Ms. Hempel Chronicles

Yurt

A YEAR AGO MS. DUFFY HAD come very close to losing it, with her homeroom right next to the construction site for the new computer lab, and her thwarted attempts to excise the Aztecs from the fifth-grade curriculum, and her ill-fated attraction to Mr. Polidori. But now, upon her return, she looked unrecognizably happy. She held court in the faculty lounge, her hair longer than ever, her big belly sitting staunchly on her lap and demanding rapt attention from everyone but her. Above the belly, Ms. Duffy laughed and swayed and acted careless with her hands, as if to say, Why, this old thing?

Ms. Hempel couldn’t take her eyes off it. It looked as tough as a gourd.

“Yemen is magical,” Ms. Duffy was saying. “Just unbelievable. The pictures — the pictures don’t capture it at all.”

A stack of parched-looking photographs circulated around the lounge. After her difficult year, Ms. Duffy had sublet her apartment and struck out for the ancient world. At first, her e-mails had been long and poetical and reasonably free of gloating, though full of figs, marketplaces, bare feet against cool tiles, shuttered naps at noon. In between classes Ms. Hempel would stand in front of the faculty bulletin board and read about Ms. Duffy’s naps, trying to detect in these messages a note of melancholy, of homesickness. Miss you all!! Ms. Duffy would write in closing, but the absence of a subject, as well as the excessive punctuation, made the sentiment seem less heartfelt. And then the e-mails stopped arriving altogether.

Ms. Hempel studied the photograph that had been passed to her: a blazingly bright and empty street with the tiny figure of Ms. Duffy standing at its center. Who had taken the picture — a Yemenese friend? A Yemenan? Both sounded lovely, though incorrect. It seemed important to know who had stood in the shade of those massive, intricate buildings and held the camera. Perhaps this was the first of many foreign transactions that would result, so spectacularly, in Ms. Duffy’s new belly.

Ms. Hempel waved the photograph in the air. “Anna, where was this one taken?”

But Ms. Duffy wasn’t able to answer as one after another, colleagues came in and embraced her. “You astound me!” Mrs. Willoughby said, pressing her clasped hands to her lips, a gesture she normally bestowed upon seniors who were making their final appearance in the spring choral concert. Ms. Duffy looked easily as triumphant and beautiful as them. Her face shone; her long light hair flared out behind her; gone was the faint grimace that had once been her expression in repose. The change seemed complete and irreversible; this wasn’t like the first week of school, when the teachers wore shorts and sundresses and still had their summer tans. Ms. Hempel remembered the shock of seeing Mr. Polidori’s firm, hairy calves rising up from a pair of glistening orange sneakers— but within days, everyone looked haggard again and it was as if summer had never happened.

“Have you seen your kids?” asked Ms. Cruz, the assistant librarian. “They’ll go crazy.”

“They will freak!” Ms. Mulcahy said. “Suzanne, where’s the sixth grade now? Are they at lunch?”

“Gym. That’s all I’ve heard this year: Ms. Duffy, Ms. Duffy. They can’t write their own names without mentioning Ms. Duffy.”

“I missed them,” said Ms. Duffy, vaguely.

“Maybe you’ll want to wait until they’ve had a few minutes to cool off. You know how sweaty they can get playing basketball. And you won’t believe how big they are. Huge. Amy Weyland is wearing a bra now.”

From his cubicle, Mr. Meacham moaned, “Must we?”

And Mrs. Willoughby, peering into her coffee, said, “That girl’s going to have a great little figure.”

“Amy Weyland?” Ms. Duffy echoed.

“Yes! Can you believe it?” Ms. Olin, teacher of sixth-grade humanities, nearly shouted. She appeared slightly feverish; in fact, everyone did, everyone seemed eager and a little overheated. There was so much to tell: Jonathan Hamish got suspended; Travis Bent went on medication; Mr. Peele agreed to turn on the air-conditioning early, even though it was only the beginning of May. And oh — the computer lab was finally done! Ms. Duffy needed to be apprised, and ushered back into the world they all had in common. The merry, frantic din of school rose up around them, louder and louder, as Yemen, fascinating and dusty, drifted farther away.

Ms. Hempel still held the photograph that she wanted to know more about. She would have her chance, eventually; she and Ms. Duffy were friends, school friends, in the sense that they had belonged to the same group of youngish teachers who adjourned to a dark Irish bar as soon as the bell rang on Friday afternoons. Returning the picture to its pile, she gathered up her untouched books, wondered if her failure to reread act 2 of Romeo and Juliet would prevent her from sparking a spirited class discussion (maybe she’d just ask them to act out their favorite scenes instead; the boys could cheerfully spend an entire period bellowing, “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?”), and watched as Ms. Duffy was escorted out of the faculty lounge, in search of her former fifth graders.

