The Next Time You See Me (4 page)

“Mrs.—” Susanna hesitated. “Shelton?”

“Yes. Nita Shelton.”

“Mrs. Shelton, Christopher volunteered to read out loud a response he had written to a sample test question on John Knowles’s
A Separate Peace.
It was a joke. A very offensive joke, in my opinion. He flat-out defied the assignment and me.”

“Do you have a copy of it?”

“I certainly do,” Susanna said, rising to retrieve it from a stack of papers on her desk. Her hands were shaking, and she felt a blush—that stupid goddamn blush, bane of her teaching career—creep across her cheeks and down her neck. She laid the paper down quickly in front of Nita Shelton, before its quivering could reveal her nervousness.

Mrs. Shelton scanned the paragraph with pursed lips.

“I think you see the problem,” Susanna said. “If I’m going to be frank here, I’d say that it’s tantamount to an act of aggression, and the punishment would have been greater than detention if I’d had my way. As it is, he’ll get a zero for the assignment.”

“Well,” Mrs. Shelton said, “this is certainly very silly. I’m sorry to hear that he read it out loud. But I know Christopher well enough to understand what he’s doing.”

“And what’s that?”

“He’s countering absurdity with absurdity,” she said. “Christopher gave you an answer that equaled the intelligence of the question.”

“I’m sorry,” Susanna said, face so warm now that she was nearly
light-headed, “to hear that you’d advocate your son’s disrespect of a teacher. Christopher is quite smart, but he doesn’t have the right or the ability to question the intelligence of the question. It’s his job to fulfill the assignment.”

“These open-response questions,” Mrs. Shelton said. “This is some kind of standardized testing thing?”

“That’s right. The superintendent is trying to raise spring scores by two percentage points so that we can avoid state-imposed penalties, such as funding audits. I’ve been directed to devote one class period a week between now and January to test-taking strategies, specifically open-response questions. That prompt”—she pointed to the sheet Mrs. Shelton had placed on the desktop—“was my attempt to make the prep session relevant to our current course content.”

“You’re telling me,” Mrs. Shelton said, “that my son is losing an hour of regular class time every week to these test-training sessions?”

“Yes,” Susanna said tiredly.
Do you think I like this?
she wanted to shout into that smug face, so like the son’s.
That this is what I went to college for? That I’d do it if I didn’t have the administration’s foot on my neck?

Mrs. Shelton tilted her head prettily, scanning the sheet of paper again. “There’s something I still don’t understand. Can you explain to me how my son can score A’s on each of the papers and reading quizzes and projects you assign but still get an 89 for his average in English?”

There it was. The bottom line. Christopher Shelton had brought a B home to Mother, and Mother was not pleased. “Christopher scored a B in English because he’s performing far below average on his open-response questions,” Susanna said. “The questions account for fifteen percent of his total grade for the class.”

“I want you to imagine for a moment how this sounds from my perspective,” Mrs. Shelton said. “It sounds like you and your colleagues are in the business these days of protecting yourselves, and children like mine are paying the price. I’m not worried about the fact that my son made a B. But you’ve shaken his confidence. He tells me that he doesn’t know the terms for getting an A in your course.”

Susanna’s heart was beating so quickly now that her eye seemed to be twitching along in time. “Your son knows fully well what he has to do to get an A in my class,” she said. “And he chooses not to do it. If you reinforce for Christopher at home that he should take these open-response questions as seriously as his other assignments, I don’t doubt that he can raise his grade to an A by the time report cards go out.”

“I plan to do no such thing,” Mrs. Shelton said. Close up, her face revealed the feltlike texture of translucent powder. Susanna could see the path of a delicate blue vein curving between her ear and the corner of her mouth, making her jaw look hinged-on. “It’s the role of some teachers to reinforce the status quo among their students. It’s the easier path, and I don’t hold that against you. You’re trying to teach eighty or ninety students at a time, but I’m raising one, and the way I see it, my role as a parent is to tell him to resist those things in the world that seem foolish or beneath him. These open-response questions are beneath him.”

“I can see you’re used to a certain level of privilege,” Susanna said, a little voice in the back of her brain screeching,
Shut up! Shut up!
even as her anger made her articulate, “but this is a public school system, and nothing that I assign is beneath any of these students. That includes Christopher.”

