The Tell (7 page)

“Mira,” Owen started, “what's going on with you?”

She waved him away. “It's nothing. Just pre-party stuff.” She wiped her face with the neck of her shirt and smiled. “How about no more work for today, okay?” Mira said. “Suddenly, I'm completely exhausted.”

During the last weeks of the school year, a profusion of flowering trees circled Spruance Middle School like hopeful cheerleaders. Smeared blossoms of pink littered the front steps. Owen struggled with a window in his classroom and imagined that if he could ever get it open, he'd be able to cool the stifling place but he might also let in the stink lurking outside that was closer to the truth of things; the rumored death of the school was like something rotting in the trees. There was the fretful buzz again that morning from teachers huddled by the shushing copying machine. The chatter suggested the city would finally close Spruance at the end of the next school year for its continued inability to improve, for its dwindling enrollment and attendance, for its failures year after year, its poor performance, discipline problems, teacher dissatisfaction, its impossible detention rate, its plummeting test scores, for what-fucking-difference-did-it-make-in-the-end. The building would be razed, plowed under like a bad idea, the kids scattered across the city, abandoned again. Teaching here now was going to be like caring for a terminal patient.

The kids read silently from
Winter Wheat, Summer Corn
, the banal but mandated novel about a city boy sent to live on a farm in Iowa. It meant zero to his students. The boy might as well have been sent to Cairo or the moon. More than a few of his twenty-eight kids stuffed into the classroom had already drifted off somewhere else, and who could blame them? Some couldn't read at a first-grade level, or speak English, but there were all the signs of transport in the lowered lids, the open mouths, their profound stillness. And where had they gone in their heads? Owen would have liked to know, because he would try to talk to them there. The afternoon sun smacked the lima bean–colored walls and the photos of wheat and cornfields he'd tacked up, though nature mostly annoyed these kids. They squirmed at bugs and shrieked at thunder and lightning, trusted only concrete, glass, and cinderblock, and raspberry flavor that was turquoise blue. Owen admired their city attitudes but lamented the fading optimism that came with age.

Since the start of the period, he'd had the uneasy feeling that someone was on the other side of the door, but saw no one when he looked out. His defensive colleagues papered over the glass portholes so they couldn't be watched, while others wanted a clear view to keep an eye open for trouble. It was most likely a parent out in the locker-lined hall, furious or confused. Teaching was never just about the kids. Behind them, over them, far away from them, there were always one or two parents, grandparents, an overburdened aunt, an ambivalent guardian. Some gave him their concerned hands, some turned their backs, others kept a tight grip on their children. Some wanted soothing, some came to argue. Sometimes he'd look into the eyes of a kid and detect generations of brutal history staring defiantly back at him: I dare you to change the course of my life.

A chair scraped against the floor, and Jacqui, in the center cluster of desks, pink tank top and black bra straps, ponytail of hair pulled back into a glossy helmet, shot up. In the amazing variation of skin color in his classroom, she was somewhere in the middle, between pale sun and wet earth, now with a greenish tint. All heads shot up with her. Hand over mouth, she wove between the desks to the door which she yanked open in time to vomit in a trash can placed with odd prescience just outside. Owen left his own desk as the kids began their derisive hooting and twisted in their seats to get a view of Jacqui doing her fearsome business. Owen put his hand on Jacqui's rounded back to absorb the jolt of the heaves. Sweat polished her neck and hid in the padding of baby fat. The smell of strawberry perfume mixed with puke. Where his finger met an inch of bare forearm, she was hot.

“It's okay, sweetheart. Just relax. You'll be okay,” he soothed. Efficient footsteps approached the turn in the hall, and Owen pulled his hand back. Touch was a loaded word, a lethal action here. The girl shuddered and shivered. “Breathe, Jacqui. Take your time.”

