The English Teacher (28 page)

All the houses were small and sunless like Gena’s, all made out of the same smooth clay. After about ten blocks they started to get fatter, their grass shorn, their driveways more elaborate. Some had gates with a keypad. There were beat-up trucks out in front of many of these houses, and small groups of men bent over a cluster of shrubs or flowers. They spoke in Spanish and did not look up when he passed by.

He had thought that the dark rim of blue on the horizon was part of the sky, but as he got closer it became the ocean. Stuart was right: it was so blue it looked fake. Gena’s long street dead-ended into a path that led down a steep incline to a strip of sand. Waves boomed against walls of rock on either side of the beach. He was too scared for some reason to go down there alone.

He wondered where on this coast Stuart and his mother had been. Perhaps one day they had stood right here on this cliff. Mrs. Belou, knowing what she did, might have held Stuart’s hand or put her arms around him, her chin on his shoulder. She might never have wanted to let go. She might have hidden her tears, pretended it was the wind coming off the ocean as she caught them on her fingers. She had loved her son, and she wouldn’t have been able to imagine saying good-bye.

Peter felt his own eyes begin to fill. Stupid, he said aloud, wiping them with his sleeve. Stupid, he said again, angry, unable to stop the tears or the clutch in his chest that was forcing them up. He squatted in the long grass as if there were people around, as if he had a cramp. He wasn’t a crier. He took pride in that. Even in grammar school, even when he got struck in the back of the head with a softball, he managed to get up and say he was okay. But now he was crying about a woman he never knew. Then he was crying for Stuart not knowing about the cancer and for Fran trying on her dresses and protecting her lilacs and for Caleb in his huge reading chair and for Tom on the phone asking, “What’s she doing now?” And then after a while it was just for himself and all that driving and his mother who was nothing, nothing like a mother, whining and complaining from the backseat but never explaining what she was doing on that soggy field, never explaining anything.

It wasn’t just her silence for the past four days but her silence all of his life. She’d drawn him a goddamn picture of his father and that was it. And she didn’t even know how to draw. She drew like
a child, worse than a child. He could have done better than that, better than a few lines of hair and smashed-in mouth. There wasn’t even a nose. Maybe that would have been fine if she had made up for it—Mrs. Belou would have made up for it—but she hadn’t, she couldn’t, she didn’t like him. His own mother didn’t like him. It was true and he’d never seen it before. All the ways he disappointed her. His very first memory was her saying he needed to grow up. You need to grow up. It was her refrain. Until it happened and then she’d get angry when his pants were too short or he’d walked to the gas station alone for candy. Only those nights when she’d tiptoe into his room and sit on the side of his bed and listen to what he’d watched with Lucy on TV did she seem to accept him the way he was. She’d stroke the hair off his forehead and sometimes, maybe twice, she’d told him that she loved him. He should have convinced Tom that she was better off drinking.

The tears had stopped and he was sitting in the grass, whose tips rested at his shoulders. His head had begun to pound and his shirt was wet in front and around the neck. His whole face felt swollen. The sun had fallen toward the ocean, darkening it, and the waves still smashed into huge white fans against the rocks below.

Gena would worry if he didn’t get back. He followed the path out to the road, crossed it, and began the long walk to her house. In the weaker light, the unfamiliar vegetation seemed sinister. He hadn’t known that a life could run amok so quickly. He wondered why he kept walking toward Gena’s. In the movie of his life he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t ever go back. He’d make a left right here on something called Caballo Way and head toward the pink and blue lights of a strip of shops he could see at its end. He still had fifty-six dollars in his pocket. He wished he could be that kind of boy they always read about in school, the kind who trusted his luck. If there was one thing Peter didn’t trust anymore, it was his own luck.

Gena’s house seemed smaller than he remembered. She’d put a light on outside, above the door. The Dodge sprawled in the small driveway at the same angle he’d pulled up in. His mother would be in bed; Gena would be making dinner. She’d feign relief at his return, as if she didn’t know he was incapable of anything else.

