Brief Encounters with the Enemy

ENCHANTMENT

It was cool weather when I returned. Cool, breezy, overcast, but no rain. I had departed in cool weather too. So in some ways it was as if nothing had changed.

What had changed was that I was a hero, coming home to great fanfare — me and one thousand other guys. We were lucky to have been included in the first wave back. This was when the news was fresh, when everyone was excited. Just like that, the war had ended. No one had seen it coming and everyone was thankful. The diplomacy had been a success, the enemy had capitulated, and all the terms of the settlement were in our favor. Everyone said it had been worth it. Everyone said they’d do it all over again.

Underneath a gray and cloudy sky, the boulevard was lined with ten thousand people who had come out to greet us, ten thousand people screaming their heads off like we were a rock band being pulled by in a flatbed truck. “We love you,” they shouted generally. “We love you too,” we shouted back. We smelled like sweat and mildew and fatigue. Some of us smelled like vomit. It had been a long trip home: a boat, a train, a plane. On the final flight we’d had to hold our duffel bags on our laps with the air vents blowing warm air on the tops of our heads, but no one complained, no one said a word, we were all happy to have made it out alive.

My mother had said she’d come out to cheer for me. She’d bought a big sign custom-made at Walmart. WELCOME HOME JAKE, it read. She showed it to me later, unfurling it on top of her bed because her place was small and there was nowhere else to put it. She was surprised I hadn’t been able to pick it out of the crowd. I was touched, but she was disappointed. “I was so sure you’d see it!” I tried to let her down easy. “It was a sea of people, Ma,” I said. A sea of flags and signs and waving hands. The fact was, I hadn’t even thought to look for her. I’d forgotten about her, actually. Instead, I’d been searching the crowd for Molly. It had been eighteen months since I’d seen her. Eighteen months of emails filled with declarations of love, declarations of what might have been and what might be. We knew our relationship would probably never amount to anything, but still we dreamed. Fifteen thousand miles away from each other, we waxed poetic and romantic, and sometimes we sent naked pictures. The last email I’d received had been three days earlier, four-thirty in the morning Molly’s time, letting me know that she was coming to the homecoming, honey, that she wouldn’t miss it for the world, that she was bringing Lola. Lola wouldn’t miss it for the world. And by the way, she’d attached a drawing she’d made that night, that very night, three people in watercolor, presumably the three of us, all pinks and purples and shadows. The girls wore skirts and I wore camouflage. What did I think? she wanted to know. It wasn’t what I had dressed like, but it was well done. “It’s beautiful,” I wrote back.

“Do you really mean that?” she responded. She had confidence issues.

As the flatbed truck moved slowly down the boulevard, I jostled with the other guys for that prime position front and center. Every so often I would think I’d hear her in the crowd, yelling, “Jake, Jake,” and I’d wave my arms in the direction of her voice, and I’d jump up and down as if I’d won a big prize. But there was no one yelling “Jake, Jake,” they were yelling “Hey, hey” to all of us. Still, I stood front and center. “Come on, Jake,” the guys said. “Give someone else a chance.” But I was selfish and wouldn’t budge. I’d earned the right. I’d trained harder, marched longer, fought better. The guys would have said so themselves. Plus I’d saved a few of their lives along the way. But the peace was upon us now. “It’s every man for himself,” I told them. It was a wonder how quickly the sense of camaraderie could evaporate.

Far out over the heads of the ten thousand fans, I could see the factories sending up their plumes of smoke into the overcast sky. You couldn’t distinguish the gray smoke from the gray sky. For as long as I’d been gone, the factories hadn’t stopped once. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the smokestacks churned. “I’m going to get a job down there,” one of the guys said. Brad. He wasn’t speaking to me, he was speaking at large. “Good luck,” I told him. He needed luck. It was a fact that half the guys were going down to the factories first thing in the morning to put in an application. Everyone had a plan, and that was their plan. As for me, I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t need one. I was coming home to a good job, secure and with full benefits, teaching sixth-grade history at the best school in the city. Montgomery Prep. On Monday morning I would show up bright and early in my tie and briefcase, as if nothing had changed, as if I’d never left, and I would say, “Good morning, boys and girls …” And they’d want to know all about where I’d been and what I’d done and what I’d seen. But there would be schoolwork to undertake. And schoolwork came first. They’d be studying the Renaissance by now. Or if the substitute teacher had been inept and inefficient, which I suspected she had been, they would have made it only as far as the Middle Ages. Or worse, the Holy Roman Empire. It didn’t matter to me. I was happy to get back to any era.

Eighteen months earlier, I’d had to abandon another class of sixth-graders unexpectedly, unhappily, midterm — Han Dynasty — with only three days’ notice. They’d gathered around and hugged me goodbye. They’d said, “We’re going to miss you, Mr. Mattingly!” I tried to be reassuring, but all I could think about was what terror lay in store for me. Everyone thought I was a hero, teachers included, but the reality was I had no choice in the matter, it was the deal I had struck in exchange for my college degree when I’d had the forethought, two weeks out of high school, to go down to the Career Center and sign up. I didn’t want to end up like my mother, working as a telephone operator for thirty years. The recruiter had told me they’d need me one weekend a month unless there was a war. “But there ain’t going to be no war,” he’d said. He had laughed. We both had laughed. I’d signed on the dotted line and then gone straight down to Peabody Community College to register for fall classes — all paid in full by that one weekend a month. It had seemed comical back then, the idea of a war. It had seemed antiquated. Three years later it wasn’t antiquated anymore, and three years after that my number had come up. Now this trip down the boulevard, with the flags waving, with the crowd screaming, represented my final remittance.

