The English Teacher (6 page)

Fran and Caleb were studying her, not with the respectful scrutiny of students on the first day of class but with cold, leery observation.

The smell in the kitchen was disarming. It was nothing like the slightly chemical, overcooked smell in the Fayer cafeteria in the morning.

“Good morning, early birds,” she said cheerfully, trying to establish that playful authority she found so easily in the classroom.

“How old is that dog?” Fran said.

“Sixteen.”

“Same as Peter,” Caleb said.

“Peter’s not sixteen yet.” Children could be so loose with their ages. Peter wouldn’t be sixteen until August. “Who’s the chef?”

“Fran is. Want some French toast, Mom?”

“Cup of coffee’s fine for me.”

“It’s over there.” Fran pointed to a percolator in the corner. “I just made a second pot.”

Vida hoped to find the mugs in the first cupboard she opened, but it took three tries. She scanned the counters and shelves for sugar.

“In the canister,” Fran said finally. She was clearly enjoying herself.

“You ready?” Vida said to Peter, scooping her schoolbag (the freshman quizzes uncorrected,
Tess
unopened, the junior author profiles untouched) off the hook with her free hand.

He nodded, but took his time with the few bites left on his plate. Fran slapped another piece of French toast on Caleb’s plate, then doused it with syrup.

Vida felt she should ask when their bus came and if they’d done their homework, but they’d been carrying on without her inquiries all their lives. She asked instead if they would let Walt in before they left.

Peter walked ahead of her to the car, his knapsack stuffed with books he hadn’t opened all weekend. He wouldn’t get away with it; he couldn’t charm his teachers with an elaborate tale and heart-crossed promises.

The temperature had fallen further and though the ground still gave slightly beneath her shoes, the hard dead smell of winter seemed to be rising up from it. The trees in the yard jerked in the cold wind, trying to dislodge the few remaining clusters of brown leaves. It was a dreadful time of year. She hated teaching
Tess,
though for years
she had been told it was her signature book. The experience of reading
Tess
with Mrs. Avery sophomore year was reenacted in skits and referred to in yearbooks. It lived on in countless mentions by reminiscing alumni in the triannual bulletin. But for Vida, the book was a torture. She had never cared about that overly naive, peony-mouthed girl who is buffeted by a series of impossible coincidences from one gloomy town to another and across four hundred and sixteen pages before she gets her just deserts at the scaffold. She did have an appreciation for Hardy’s descriptions and his worries about the effects of the Industrial Age on the land and its people. She used to believe it was her discussions of this “ache of modernism” that made the book meaningful to her students, but she had come to realize that it was her own lack of sympathy for the girl that galvanized them. By the end their attachment to Tess herself was fierce, and their devastation at her demise profound.

They got behind a garbage truck. Vida lit a cigarette as the two men in back leapt from the runner, separated to opposite sides of the street, hurled bags three at a time up and over the truck’s backside, and hopped back on just as the truck jerked ahead. White steam streamed from their nostrils. They wore no gloves and drank no coffee and yet they seemed warm and full of energy. They’d probably been up since three, and soon they would be done. They’d go to a diner for lunch—Reubens, french fries, a few beers. Then they’d sleep—at a girlfriend’s, or their mother’s, or in their own solitary bed in a one-room apartment on Water Street, their muscles tired, their bellies full, their minds thoughtless as cows. The truck stopped again, and the man on the left, having caught Vida’s covetous eye, grinned at her. She glanced quickly away in what felt like fright. The truck veered off then, but the acknowledgment made her uneasy for several more blocks, as if a character in a book had addressed her by name.

The sun hung small and naked above the rooftops, unable to push itself fully through the pale cloud bank. They passed a 7-Eleven
and a launderette. In both windows middle-aged women stared blankly out. She thought again of
Tess
and wondered whether she might like it better if she assigned it in the spring.

Ahead of them the bridge to Fayer rose up in a high arc, and its sides were a series of thin squat rails, allowing for a full view of the harbor and its boatyards on the right and the open ocean on the left, with a few fishing trawlers heading toward the horizon. There was often heated talk, especially in the weeks following an accident, of building a wall on either side of this bridge, but Vida was pleased the view had remained, unimpeded by safety and common sense.

It ran nine-tenths of a mile and she took it slowly, like a tourist. Light poured into the car from all sides, an opaque blue wavering light, as they rose toward the height of the bridge. She loved the carnival-like ride of it, the web of patina-green supports above and the false yet convincing sense of sheer solidity beneath her tires. She remembered the few times last summer when she had crossed the water back to Fayer after an evening with Tom, and though she had felt at the time confused and conflicted, the memory now was peaceful. She took a long sip of the coffee she’d wedged between her knees. They were falling now, falling through the early light over cold blue water. She felt happy and even slightly sexual until she remembered the two nights since her wedding, and the feeling recoiled.

“Why is your hair like that?”

Damn. Her hair. “Will you check in there for my barrette?”

Peter flipped open the glove compartment and plunged his hand into the mass of candy wrappers and receipts. “Nope. Nothing.”

Vida pulled out the ashtray, stuck her fingers into other dark cubbyholes of the Dodge’s dash, then slid her hand beneath the seat. “Damn.” In nineteen years, she’d never taught a class without her hair firmly yanked back.

“They have rubber bands in the office,” Peter said.

It was true. But she avoided the office, and Carol, now.

They drove through Fayer’s tiny center, a small deposit of buildings: a brick police station, a white clapboard church, a stone library, and a few green store awnings. Several people were out, tugged along by dogs or children. She had never known these streets well, never seen them at this time of day. And yet they beckoned to her now.

The road out of town clung to the ocean. Even when a patch of woods or a summer estate blocked it from view, it was always with you, in the wet morning mist, the sandy roadsides, and the seagulls crying out.

