself getting angry. How is he supposed to grade his own papers now—particularly the one he
has been trying to focus on for the past hour—with that pile of success across the table?

He gets up and goes to the stacks and begins to thumb through the papers. Sure enough, there are little red marks on each of them. They’re authentic. He slows down to read some of the comments. In one margin there’s a note that says, “You should try Lacan—let’s talk.” On another paper: “You know this could be better.” On a third, there is a paragraph circled with a single word written in the margin next to it: “Metempsychosis?” This last paper is Liz Warren’s. He flips to the last page to see the grade. A-minus.

It takes some nerve to give Liz Warren an A-minus. It’s almost admirable. What really gets him: she’ll probably respect Hughes even more for it.

He feels spiteful and takes a handful of the neatly ordered papers from each stack and shuffles them into the opposite stack. Then he goes to the window and stares out of it for a while. On the street below a car pulls up and lets out a Carmine-Casey girl, maybe coming late from a dentist appointment. He watches as she adjusts her skirt and her shirt before entering the building.

There’s no way he’s going back to grading. Not yet at least.

Instead he takes a book of Adrienne Rich poems and walks down the hall to the copy room, where Sam the copy man is bent over his desk with headphones on, doing a crossword puzzle. The copy room is empty, so Binhammer takes the machine in the farthest back corner and opens the book of poems facedown on the glass.

He shuts his eyes as the vertical line of pure bright light sweeps underneath the glass. He can feel the light on his face. Then he turns the page and presses the copy button again.

He’d like to see that Ted Hughes get the wind knocked out of him some time. Ted Hughes and his grotesquely large stacks of corrected papers. It would be nice, just nice, to be there when he stumbled. It would be gratifying to see Mrs. Mayhew thumb through the stacks and say, “Is this what we’re calling teaching these days, Mr. Hughes?”

He turns to the next Adrienne Rich poem and slaps the copy button savagely.

The problem is that it seems when Ted Hughes stumbles, he does so into the open arms of adoring fans. Binhammer has never seen someone so
accidental
in his accomplishments.

To hell with him and his lost-looking eyes, his piles of achievement, his gestures of passion and grief. To hell with his sudden camaraderie, his strange moods of intimacy that corner you in silent places, his performances of delicacy. To hell with his seductions. Of the students, of the faculty, of his wife. He is a man who cannot be trusted. A man who will betray you.

When Binhammer slams his palm down on the copy button again the machine gives a quick ratcheting sound and screeches to a halt. On the digital screen flash the words
PAPER JAM
and a diagram with arrows pointing to the possible location of the problem. Damn.

He looks up briefly at Sam the copy man, but to get Sam involved means a bantering conversation that Binhammer is not in the mood for. Getting down on his knees, he reckons he can fix the problem himself.

Opening the front panel of the machine reveals a complex and disturbingly organic tangle of dials, plates, wheels, cables, and cylinders. He can see the white edge of a page choked up in what he thinks of as the throat of the machine—and he sees that he needs to turn a green plastic dial in order to release the page, but when he grabs hold of the thing it won’t turn. He tries again, but his hand slips and his knuckles are driven into the sharp metal edge of the paper drawer.

He is not in the mood for this. Ted Hughes gives meaningful criticism to piles and piles of paper, and Binhammer cannot even produce pages with the help of a machine.

That green plastic knob is going to turn.

Gritting his teeth, he grabs hold of the thing and bears down on it until it snaps off, sending him sprawling on the floor. It’s not until he looks down at the knob in his hand that he sees
an arrow on the face of it—indicating that the knob was only meant to be turned in one direction.

He peeks around the machine at Sam the copy man, but he is still hunched over his crossword puzzle, the earphones emitting a tinny, repetitive music that can be heard even from back here.

So he stands up and brushes off the front of his pants, closes the front panel of the machine, notices that the digital readout now reports that it
NEEDS SERVICE,
and pockets the green knob surreptitiously.

Everything is coming apart. This is what he thinks as he gathers his Adrienne Rich poems and any other evidence that might implicate him in the malfunction. Everything is coming apart in my hands, he thinks. What do they expect of me now? My pockets are full of pieces of other things.

As he leaves the copy room, he does not look at Sam the copy man, who has squinted his eyes trying to think of a five-letter word for “ordered.” He glares at Binhammer’s back and chews on the end of his pen.

Sam has never liked Binhammer, who does just as much sulking from place to place as all the little twit girls he teaches. The whole place is going to hell, Sam thinks. If this is what kind of women we’re creating, forget it. The snotty rich girls with their doily socks and their arrogant little ponytails.

They think they own the world. And the teachers don’t help, like they should. Why don’t any of them give these little brats a kick in the ass? They’re just as self-involved as the students—like that Binhammer. These girls think they own everything. They think they can have whatever they want. They think everyone is looking at them.

Wait till they find out different.