The English Teacher (2 page)

Whether she spoke or simply nodded she’d never know. All she knew was that the ring, several sizes too big, was slipped on her finger and Tom was kissing her, then burying his face in her hair, then kissing her again. Everything felt rubbery. She had the sense,
despite his enthusiasm, that it wasn’t really happening this way, that they were rehearsing, hypothesizing, and that the real moment would happen later, would happen differently.

Tom called up to Peter, who launched himself down the stairs immediately, his lack of athleticism embarrassing to her in Tom’s presence. His face was bright red. He already knew. Even before Tom made the announcement, clutching her at the shoulders, she saw that Peter already knew.

“I am
so
psyched,” he said, pumping Tom’s hand, then raising both fists in the air as if it were the successful end of a soccer game. “Congrats, Mom,” he said to her and pecked her on the cheek. There was a bit of a bristle to his chin. “This has been a long time coming.” He was beaming at her, though he barely knew Tom. A handful of hellos at the door, that was all.

They celebrated with cookies and cider. She filled the glasses, passed the plate, but still she was somewhere apart from her body, and this moment was somehow apart from the rest of her life. Again and again she felt they were practicing, all three of them, and each time she smiled at Tom or Peter, she felt they were acknowledging that, too.

She walked Tom out to his car. She hoped that this would serve as their date, that she could have the rest of the evening to herself to finish her work. But he hugged her again and said he’d pick her up at seven.

He got into his car, then leapt out. “I almost forgot.” He reached into the backseat. “A little engagement present.”

It was a blue box with his insignia on it,
Belou Clothiers.
He had been that certain she’d say yes.

“When I was a very little boy,” he said, leaning against the car and pulling her toward him in a gesture of familiarity that was probably familiar only to his wife in the grave, “my grandfather made a dress for a customer, a very simple dress. A few weeks later a friend
of hers came in the shop and ordered the exact same dress. She said her friend had told her it was a magic dress. After that he got another request, and another. My grandfather must have made twenty-five of those dresses. I forgot all about them and then when I saw you I remembered. I remembered the dress exactly, right down to the pearl buttons. I don’t know why.”

She lifted off the top. It was yellow, a color she never wore. She was relieved that it was a summer dress with tiny capped sleeves: it would be at least eight months before she’d be expected to wear it.

“It’s lovely,” she said, holding it up to herself. Dear God, what had she done?

“It’s magic.” He kissed her again. The kisses were different now—firmer, possessive.

Tom the Tailor made me a dress, she imagined telling Carol, though she knew she wouldn’t.

She watched his car turn off her gravel road and onto the paved school avenue, which carried him past the mansion and all its new limbs, then the tennis bubble, then the hockey rink, in a long arc before finally setting him back on the main road. She would have to leave this campus, this haven of fifteen years, if she actually married him.

“Aren’t you freezing?” Peter called to her from the front door. There was a thrill, a wildness, in his voice she’d never heard before.

She opened the trunk of her car and tossed the box in. What’s in the box, he’d ask when she got a little closer. He was going to have so many questions this afternoon. She stopped on the path to the house and lit a cigarette to buy herself some more time.

TWO

A
T HIS MOTHER’S WEDDING, PETER DANCED WITH HIS NEW STEPSISTER
Fran, whose attention had slid over the top of his head at the beginning of the song. She wasn’t focused on anything in particular, which made her lack of interest in him all the more apparent. But he was simply happy to be dancing with her. He might never again have the opportunity to dance with someone so thoroughly out of his league.

This marriage was exactly what Peter had wanted and now it was here, all around him, written on balloons tied to chairs and on the inside of the gold band his mother now wore—the first piece of jewelry he’d ever seen on her. It had all happened so fast, and he was still dizzy with his own good luck. There was something creepy to people about a boy living alone with his mother for his whole life—fifteen and a half years. He’d been embarrassed by it. And now that long chapter was finally over. Tonight they’d go home to a regular house on a regular street, husband and wife in the master bedroom and four kids sprinkled in rooms down a hallway.

The song was coming to an end. He hoped its last notes would bleed into the beginning of the next. But there was a pause as the lead singer, his math teacher, Mr. Crowse, took a swig of beer, and Fran wavered like a leaf in the silence, poised to catch the first wind away from him. He had to secure her in place, and his mind spun in search of the words. After they had lived together for a few weeks, he’d probably have a ton of things to say, but now they were strangers.
He’d already complimented her bridesmaid’s dress, as well as her poem the night before. He could make fun of the band, the Logarithmics, which was made up of the very geekiest teachers at Fayer Academy, but he wanted to say something big, something that would intrigue her.

“My mother wanted to marry your father from the moment they met.” His mother wouldn’t like him saying that. He knew it wasn’t true.

“I could tell,” Fran said, scrutinizing them, his mother and her father, who stood holding hands and not letting go as the music started up again. It was “Beast of Burden” and they played it much slower than usual, Mr. Crowse practically whispering into his mike with his eyes shut and sweat streaming over his lids. Peter and Fran watched their parents step closer, her father tucking his mother’s fingers tight in the dip between his shoulder and collarbone.

Fran turned back abruptly to him. “Shall we dance?” she said in a foreign accent.

At school dances, he headed straight for the bathroom whenever he heard the first languid notes of a song like this. Even a slow dance with Fran did not overpower the urge to bolt. But she’d already looped her arms loosely around his neck, so he placed a hand on either side of her waist. She was a year older but no taller. The fabric of her dress was so thin he could feel the narrow band of her underwear and the heat of her skin where there was no underwear at all. Peter tried to keep all the facts straight in his head: this was his first slow dance and his first contact with the underclothes of a girl; yet this was his mother’s wedding and this was his stepsister. He felt there was some secret to this kind of dancing that he hadn’t been let in on. Quickly his hands made damp nervous spots on Fran’s dress.

