Derailed

FORTY-SEVEN

I started teaching the day after Labor Day.

Seventh-grade English. They gave me a choice of grades, and I picked the one closest to Anna’s age. If I couldn’t help her at the moment, I thought, I could help kids like her.

It was balmy, but I could already feel hints of fall in the intermittent breeze, like icy currents in an August ocean. I stood outside in shirtsleeves on the steps of George Washington Carver Middle School and shivered.

My first day was the worst.

The bell stopped ringing, and I found fifty-one skeptical students staring up at me.

The class was two-thirds black and one-third black wannabe. Even the white kids wore those low-slung dungarees with the elastic bands of their underwear showing. They practiced the strut that seemed to come naturally to their black peers; they’d stand in the schoolyard before first bell, making up raps.

When I wrote my name across the blackboard, the nub of chalk broke and the entire class laughed. I opened my desk to find another piece of chalk, but there wasn’t any — something I would discover with all my school supplies that first year.

“Mr. Wid” remained on the blackboard.

So that’s what they began to call me. Mr. Wid.

Hey, Mr. Wid, what’s shakin’? Yoh, Wid . . .

I didn’t correct them. It broke the ice that first day, and as time went on I grew almost fond of it, with the exception of a certain piece of graffiti I read on the wall of the boys’ urinal one day.

I’m holding Wid’s head in my hand!

I became fond of them, too — even the graffiti writer, who sheepishly admitted it when he was caught adding to his collection and spent two afternoons in detention for it. His detention supervisor, as it happened, was me. I volunteered for it; I had nowhere to go and no one to go home to. So I supervised detention, I taught an after-school study hall, I helped out the school basketball team.

The graffiti artist was named James. But he liked being called J-Cool, he told me. He came from a one-parent household—just his mama, he said, and I instantly thought about Anna.

I told him if he stopped writing that he was holding Wid’s head in his hand on the bathroom wall, I would start calling him J-Cool.

Deal, he said.

We became friends.

I became kind of popular with everyone. Not just with the kids, but with the faculty, since I was always volunteering for things they themselves would otherwise have had to do.

Being liked, however, had its drawbacks.

When people like you, they invariably ask you questions about yourself. They’re curious about where you came from, what you did before, if you’re married or not, if you have any kids.

Lunch hours became awkward for me. An obstacle course I had to negotiate for forty-five minutes every afternoon, maintaining just enough concentration to avoid tripping up. At first, I’d be talking to someone and would forget what I’d told someone else — Ted Roeger, eighth-grade math teacher, for instance, who’d invited me to play weekend softball with him in his over-forty league. I politely declined. Then there was Susan Fowler, a thirtyish fine arts teacher who seemed unattached and desperate, who always seemed to find an empty chair at my lunch table and turn the conversation to relationships and the difficulties thereof.

Eventually I went home and wrote out my life as Lawrence Widdoes. From childhood to now. Then I practiced it, asking myself questions about myself and answering them.

Where did you grow up?

Staten Island. (Close to home, yes, but I needed to pick a place I would at least know something about. And since I’d passed through there a million times on the way to Aunt Kate’s, I knew enough about Staten Island to avoid looking stupid if a Staten Islander decided to ask me questions about it.)

What did your parents do?

Ralph, my father, was an auto mechanic. Anne, my mother, was a housewife. (Why not? Auto mechanic was as good an occupation as any, and housewife was what most women did back then.)

Did you have brothers or sisters?

No. (Absolutely true.)

What college did you go to?

City University. (That’s, after all, what I’d put on my résumé.)

What did you do before this?

I ran a beauty care products business out of my house. Hairsprays. Facial creams. Body lotions. (A friend of mine had done that back in Merrick, so I knew something about it — enough, anyway, to get by.)

Are you married?

Yes. And no. (This was the tough one. There were no wife and children with me in Chicago now, but if things went according to plan, soon there would be. Suddenly they would just appear. Why? Because we’d suffered the great malaise of the twentieth century — marital difficulties — and we’d separated for a time. But just for a time. We were working at a reconciliation — we were hopeful it would happen and that they would join me.)

Do you have any children?

Yes. One. A daughter.

I stayed close to the truth in almost everything. It made it easier when my mind went blank, when someone cornered me with a question I wasn’t prepared for. The life of Lawrence Widdoes was different from the life of Charles Schine, yes, but not that different, and those differences slowly and haltingly became second nature to me. I became familiar with them, nurtured them, trotted them out and took them for strolls around the park, and finally adopted them as my own.

“She’s begun dialysis,” Deanna said.

I was standing at the public pay phone two blocks from my Chicago apartment. It was October now. Wind was knifing in off the lake and rattling the phone booth. My eyes teared up.

“When?” I asked.

“Over a month. I didn’t want to tell you.”

“How . . . how is she taking it?”

“Like she’s taking everything else these days. With this horrible silence. I beg her to talk to me, yell at me, scream at me, anything. She just looks at me. After you left, she just closed up, Charles. She’s holding it in so tightly I think she’s going to explode. I took her to therapy, but the therapist said she didn’t say a word. Usually you can wait them out — the silence becomes so uncomfortable they become desperate to fill it. But not our Anna. She looked out the window for fifty minutes, then got up and left. Now this.”

“Jesus, Deanna . . . does the dialysis hurt her?”

“I don’t think so. Dr. Baron says it doesn’t.”

“How long does she have to sit there?”

“Six hours. More or less.”

“And it doesn’t hurt her? You’re sure?”

“Your being gone is what’s hurting her. It’s killing her. It’s killing me not being able to tell her. I don’t think I cannot tell her anymore. Charles . . .” Deanna started crying.

I suddenly felt as if every useful part of my body had stopped working. Someone had just plucked out my heart and left a hole there. It was waiting for Anna to come and fill it. Anna and Deanna both. I began to calculate. It had been, what . . . four months?

“Have you put the house up for sale yet?” I asked her.

“Yes. I told anyone I’m still talking to that I have to get away. There are too many memories. I have to start fresh.”

“Who are you talking to?”

“Hardly anyone. Now. My aunts and uncles have given up on me — I had another fight with Joe. Our friends? It’s funny . . . at first they give you the song and dance how nothing’s going to change — you’ll still get together for Saturday night dinners and Sunday barbecues. But it does change. They’re all coupled up and you’re alone and they feel awkward. It becomes easier to just not invite you. We were worried how we’d manage to cut ties with them, and it’s happening on its own. Who do I talk to? My mother, mostly. That’s it.”

“The first decent offer you get on the house — sell it,” I said. “It’s time.”