“Look who’s here,” cried Ms. Olin, leading the way.

The whole display was affecting, but naive. Ms. Hempel imagined a procession moving in stately fashion down the middle school corridors, cheering administrators, a swaying litter, children tossing flower petals and pencil shavings in its path. Ms. Duffy was back! Once more there would be field trips to Chinatown for soup dumplings, and scavenger hunts in the botanic gardens, and sing-alongs to the Meat Puppets and other college-radio stars of the ’80s. Once more the Temple of Dendur would be erected in all its cardboard and tempura glory. The final bittersweet pages of Tuck Everlasting would again be read aloud in Ms. Duffy’s husky, choked-up voice. Fifth graders of the world, rejoice!

But Ms. Hempel knew better. Ms. Duffy was merely stopping by. She knew as soon as she saw her: Anna Duffy wasn’t ever coming back, even after her big hard belly resolved itself into a baby. Most likely necessity prompted this visit; she probably needed to empty her locker, or roll over her retirement plan. Didn’t the others see? She was no longer one of them; at some point during her year, she had turned away. Slipped into her civilian clothes and disappeared. And if she was back now, it was only to say good-bye or — if Ms. Hempel were writing the script — So long, suckers! A farewell so improbable, it made Ms. Hempel laugh.

THE IRISH BAR WAS ONLY a few blocks away from their school. Beautiful Ms. Cruz, who really did lead the fabled double life of the librarian, had discovered it one night while careening through town with a free jazz drummer nearly twice her age. Mooney’s had been their last stop. What must Ms. Cruz have been thinking when she stepped out onto the sparkling, empty avenue, her head resting against the drummer’s shoulder, dawn only an hour away, and saw that she was literally around the corner from her desk, her rubber stamps, her little stack of late notices? Maybe she was thinking, How perfect. To feel one’s real life rub up so closely, so careless, against one’s school life — there was no greater enchantment. Or so Ms. Hempel supposed, having never put enough distance between the two to experience it herself. She liked to hear Ms. Cruz talk, in her mild and self-effacing way, about all the old musicians she had fallen for. The hard-drinking drummer included. Ms. Cruz took him home with her that night, and then on Friday she took the teachers to Mooney’s.

The narrow space was illuminated by strings of colored Christmas lights and a glowing clock. A jukebox stood in the back, in between the cavelike entrances to two bathrooms whose affiliation with any particular sex was never rigidly observed. Black battered tables, high unsteady stools, linoleum floor. The floor was wonderful to dance on. It made Ms. Hempel feel very graceful and coordinated, even before she started drinking. All the teachers loved to dance on Friday afternoons. They did the Hustle. They did the Electric Slide. The sticky blinds on Mooney’s windows were always pulled shut, so it was easy to forget that it was only four o’clock and the sun was still shining outside and no one had come home from work yet. They danced as if it were the middle of the night. They did silly moves they remembered from high school and looked good doing them. When Mr. Radovich tried to dance like he was black, no one minded. They were too happy feeding quarters into the jukebox, shimmying to the bar and back. As she bumped hips with Ms. Cruz and sashayed toward the bathrooms, Ms. Hempel realized that she was actually meant to spend her whole life dancing, like those characters in the Ice Capades who go about their daily business on skates.

For someone who had an abundance of freckles and almost always wore clogs, Ms. Duffy could dance astonishingly well. She shook back her hair and half closed her eyes and lifted her chin ever so slightly, as if a handsome, invisible person were tilting her face up to kiss her. And then she stepped from side to side, with a barely discernible lilt in her hips, her spine long and straight, her shoulders faintly twitching, the movement small, purposeful, precise, and entirely effortless. It was the simplest dance in the world. And also the most beguiling, somehow. It inspired a feeling of great confidence in Ms. Duffy’s body and the various things she could do with it. Other dancers drew close to her, unconsciously. She could often be found in the middle of a spontaneous dance sandwich. One afternoon Mr. Polidori sprang from his bar stool, cracked his knuckles, and then slid across the linoleum floor on his knees to arrive breathless at her neatly shuffling feet.

