Precious (5 page)

Eva plans a necessary lie. If Mr. Nealy should see her father and mention that he saw her on this day when she was told to stay at home and watch her sister, Eva will say she only went to the grocery store for milk, butter, and eggs, all of which they are in dire need of getting. She cannot bear the thought of her father taking the car keys as punishment. Nor can she bear the thought of irritating him more. She has spent most of her time staying out of his way. How angry he often becomes with the girls, how bitter when things aren’t just right, when chores aren’t done and the house is left a mess. His outbursts happen with greater frequency and seem directed at what Eva hasn’t done correctly: Sissy hasn’t been wearing sensible clothes, or Eva has been wrong to let Sissy excavate only the toffee bits from the ice cream, or dinner wasn’t nutritionally balanced, or she has once again managed to turn his T-shirt a shade of pink. It is as if, in Natalia’s absence, Eva is supposed to become Miss Manners, Betty Crocker, Ann Landers, Mrs. Brady, and Alice the maid, all rolled into one. And when she fails, when things aren’t the way they should be, she must work through the winds of her father’s moods, only to have them replaced with a silence that clamps down to the bone, forcing Eva to gnaw her way out of it.

He would be happy if she never left the house. He would be happy if she were just like Natalia.

Eva winces. Mr. Nealy’s car is barely visible in her rearview mirror,
and she changes the radio station, opting for the Beatles. She taps her fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music.

Pete, Peter, Petey. No,
she decides,
not Petey.
Petey suggests a fumbling boy, like Brian with his fantasies and George with his sloppy fingers. She thinks of Peter’s broad face that is more complicated than attractive—a pronounced nose; round glasses that accentuate his green eyes; a mass of wavy hair; pale skin that suggests he spends all his days indoors. He is a man with political convictions, a man who lived through the protests of the sixties and came out on the other side wiser, and, according to him, only mildly cynical and scathed. “The country,” he told her over the phone one night, “is going to hell. We were better when we were younger. We never thought our ideas would collapse under us.”

“You’re at your best now,” she assured him, and she was surprised— genuinely surprised—when he laughed. “Maybe you are,” he said. “But I’m not.”

She checks her face in the mirror and wonders what Peter sees that she cannot see yet in herself. She smudges her eye shadow—copper and rose blend. Satisfied, she sings. She passes homes of those she knows, parents of students who attend Watson High. She passes winding streets: Brandywine, Ellwine, Copeland, Main. She passes the firehouse. At the light by the 7-Eleven, she turns and drives over the metal bridge and holds the wheel tighter as the car judders. Below, she can see the rows of dark buildings, long covered with soot, the blast furnaces that spew out an orange-red flame. She scrunches lower in her seat. Somewhere below, her father is checking pipes and lines and fixing damaged equipment. She speeds up, exits the bridge. “I am going, I am gone,” she sings. She waves her hand out the window, feels bold again.

She loops around the public library with its wide, squat steps, its functional design and brick columns. The sight of the library still thrills her, the thought of that early June day when she first ran into Peter outside of classes, how everything started from that brief encounter, when he held a copy of Kerouac’s
On the Road
and told her his baby had destroyed his copy, crayon marks on half the pages.

How did I get so lucky?
she wonders.
How lucky to be able to pick between the boy’s love and the man’s love and pick the man, with his expansive thoughts and reading!
He has told her things, such things! He speaks of Thoreau and Emerson and Donne, Nixon and Johnson. In conversation, he has treated her as an equal. He thrills her, he alarms her, when he whispers, “Here, like this,” and “Go down.” He appeases her when she, feeling brave, speaks tentatively of home, her father, but never of that night. He almost never disagrees that institutions are oppressive to today’s youth, that they obliterate every imaginative thought. Once, over Sunday dinner, Eva told her father “The ozone is a factor,” and Frank Kisch responded plainly, “What kind of shit are you learning in school?”

Watson High remains as it has throughout its many years of existence: an uninspired four-story building, its boxy formality consistent right down to the hedges that run along the base of the building. Even now, with school ended, there are summer classes under way, and signs of life. She spots Jeremy Reed, the boy Eva let into her mouth, the boy who later, during study hall, ignored her while Eva sat rigidly next to him, penning eyeballs into her notebook. He leans up against his Firebird and gives her a lazy grin. When she gets out of her car, she strides by, ignoring him.