Halfway through the song Fran’s head, which had been cocked and swiveling in every direction away from him, plummeted to his shoulder. Her eyelashes flickered on his long neck.

“Does your mother dye her hair?” she whispered.

Peter opened his eyes to see his mother floating by. Her hair was longer than most mothers’. Usually she wore it pinned at the back with the same tortoiseshell clip but today it was down, her dark red curls draped over Tom’s arm like a flag.

“No,” he said, though he sensed another lie would have pleased her more. “She doesn’t.”

At the end of the song, Peter peeled his palms from Fran’s dress. Before he could decide what to say, her father tapped her on the shoulder and gave a little bow as she turned to him. She put her arms out like a professional, the way she had when she’d said to Peter, Shall we dance? But this time her face looked like it had been plugged in. No girl had ever looked at him like that.

Instead of completing the swap, his mother whispered that she had to go to the john, and left him on the dance floor alone. He watched, for a short while, her tall figure try to push through to the stairs on the other side of the room. Every few feet she was stopped by people wanting to congratulate her. They mashed their faces against hers, pawed at her dress, spoke loudly into her ear, and all the while his mother kept imperceptibly moving on. If he held his breath, she would look back at him. But she didn’t. She reached the stairs, kept her eyes forward, and disappeared beneath the floor.

He took a seat at a table with some children he didn’t recognize and their babysitter. The children were tying her wrists together with the strings of balloons and none of them noticed when he sat down. He swung his chair toward the dancers and sipped on a flat Coke someone had left behind. He felt suddenly grown-up, beside but apart from the screeches of the little boys, his right ankle on his left knee which made a box of his legs, the way most of his male teachers sat during assemblies. The babysitter was pretty and probably thought he’d come over to try and talk to her so he was careful to ignore her. All three of his stepsiblings were out dancing now:
Fran, with her father, still shining like a star; Stuart, the oldest, old enough to be in college but for some reason wasn’t, glumly twitching with a fat cousin of theirs; and little Caleb up on the shoulders of Dr. Gibb, who had been Mrs. Belou’s oncologist. She had only been dead a couple of years and now his mother was Mrs. Belou.

Peter started to wish he’d invited Jason. His mother had told him to invite as many friends as he wanted, but he thought they’d get in the way of the beginning of his life with his new family. He’d envisioned the whole wedding differently, with him and Stuart and Fran moving through the day together, comparing parents, trading information like spies before a mission. He pictured them all sitting around one table, pointing out relatives and telling their stories. Well, Peter only had one relative there, his aunt Gena, but she had a good story. Years ago, she’d gone into the Peace Corps and fallen in love with a guy in her village in Africa. One of the guy’s wives had tried to strangle her with reeds from the river. She still had the scars on her neck.

As if beckoned by his thoughts, Gena took the seat beside him. “You look a little gloomy.”

“I’m not.”

“Really?”

She put a finger under his chin and guided his face to hers. Even though Gena was four years older, she was like looking at his mother through magic glass, the creases gone, the cheeks soft shiny bulbs above her big smile. His mother once said she wanted to skate on Gena’s skin it was so smooth.

“I’m just taking a break from dancing.”

“You glad she did this?”

“Yeah.”

“You like the steps?”

“I don’t know them really.”

They were all dancing together now. Stuart had tied a napkin around his head and was jutting his arms out like he was putting a hex on people.

“They must be pretty tough.” She meant because of their mother.

“I guess.” He didn’t like it when people dwelled on Mrs. Belou’s death.

Gena looked away. He was afraid she was preparing a move. He hadn’t been a great conversationalist, though usually he liked talking to her. He’d only met her twice before, but he felt comfortable with her. She said what she thought.

“What do you think about Tom?”

Gena watched Tom, who was dancing in that shoulder-bouncing way that people who did not grow up with rock music did, then turned back to him, as if he were the real subject of study. Finally she said, “He’ll call a spade a spade.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said with sudden defensiveness, as though they were in the middle of a fight.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what he’s going to find in there.” She looked at Peter and seemed surprised by his disturbed face. “Oh honey, for you this is fantastic. It’s a nice family. And you’ve got brothers and sisters now.”

“One sister.” He felt sulky. What did she mean by find in there?

“One sister.” She looked at Fran, twirling beneath the bridge of her father’s arms. “Who will hog the bathroom and torture you with all the gorgeous friends she brings home.” Her head fell back, laughing at her vision, and he could see the three ragged white stripes just below her chin.

The bass player, Mr. Carbone, struck the last chords of a song with a long flourish and an embarrassing scissor split, then announced the band would be taking a breather. Peter hoped his stepfamily would join him. There was plenty of room—the children
were playing at the dessert table now, smashing pieces of cake faster than the babysitter could push the plates away. But the Belous drifted over to their side of the room where Tom’s friends and family all congregated. Peter scanned the top of the crowd for his mother’s hair, but she still wasn’t up from the bathroom. He had a flash of her climbing out a small window but he knew that was ridiculous. Where would she go? Their house on campus had been emptied out that morning; Mr. Hoyle, with his wife and new baby, would be moving in tomorrow.

Dr. Gibb took a seat on the other side of Gena. He leaned across her to shake Peter’s hand for the third time that day, then said something that made Gena smile. He was neither young nor old, but in that long dull part of life Peter dreaded. He had a squat face and an oxbow of hair just above his forehead, cut off from the rest of his scalp by the bald patches on either side.