TWELVE

WHEN I MAKES TEA I MAKES TEA AND WHEN I MAKES WATER I MAKES WATER
. Buck Mulligan imitating that old lady—Old Mother Gowan? Grisby?—and she couldn’t get it out of her head. It was a habit from childhood, letting a senseless cluster of words get lodged like that. She tried to concentrate on the hummingbird whirring its wings against the screen across the room as it tried to push itself into the long tube of a white flower. Water I makes water. She wondered what a cup of tea would taste like. She’d always been a coffee drinker, never understood the teachers with their delicate cups of tea, the little paper tassel hanging off the side. Davis Clay had switched to tea. Not right after that summer his wife sent him off but a year or so later. Coffee’s an addiction like any other, he’d told her. His wife had probably flown people in for that, too. Tea drinkers were like that. Sheep. Look at the Irish and all they put up with for centuries. Then again the English themselves were obsessive about their tea. In novels they packed it in their suitcases with their toothbrushes when they went abroad. Anger spiked down her arms. Why was she getting so worked up about tea? Could there be anything more innocent than a poor cup of tea? And when I makes water I makes. She heard, beyond the closed door, voices, soft, companionable. She should have given him to Gena and he could have been raised among guinea pigs. And then that feeling again that these choices were still ahead, not behind. It had always been a comforting sensation, a
protective nook where she took cover. She remembered her mother throwing a dish towel at her father’s face and her father taking her mother’s head in his hands and knocking it five times fast and hard against the wall then walking out of the room and Vida laughed even though her mother was in the bathroom crying because she knew when this exact moment happened again, her father wouldn’t do that and her mother wouldn’t cry. How did you go about convincing yourself that this instant right now was real and solid when it felt so flimsy in your hands, bleeding into the next, porous, full of holes and puckers, and the mind was so bad at recording anything correctly? How did you make this moment right here with the hummingbird moving now onto the flat yellow flower and the voices dwindling toward the kitchen and her own quick breaths pushing up against her hand—how did you cut that into a granite block and slide it perfectly into place beside all the others?

Did Gena know how to do that? Isn’t that what she’d always been so envious of, the way her sister had always known how to live? Their whole childhood she was the one the phone rang for, the car outside honked for. She was the one with the plans and the dreams. She had gone to Africa. Vida hadn’t been aware that she had formulated a picture of Gena’s life here until she walked into it however many days ago and nothing was as it should be. Where was the furniture, the bright fabrics, the plush cushions, the strange art? Where was the bulletin board crammed with photos and phone numbers? Why didn’t the phone ring more often? She could hear their mother’s voice full of vicarious titillation, “Gena, it’s for yooooouuuu!”

When she and Peter arrived, Gena had had to go out to a shed for two more chairs for her kitchen table.

Outside her window she heard Peter and Gena, their voices approaching and receding as they walked around the house.

“Someday I’d like to plant things out here.” Gena was saying.

“I can help you,” Peter said.

A few days later she heard Peter say, “I really thought I was in love with her.”

Another time, as they lay in the grass after lunch, he said, “Just looking at a palm tree makes me happy. Isn’t that weird?”

She heard Gena tell him about a dream she’d had about her boyfriend in Senegal. “And he pulled up into the driveway, just like you did, and I went running out to him and I was crying and laughing at the same time and I said, Look, look at my beautiful scars.”

If they were outside, Vida walked about the cool house, made a bowl of cereal, spied on them through the small windows, but when they came in she retreated to her room. She found a sketchbook and a charcoal pencil in a drawer, and remembered how well Gena had drawn as a child. But all the pages were empty. Vida sketched the tree outside her window, a tall palm with spears for leaves. When they checked in on her, she hid the book and pretended to be asleep. Sometimes she did doze during the day, but at night she stopped sleeping altogether. Her old fear had new power now and she lay in the dark, blindsided by panic. Her heart vibrated, its beats barely separate. She couldn’t get enough air; her skin felt like it would peel off. She turned on the light and focused on the pillow, the faded blue flowers and their sprigs of leaf. She tried to put Joyce back in her head, When I makes tea, I makes tea, but it wouldn’t stick. She could not get her pulse to come down. She was going to have a heart attack, a heart explosion.

