The English Teacher (9 page)

The clock spooled out its remaining minutes as she led them through the thicket of their own language, through Tess’s first recorded day and into the dawn of the next when, delivering the load of beehives her drunken father could not, she falls asleep while driving the cart and kills the family’s only horse.

The bell reverberated at their feet. Vida marveled at how easily they shut their books, stuffed them brutally back into their bags, their minds having moved on to the algebra test or a crush in the hallway or an urge for a particular candy bar inside the vending machine. Vida bid them good-bye from her perch on the desk, unable to dismiss the image of the girl in the narrow lane beside the family horse, trying to stem with her hand the strong stream of blood spurting from its chest. She had always balked at Hardy’s heavy hand, the way he put Tess on a conveyor belt of tightly orchestrated events that led to her destruction. But Vida could not find that resistance now. Hardy had all but disappeared, leaving this inexperienced girl to carry on alone.

Peter left without a glance, in a cluster of boys, their voices like the low grunts of large animals, their laugh on the stairs sharp and sinister. Then they were gone, and silence, having been kept at bay for forty minutes, rushed back in.

As she turned to erase the board for the next class, she was aware of the thoroughly irrational hope that this time it would turn out differently for Tess. When she reread tomorrow’s forty pages, Tess might not meet Alec the fake d’Urberville, or fall asleep in the bed of leaves he gathered for her, or allow him to lie beside her. And in a week or so, perhaps Angel Clare would not mind about her past, would not reject her for so long with such dire consequences.

Her seniors came in, the boys with their size 12 feet, the girls in their mothers’ expensive blouses, slapping down their copies of
The Sun Also Rises
on their desks. She was grateful for the shift to Hemingway, to Spain, to characters who would remain characters, silly drunken characters who mattered nothing to her.

Vida picked up the eraser. At eye level were the words MRS. BELOU. With one stroke, they were gone.

At break she went down the two flights of back stairs to get a cup of coffee. Once the servants’ pantry, the teachers’ lounge, with its buckling linoleum squares and wall of tin sinks, was not the coziest in the mansion. There was a couch and an end table and some desks and chairs for the math and science departments, who could easily correct their multiple-choice tests in the midst of gossip and complaint, but it needed a rug and standing lamps for real comfort, and most teachers only lingered for a few minutes to read their mail or wait for yet another pot of coffee to brew. Today, however, the place was jammed. Faculty crowded around a card table, loading flimsy paper plates with smoked salmon, croissants, muffins, and cubes of fruit. It was the time of year, a month and a half before first-semester grades came out, that the mothers of less than stellar seniors grew frantic and tried to bribe the faculty with expensive food and a little place card in the center of the table declaring, above their carefully written names, their deep appreciation for all the teachers at Fayer.

Vida’s first impulse was to sneak down to the cafeteria kitchen, where she knew Marjorie and Olivia would have a pot on, but the smell of baked sugar sucked her in with the rest. She’d just slip in, fill up her mug, grab a muffin, and get back to her office.

“Vida Belou!” Brick Howells bellowed from the middle of the room, the great boom of his voice mostly unimpeded by the minibagel halfway down his throat. He placed his pile of food on the table, swallowed, and made for her, carrying his weight as if he were a larger, taller man. His arms reached out for her well before she was within reach. Over the years Brick had tried to fix her up with various men: his wife’s brother at a Christmas party, his college roommate at a faculty-trustee luncheon, and his freshly divorced physician at an athletic banquet. And then, a few years ago, having given up on his friends, he licked her on the neck while she was pouring rum into their Cokes in this very room during a Valentine’s dance they were chaperoning together. She’d twisted out of his grasp and said, “C’mon, Brick, you can do better than me.” He was drunk—they both were—but her words seemed to sober him and he withdrew in agreement.

But here he was now, ready to gather her up in a public, avuncular hug. Thinking fast, she clasped his hands in hers, keeping him two arms’ lengths away but preserving the facade of a strong collegial bond. Her fellow teachers cheered. Vida flushed in anger—hadn’t the applause at assembly been enough?—which they took for embarrassed thanks, prompting them to clap even louder. Heads of curious students appeared in the door’s small window.