Mrs. Shelton pursed her lips. “You and I agree on one point. Christopher is no different than his peers. He’s been raised to understand that. These open-response questions are beneath every boy and girl you force them upon, and the sad part is that most of the other children’s parents won’t have the nerve or the ability to tell you as much.”

Susanna felt tears threaten and swallowed them back. This was, she’d think later, a version of the arguments she’d had when
she
had been in eighth grade with the richer and prettier and more popular girls in school. She felt the same crippling insecurity, the same despair, and the hardest thing was realizing that nothing much changed between the ages of thirteen and twenty-eight. “My hands are tied,” she managed to say. “If I don’t assign a grade to the open-response questions, there isn’t any student accountability.”

“Then perhaps my son has more integrity than you do,” Mrs. Shelton said pleasantly. She paused, waiting to see if Susanna would attempt a rebuttal, but Susanna had nothing.

“Okay, then,” Mrs. Shelton murmured, and she walked out.

2.

As Susanna drove the last leg between Hound’s and the day care, she found that her passing concern about Ronnie had solidified into actual anxiety. Perhaps the stress of the day had made her more on edge than usual. Perhaps some instinct had kicked in. She and Ronnie weren’t close the way a lot of sisters she knew were—their history was too fraught, their personalities too different—but every now and then they ended up on the same wavelength. Susanna would fight with Dale, and Ronnie would call, a welcome interruption. Once they’d run into each other at the grocery, glanced at each other’s shopping carts, and laughed to discover that they’d both picked up Cheerios, Colonial bread, orange juice (extra pulp), and Neapolitan ice cream, which had been their father’s favorite.

So there was a bond, if you want to call it that, however tenuous. But there was also Ronnie’s history of personal screwups, colorful enough that Susanna would have been a fool not to feel a twinge of worry at her sister’s recent silence. There was the time when Ronnie drank a fifth of Wild Turkey and woke up in the hospital with alcohol poisoning, and the day, five or so years ago, when Ronnie had mouthed off to a guy in a bar and gotten her nose broken. The earliest memory of this kind still frightened Susanna; she had never been able to shake it. She was twelve, Ronnie sixteen, and Ronnie was climbing into a conversion van with four or five guys—men, really—and Susanna could see that they were all drinking and smoking, and there were no other girls around, not one, and Ronnie was trying to get Susanna to come with them.
Are you a dyke?
she’d taunted, the look on her face a mixture of meanness and desperation that Susanna
hadn’t understood. The men had laughed. Susanna had backed away. In those days she’d had to put energy, real effort, into rebuffing her sister’s attempts to corrupt her. She’d spent her adolescence hating and fearing Ronnie and her young adulthood forgiving her and worrying about her, and Ronnie, to her credit, had tried in the last few years to be a better sister. She’d given Abby a $500 savings bond on each of her birthdays and she’d never complained about the fact that Susanna didn’t trust her to babysit or even take Abby alone for an ice cream or hamburger at the Dairy Dip down the street. Ronnie knew all the things she’d done, the reputation she’d earned, and she didn’t feign self-righteousness. She was a realist.

At the KiddieKare, Susanna opened the door to see her daughter already launching herself across the room in excitement to greet her, midair before Susanna could get her arms outstretched, and then the child was clinging like a monkey to her middle, all clutching legs and arms, smelling of salty sweat and orange-scented tearless shampoo. Susanna kissed her neck, which was warm and a little sticky, then her forehead. There was a spider painted on her plump pale cheek; it was already threaded with cracks.

“Mama-mama-mama,” she said, and Susanna said back, “Abby-Abby-Abby,” because that was their routine. Susanna hugged her again, feeling her stomach flutter in the way it had when she’d first started falling for Dale. Abby was her sweetheart now, her one true love, and that excitement hadn’t waned in the four years that the two of them had spent getting to know each other, as hard as mothering could sometimes be for Susanna. She’d taken to it like she’d taken to cooking: with intelligence and determination but no confidence, consulting books and her own mother’s counsel the way she checked, every time she made a white sauce for macaroni and cheese, to make sure that the recipe called for two tablespoons of flour and not three. She wasn’t the kind of woman who could throw three or four ingredients into a pot, willy-nilly, and create a meal. She wasn’t the kind of woman who could give discipline or life instruction or even an allowance, willy-nilly, and create a daughter.