Down at the field, the coach runs drills, and Eva sees Greg, her boyfriend from the days of sweet kisses, her now good friend and purveyor of pills, weed, and beer. He stands by the sidelines, waiting for the players to finish. Even at a distance, he has an unmistakable slouch, an easy gait, his thumb frequently hooked into his belt loop. She waves, but he doesn’t see her, so she turns her attention to the bus that remains parked near the building, ready to deliver students home from the shame of summer school. A group of girls congregates at the front entrance: Brenda Armstrong and the Armstrong sisters, or as Eva refers to them, the Mafia sisters, the Brenda wannabes. They wear platform shoes and summer shades, tops tied in knots just above their belly buttons.

Eva does not want to feel this way—a pull, a small panic when she
sees the girls. She wishes so desperately to be prettier—taller, more graceful, smarter than she pretends. She does not want to think of these girls as competition. But she can’t help but remember them all seated in Peter’s class in the spring, their moist lips slightly parted, their legs crossed. She’s seen the way they smile at him, the way they sometimes look at him as they answer questions about Shakespearean sonnets, as if they actually cared about Shakespeare at all.

Her strides grow more brazen. When the girls see her coming, they trade such knowing glances that Eva raises her shoulders and holds her head higher. A stiffness settles in her, one that she has had too often of late, when anyone stares at her for too long. She calls upon reserves of vanity, the knowledge that she has been told over and over again that she is beautiful, but which she never successfully embraces. She hurries more than she wishes to, feels adrenaline pour through her legs.

Brenda Armstrong, who is homely despite being a shoo-in for prom queen, smiles as Eva nears, exposing a row of perfect teeth that were only recently released from the stranglehold of wires. Eva supposes it is Brenda’s smile and oddball humor that make her popular. It surely isn’t her nose.

“You’ve
been around,” Brenda says casually. She flicks the underside of her painted fingernail.

“A lot,” a Mafia sister says, the one with the short hair and full cheeks.

The girls all snicker. Eva’s look grows steely. It is a look she learned from her mother when she’d turn militant, irritable with the girls, with Frank. Eva is certain there’s a crease etched between her eyes and that her left eye is squinting in a mock curse. She pushes the door open. “Cheerleading is really kid stuff, don’t you think? Rah, rah.” She leaves them standing there, Brenda’s jaw slightly dropped.

Eva hears the buzzing fan in the principal’s office, set strategically to catch cross breezes of air. The hallway stretches on either side of her and gives way to classrooms and labs. In front of her is the gymnasium with its double wooden doors and stale smells. A water fountain is positioned
neatly outside, a testimony to the fifties with its pea-green base and creamy knob. The tiles beneath her remain mottled and dirty-looking, though Mr. Wood, the janitor, mops them several times a week, his head down, oblivious to the students.

Eva sneaks by the office and ascends the steps to room 312. The lights are on, the door closed. She peers through the opaque glass, but it is as useless as peering through an icy window. She abandons the door and opens the nearby lockers instead, to pass the time. Most are empty but on her fourth try, she finds a key chain that says
BORN TO BE WILD,
and a pack of pens. She places both in her purse as she rehearses a conversation designed to make her seem older than she is, so that she doesn’t get tongue-tied as she often does when she is nervous. She will tell Peter about the local college she wishes to attend. She will say she has no desire to push papers at a doctor’s office, as her mother did when she finally was able to seek part-time employment, wearing skirts that were too short not to be strategic. Eva has plans. She will travel first— Italy, France, London—before attending school. She will appear talented, poised. Ready to take on the world. Things are changing, she might say. Does he have any idea who taught her to embrace such freedom?

Eva is a reinvented woman.

If the mind has its own atmosphere, today the weather in Peter’s head is cloudy and foul. He glances out the window and wishes for rain instead of sun, for pounding thunder and cracks of lightning. He blames his mood on too much starch. Because Amy is trying to perfect her role as housewife, because she seems bent on reminding him that, in light of the baby, she has turned over a new leaf, as it were, given up smoking and cursing and even so much as an ounce of alcohol, she has seen fit to have Peter included in the general betterment of the house and so has had his shirts professionally dry-cleaned. He feels like his neck must stretch to accommodate the confines of polyester and cotton. Such
shirts remind him of his banker father, that depressed, fidgety man who spends his days sitting behind a mahogany desk, mulling over lending applications.