“Stop,” Vida said, more harshly than she would scold a rambunctious class, but to no avail.

After the clapping, she was unable to escape the warm wishes, the hugs, the dreamy smiles. A new teacher, one of the many young hires this year, tossed up Vida’s unclipped hair and said, “I like it. Get married and let it all hang out.”

They had, every one of them, misunderstood her entire life. She had never yearned to marry as these people apparently thought
she had. Brick Howells was hardly the only person to have attempted the fix-up. How many times had she accepted a dinner invitation from one of them, only to find in their living room some recently devastated fellow wiping his palms on his slacks? You have so much to offer, she was often told, as if she had a tray of cigarettes and candy perpetually strapped to her waist. But these setups had stopped a few years back. Vida realized now, from their relieved, astonished expressions, that they had all given up.

Her life with Peter had been enough. It had. Why had she tinkered with it? She felt incapable of piecing the events of the last five months into any fluid, comprehensible sequence.

“So, you married your fighter pilot,” Paul Gove said to her at the coffeemaker.

Men chose the strangest ways to debase each other. Tom had trained in the air force, but by the time he got to the Pacific, the Korean War had ended and after a few weeks they sent him home to resume his work with his father at Belou Clothiers. Exactly how Paul had gleaned this information about Tom was a mystery to Vida.

“I did,” she said, with far more conviction than she’d had in the past twenty-four hours. Paul always had this effect on her. His confidence with women made her defiant. In all the years they’d taught together, she’d felt like a horse he was trying to break. Her falling in love with him seemed to be his prerequisite for friendship. She had never complied, thus they had never been friends, but now he wanted to play jilted suitor, not because he had loved her, but simply because she had not loved him.

“Short courtship.” He took a sulky bite of a chocolate croissant. “You pregnant?”

It should have been funny—a woman her age having a shotgun wedding—but she couldn’t muster a small retort or even a smile, and she turned away from him with her coffee to the plate of banana muffins, her throat inexplicably twisted shut.

She felt Paul’s hand on her arm. “I wish you and Tom the very best. I really do.”

“Good God. All these best wishes. You all make me feel like I’m entering a battle armed with a feather.” She tossed a muffin onto a napkin and climbed back to her office on weakened legs, glad for this free period before another set of seniors.

She sat at her desk in her office, unable to touch the coffee or muffin or her work. She was aware of the black phone to her left, which she only used when Peter was home sick or once when a student fainted and she couldn’t revive him. It was a direct outside line, with an unpublished number and no connection to the office, so no parent could reach her here. It never rang. She could pick up the phone now and call Tom. She had his work number in her book, though she’d never used it. And he didn’t even know she had a phone up here. Just the idea of calling him made her heart race. What would she say? What had she done?

She thought of all those wary smiles at the wedding reception, some guests not even bothering to hide their astonishment. How did this Vida Avery, boyfriendless as far back as anyone could go, how did she receive this stroke of luck? A mere high school English teacher who wore old moccasins and drank too much at parties—who had suddenly aligned her stars? The same surge of victory collided with the same certainty she would fail.

For lunch Vida had to descend the two flights, then cross the length of the mansion and the two added wings to reach the cafeteria. Because there was not the room or the staff to feed the entire school at once, lunch was spread out over the three middle periods, and fifth-period classes had already begun in many of the rooms she passed. Through the window of Sally Haynes’s history class, three juniors stood before a homemade map, tracing what looked like the Silk
Road. Next door, Roger Graver sat in the middle of his psychology elective, mouth open, eyes closed, while his students walked around him in a circle. In ninth-grade English, Yeats himself read “Innesfree” from a tape recorder: “… shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, dropping from …” His voice was old and Irish and lovely.

Students past and present hollered out hellos in the hallway as they passed, some sticking to her old name, some trying out the new.