And suddenly right then and there, standing in the front row behind the police barricade, not more than a dozen feet from me, waving one of those small ninety-nine-cent American flags that you could buy at any supermarket, was Molly. I saw her before she saw me. Her red hair was loose and long, longer than it had been before I’d left, and it was cascading down her shoulders like a lion’s mane. She was wearing a sweater because it was breezy and cool, but there was an extra button unbuttoned that allowed me to see the tops of her breasts. She had small breasts and a big butt, which I liked. “It’s all going to waste,” she’d written me, two months into my deployment. The truth was, we’d hardly ever had sex. Maybe ten times total. Twice in my car and the rest on my futon. She’d regretted all of them. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she’d sobbed the last time. She’d put her face in her hands and her hair fell forward. I wasn’t sure if she was sorry about the sex or sorry about being sorry. I’d tried to put my arm around her shoulder to comfort her, but she shrugged me off. She told me she preferred me as her muse, not her lover. I had no idea what that meant. “From now on,” she said as if making a declaration, but didn’t bother to finish the thought. She tried it for a while — muse not lover — but physical affection cannot be forestalled forever, and eventually she started holding my hand again, and then kissing me, and three weeks before I deployed, she put her hand down my pants. Thirty minutes later she was sobbing. Now here she was, as promised, standing in the crowd, looking intense, concerned, almost despairing. She must have been waiting at least two hours for my return, studying the faces of the floating one thousand. She no doubt had reached the point when she was certain I had passed her by. “Here I am, Molly!” I wanted to shout, but I didn’t say a word.

Just to her right was Lola, grinning, waving to anyone and everyone, unmoved by her mother’s dilemma. It was all fun and games to her, this parade. Her umbrella was open, even though it wasn’t raining, and she was resting it on her shoulder, twirling it like a little woman. I was stunned at how much taller she’d gotten since I’d seen her last. If it hadn’t been for her own red hair, I wouldn’t have recognized her. She’d been a girl when I left, six years old, interested in girly things, dolls and teddy bears; now she was close to nine and tending toward women’s things. “Here I am, Lola!” I thought about shouting. But no, I didn’t say a word, because standing beside her, which is to say between her and her mother, was her father, tall and thin and gullible. His face was friendly and welcoming and wealthy. He was clean-shaven. He was clueless. He wore a baseball cap that said U.S.A. He had one hand around Molly’s waist, squeezing her proprietarily, and with the other hand he waved generously at the passing soldiers. “Thank you! Thank you!” he called. There had been only a handful of times when I’d seen him in the flesh, and every time had left me both despairing and emboldened. His presence brought him out of the realm of conjecture and into the solid world, where he eventually would be vanquished.

When it came my turn to receive his thanks, I did so, lifting my hand and waving in return. “Thank you! Thank you!” he shouted naïvely. It was then that Molly saw me. Her face registered shock. Her shock turned to relief. The relief turned to love. I smiled at her as I would at any bystander. Then the truck moved past for the last leg home.

The manual said that I’d most likely experience some aftereffects from the war once I got home. But the first thing I had to do was reclaim my efficiency from Fred the subletter. He was clearly disappointed to see me return. There were no accolades forthcoming.

“I wasn’t expecting you” was what he said. He was probably hoping I’d been killed.

He’d taken decent care of the place while I’d been gone, as well he should have. I’d given him a sweet deal. Somehow he’d managed to leave a palm print on the ceiling in the kitchenette, but other than that I could find no wrong. The apartment was smaller than I remembered, and more cramped. I had thought it would feel bigger after eighteen months away. After all, I’d been living on a military base with five hundred other soldiers, sixty-two to a room, twenty-two to a shower. In the middle of the night I’d be awakened by the sound of everyone snoring.

“How was it, Jake?” Fred wanted to know, meaning the war.

I was sure he didn’t care, and I didn’t care to tell him. I offered a cliché: “Fred,” I said, “I’d do it all over again.”

He liked that. “Thank you for your service,” he said.

He gave me the last month’s rent in cash. I wanted to count it in front of him, because I didn’t trust him, but I waited until he left. The sun was starting to set, and it cast shadows in thin gray lines across the apartment. I call it an apartment, but it’s a room, a square room, fifteen by fifteen with a kitchenette off to the side. I sat down at the table that doubles as a desk, and I counted the money. It was all there, in tens and twenties. It made me feel rich. The feeling of wealth helped to mitigate the feeling of claustrophobia. I spread the bills out on the table. It was the same table where I graded my papers and ate my meals and read my newspaper. If I folded the leaf up, it could be a table that sat six for dinner. I couldn’t even fit six people in the apartment. On the wall was a drawing that Molly had made for me, framed and signed, of a man sitting at a table looking at a drawing of a man sitting at a table. “I like to work in meta,” she’d said. It had been done in charcoal and like everything else she did, it was very good. Sitting there staring, I realized that I’d developed a half-shaped, half-conscious idea that when I returned from the war, I’d be returning to a house. Maybe Molly’s house. When you’re fifteen thousand miles away, it’s easy for things to seem possible and attainable. I could have been at her house in twenty minutes. I’d once driven by on a whim, dinnertime, just once, pretending to myself that I had some errand to run in her neighborhood. Her proximity was terrifying and tantalizing. I could have walked right up and rang the doorbell. Instead, I’d parked across the street and sat in the car. I didn’t even turn the radio on. Her house was grand. It should have been grand, her husband was rich. It had a wraparound porch, it had a balcony off the master bedroom, it had a swing set in the yard. For thirty minutes I sat in the car waiting for something to happen, something like Lola coming out and swinging. Every so often I would catch a glimpse of a figure passing in front of the bay window, but the shade was drawn halfway and I was never certain who it was. Later Molly told me, “Don’t ever do that again.”

But I don’t really mind my apartment, it’s the nicest apartment I’ve ever had, and I’ve had many. We went from apartment to apartment, my mother and I, a succession of apartments, small, big, lousy — roaches, no roaches — on average a new apartment every two years, and one year it was two in one year. That was when times were hard. That was when I was a child. Now I’m an adult with a dishwasher and central air.

It turned out that Fred wasn’t the only one unhappy to see me return.

“Where’s Mrs. Tannehill?” the sixth-graders wanted to know.

Mrs. Tannehill was the substitute the school had hired to take my place while I was gone. She was elderly, fifteen years past retirement, still bouncing from school to school, trying to piece together a living. She had arthritis and perfect diction.

“I do so love children,” she’d told me before I left, as if she weren’t doing it to make money.

“Who doesn’t love children?” I’d asked her. I was being snide, but the question had made her beam.

She obviously knew something about teaching, though, because the children weren’t behind in their lessons. That Monday morning I’d been surprised to walk into the classroom before school began and find the walls covered with drawings of the major figures of the Enlightenment. Spinoza. Locke. Newton. They were already on the Enlightenment.

On the floor beneath the drawings were cardboard dioramas in shoe boxes, a dozen or so dioramas featuring pivotal scenes from three centuries ago, like the apple hitting Newton on the head. I’d never done dioramas with my class. I’d never even considered them.