Ms. Hempel liked to think that this was the moment at which their grand passion began. Of course she could be wrong; Mr. Polidori performed sudden, extravagant gestures all the time — kissing your hand in gratitude, wrapping his fingers around your neck and gently throttling you, draping his arm across your shoulders with comradely indifference — gestures that thrilled Ms. Hempel whenever she happened, through luck and proximity, to be the recipient. Her skin on fire, she felt how ridiculous it was: Mr. Polidori, as a rule, could not be taken seriously. And Ms. Duffy did not appear to do so. After he came gliding across the floor, arms outspread, she merely offered him her hand and hoisted him up, never once losing the beat of her winsome little dance. But what if, as their hands joined, a secret message was exchanged? A message that took them both by surprise. Ms. Hempel wished that she had been sharp enough to catch the exchange; she thought of this moment only in retrospect, as she tried to make a story of what had happened. How interesting it would have been to witness the very inception of an affair! Or, rather, a thing; these days only married people were entitled to affairs. Either way, she could have hoarded up the image — he on his knees, she swaying above him — to share with Amit when he came home. Walking back dreamily from the bar, the afternoon light slanting across the pavement, Ms. Hempel was full of marvelous jokes and observations and stories to tell him. But then she went inside and it got dark; she turned up the television and felt a headache coming on, and by the time Amit returned from the lab, she couldn’t think of anything to say, even when he wrinkled his nose and tranquilly asked, “How come you smell like cigarettes?”

MS. HEMPEL WONDERED about the father of Ms. Duffy’s baby. A sloe-eyed camel driver singing beneath his breath? A poet studying English at the university, or maybe a young doctor who led the way through a bazaar? She spent much of last period considering the possibilities. And if in her speculations she caught a whiff of something faintly rotten and imperial, she ignored it. Of all the wonderful novels E. M. Forster had ever written, A Passage to India was her favorite. It made her wonder, Were there any caves in Yemen? Caves that Ms. Duffy could have wandered into to explore, and then stumbled out of, dazed and transformed?

At the entrance to the library, Ms. Cruz sat behind her enormous wraparound desk. It resembled a sort of cockpit, its high sides studded with librarian paraphernalia, Ms. Cruz wheeling expertly about the interior in her ergonomic chair. The desk had two levels; the lower level was intended for the librarian’s use as she tried to do her work, while the higher level was meant for those standing around the desk and bothering the librarian. It was chest-high, the ideal spot for quickly finishing one’s math problems before class, or asking importunate questions about the fate of the dinosaurs, or resting one’s elbows, as Mrs. Willoughby was now doing, and speaking in confidential tones with Ms. Cruz below.

“Did you see—” Mrs. Willoughby turned to Ms. Hempel with excitement. Then she remembered. “Oh yes, you were there. Isn’t she gorgeous?”

Ms. Hempel said, “Gorgeous. And very—” She extended her arms.

“I know, I know! Not what we expected. I thought she’d come back with a slide show and some nice scarves. But no! So much more.”

She leaned toward Ms. Cruz, resuming: “Thirty-five miles from the nearest hospital. Is that madness?”

“There’s a midwife. She’ll be fine.”

“Of course she will be. But still. Out in the middle of nowhere? With your first child? You have no idea.”

“She was tired of living here. She said so all the time.”

“You girls don’t know what it’s like. You get lonely at the beginning. You’re tired, your nipples hurt, you can’t remember what day it is.”

“Roman will be there. And they’re building a second yurt,” Ms. Cruz said firmly, and then glanced up at Ms. Hempel. “Anna is moving upstate,” she explained.

But that explained nothing. “A yurt?” Ms. Hempel asked. “Is that something… Yemenese?”

She blushed.

“Mongolian,” Mrs. Willoughby said. “I had to ask, too. Don’t worry; I won’t tell Meacham. Not everybody who teaches here is a walking encyclopedia. It’s a big circular tent made out of animal skins. Or, in Anna’s case, some fancy, state-of-the-art, flame-retardant fabric.” In the air, Mrs. Willoughby conjured up a miniature yurt with her hands. “Not like a teepee, more like a circus tent. Made out of yaks.”

With a laugh and a wave, she demolished the little dwelling.

“But the father,” asked Ms. Hempel, “is he from Yemen?”

Mrs. Willoughby looked at her peculiarly. “Heavens, no.”

For the trip abroad had been cut short. Something in the food made Anna sick, dangerously so. Only two months out of the country and she was doubled over, shitting water. Thus the end of the lyrical e-mails. She had lost nearly twenty pounds by the time she crept onto the airplane and came home to convalesce at her mother’s; it was there, looking pale and otherworldly, that she met Roman. A kite artist.

“He was visiting his mother, too,” said Ms. Cruz.

“They’re neighbors in the condo complex, the one her mother moved to after the divorce,” said Mrs. Willoughby. “Anna claims that it’s soulless and horrible. But maybe she feels differently now.”