Mrs. Tevas, the librarian, hadn't been rushing to the scene, but had happened on it. Waylaid, she stopped, an ancient encyclopedia volume pressed to her chest. Her thin eyebrows dipped as she noted the posture, the trash can, the open classroom door, the stink of puke. Just last week Owen had been in the library and picked up a book about space exploration for one of his students. The first line read, “Someday man will walk on the moon.” He'd showed it to Mrs. Tevas, but she hadn't found it nearly as funny as he had.

She passed off the encyclopedia to him so she could hold the girl's shoulders. He sensed that Mrs. Tevas didn't think all that much of male teachers. Still, there was something assertive about her that he admired. She tended the library like it was a garden, a place you might someday enter and be surprised by. Like most of the teachers in the building, she was a native of the city and had a pragmatic surface, a Formica demeanor. Her accent sounded like a piece of bright melted plastic. She always eyed him circumspectly, as did his fellow teachers, as though he'd come to Spruance with an unfair advantage, as though his height and size alone could scare kids into compliance. Almost instantly they'd decided that his ability to control a classroom hadn't been earned—though it had been, in harder, tougher schools than this one. That he might actually be able to teach was a secondary consideration. He was from out of state, always an outsider, and so suspect of other things, too: aloofness, his own ideas about how to teach, maybe even the sin of mystery. Moments of affinity with his colleagues were rare. He didn't regret this very often.

“What happened?” Mrs. Tevas asked. Her mustard yellow blouse and blue skirt had the toxic sheen of dry cleaning.

Wasn't it clear, the smell rising in yeasty waves? “Jacqui was reading, and …”

“I got mad sick.” The girl spoke from the echoic depths of the trash can. A cell phone in her back pocket pulsed with light.

“Maybe something from lunch,” Mrs. Tevas said, and looked at Owen. “You taste those fajitas?” She rolled her eyes.

Over Jacqui's back, they silently rifled through what they knew about the girl: mouthy, fifteen, bright, twice repeated grades. She'd given Owen cookies at Christmas; she laughed wickedly, often cruelly, at other kids. She never did her homework, and shrugged as if to say,
Mister, you know how it is
. He was fond of her, but what he knew about any student, even the ones he knew best, was treacherously full of holes, and too often meaningless when a kid was eclipsed by problems. They called him
cocksucker
and
motherfucker
and mostly
Mister
. Some were sweet and bright, others were sullen and dull-eyed, impossible to reach. They all came and went too fast anyway, a new crop filling the seats in September and emptying them in June, each taking another's place in startling repetition. Here was America's true limitless natural resource—squandered. Owen wondered if Mrs. Tevas was thinking, as he was, that the girl might be pregnant. He hated his quick assumption that if Jacqui wasn't doing her homework, if her bra straps showed, if her lip gloss was too pink, if she was poor and throwing up, then she must be fucking, and fucking carelessly, too. But he'd also been teaching a long time. He'd seen it before.

Mrs. Tevas took Jacqui down to the office, though this wasn't the one day a week the nurse was in the building. What remained was the soupy trash can in a ray of sun and the encyclopedia in his hand. The stink had made its way into the classroom. The kids waved their books in front of their faces and yelled they were dying. Reading was impossible now, surrendered to the more relevant drama of Jacqui and the fact that bodies in distress were the most fascinating of all. He tugged again at the window. He wasn't sure why he kept at it after all this time, all these years. Justin yelled that he should just break the thing, that it was an emergency.

“I think I have it,” he said.

“Fuck you do,” a boy shouted. “You're a pussy.”

His fingers strained. His shirt stuck to his chest, his arms trembled. Once, Spruance had been the home of soldierly virtues with its medieval arches and heraldic designs stamped in brass above the doors. Everything was dull-colored and indestructible these days, soldierly now in an entirely different kind of way. How many kids had also heard the distressing rumor that the end was near? He gazed out over Lincoln Street, its well-kept houses and wide stone driveways that led around to back doors and gardens. The NASCAR whirr of lawn crews at work came from every direction. He closed his eyes to imagine Mira at Brindle just then, waiting with a mixture of determination and care—that was pretty much what you needed—for the afterschool kids to arrive, and then someone said that there was a guy outside the door. Owen turned to see a face pressed up against the glass, goggle-eyed, lips smashed, a deranged mouth, pink tip of tongue.