She’d also been conscientious enough to leave a detailed report on my desk, written in exquisite, outdated penmanship, informing me of each student’s strengths and weaknesses. “Ellery is shy, analytical, easily flustered. Mallory is contemplative, creative, and has allergies …” I didn’t bother to read the whole thing. My main concern was the prospect of having to rework my lesson plan, which had been handed to me six years earlier like a baton by the retiring history teacher, and which went only as far as 1959. “You won’t ever make it past 1910,” he’d sniggered. He’d been right till now. At the rate the students were going, they’d make it all the way to the present.

The day had started with such promise. I’d had butterflies coming around the bend, seeing the school in the early-morning light, two stories in red brick with a chimney. It was idyllic and beautiful, the school, in a run-down, affluent sort of way: drafty in the winter, hot in the summer, mice in the basement. It was surrounded by woods, a pond, and a baseball field, which had, when I’d driven up, six sprinklers going full force, trying to keep the grass green and lush. The school had been built one hundred years ago, when everything was corn and wheat. Since then it had produced three congressmen and one poet. Their portraits hung in the lunchroom as a reminder. “Give your best, get your best” was the school motto, etched above the main entrance. And that morning the principal, Dr. Dave, had been standing beneath the portico, waiting to greet me personally.

“Here comes the soldier-teacher!” he cried. He shook my hand vigorously. He looked me in the eye.

“I’m glad to be back, Dr. Dave,” I said. I wanted to sound easygoing, but I was ecstatic that he was taking time out of his day. He wasn’t much older than I, but he was more successful, and that always plagued me. It put my life’s accomplishments into perspective. He’d gotten his doctorate by twenty-six, he’d become principal by twenty-nine, he spoke Japanese. He wore jeans every day to prove that he was down-to-earth. He went by his first name, but with “Doctor” added for the constant evocation of academic achievement. The day I got the news of my call-up, he’d appeared unannounced in the teachers’ lounge and said a few impromptu words about “Jake’s decision to become a soldier,” ending with “Give your best, get your best.” I’d always found the phrase fatuous, but it had made me blush like a boy.

It was only seven-thirty and the students hadn’t arrived yet and everything was quiet. Dr. Dave escorted me down the hallway with his hand lightly on my arm. My arm felt muscular beneath his hand. Our footsteps echoed on the stone tile. Here comes the hero.

George the custodian was mopping the floor. He’d been mopping the floor for twenty-five years. When we passed, he stopped and said, “Welcome back, Mr. Mattingly.”

“I’m glad to be back, George,” I said.

“I prayed for you every day,” he said. He was being obsequious, and I liked it.

The typing teacher came out of her classroom and said, “Oh my God, Jake,” and hugged me. It was the first time a woman had touched me in eighteen months and I thought about resting my head on her shoulder. Her voice filled the hallway, which brought the spelling teacher out of her room, and the art teacher, and the English teacher. They all came running. Soon the hallway was filled with two dozen teachers and George, standing around waiting for me to regale them with war stories. I gave them platitudes. I told them it had been an honor and a privilege. I told them I’d do it again. They enjoyed the platitudes. They mistook the platitudes for details. Dr. Dave raised my arm like a boxer who’d won the championship.

But an hour minutes later I had fourteen boys and girls staring at me, wanting to know where Mrs. Tannehill was.

“Mrs. Tannehill was your substitute,” I informed them.

Their faces were blank. They didn’t understand. A substitute was someone who replaced the teacher. They had begun the year with Mrs. Tannehill, who was now being replaced. The seventh-graders before them had only ever known Mrs. Tannehill as well. As far as everyone in the near vicinity was concerned, I was the substitute.

The students sat in two rows of five and one row of four. They were the children of those who could afford prep school tuition — bankers, lawyers, doctors. They would grow up to be bankers, lawyers, doctors. This was the cycle and I was a part of it. They dressed in clean, pressed uniforms in the school colors of gold and black. The girls wore dresses, the boys wore ties. Their ties were gold or black. They might have appeared like well-behaved students, with their hands crossed, their pencils at the top of their desks, but their expressions were vindictive and mistrustful. They wanted me gone.

I explained to them that Mrs. Tannehill had been covering for me while I’d been “off fighting a war.” This was supposed to impress them, but it made no significant impact, even on the boys. It left me at a total loss as to what to say or do next. I’d been prepared for a rousing reception from these twelve-year-olds and now there was silence. Perhaps they thought I was inventing my military service. No doubt they’d grown accustomed to being lied to by adults. It would have helped if I’d been wounded in the line of duty, just a minor wound, something that had left a mark. I could have rolled up my sleeve and said, “This is where the bullet went in.” There was a soldier in my battalion who lost the tip of his pinkie finger. Brandon. It was only the tip and only the pinkie, and he’d done it while cleaning his gun one morning. He was an idiot, but it wasn’t a gruesome disfigurement, nor would it hinder him in life, and it was something he would forever be able to tell an unprompted story about. In lieu of my own wound, I thought about passing around my military ID, but that struck me as defeatist and emasculating. No, they wanted something tangible. They wanted the tip of my finger.

I tried a different angle. “Who here can tell me how the war ended?” Even as I said it, I could hear the honeycoated quality of my voice, pedantic and condescending. It was too late to take it back. I was talking down to them and they knew it, asking them a question that even a five-year-old could answer. Still, I waited, arms crossed in the pedagogical style, looking for someone to provide me the correct response, which, of course, was “We won.” This was the pivotal moment that I had studied in my teacher training courses; it was where I would gauge if the students respected my authority and viewed me as an educator. All I needed was one child, one out of fourteen, to give me the answer and I’d be able to move on organically to a discussion of what I’d been doing the last eighteen months. They would demand descriptions and I would give them descriptions. All the brutal descriptions their hearts desired. I’d hold nothing back and they’d be spellbound. Death by drowning, by burning, by whatever means available. That was how we had won the war.

While I waited, I could feel a prodigious amount of silent time slipping past. My mind wandered dangerously. It began to fade. I realized how jet-lagged I was. The manual had cautioned about fatigue. I became absorbed in the dioramas, little resting Newton being crowned by a clay apple, and I contemplated what historical events came after 1959 and how much work it would be for me to piece those events together. Through the window, I could see the gray sky hovering over the edge of the woods. The sprinklers oscillated across the baseball field, shuck, shuck, shuck was their sound, their reach long and powerful, and most of the time they missed the field altogether and shot straight into the pond.