“Wow,” said Ms. Hempel, collecting herself. So the father of Ms. Duffy’s baby was an American, met early one morning in the courtyard of an ugly condominium.

“Being a kite artist — that’s his job?” she heard herself asking.

Ms. Cruz nodded. “He’s a master. You can find him on the Internet.”

“He spends all day making kites?”

“And flying them.”

“How wonderful,” Ms. Hempel said uncertainly. “I’d like to do that.”

“Oh, wouldn’t we all?” Mrs. Willoughby said, and took a great breath, and for a precarious moment it looked as if she might sing the opening chorus of “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.” But then the opportunity softly passed. “There’s family money, too, of course. And a big piece of land passed down through the ages. Anna is living on an estate! In a yurt, admittedly, but still. Pretty grand. Isn’t this what they would call marrying up?”

“She got married?” Ms. Hempel asked, startled. She hadn’t seen a ring.

A delicate look passed between the two other women. Ms. Hempel caught it, and felt herself go warm.

“It happened very quickly,” said Ms. Cruz.

“As it so often does,” added Mrs. Willoughby. “One minute you’re all alone and the next — boom! — you’re standing there in City Hall with the man of your dreams.”

“And moving upstate,” Ms. Hempel said. “And having a baby.”

“Exactly,” Mrs. Willoughby said, with a slap of her hands on the top of Ms. Cruz’s desk. “That’s the trick of life, how much everything can change.”

And then, squeezing Ms. Hempel’s arm, she asked, “Remember? Anna was miserable.”

BUT MS. HEMPEL WOULDN’T have described her as miserable nor, she doubted, would Ms. Duffy have ever used the word herself. Because didn’t misery imply a wallowing sort of wretchedness? And a teacher had no time for that. The curriculum was always marching on, relentlessly: the scrambling dash from one unit to the next, the ancient Egyptians melting into the ancient Greeks, the blur of check marks and smiley faces, the hot rattling breath of the photocopier, book reports corrected shakily on the bus, the eternal night of parent-teacher conferences, dizzy countdowns to every holiday, and the dumb animal pleasure of rest. One could be quite unhappy and never have a chance to know it. Ms. Hempel was sometimes astonished by the thoughts she’d have while walking to work: one morning, she looked longingly at a patch of ice on the pavement and realized that if she were to fall and fracture her leg in several places, then she wouldn’t have to go to school. And maybe, if the doctors put her in traction, a substitute would be hired for the rest of the year. Perhaps she’d need a body cast.

There was a way out, an honorable and dignified way out. All she had to do was undergo a terrible accident….

But then her desk would be emptied, and every one of her secrets would come scuttling forth: the torn and smelly pair of stockings, abandoned there months ago, the descriptive paragraphs she took so long to grade that she finally claimed to have lost them at the laundromat, the open bag of Doritos. And, embarrassment aside, she had responsibilities: the volleyball finals were fast approaching — who would keep score? Someone else would have to chair the weekly meetings of the girls’ after-school book group, and conduct the middle school assembly on Diversity Day. And who would finish grading the Mockingbird essays, adhering to the byzantine rubric she’d devised?

The fact was, no one could.

“Call in sick,” Amit would say sleepily, his arm flung over her. “Tell them you caught a cold.” He’d kiss her. “You’re infected. And extremely contagious. You need to stay in bed, okay?” But she would already be staggering toward the shower.

Did Ms. Duffy ever think about slipping on the ice? Probably not; her thoughts likely took a more enraged and sensible turn; probably, as she waited for the bus, she drafted letters of resignation in her head, letters that described in withering detail the incompetence of the new middle school director, or the shabby state of the women’s bathroom on the second floor. Ms. Hempel suspected that such letters existed because Ms. Duffy was so thoroughly equipped when it came to complaining. They all loved to do it, of course, just as they all loved to dance, but she could outshine everyone. She would begin drily enough, with a sigh and a little self-mocking smile, but soon the full force of her indignation would take over, and her complaints would build in hilarity and ire until she was magnificent to behold — her whole self radiant with fury — so that Ms. Hempel shook her head and wondered how poor Mr. Mumford, even in his most ill-conceived moments of middle school leadership, could ever think it wise to say, “Now, Anna, just calm down.” Often her stories ended with Mr. Mumford saying these words, or a variation thereof, and even when recollected in the yeasty tranquility of Mooney’s, they still made Ms. Duffy utter a murderous, strangled scream.

“Aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrr!”

From the end of the bar, Mr. Polidori would raise his glass to her.