She dreamed about the mansion. The appendages were gone—no hockey rink or tennis bubble or science wing. She drove up to the front door, Walt in her lap, a puppy again. Her grandfather came out, carrying the bust of himself. He didn’t see her. He followed a path along the side of the house to a garbage can, and he dropped the head in. Then he went back into the house and shut the door.
Down in the fields girls in white dresses were holding hands and dancing, some raising their arms high and others dipping their heads through, making intricate tangles then pulling back out to a large, perfect circle. The May Dance, she thought, looking for Tess but seeing, at the crest of the rise beyond, Angel Clare. He was walking away. No, she cried out. Not again. Not again. The sound of her own voice woke her up, but still she could not stop screaming.

On their eighth day in California, Gena drove her to a shrink. In the corner water bubbled over black rocks. Toward the end of the hour, Vida managed to say it out loud.

“I’ve always been scared that I’d kill him in my sleep.” She waited for the woman to call the police or the nuthouse. They locked up people who said things like that.

Instead the woman said calmly, “What feels truer than that?”

Vida felt a small loosening in her body. This was what she was always asking of her students, to see beyond the words on the page.

“I’m so scared,” she said, and even just saying those words shrank the feeling slightly, “of losing him.”

The next day she agreed to go to lunch with Gena and Peter. “It’s just a few blocks away,” Gena reassured her.

She trailed behind Peter and Gena on the sidewalk. It was hot and sweat soaked into her turtleneck and the waistband of her skirt. She’d left her tights behind, and the canvas shoes Gena had lent her scraped the skin off her swelling ankles.

Gena pointed out a house and said the owners were extremely peculiar, as if she herself didn’t live alone in a dark empty house with guinea pigs.

“Why did you come to California?” Peter asked.

Gena looked around. “I suppose it reminded me of Africa.”

“Africa? Really?”

“Something about the flatness of the light. At dusk the sun just sets, like a light being put out. No afterglow, no in the gloaming.” She glanced back at Vida, who decided to play her part.

“‘In the gloaming, Oh my darling!
When the lights are dim and low,
And the quiet shadows falling
softly come and softly go …’”

They both smiled at her encouragingly. She had a stab of paranoia. Were they scheming something? Was Tom going to be at the restaurant?

But the restaurant was nearly empty, every booth along the wall free. Through the doorway in back was a bar.

“Everything’s yummy,” Gena said, “But the soups are their specialty. Perhaps I’ve mentioned the spicy artichoke—”

“Yeah, I think you did,” Peter said. “About a hundred times.” They were smiling at each other. They already had their little jokes.

The waitress came and went, a tiny creature in turquoise ballet shoes. Stuart’s kind, more sprite than girl. She couldn’t stop the great chasm of failure, of shame, that opened up beside the thought of Tom’s children. She pulled herself quickly from it.

Peter peppered Gena with questions: did she know how to surf, did she like the Giants, did it ever snow? He got her to describe her work at the nursing home and what an earthquake felt like. And yet their voices were too animated for the context; they were saying other things beneath their words. They shared a secret, an anticipation. Vida forced herself to look each time someone came through
the door. He was coming; they had asked him to come. She was sure of it.

Gena was right. The soup was good, but Vida only brought a few spoonfuls to her mouth before she lost the energy and interest. Peter and Gena polished their bowls clean with the thick slices of sour bread from a basket the poor little waitress had to keep running back to refill. Vida slid her soup over to them and it was gone within minutes. Then they ordered ice cream sundaes, enormous goblets with chocolate, caramel, and pineapple sauces cascading down the sides. Peter giggled and raised the long spoon to the top. Gena said, “We’ve concocted an idea,” and Peter put the spoon down again.