Finally, mercifully, a little girl in the back row raised her hand. Her name was Bethany and she wore a gold ribbon in her hair and sat with perfect posture. “Bethany is bright, introspective …”

“Yes, Bethany?” I said.

“Is Mrs. Tannehill sick?”

It was three weeks after I’d gotten home that I was finally able to see Molly. It was supposed to have been only two weeks, but that’s the nature of an affair. We’d had a few phone conversations along the way, breathy and furtive and yearning, and each time she’d had to hang up in the middle. “I’m trying my best, honey,” she’d promised. But she didn’t seem all that bothered. This was not how I’d envisioned my homecoming.

She arrived on a Saturday afternoon with Lola. They were en route to a pottery class and had one hour to spare. Lola leaped into my arms straightaway. At least she was happy to see me. “What’d you bring me?” she wanted to know. She was heavy in my arms. She’d become a little woman. I wanted to bury my face in her neck and weep at the passage of time. I wanted her mother to see how much I had missed them.

“I was at war,” I said. “I didn’t bring you anything.”

She shrugged. She jumped from my arms onto the futon. She jumped up and down on the futon. The futon was pushed against the wall and doubled as a couch, in the same way that my desk doubled as a table. My kitchen cabinets doubled as a place to file papers. This was life in an efficiency. With three people it was crowded.

“Don’t jump on the bed,” Molly said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I wanted to be permissive.

Molly let me kiss her on the cheek. It was a casual, platonic, meaningless kiss that I had perfected. Molly wanted to make sure Lola was protected from the effects of “our transgression.” If Lola were ever to innocently mention something to her father, it could be explained away as a harmless kiss from a harmless friend. “Mommy’s old friend Jake.” “Mommy’s dear friend Jake.” That was the parameter we worked within. We’d been working within it for three years. In three years, Lola had never said anything to her father. She seemed to notice nothing and be affected by nothing. As far as I could tell, she seemed to love me. I often wondered if she loved me most of all and was aiding and abetting us, perhaps unconsciously, because I was the one she really wanted as her father. “He’s absentee,” Molly had told me when we first met. She didn’t mean that her husband traveled, she meant that he was emotionless and humorless. He was an entrepreneur. He owned shopping malls or shopping centers. “I’m trying to help the world,” she said he’d tell her. He spent his weekends on the phone.

We sat around my desk/table, the three of us, eating muffins that I’d bought for our reunion. Lola wanted to eat only the tops of the muffins. “The muffinheads,” she called them. She pulled them apart, stuffed the heads in her mouth, and put the unwanted portion back on the plate. She was disgusting.

“Eat the whole thing,” Molly instructed.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. I wanted to be the good guy.

Six muffins later, Lola had to use the bathroom. The moment the door was closed, I pulled Molly onto my lap. Her body was warm and her hair fell in my face. “No, no, no,” she cooed, but she straddled me anyway. She was always sure to offer resistance. The resistance only increased the desire, of course, but it seemed to put her mind at ease and resolve the moral dilemma.

She’d married too young. That was the dilemma. She’d had Lola too young. That was another dilemma. She’d wanted to be an artist — now she was thirty-eight and a housewife.

“It’s too late,” she’d tell me.

“No,” I’d say, “it’s never too late.” But I didn’t really believe it myself.

We’d met by chance at a museum three years ago. She’d had her sketch pad and I’d had my students. I’d brought them on a field trip to show them a traveling exhibit of antiquities from the Ottoman Empire. They were disinterested and I was distracted. Molly kept walking past with her high heels and her hoop earrings and her red hair. I tried my best not to have my students catch me looking at her ass. I’d shown off in front of her by doing an imitation of Mehmed II. The class had roared and she had smiled. They loved me, those students. They would do anything I wanted, answer any question I asked. As we were leaving, I happened to run into her at the coat check. “If you ever want a guided tour …” I said. I had no idea she’d take me up on it. I had no idea she was married. A week later we were back at the museum. She’d brought her sketch pad again. In truth, she was the expert, telling me about the artwork and the artists and the brushstroke. She showed me some of her own drawings. They weren’t of paintings and sculptures but of people looking at paintings and sculptures. She was obviously talented. “They’re amazing,” I said. “Do you really think so?” she said. We sat close to each other in front of Monet’s water lilies while she talked for twenty minutes about the painter’s failing eyesight. I was fixated on her hip pressing against my hip. Later we made out in my car, and when we were done, she pulled her wedding ring out of her pocket. It had one huge diamond. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said. She thought that would be the end of us, but it wasn’t. I didn’t care about any nameless, faceless husband. It was every man for himself in this world.

We’d seen each other about once a month since then, sometimes twice a month. We avoided phone calls, we deleted emails, we met at out-of-the-way places. Once, when her husband was preoccupied, we managed to see each other two days in a row. We took Lola to the circus on Saturday and the amusement park on Sunday. It was like we were a family, or trying to be a family, laughing and sliding down the water slide. It had seemed like a grand achievement at the time not to exhibit any trace of desire. “Mommy’s friend Jake.”

Now Molly was on my lap. Her legs wrapped around me. Her skirt rode up high.

“Come back,” I gasped.

“I will,” she whispered.

“When?” I asked.

“Soon,” she said.

“How soon?”

By the time Lola came tearing out of the bathroom, flinging herself on my couch/bed, and screaming, “Let’s play war!” Molly and I were sitting in our respective seats talking about the weather. We were pros.

The days were getting longer and warmer, but the sky was overcast and it still hadn’t rained. To get to school each morning, I drove over the bridge heading east. Down along the river, I could see the factories all in a row, their smokestacks going. A few of them had closed since the war had ended. That was an unintended consequence of the peace. The people who had come in from the outskirts for work were heading back to the outskirts.