The gesture was perfectly in character: joking, wry, yet also somehow gallant. He would then return his attention to Mimi Swartz, the person whose company he enjoyed more than anyone else’s. She ran the art department, and made sculptures out of giant nails, was fifteen years his senior and went on long bike trips with her girlfriend. And he, as a teacher of physics, seemed always full of things to say to her. A mystery. But no more a mystery than his affair with Anna Duffy, who was once again complaining operatically.

AFFAIRS. FLINGS. APPARENTLY they happened all the time, and between the people you would least expect.

“You didn’t know about me and Phil?” asked Ms. Cruz. Phil Macrae taught life science to the sixth grade. Beardless and cow-licked, he looked as if he had completed the sixth grade only recently himself. She had also had sex with Mr. Rahimi, the computer teacher, and Jim, who ran the after-school program.

“It got a little weird,” she said.

Things also got weird for Mrs. Bell and Mr. Blanco; so weird, in fact, that he had to go teach at another school for a few years until the conflagration finally died out.

“Julia?” Ms. Hempel cried in dismay. She loved Julia Bell.

“This was ages ago. Long before you came to us,” Mrs. Willoughby said.

“But Daniel?” Ms. Hempel cried. “I thought maybe he was gay.”

“Oh no. No. What ever gave you that idea? He’s just Spanish.”

And, incredibly, the former lover of Mrs. Bell. With his pointed goatee and his funny little vests? It was very hard to picture. Perhaps, in a younger version, what Ms. Hempel found vague about his sexuality was actually dashing, irresistible. So much so that Julia Bell — a teacher blessed with pluck and humor and sense — risked everything to be with him.

“This was before the boys were born?” Ms. Hempel asked.

“Wally was two, I think, and not yet in school. But Nathan had already started kindergarten.” Mrs. Willoughby raised her eyebrows. “It could have been a real mess.”

Unthinkable, Julia making a mess. Which was exactly why Ms. Hempel adored her: the serene, amused, and capable air; the way she kept an easy sense of order among even the most fractious children; the affection that her sons heaped upon her, tackling her in the middle of the hallway. She also had a plume of pure white hair growing from her right temple, like Susan Sontag if she had gone into eighth-grade algebra. Her husband taught math, too, at the state university; they had fallen in love during graduate school. And all this — her world of boys and equations and good cheer — had been hazarded.

And then recovered.

Now she could sit in faculty meetings with Daniel Blanco and not show the slightest sign that he was in any way different to her from all the other staff members assembled around the room. If it weren’t for the older teachers like Mrs. Willoughby, who remembered, there wouldn’t be a trace left of that strange and perilous affair. Ms. Hempel couldn’t decide which amazed her more: the sight of Mrs. Bell and Mr. Blanco talking amiably by the coffee urn or the thought of them locked in an ancient, urgent, hopeless embrace.

LEAVING THE LIBRARY, Ms. Hempel was surprised to see Ms. Duffy standing alone in the vestibule, her hands resting lightly atop her belly. She seemed to have lost her entourage somewhere along the way. She was looking at the enormous bulletin boards that lined the walls and displayed the latest projects generated by the younger grades. Only a year ago she had been responsible for filling such a board, which required judiciousness (for not every child’s hieroglyph could be hung) and a protracted wrestle with crepe paper and a staple gun. But now she was free of that. What an escape! She gazed at the artwork with the cool eye of an outsider.

“Beatrice,” Ms. Duffy said, and Ms. Hempel gave her a hug. The belly turned out to be as hard as it appeared.

“Have you seen this?” Ms. Duffy asked. She was studying one particular display. “They’re overlapping. You can’t read them. And he put a staple right through that kid’s name.”

He being Mr. Chapman, Wall Street trader turned teacher, called in to replace Ms. Duffy for the year, and now, it seemed, quite possibly for good.

“How are we supposed to know who drew the Minotaur?” She pointed at the bulletin board. “A child spent hours — hours! — working on this, and you can’t even read her name.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Ms. Hempel said, peering. “But you’re right. The name is kind of obscured.”

“My god,” Ms. Duffy muttered. “This isn’t rocket science.”

She reached up and pinched the staple between her thumb and forefinger. With a worrying motion of her hand she extracted it, and then flicked it to the ground like a cigarette butt.

“There,” she said.

The child’s name was Lucien Nguyen.

“Much better,” Ms. Hempel said, and smiled. She wanted to leave, her curiosity deadened; now that she knew Ms. Duffy wasn’t harboring a little half-Yemenese baby, she no longer felt a strong need to talk with her. But she didn’t like the way Ms. Duffy was still eyeing the display. And Ms. Hempel’s tendency to suggest precisely the opposite of what she actually wished, in the vague and automatic hope of pleasing someone, asserted itself.