Cindy’s smile was polite but strained. “Mrs. Mitchell”—she pronounced “Mrs.” the way Susanna’s mother did, emphasizing the “r,”
mizz-rizz
—“we’re supposed to shut up here by five on Fridays.”

“I’m so sorry,” Susanna said, emptying her wallet of its contents. She handed the bills, a ten and a five, to the young woman, who stared at them for a moment before folding them into thirds and slipping the wad into the watch pocket on her light-washed blue jeans. “I was held up at school.”

“If you could just get here by five from now on,” Cindy repeated, her expression flat, “we’d appreciate it.”

“Can do,” Susanna said. She took Abby by the hand and left.

At home, Abby was up another four and a half hours, until the Nashville news came on. Susanna grilled her a cheese sandwich with Velveeta, Abby’s preference, and ketchup—a combination that still made Susanna nauseous, even as she served this feast to her child for the hundredth or more time—then she bathed her, taking care not to rinse off the spider face-painting, which Abby was on the verge of getting screechy about. “Don’t clean it,” she’d whined, lip fat, and so Susanna had worked around the grubby little black spot with her washrag-sheaved forefinger, getting Abby behind her ears and rubbing at the dirt ring on her neck until she whimpered dramatically, falsely, that Susanna was hurting her. Then, freshly done up in her Flintstones footed pajamas, an artifact from Susanna’s own toddlerhood, Abby requested her mother’s assistance on a handful of projects: reading
Lottie’s Halloween Adventure
again before it was due back at the library, Susanna prevailed upon to make distinctions between the high-pitched voice of Lottie, girl investigator, and Max, her talking cocker spaniel; and then, after that fifteen minutes had been successfully killed, playing Duplo blocks in front of the television while Susanna watched a rerun of
Family Matters
. By the time Abby passed out, spread-eagle, in front of the television, and the dishwasher was unloaded, loaded again with the plates and glasses that had accumulated over the last few days, and set to run, Susanna was tired enough to just turn in and give up—but she’d promised herself the wine
and the bath, and she hadn’t swallowed down more than the messy sandwich rinds, those that hadn’t touched the pool of ketchup, of her daughter’s grilled cheese sandwich. She thought for a second and decided that yes, she was probably hungry. It had been a long time since her lunch of microwave lasagna.

She’d downed half a glass of her cheap wine, which was teeth-rattlingly cold and yet still sour, and was investigating a carton of ice cream, which was furred with freezer burn, when she thought about Ronnie again. It was after ten on a Friday, so calling was silly, but Susanna resolved to try her anyway.

She got the machine, as she’d known she would. “Ronnie, it’s Sister,” she said. That’s how Ronnie knew her: Sister. That had been what Susanna’s father always called her, solidifying her place as the younger and secondary of his children, but Susanna had never minded. “I realized tonight that we haven’t talked in a while, so I thought I’d check in. Will you call me back?” She glanced at the clock above the microwave: ten thirty. Dale would be home soon, and he’d have to go to sleep immediately if he wanted even a few hours before embarking on his big day tomorrow. The students were due at the band room by six
A.M
., and Dale would get there by no later than five thirty to warm up the school buses and triple-check the equipment list. Nonetheless, she finished the message by saying, “You can call me when you get back tonight, no matter how late. Or early. Love you, bye.”

This done, she topped off her glass of wine. It really was a glass, a regular drinking glass, because when she’d married at twenty-two she’d seen no reason to register for any stemware but water goblets—what was she, a dignitary? Queen of England? But, sour or not, the wine was doing its work now, and she went into the living room and curled up, feet tucked under her hip to warm them, in Dale’s recliner. Abby’s blocks and dolls were still, were eternally, scattered across the swath of pilled carpet in front of the TV. The TV was eternally on.

Susanna had met Dale at Murray State University, at band camp the summer before her freshman year of college—his senior
year—and they were a couple by the time the week was out. He was her first real boyfriend. Her first kiss.