“Do you think those people will be killed?” Peter said. He reminded her of Tom already, the concern in his voice as if he personally knew each one of those unlucky paper pushers halfway around the world.

“Not a chance. It would be suicide for the Iranians. There’ll be some sort of negotiations today and by supper they’ll be free. These things wrap up very quickly.” She tried to think of an example and couldn’t. She was hopeless when it came to historical facts. The events didn’t adhere properly in her brain. She never understood why moments in novels were unforgettable, while in real life the details slipped quickly away. A few weeks ago she couldn’t even explain the Bay of Pigs to Peter. All she knew was that she was reading
Middlemarch
at the time. She remembered Dorothea and the wretched Casaubon, and how they had just arrived in Rome for their wedding journey when her mother called her in to listen to President Kennedy’s speech. But she couldn’t recall what he’d said or in what order the events had unfolded or exactly how it had been resolved. All that came to her when she tried was Dorothea and Will’s trembling kiss by the window at the end.

They passed through the stone pillars,
Scientia
carved into one and
In Perpetuum
into the other, and followed the slow-moving line of station wagons up the hill. She hadn’t been part of this carpool convergence for sixteen years. She glanced over the girls’ field to their
old house and the path that ran across a ridge to the school. When he was younger, Peter had a small red canvas backpack that was never filled with more than a pencil and a few exercise sheets. He’d run ahead of her on that path to school, the nearly empty backpack bobbing behind him, stopping only to scoop up something from the ground and drop it into her hand, the soft brown ball of a frightened caterpillar or a long, sticky worm.

There was no ancestral tug as the mansion came into view. There never was. The oversized house, with its bays, turrets, and copper-plated mansard roof, was a school to her, just as it was to everyone else creeping up the long driveway this morning.

Vida pulled into her faculty spot beside the cafeteria. Through one window, a few students from Peter’s class hunched over their notes, cramming for something, and through another Marjorie and Olivia in their white uniforms and nurses’ shoes were already setting up for the lower school snack.

They sat for a moment in the stilled car.

“You have a test today?” she asked.

“Quiz.”

“History?”

“Yeah.” He was poised to bolt. He didn’t like to be seen walking into school with her anymore.

She could tell he was worried, but she couldn’t brush his bangs out of his eyes or lift his chin toward her. She couldn’t do that anymore, if she ever had. He was changing so fast and she was too scared to look at him for any length of time. “Did you get a chance to study last night?” she said gently.

He gave some sort of stifled snort through his nose and shook his head. It was rude—the snort, the aversion of his eyes, the lack of words. She wasn’t used to rudeness in him. But before she could correct him, he got out and slumped away around the building to the front entrance where he would blend in with the rest.

How dare he be disillusioned already. She slid her bookbag from the backseat onto her lap and shoved open her door. Screw it if he didn’t like it. He’d gotten what he asked for. Welcome to life and all its shitty little tricks. Her irritation at him rose, chafing hard against her affection. This was the nameless emotion she felt most in life, this abrasion of love meeting anger.

She walked up the scrubby knoll to the basement entrance, her tight fists bared to the cold, her head leading her body like a sledgehammer. She was a hard woman. Yet Tom said last summer, when he first kissed her, that she was like a heron, with her long neck and delicate bones.

In the vestibule outside the auditorium there was a bronze bust of her grandfather. No delicate man, he. His wild wiry eyebrows, suspended at the edge of his enormous brow, and his thick, nearly detached jaw belonged in a natural history museum. He had the childlike impatience of an old man who did not want to sit for a sculptor, who did not care about his house being transformed into a school, despite all the undeserved credit bestowed upon him. He’d been forced to sell because his only child, Vida’s mother, had married a dreamer who’d whistled through the family’s money within a decade. Though she had no memories of ever having visited this house, she did remember him, a crooked branch of a man, speechless from strokes, tufts of white hair growing from the tops of his ears. He was the one who named her. He hadn’t spoken for months but when her mother placed her in his arms for the first time, saying, “It’s baby Vivian, Grandy,” he smiled so wide her mother said she heard his face crack, and he said eloquently, seemingly proficient in a language no one had known he knew, “No, mi amor, su nombre es Vida.” Another crack, then “Life!” That was his final word, though it took him several more years and the loss of his house to die. When Vida left Texas all those years later, without a map or a plan, nothing surprised her more than finding herself in Fayer, at
the enormous front door of her grandfather’s house. No one had told her it had become a school. Within a few weeks she had a job as a substitute English teacher, and by the next fall she’d been given a full-time contract and the gardener’s cottage.

Though she’d requested high school, they started her with the sixth grade and she’d had to push her way up a grade a year until she’d secured herself a spot in the English department of the upper school. Since then, she’d turned down every promotion offered to her: English chair three times, dean of students, dean of faculty, curriculum director, and assistant head of school. The only thing Fayer Academy had offered her that she’d accepted, above and beyond a teaching contract each year, was the Hutchinson Prize, chosen and awarded at graduation by the senior class for superior teaching, which she’d received four times, most recently last June. She didn’t know then, as she rose to accept another sparkling silver bowl, that a man named Tom Belou was seated in the seventeenth row. What she did know is that she was a fool at the podium, fighting back tears of all things, tears for the senior class with whom she’d formed a special, unexpected bond, and tears for her dear friend Carol whose son, she had learned that morning, had committed suicide. She’d pushed out a few platitudes of thanks and hurried back to her seat beside Peter, raw and embarrassed. At that moment, Tom claimed, Vida became the first thing since the death of his wife to disturb him, to make him anxious for the passing of time as one senior then another then another rose from a folding chair, ambled self-consciously across the grass to the lectern, received a diploma, and ambled back.