“Do you want to walk to Izzy’s and get a bubble tea? My treat?”

For a moment it looked as if Ms. Duffy was about to agree. But just as she was turning away from the displays, she inhaled sharply and wheeled back around to stare at the bulletin board.

Her finger landed on a pink piece of paper and circled a single word with baleful vigor. “Did you see this?”

Ms. Hempel stepped closer to read the text, printed in a computer’s version of girlish handwriting: Persephone picked up the pomegranate and ate four of its’ seeds. She winced.

“Oooph. Not good.”

Ms. Duffy held the word pinned beneath her finger. Or could it even be called a word? It didn’t rightfully exist outside of the grammatical underworld, but Ms. Hempel knew from her own observations (in newspaper headlines! on twenty-foot billboards!) that these crimes were spreading. Rapidly. And evidently unchecked.

“They’re kids,” Ms. Duffy said. “They’re learning, they make mistakes. But how are they going to know that they’re mistakes if their teacher hangs them up on the fucking wall? I mean, does he make them do drafts? Does he correct anything?”

Ms. Hempel shrugged weakly. Her own alertness to error had wavered over the years. But maybe all it took was some time away, some time abroad, for one’s acuity to be restored, because now, by simply standing beside Ms. Duffy, she could feel her powers beginning to return, she could see the mistakes leaping out at her, the bulletin board lighting up with offenses like the big maps she imagined they used at the FBI.

“Upper right-hand corner,” she reported. “Completely random capitalization. Since when is swan a proper noun? Or rape, for that matter?”

Though she had to admit, both choices had their own logic.

She also spotted Aries, alter in the place of altar, and — there it was again — that old devil, its’. The real wonder of it all was how these mistakes managed to survive under the pitiless eye of spell-checking. You had to kind of love them for enduring.

But Ms. Duffy felt no such affection. She was pulling Persephone right off the wall. “Where’s Leda?” she demanded.

Ms. Hempel pointed reluctantly at the display. There was now a naked, pockmarked hole on the board. “Up there,” she said, and stole a look down the hallway. Maybe Mr. Mumford or, even better, Mr. Peele would make a sudden and sobering appearance.

Ms. Duffy had risen up onto the very tips of her clogs, as if they were toe shoes and she a young dancer. Her belly didn’t throw off her balance at all. Up, up, her puffy fingers reached, quivering with purpose. “Got it,” she gasped. Down came Leda. Down, too, came Hera and the peacock, Echo and a weedy-looking Narcissus, Danae dripping wet in her shower of gold. Down came the Minotaur and Medusa, Hermes, Neptune, Athena leaping bloodily from her father’s splitting head. Neptune? Wasn’t that the name the Romans used?

Exactly, said Ms. Duffy’s scrabbling hands.

She thrust the rustling pile at Ms. Hempel. “Can you hold this for me?” she asked, out of breath, then rose up again on her toes.

Ms. Hempel gazed at the pillaged display, felt afraid, and looked frankly down the hallway, in the direction of help. But it didn’t appear as if the authorities would be arriving anytime soon. She wondered briefly why she, of all the young teachers who drank too much at Mooney’s, had been chosen by Ms. Duffy for this particular mission. Perhaps it was simply chance. The end of the day, an empty vestibule, a surge of nameless emotion — and then someone emerges, making you not alone anymore. So it had happened, a year ago, with Mr. Polidori. “Out of the blue?” Ms. Hempel had asked Ms. Duffy. “The two of you just—” She could not believe it then; she had wanted more — but now, holding the plundered goods against her chest, it made a sort of sense to her. It was possible to find oneself, without warning or prelude, involved. So she crouched down and tapped the papers against the floor, neatening the pile, making a crisp little sound, wanting above all to avoid the appearance of untowardness, wanting the whole operation to feel as tidy, as considered, as possible.

THEY AGREED, FINALLY, that the best thing to do would be to return the projects to Mr. Chapman’s classroom, with a carefully worded note attached. My room was how Ms. Duffy referred to it, and then she alarmed Ms. Hempel by asking, “You’re going to sign it, too?” No, she was not; but she didn’t have the heart to say so yet, especially now that Ms. Duffy had been seized by some fresh distress. As the fluorescent lights flickered on in the classroom, she looked about her wildly. Things were not as she had left them.

There were still the purple beanbags in the reading corner, and the jade plants were thriving, having been faithfully watered by Ms. Cruz. The record player was still there, too, although buried under stacks of handouts, and the Calder mobile still dangled from the ceiling. But the Indonesian shadow puppets were gone, and so were the poems.