Peter scratches at his collar. A line of sweat gathers at the base of his neck. Under the fluorescent humming lights, his class takes on a bleary existence. He regards them all, this motley crew of eleventh graders who have failed English literature. Someone told him to take it easy on himself and use multiple choice instead of essay, but Peter is not a drill-and-kill type of teacher. Instead he tries to inspire these young minds. When they cover plays, he discusses Hamlet’s troubled and erratic moods, as if Hamlet might encourage them to move beyond their own angsty depression and indecision, to embrace what Peter calls the “alternate path of action,” one that is decisive and swift. He has encouraged conversation that too often falls short. He has implemented Elbow’s theory of teaching without teachers, but he does not know finally whether it’s really gotten him anywhere, or done any good.

“Is there any point,” he asks them now, “to rhyme and repetition, beyond mere churlishness, of course? What lies buried under the surface of a Donne poem, what voice lives in the negative space?”

No one answers, of course. No one cares about Donne. These kids care about their wasted summer, their waiting friends and parties. Peter isn’t even sure
he
cares that much about Donne, either, at the moment.

“Is it the heat that’s getting to you?” he asks. His eye wanders as it always does, across the faces, not holding on to any for too long. They his students, this group of latchkey kids and future consumers of pay-by-plastic, ask nothing of him. Irritated, itchy, quite possibly depressed and suffering from what he fears is a premature midlife crisis, Peter lingers in the silence. Things happen, he wants to say. Poetry fails. Art is forgotten. Governments go corrupt and cities are bombed. People eat, drink, and screw only to die uncomfortably in bed, alone, waiting for those they love, remembering times that are all but gone. “What is the speaker’s voice in this Donne poem? How might you characterize it?” He picks it up, reads again.

Sue Kidmark pops her gum and then peels it off her face. Peter regards her as one might an experiment—he is distant, clinical, with a now detached curiosity. His gaze moves again. Some in his class will go on and negotiate their way through the maze of school, only to be confronted by more complicated mazes. Others will simply give up. They like he, will stop scrambling and say,
Fuck it. I refuse my part.
And those who exercise the smallest defiance of the system, those who go on to be thieves or bums or even people—Peter suddenly thinks—who just have good old-fashioned affairs, will be forsaken and left to their own quiet regrets. Gone are the days of free love for all of them. In the eighties they will turn to punk rock. In the nineties they will be bankers, their fathers’ children. A grayness will settle on everything just as this gray-walled room settles on them now, confining, restricting.

He wishes he had another shirt.

He calls on Ethan Fritz, a boy who is sure to never run the rat race. Ethan glances up from his book, looks around to his peers, and then regains his hip coolness. He taps his pen on the desk as if the action itself is more significant than words. He makes a sudden, airy noise through his nose and gazes out the window. “I think the speaker in the Donne poem is gay, man. I bet he likes disco.”

“We should probably stick to the text,” Peter says. “There’s no disco in the text, at least not in this version. There’s sex, though. I’d think you’d all be interested in sex.”

A few students laugh uncomfortably. He glances up to the clock over the door. Five minutes left and still this excruciating irritation. He notices the way the second hand speeds around, the odd way the long hand jumps ahead by minutes with a click and then jumps backward— still running, it seems, always too slowly.

He pulls at his collar. He could strip now, just as he did one summer night when he and Amy lived out on the West Coast and frequently took late-night walks at the park by their apartment. Amy pulled away from him, and then waded into a granite pool of water, lifting her skirt as she did. He remembers how the park lanterns flickered
on one by one, along the line of idle trees, and how Amy swayed under a marble statue of Pan—the lifted skirt revealing her pale calves; her long hair flowing around her shoulders. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Come in,” she said, splashing the water. He stripped off his pants and went in after her, and she laughed as she pulled off his shirt and tossed it over the statue, just out of his reach. Thinking of this—of the warm-scented air and Amy’s unexpected actions, her youthful fancy—Peter shifts his weight and puts the book down.