As for my classroom, it was established that the students hated me. Even those Mrs. Tannehill had described as “loving,” “caring,” “forgiving” loathed me. In the beginning I tried to curry favor by handing out candy from a large glass jar that I kept on my desk — a blatant disregard of teaching ethics — but it didn’t achieve the desired result. The children would eat the candy sullenly and in a manner of obligation. I had become the enemy in their eyes, and even when the enemy gives something good, it is received with suspicion and resentment. Naturally, I began to hate them in return. I fantasized about failing them, each and every one. I would fail them through no shortcoming in their classwork, but it would serve them right all the same. I would teach them a lesson about the vagaries and the violence of the real world. Unfortunately, failing them would require more work from me than passing them. It would require written explanations and conferences with parents. Dr. Dave would want to know what had gone wrong and where. In the end, it would be simpler to pass them. A’s across the board. But those A’s would come at a price. There would be no drawings, no dioramas, no excursions to museums. No candy. In short, no fun. That would be our pact. If I were the enemy in their eyes, then I would play the role of the enemy.

Meanwhile, they made quick work of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Victorian Era, the Great Famine. Decades fell by the wayside. Their collective rigor and acumen were impressive. They wrote thoughtful, insightful essays about the reasons one million people had to starve to death. Their grammar was excellent, their spelling perfect. I could find no fault. The twentieth century loomed. It wasn’t until the Civil War that I managed to bog them down. War made their shoulders slump and their eyes glaze over. I punished them all the more for it. I spent whole classes standing at the front of the room, reading aloud from eyewitness accounts about Harpers Ferry and Bull Run—“Yonder down below, I descried a figure …”—trying to draw subtle, meaningful parallels to our present. Other times I copied long passages verbatim from the textbook onto the chalkboard, and as I copied, they copied. For an hour the only sounds in the classroom were the scraping of chalk and pencil and the sprinklers going shuck, shuck, shuck. On Thursdays they read aloud, on Fridays they read to themselves. On Mondays I turned obscure. “Who was General Zollicoffer, Chloe?” Chloe didn’t know. Chloe must memorize. “Where was the Battle of Pea Ridge, Trevor?” Trevor must study more.

“History is dead,” I said one day, apropos of nothing. “The past doesn’t exist.” I slammed the textbook closed for emphasis. The idea had come into my head fully formed. I thought it sounded profound, but the students looked weary. I opened the jar of candy on my desk and took out a handful. They had not had any in quite a while. I jiggled it in my hand as if considering. They stared at the bounty. I went from desk to desk, slowly giving one colorful piece to each student.

The enemy sometimes gives spontaneously and for no apparent reason.

They unwrapped their treats reflexively. They stuck them in their mouths. They waited for the bell to ring. They thought of Mrs. Tannehill.

It was during the Gilded Age that Dr. Dave showed up one morning unannounced. I was content with the Gilded Age. I had slowed the class perfectly, and with summer vacation approaching, we would have enough time to dip a toe into the twentieth century. That was all we needed to do in order to say we had done it. Then they could go on to seventh grade.

“Is it okay if I sit in today, Mr. Mattingly?” Dr. Dave asked. There was a hint of agenda in his voice.

“Of course it is,” I said. But I was ill prepared for observation. I made a grand sweep of my arm toward a desk in the back, as if my hospitality were immense.

I instructed the class to welcome Dr. Dave and they obliged mechanically: “HEL. LO. DOC. TORRRRRR. DAY. VE.” I scanned my students’ faces, trying to determine who among them had betrayed me. Someone no doubt had said something to their parents, who had called Dr. Dave. He had decided to come investigate for himself. The first thing he was sure to notice was the jar of candy on my desk. It glowed multicolored and bright.

He took a seat in the back row with his blue jeans. He was too large for the desk and he crossed his legs, trying to find purchase. He waited. The students waited. They knew something was amiss. They sensed my predicament. The enemy was being watched. Crimes would be revealed. As the bromide goes, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Dr. Dave may very well have been the students’ enemy too. He had it in him. I had observed him once bring to tears an eighth-grade girl who’d made the mistake of referring to him as “Mister.” “Good morning, Mr. Dave.”

“I worked very hard for my doctorate, young lady,” he’d explained, inches from her face.

So we stepped lightly, the students and I, we groped for détente.

I loosened my tie and smiled. They smiled in return. I asked if they had plans for the weekend. They murmured some response.

With small talk depleted, I broached the subject of the Gilded Age. “Who here can tell me about the Gilded Age?”

There was a great, wide silence. I had overwhelmed them with too broad a question. They couldn’t have responded if they had wanted to. My technique had ignored the principles of how a young mind was equipped to think. Begin with relatable details, work toward larger concepts, expand outward into interpretation. It took everything I had not to glance in the direction of Dr. Dave. It took everything I had not to open the jar of candy.

“Who here can tell me,” I tried again, “about the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt?” Again silence. I had whittled the era down to the size of one human figure, though I wasn’t sure whether the students would have given me an answer even if they had one.

The enemy was hunted. The enemy was cornered. The enemy would capitulate. Now was not the time to show mercy.

It was warm in the classroom and I was beginning to sweat. To buy time, I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of my chair. I was sure that patches of sweat were visible around my armpits. One of the drawbacks about teaching in a quaint one-hundred-year-old building was that no provision had been made for air-conditioning. When the temperature rose, we suffered for it. The best you could hope for was that George the janitor would bring you a fan. Outside, the sprinklers toiled over the baseball field, but the grass was turning brown. Grass all over the city was turning brown. Rain was what was needed.

On the last day of the school year, Dr. Dave summoned me into his office. “Can I have a word with you, Jake?” is how he asked. I’d been expecting something of this sort but hadn’t prepared an able defense.

His feet were on the desk when I walked in and his diplomas were on the wall. He was dressed in a black suit with cuff links in the shape of mortarboards. Today was graduation and presently he would be standing onstage handing eighth graders their diplomas, intoning to each, “Give your best, get your best.”

It was strange to see him in a suit, and he looked severe. Severe like a magistrate. I took a seat across from him and waited for what no doubt would be an unfavorable verdict. He was dressed to inflict maximum punishment.

“I have a proposition for you, Jake,” he said without preamble. Then he launched into a strange and roundabout story — interrupted periodically by the ringing of his phone — that had nothing to do with my lack of pedagogy.

He was looking for a house-sitter.

Now that the war was over—“Thanks to you, Jake”—he would be doing some traveling. He was going to see the world. He and his wife. They were leaving in a few days. Day after tomorrow, actually. He had lined up a house-sitter — a friend of a cousin — but that person had fallen through at the last minute because he was young and irresponsible. Dr. Dave had thought of me. I had popped into his head. Would I be interested? There was no money, of course. “But I’m sure you could use your own sort of vacation, Jake.” We laughed together at this. He knew my salary. He probably knew the size of my apartment. All that was required of me was to collect the mail and water the garden. Other than that, I would have the run of the house, including the forty-two-inch high-definition television.