“He took down my poems?” Ms. Duffy’s voice was small. She had gone to great lengths to procure them, risking arrest. A few years earlier, the poems began appearing on subways and buses, in the place where advertisements for credit repair and dermatologists had once hung. And as soon as a new poem was posted, Ms. Duffy would devise a plan for obtaining it: scouting out empty subway cars, climbing up onto the scarred seats, easing the poem from its curved plastic sheath, secreting it away beneath her long winter coat. All for the sake of her fifth graders! Every day they could gaze up and contemplate the words. Or not, and therein lay the beauty of osmosis. They passed the year in the company of Whitman and Dickinson, Mark Strand and May Swenson; some of it would penetrate even the most obdurate souls.

Which was probably the thinking of the transit authorities, as well; but the fact that her fifth grade’s edification came at the expense of the citizenry did not seem to give Ms. Duffy pause. And then it became possible to acquire the poems lawfully by sending off a simple request on school letterhead — but Ms. Duffy, like all true teachers, had a renegade spirit, and continued to haunt the buses late at night.

Now, in the place of her stolen poems were boldly colored posters urging the class to read! Also pointing out that reading is fun! That people everywhere should celebrate reading! Additionally, there was a poster commemorating the Super Bowl win of the Green Bay Packers. All of which, it was obvious, had been obtained through official channels.

Ms. Duffy sank down onto one of the many little tables arranged throughout the room. The fifth graders didn’t yet know the isolation of desk-chairs; they still worked companionably at these low shiny tables. She covered her face with her hands and sighed, her elbows digging into the high mound of her stomach.

“I hope he put them somewhere safe,” she said.

“You want me to send them to you?” Ms. Hempel asked.

“No, there’s no room. I just meant in case he changes his mind.”

She glanced over at what had once been her desk, at the piles she was no longer accountable for.

“He has them doing those dumb workbooks?” she asked, but all of her fire from the vestibule was now extinguished.

“It’s his first year,” Ms. Hempel said, and laid the ransacked myths on Mr. Chapman’s desk. “He should take whatever shortcuts he can find.”

Ms. Duffy didn’t answer. She was still looking around the classroom, at the small ways it was now strange, at the names taped onto the backs of the chairs, names that had no meaning to her.

She said, “I lost Theo McKibben at the Metropolitan Museum. My first year.”

“Theo?” Ms. Hempel laughed. “That’s easy to do.”

“It was a nightmare. My first waking nightmare.”

“The first of many,” said Ms. Hempel. “But just think: You’ll never have to go on a field trip again.”

Ms. Duffy smiled slightly. “Never again.”

And then Ms. Hempel realized with a sickened feeling that she had forgotten to distribute the permission slips for next week’s outing to the planetarium. Only three days left: not a problem for the organized ones, but it didn’t allow much leeway with the children you always had to hound for everything. She would have to resort to an incentive plan: Early dismissal? Ice cream?

She paced around the desk mindlessly and saw it as both hopeful and doomed: the careful stacks beginning to slip, colored pens littered everywhere, memos from Mr. Mumford protruding at odd angles, the plastic in-box taken over by trading cards, half-eaten candy bars, extra-credit assignments on the verge of being lost.

“You’re brilliant.” She turned to Ms. Duffy. “You are. Because we can’t leave to make more money; that’s despicable. And we can’t leave to do something easier, some nice quiet job in an office; that would be so embarrassing! Am I supposed to tell my kids, ‘Okay, I’m off to answer phones at an insurance company’? It’s impossible. So what can we do? We can always…” Ms. Hempel gestured helplessly at Ms. Duffy’s belly. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

She had imagined a body cast instead.

Again Ms. Duffy gave a thin smile. It wasn’t clear whether she took Ms. Hempel’s compliment as such.

“So what’s stopping you?” she asked idly. She plucked a long, loose hair from the sleeve of her sweater and dropped it onto Mr. Chapman’s floor. Then suddenly she seemed to remember that she was herself pregnant, and undergoing a remarkable experience. She lit up. “You should do it!” she said with abrupt conviction. “You’ll love it. You will.” She pushed herself off the little table and moved warmly toward Ms. Hempel. “We think we have all the time in the world, but in reality we don’t. And when you find the right person, you just have to go for it. There’s never a good time; it’s never convenient; don’t fool yourself into waiting for the perfect time—”

She stopped. Her hands flew up to her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”

Ms. Hempel touched the fair, freckled arm. “Oh, don’t worry. Please, really, don’t worry.”

“I’m an idiot,” cried Ms. Duffy.