“You said if I was interested, I should come by and see what you do,” Wilton whispered, when Owen opened the door a few inches. “So here I am.”

Owen hadn't actually expected the man to take him up on the offer—because he hadn't meant him to. It was just something he'd tossed out at the end of another one of their long dinners together. The man had become a regular at their table, a regular in their house, a regular in Mira's days and conversation. And then sometimes Wilton would go away for a couple of days, and his house would remain as mysteriously dark as his destinations and desires. Mira would be left blinking at his porch light left on.

“Look, the period's almost over,” he told Wilton. The kids were itchy and noisy behind him, straining to see what was going on. “This isn't a good time.”

Wilton's face sagged as if a tension line had been snipped. “I wanted to see you in action.”

“There's no action. They're reading.”

The room was anything but quiet, the restless tenor rising with Wilton's grin. “That's some loud reading. I'll sit in the back. I won't say a word. Besides, you can't leave me out here with this.” He gestured at the trash can.

Spruance's front office staff was impossible to break through, but Wilton had done it because here he was, wandering the halls alone. Owen imagined that he'd charmed the women as he leaned over their high counter, thumbed their attendance book and asked their names, imitating their Spanish
r
's, and today he looked like a rich, generous uncle in a lapis blue linen shirt and pressed blue jeans. Owen pushed back his reluctance and ushered Wilton into the classroom. He introduced him as an actor. Other guests had withered under the kids' scrutiny. Last month a reporter from the
Journal
had come to talk about bullying. She had cleared her throat incessantly as wet spots spread under her arms. Wilton was a combination of coyness and composure, self-confidence and humility. He leaned against Owen's desk with his legs crossed at the ankles. He allowed himself to be stared at, every piece of him scrutinized and judged. He was priced, assessed, evaluated, and enjoying it. The attention fed him. He plumped and glowed.

“You on TV?” Kevin asked. “Because I never seen you.”

“Yes, on television, but way past your bedtime.”

The kids laughed at that infantile idea. “What channel? I'm going to watch,” China said, and waved her lime green pencil at him. “You got rich, I bet.”

“How do you know I got rich?” Wilton asked.

“Because you have some fancy-ass shoes,” she said.

“These things?” Wilton looked down at his feet. “Fancy-ass? Is that a brand? Is that like Nike?”

“And your shirt, too. Fancy-ass.”

Wilton flipped up his collar, playing to the kids, and hooked a thumb at Owen. “What do you think of this guy? Is he a good teacher?”

“He's good. He's okay. He's big, but he's not so strong.” The kids continued to shout their opinions, some standing, waving their arms and leaning over their desks, slapping the chipped plastic veneer with open hands to make sure they were heard. They threw in what they didn't like about him—too strict, too tall, too much writing. Too white, someone said.

“Too white? He can't do anything about that. But he's the best teacher you'll ever have,” Wilton said. “He's one of the top in the country. It's a proven fact. I'm not making it up. The experts say so. Believe me.”

The kids were baffled by this. Maybe their teacher wasn't exactly who they thought he was. Or maybe this man was just playing them. Owen was irritated. Why do this? What was the point? Authority was mostly an illusion; it couldn't stand too much fiddling with and poking, too many shifts in light. The bell rang and the kids burst out of their seats. In a second, the place echoed with their escape.

Wilton crossed his arms over his chest. “You look out at these kids and it's like the UN. Amazing. All those colors, so many hues and tints. What are they, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Guatemalan, Cambodian, Haitian? Other?”

“Yes, other,” Owen said. He was sorry he'd let the man in. “The kids knew you were bullshitting them. They're not babies. All that crap about best teacher and proven facts and experts. They can smell it a mile off.”

“But I meant everything I said. It wasn't bullshit. You are one of the best teachers.”