“Do you want to think about it?” he asked. No, I didn’t want to think about it.

I called Fred the subletter the next day. This time he was happy to hear from me. He showed up with a dozen boxes and the first month’s rent in cash. My mother was there, helping me pack. It was her day off from answering phones and she had nothing better to do. There wasn’t much to pack except clothes.

“We’ll be out of your hair in no time,” she told Fred. She was always apologizing for things that didn’t require apology.

“If you forget anything,” Fred said to me, “you’re always welcome to come back.”

“I know that, Fred,” I said.

By the time we left, he was reclining on my couch/bed with his shoes off and his arms behind his head as if he had been the tenant all along.

Dr. Dave’s house was located an hour away, on the other side of the river, in the exclusive and upscale Cranberry Township. In the car, I gave my mother half the rent money.

“Oh, I don’t need that,” she said. She took it anyway.

Fifteen minutes into the drive all traces of the urban world were gone, replaced by the countryside. The countryside would have been picturesque, except it was wilting. I’d been to Cranberry Township once, when I was a boy, eight years old maybe, visiting a friend I’d made at day camp. Rodney. It had been a summer day but we’d spent our time in the basement playing video games and eating potato chips. In the evening his father had driven me home in his Mercedes-Benz. I’d had the idea that I would be returning to Cranberry Township shortly, but twenty years had passed.

“All I’m saying,” my mother was saying, “is it’s wrong.” She was complaining about the war. The second wave of soldiers was coming home and apparently no one cared, including me. This is why it’s good to be first.

“It’s just not right,” she said, “it’s not good.” It was a sign of bad things to come. She paused, waiting for me to agree with her. I turned the radio up louder. After a while she started humming along, one hand tapping out the rhythm on her thigh. Her thighs were getting thicker. Her hair was getting grayer. She’d be retiring soon. She’d end up with back problems and a decent pension. Suddenly she turned to me and said, “How’s your girlfriend?” The word “girlfriend” reverberated within the confines of the car. I couldn’t tell if she was using the word ironically. I couldn’t tell if she knew something. That was always one of the concerns with having an affair: you never knew who knew something.

She’d seen Molly once by accident. We’d gone to the movies together, Molly and I, on one of our clandestine romantic outings, and my mother happened to be sitting in the back row. I was hoping she wouldn’t notice me, but she did. I introduced Molly to her as my girlfriend. It had slipped out inadvertently. I’d never used the term before or since. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” my mother had said with overblown formality. Molly and I sat in the front holding hands, but I couldn’t follow the plot. We ended up leaving midway without my mother seeing us. She called me later to say, “Your girlfriend’s got nice hair.”

The farther I drove, the more the countryside wilted. The earth was drying up. The trees were losing their leaves. Brown swaths covered the hills like a disease. In Cranberry Township the houses got larger and the streets got wider and the grass got greener. The streets had bucolic names like Eagle Claw Lane and Turtle Dove Drive.

My mother said, “Looks like a fairy tale.”

I turned right, I turned left, and there at the bottom of a steep hill, set back about one hundred feet behind two trees, with a mailbox and a weather vane, was my final destination for the summer: 14 Misty Morning Way.

The blue jeans did not begin to tell the story. The blue jeans were an affectation bordering on fraud. Whatever else Dr. Dave had accomplished at such a young age, his house had to have been the ultimate accomplishment. Ivy covered two walls. The walls rose three stories. The windows were framed by wooden shutters. On the front door was the number fourteen carved in wood, and when I turned the key in the lock, the door swung open onto a foyer with two umbrellas in an umbrella stand. Stepping over the threshold, I had the sensation that everything had just changed for me, changed for the better, that I was passing through a very difficult epoch of my life and arriving at something akin to success.

My mother passed through behind me. We trod silently, cautiously. We could have been mother and son from the Gilded Age, entering their grand home. We could have been thieves.

There were four bedrooms in the house and stainless-steel appliances. There was wall-to-wall carpeting and a library. The library contained educational tomes and books in Japanese. “I’m going to do some reading this summer,” I announced.

Past the library was a living room. Past the living room was another living room. Everything was pristine and flawless and spotless, including the garden, which my mother and I entered by opening a sliding glass door that had no fingerprints and made no sound.

The garden was the masterwork. It was as wide as the house and twice as long. There were trees, there were birds, there were flowers. It could have been a painting. I took off my shoes, because to walk on the grass with shoes seemed like a violation. The grass was as soft as the carpeting. It looked as if it’d been trimmed with scissors. My mother and I stood around saying nothing. The garden smelled like summer and country and rebirth, and in spite of the dry spell, Dr. Dave had managed to keep it alive. But it was more than alive, it was thriving. Add to his accomplishments horticulture.

I commandeered the house without hesitation. I’d been born for a house like this. Within days I was walking around in my underwear, leaving the toilet seat up, and eating straight out of the refrigerator. In effect, I had supplanted Dr. Dave.

Each morning I’d wake in the master bedroom to the gray light coming through the windows. I’d lounge in the king-size bed listening to the birds, thinking about how Lola would enjoy jumping on a bed like this, thinking about how Molly might want to have sex on a bed like this. Then I’d walk down two flights of stairs to the kitchen and eat breakfast in front of the forty-two-inch television. When I was done, I’d slide open the glass door and step outside in my bare feet and water the garden. I didn’t use the watering can, I used the hose, generously, spraying the plants and flowers until everything was soaked through including my feet.

Around noon the mail would arrive. After the mail arrived, Molly would arrive. Lola came too. She came every time. They seemed unfazed by the new surroundings, Lola especially. The first time she entered the house, she jumped in my arms and seemed to take no notice that we were no longer in a one-room apartment. I wanted to give her a tour, but she didn’t care about “any dumb tour.” She was a rich little girl, after all, with a house of her own. Still, I’d expected some sense of wonder. But all she wanted to do was play. I bought her balloons and balls and a Hula-Hoop. While we played together, Molly painted. “Don’t disturb Mommy.” She’d brought her paints and an easel and a smock and set up her studio in the garden beneath the lemon tree. She was going to make five paintings this summer. She was going to make ten paintings. She was going to find an agent. Maybe find a gallery. Maybe have a show. Everyone had a plan and that was her plan.