“You’re not,” said Ms. Hempel. “Because I forget, too. After I do the dishes, I get this panicked feeling that I’ve put my ring down somewhere and now I can’t find it.” She lifted her bare hand and looked at it. “Everything was friendly, it really was.”

Ms. Duffy nodded, her face stricken.

“Amit and I still talk on the phone. And last week he sent me a book.” She didn’t mention that it was actually one of her books, a book that had been swept up in his wake and had now washed up again on the shores of his new apartment. “We’re in very good touch,” she said.

Ms. Duffy remained unconsoled. “What happened?” she murmured. “What made you decide—”

It was hard to keep straight; they had told people different things at different times. There was Amit’s fellowship in Texas, which he couldn’t turn down; and there was the difficulty of finding time to plan a wedding, not to mention the expense; there was their youth, of course, and the uncertainty that comes with it, the fearful cloudiness of the future (and what a mercy that was, to be considered, at nearly thirty, still hopelessly young)…. All of which was true, just as all of it was prevarication, and even in the midst of saying these things, she was never sure exactly whose feelings were being spared, just who was being protected. For whose sake was all this delicacy required? She hated to think that it might be hers.

“It wasn’t the teaching, was it?” asked Ms. Duffy.

Oh no, it wasn’t that. At least she didn’t think so. But funny how everyone had a theory they believed yet also wished to see refuted. “It’s not your father, is it?” her mother asked, her father dead two years now but his absence still brimming as his presence once had. When she showed her the ring, her mother had offered to walk her down the aisle. “But I know it’s not the same,” she said. “I know that.”

So she had told her mother no, it wasn’t because she missed her father. Though she still could feel his warm, dry, insistent hand hovering just above the top of her head. And she had told Mr. Polidori no, it wasn’t because of him, either. Though at moments she could still feel his hand, too, as it made its way down the length of her spine. She had been surprised that he’d even asked. A surprising glimpse of vanity, of self-importance. He had cornered her by the jukebox and gazed down at her earnestly — the earnestness also a surprise.

But it was only a kiss!

And some nuzzling, some breathless pressing and hugging, in one of Mooney’s indeterminate bathrooms. Ages ago, on one of those happy Friday afternoons. After he had ended things with Ms. Duffy but before he had fallen for the gamine younger half sister of Mimi Swartz. A pause between the acts, there in the dark stall at Mooney’s, everyone giddy with the fast approach of summer. She had tumbled into the bathroom and found him, back to the door, penis presumably in hand, and before she could even gasp he had glanced over his shoulder, told her to wait, and then unhurriedly finished, washed his hands, dried them with a sheet from a roll of gray paper towels, asking her, Do you hate this song as much as I do? They had danced, barely able to move. He had lowered the swinging latch into the little round hook by the door.

Forgot to do that, he said, and she laughed.

Or did she? She would like to think that she had, that she had kept her wits about her and laughed, kept things floating along lightly, the encounter accidental and jolly. She would like to think that she hadn’t swooned. Hadn’t shut her eyes and given way, tipped her head and held on. There was no hesitation — only treachery, only readiness — a perfect swan dive into the dark pool of flings and affairs. Maybe she had let out a little moan. But then the song came to an end, and he clasped her bearishly, pecked her on the forehead, said: I bet you make all the boys crazy, Ms. Hempel. And after releasing the latch, gallantly held the door open for her.

She walked, obedient, to her seat at the bar, wondering, What just happened?

Later, she would return to this moment, flipping it back and forth like a tricky flash card, one that somehow refused to be memorized. She asked herself all the boring questions (not pretty enough? odd smell? fiancé?) but couldn’t quite manage an answer. Causality kept escaping her. He kissed her, then he changed his mind — that was as far as she ever got. But always fascinating to her was the fact that she could feel him changing his mind. Feel it in her muscles and on her skin. Not that he did anything so obvious as stiffen, and his body didn’t once let go of hers; yet something shifted: the pressure that was once excited now merely emphatic, the mouth still warm but only reassuringly so, the embrace turning into a squeeze. His body’s gracious withdrawal of interest in the very moment that he decided, No, this really isn’t for me.

And though many things would reveal themselves in time — the sex of Ms. Duffy’s baby, a girl; and the name, Pina, after the bleak choreographer; the name of the woman who worked at Amit’s lab, which was Lilly; the right word, the word she’d been looking for, Yemeni—still she returned to the bathroom at Mooney’s, to its perfect mystery, to the moment when Mr. Polidori wrapped his arms around her like a bear. So that was what it felt like, someone making a decision. She wanted to remember how it felt.