At last she reached the theater, her favorite place to spy. She wedged the door open a crack to hear the two actors on stage beside a kitchen table. To her surprise, the girl was Helen from her sophomore class. It was impossible to reconcile the private, contained Helen with the Helen now hollering at her stage husband, slamming cabinets, hurling a pot against a wall. Within seconds, however, the incongruity was gone, for the Helen on stage obliterated any memory of any other Helen, obliterated the stage itself, forcing you to believe that this was the only reality, right here beneath these lights, these acts, this pain.

“Ticket, please.” The voice just behind her ear made her leap. Jerry Poulk held up a plate of french fries floating in ketchup. “They don’t seem to need to eat, but I was starving.” He bit off half a fry, then nodded toward the stage. “What do you think?”

Vida had assumed he was down there in front, but they had been performing alone, for themselves. They still were, sitting at the table now, Helen crying softly.

“It’s a one-act for this Friday’s assembly. They ready?” he asked. He was standing too close to her, chewing, the odor of ketchup coming out of his nose.

“She is. Adam, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that she outshines him.”

“Girls always do at this age.”

“Do they?” She shot him a sly eye. He was careful to ignore her.

Jerry had come to Fayer six years ago. He became the new novelty with all his energy and charm and the ridiculous little ponytail that hung over his tweed jackets. From the start, Vida understood his game. He made his students need him emotionally. In his classes he churned them up, then broke them down. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he was never again seen eating lunch, walking a hallway, or leaving the building without some student pressing beside him, the two in a deep, closed conversation. He built an extraordinary drama department. The spring musical, formerly a one-night embarrassment, now ran two weeks, attracted audiences from out of state, and earned the school nearly twenty thousand dollars each year. And each year, Jerry Poulk was screwing around with a member of the cast. At first, it was hard to tell which one. But Vida caught on to his method after a few years: it was always the girl in the fall that he was hardest on, the one who didn’t seem to be enjoying the class all that much, the one who wasn’t ever seen in fierce private talk with him. But by February she’d have a good part in the musical, if not the lead, and she’d often be found alone on his stage or belting out a song at his piano. By graduation the entanglement would be over, Jerry refueled, spouting off about some European vacation he was planning with his wife and children, the girl underweight and withdrawn. Whether Brick was aware of this pattern, whether any other teacher had caught on, Vida didn’t know. She’d decided long ago it was none of her business.

Without answering her, Jerry headed down the center aisle with his plate of fries. Helen and Adam moved downstage, where they stood close to each other in quiet conversation. Helen managed to convey, all the way to Vida at the back of the theater, that weary acquiescence in the wake of an argument, the listening and not-listening, the acceptance of the failure of real communication. Then her husband made a joke and she kissed him so impulsively it seemed impossible that even Helen knew it would happen.

“No!” Jerry barked from a seat in the third row, and Vida closed the door before he could destroy what she had seen. She was alone in the hallway with the smell of boiling oils and overcooked meats. Her lunch period was already half over. How she wished she could go back in and hop up on that stage in possession of new words and new impulses, a truly new identity and not just a different name. Instead she’d have to squeeze in at a corner of the faculty table, forced to listen to the petty November complaints about the soggy fields or disgruntled parents, or to her own mind full of yearning for youth and talents she did not have—and the unpleasant discovery that Helen Cavanough would be Jerry’s spring victim.

On Mondays, Vida finished teaching at 1:40. She monitored an eighth-grade study hall in the library from 2:25 to 3:05, where she intercepted notes, separated disruptive elements, and corrected a set of Macbeth quizzes. On her way back up to the third floor, where she would work until Peter’s soccer practice ended at five, she stopped in the lounge for more coffee. It was empty now. Nearly all of her colleagues had afternoon obligations: coaching, tutoring, supervising volunteer work or independent projects for the growing nonathletic population. It boggled her mind, the extra hours her coworkers would put in for a few extra bucks in their paychecks each month. On weekdays, she liked to have all her work done before she went home.