In the afternoon I would grill fish or chicken on Dr. Dave’s immaculate gas grill with its pushbutton ignition. I used his Japanese carving knives. I behaved like a patriarch, hoping to ruin their appetite for dinner. I wanted the memory of our day to linger long after they got home.

Afterward, the three of us would lie on our backs, sated, looking at the gray sky, while I told Lola tales from history. Archdukes and presidents and the Ottoman Empire.

“Those are boring,” Lola would say.

At five o’clock they left. Occasionally Molly would put Lola in the car, then pretend she’d forgotten something, rush back in the house, and make out with me in the foyer.

“Come back.”

“I will.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“How soon?”

She did not come back soon. She came only a few times a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That was her schedule. That was not the schedule I had envisioned when I had envisioned my summer. Sometimes she came Monday, Wednesday. Once it was just Monday. It was never weekends.

“Where have you been?” I once screamed after five days of absence. We were in the garden, and I was unshaved, and Lola was staring at me in disbelief because she had never heard me scream before. Molly was staring at me too, smiling slightly as if she’d known it would eventually come to this. “You men are all the same,” I could hear her thinking. She had one hand on her hip, cocked slightly, and one hand on her easel. She had just begun a new painting of people lying on the grass looking at people lying on the grass. I thought of grabbing the canvas and smashing it against the lemon tree.

“Would you like us to leave?” she asked. Her equanimity terrified me. I had no choice but to accept the terms.

I filled my empty days by trying to do something productive, something enriching. I selected Dr. Dave’s educational tomes and took them out into the garden. The books were heavy and the reading was ponderous. Soon I would fall asleep, facedown on the grass. I dreamed once that I was heading back to war. I was on a train going over the ocean. The waves lapped at the window. “Is this seat taken?” someone was asking me, and when I turned, I saw that it was Molly. “No,” I said, “it’s yours,” and then I watched impassively as she struggled to put her suitcase in the overhead rack. I should help her with that, I thought, but it was every man for himself in this world. So I stared out the window, hoping to spot whales in the water below. I had never seen whales before. The din of the train grew louder; it combined with the din of the ocean. Beneath it I could hear Molly saying, “It’s all going to waste.”

It was apparent that I did not have what it would take to earn a doctorate. It was also apparent that the solitude of the house was beginning to crush me. I considered driving back into the city, back home even, just to stop by for a minute, “just stopping by, Fred.” But that seemed akin to admitting defeat. Defeat of what, I wasn’t sure. I thought of calling Molly. I wouldn’t care if her husband answered. “Do you know who this is?” I’d ask. “Do you have any idea?” I’d gloat. I’d preen. He’d squirm. “Who is this?” he’d demand. I’d let the line go dead.

And if she answered the phone, I’d say, “Please come.”

Instead, I roamed the house with the television turned high. The third wave of soldiers was arriving home. They were having a parade to which no one was going. Only the reporters were going, and a high school band. From floor to floor I roamed. Room to room. The rooms echoed. What once felt spacious now felt vacuous. Those few things that Dr. Dave and his wife had forgotten to put away before they left to “see the world,” a half-empty glass of water, for instance, began to give the impression that the occupants had been surprised by thieves one afternoon and murdered. I added to this sense of disarray. My absolute ease in their home had an insulting, apathetic underbelly: muddy footprints on the carpet, dirty dishes in the sink, hair in the bathtub. I recalled having once read an article about a gang of criminals who had invaded a vacant, wealthy house, not to steal but to live slovenly.

That’s what I was, an invader, a plunderer of privacy. In one of Dr. Dave’s closets I discovered two dozen pairs of identical blue jeans, hanging on hangers, ready to go. For fun I tried them on — they were too big. In another closet I found a box of photo albums. Sitting on the floor cross-legged, I looked through every one of them. Dr. Dave in the swing, Dr. Dave on his eighth birthday with cake on his face, Dr. Dave at the prom. He was born, he grew up, he graduated. And then it was his wedding day with his bride, a babe, dressed in her wedding gown and winking at the camera, her bouquet in her hand.

In another closet were his academic papers and professional correspondences, hundreds of pages, some in Japanese.

Everything that I took out, I put back exactly where it’d been. There would be no trace of my transgression. But hours later I’d be overcome with anxiety that I’d been careless somewhere, and I’d retrace my steps into the closets and trunks and boxes, fixing and readjusting.

Still, I hunted. What I was searching for, I did not know, something illicit I suppose, something secret, something that would debase Dr. Dave before the world. I found nothing. Not one thing. Not even pornography.

In lieu of nothing better to do, I masturbated one afternoon using his wife’s panties. It was thrilling and empowering, but when I came, I had a clear and unobstructed view of myself, almost as if watching myself from above. There, down below, I could see a small figure named Jake standing naked in a stranger’s living room in the middle of a summer afternoon with no idea what he was supposed to do next.

The flowers are dying, I thought, and I went out to water the garden.

Meanwhile, Molly’s painting progressed. It’s amazing what you can accomplish given just two days a week.

When she arrived, she would give me a kiss on the cheek and get right to work. “I don’t have much time,” she’d say. She meant it. She wore her smock and mixed her paints and studied the foliage. She painted people looking at the foliage. It was a theme that never tired and which she consistently improved upon. I liked thinking that the subjects in her paintings were variations of us, the three of us, but I didn’t want to presume, and I didn’t want to ask.

She worked slowly, cautiously, meticulously. It took hours for something even remotely recognizable to take shape, sometimes days, but when it did, it was glorious. She saw things I never noticed: snails and spiders and imperfections in the stonework. “Look at how it curves slightly. Isn’t it beautiful?” Yes, now that she mentioned it, it was beautiful.

It had become my job to occupy Lola while her mother attended to the important work. Never mind that I had my own aspirations for the summer. I would wander through the rooms calling “yoo-hoo,” displacing furniture as I went, further distressing the home in my game of hide-and-seek. And when I finally found Lola hidden under the bed or under a pile of dirty laundry, she’d scream as if she were about to be killed, bloodthirsty screams. I’d pick her up and swing her around. Her beautiful red hair falling in her face.

Back out in the garden, we filled balloons with water and hurled them at each other, so careful to avoid Mommy and her paintings. When the balloons burst, I would reflect on how our game was doing its part to aid the dying garden.

And the garden was dying. There was no question about it. We were presiding over its death. The plants and flowers were not able to survive the lack of rain, they were folding and drooping. Even the sturdier ones had collapsed and died, and the grass was turning brown. I blamed myself for this state of affairs, for not having been more diligent in my care. To make up for it, I fed them an inordinate amount of water, sometimes three or four times a day, sometimes in the middle of the night. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Forgive me.” My feet made indentations in the earth as I walked to and fro with the hose, spraying it like a firefighter entering a burning house. A bee buzzed around a flower, and I knew that this was how flowers were made, and I knew that I had no real understanding of the process beyond that. Bugs crawled past my feet at a glacial pace, asking not to be harmed. “I won’t harm you,” I said. This was the garden I would have had as a child if things had been different for me. If my mother had had ambition towards something more than being an operator. It was the luck of the draw.

And then summer was ending. Just like that. Dr. Dave was on his way home from his travels, school was about to begin, and Fred the subletter was being dislodged once more.

“Hope you had a wonderful vacation,” Dr. Dave wrote by way of a postcard that arrived on a Thursday afternoon. He signed his name “Dr. Dave.” There was a photograph of a winding river in some exotic locale. What river it was, I didn’t bother to look, because I didn’t care. The arrival of the postcard shocked me into something resembling the present. I had two days to pack and leave. Two days to put the house in order, the state of which was distressing. One and a half days really, since it was already midafternoon.

I began by cleaning the stairs, the carpet, the master bathroom. On my hands and knees, I scrubbed the tub and toilet. Somehow I had left a dark ring around the tub, even though I’d only taken one bath. There was a small trail of moldy spots above the shower which I could only reach by perching precariously on the edge of the sink. When I was finished, my neck ached, but the bathroom shone. I stayed up past midnight doing the best I could. The house was big, though, and the more I cleaned, the more I realized how much needed to be cleaned. If I had plundered Dr. Dave’s privacy before, now I plundered his cleaning products: Lysol and Ajax and Pledge furniture polish. That night I slept on the couch because the sheets and blankets were in the laundry.

It was fortunate for me that Molly and Lola arrived the following afternoon. They found me standing in the foyer wearing rubber gloves and holding a brush. “The lease has expired,” I said. There would be no painting that day.

To Molly’s credit she helped without complaint. Lola helped too, loading and unloading the dishwasher. She liked pushing the buttons. The three of us cleaning made me feel like we had come together as a family again, like there was hope for us again.

In the pantry, I found Molly bent over sweeping crumbs into a dustpan. I grabbed her from behind. Her ass was soft and round.

“Come and help me make the bed,” I whispered.

“There’s still so much to do,” she protested, but she followed. In the bedroom, the gray afternoon light was coming through the window one last time.

“So this is the master bedroom,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was impressed. She had never been in it once. The realization was painful. Still, I took some pride, as if the room belonged to me.

We lay down on the bare mattress and made out. She let me unbutton her shirt. She let me feel her breasts. Her breasts were smaller than I remembered. I liked them small. We would finally have sex on something other than a futon.

“Lola,” she whispered, “Lola is here.”

Lola was always here, always somewhere nearby. She was the sentry that stood between her mother and me. She was the thing her mother never left home without.

“She doesn’t know,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “she does.”

What did she know? She was innocent and oblivious. What could she know about what was happening between the adults? She could not possibly define what was going on. It was a mystery to everyone involved, including us.

But perhaps it was possible the little girl did know something. Something more than us even. Perhaps she only needed a few more years to be able to find the right words that would help her explain the thing — at least to herself. Twenty years from now she’d recall this as the summer she spent playing in that strange house with that strange man. She wouldn’t even remember my name. I’d be a memory by then.

Molly was on top of me. Her bra was off but her pants were on. I grappled with her belt. “No, no, no,” she kept saying, even as she pressed down on my chest with her hands, bearing down as if she wanted to push me through the king-size mattress. She looked so beautiful in the gray light. “I love you,” I said. I love you. I waited for her to rejoin.

And shortly there came the reply, from Lola of course, shouting up three flights at the top of her lungs, “THE DISHES ARE DONE!”

The efficiency was small again and reentry was painful. Fred the subletter shook my hand and said “Till next time, Jake,” but there wasn’t going to be any next time. He gave me the last month’s rent in cash again, but I didn’t bother to count it. I had more important things to do, like get ready for my first day of school. There wasn’t much to prepare, of course, what with my recycled lesson plan, but I was determined to start the year off right.

The next morning I came around that familiar country bend driving fast, with the school in the early light, two stories in red brick with a chimney. I parked and got out and walked briskly. Fall was in the air. “Welcome to the history of the world!” I planned to say to my students. I had rehearsed it. It would be a dramatic opening line and it would get their attention. They’d look at me with eager, anxious eyes, not knowing what to make of me. Then I’d launch into the great migration out of Africa where it all began, thousands of miles away, thousands of years ago. We’d be allies not enemies, my students and I. In the end, they’d adore me.

As I neared the main entrance, I was surprised to see Dr. Dave standing there beneath that eternal school motto, “Give your best …” Here comes the soldier-teacher! He looked tan and rested in his blue jeans. He would have stories to tell me of his adventures. “Thanks for getting the mail,” he’d say. We’d laugh about it.

“Welcome back, Dr. Dave,” I called. But he didn’t respond. He only stared as I approached. I thought of his house, the disorder that I had wrought over the summer, the disruption, the transgression. But I had been meticulous in restoring everything to its proper place — all secrets were safe. I had made sure of it.

On the last evening, I had stood in the garden looking up at 14 Misty Morning Way, sentimental and forlorn. The only house I had ever lived in … Had I lived in it? Or had I merely stayed. Molly and Lola had already left for home, and I spent my last few moments watering the garden one final time. The poor and ravaged garden, beguiling, chaotic, struggling to stay alive. No amount of water could have offset the terrible effects of such a dry summer, but I had tried my best. These were my thoughts as I turned off the hose and squished across the soaking lawn and through the sliding glass door to get my bags of clothes. My bare feet had left little wet footprints on the carpet, but those would dry soon enough.

It was only now, walking up the stairs to where Dr. Dave stood waiting, that I realized with great and unbending certainty that it was not the heat that had killed the plants and flowers. I had drowned the garden.