The English Teacher

TWO

AT HIS MOTHER’S WEDDING, PETER DANCED WITH HIS NEW STEPSISTER Fran, whose attention had slid over the top of his head at the beginning of the song. She wasn’t focused on anything in particular, which made her lack of interest in him all the more apparent. But he was simply happy to be dancing with her. He might never again have the opportunity to dance with someone so thoroughly out of his league.

This marriage was exactly what Peter had wanted and now it was here, all around him, written on balloons tied to chairs and on the inside of the gold band his mother now wore — the first piece of jewelry he’d ever seen on her. It had all happened so fast, and he was still dizzy with his own good luck. There was something creepy to people about a boy living alone with his mother for his whole life — fifteen and a half years. He’d been embarrassed by it. And now that long chapter was finally over. Tonight they’d go home to a regular house on a regular street, husband and wife in the master bedroom and four kids sprinkled in rooms down a hallway.

The song was coming to an end. He hoped its last notes would bleed into the beginning of the next. But there was a pause as the lead singer, his math teacher, Mr. Crowse, took a swig of beer, and Fran wavered like a leaf in the silence, poised to catch the first wind away from him. He had to secure her in place, and his mind spun in search of the words. After they had lived together for a few weeks, he’d probably have a ton of things to say, but now they were strangers. He’d already complimented her bridesmaid’s dress, as well as her poem the night before. He could make fun of the band, the Logarithmics, which was made up of the very geekiest teachers at Fayer Academy, but he wanted to say something big, something that would intrigue her.

“My mother wanted to marry your father from the moment they met.” His mother wouldn’t like him saying that. He knew it wasn’t true.

“I could tell,” Fran said, scrutinizing them, his mother and her father, who stood holding hands and not letting go as the music started up again. It was “Beast of Burden” and they played it much slower than usual, Mr. Crowse practically whispering into his mike with his eyes shut and sweat streaming over his lids. Peter and Fran watched their parents step closer, her father tucking his mother’s fingers tight in the dip between his shoulder and collarbone.

Fran turned back abruptly to him. “Shall we dance?” she said in a foreign accent.

At school dances, he headed straight for the bathroom whenever he heard the first languid notes of a song like this. Even a slow dance with Fran did not overpower the urge to bolt. But she’d already looped her arms loosely around his neck, so he placed a hand on either side of her waist. She was a year older but no taller. The fabric of her dress was so thin he could feel the narrow band of her underwear and the heat of her skin where there was no underwear at all. Peter tried to keep all the facts straight in his head: this was his first slow dance and his first contact with the underclothes of a girl; yet this was his mother’s wedding and this was his stepsister. He felt there was some secret to this kind of dancing that he hadn’t been let in on. Quickly his hands made damp nervous spots on Fran’s dress.

Halfway through the song Fran’s head, which had been cocked and swiveling in every direction away from him, plummeted to his shoulder. Her eyelashes flickered on his long neck.

“Does your mother dye her hair?” she whispered.

Peter opened his eyes to see his mother floating by. Her hair was longer than most mothers’. Usually she wore it pinned at the back with the same tortoiseshell clip but today it was down, her dark red curls draped over Tom’s arm like a flag.

“No,” he said, though he sensed another lie would have pleased her more. “She doesn’t.”

At the end of the song, Peter peeled his palms from Fran’s dress. Before he could decide what to say, her father tapped her on the shoulder and gave a little bow as she turned to him. She put her arms out like a professional, the way she had when she’d said to Peter, Shall we dance? But this time her face looked like it had been plugged in. No girl had ever looked at him like that.

Instead of completing the swap, his mother whispered that she had to go to the john, and left him on the dance floor alone. He watched, for a short while, her tall figure try to push through to the stairs on the other side of the room. Every few feet she was stopped by people wanting to congratulate her. They mashed their faces against hers, pawed at her dress, spoke loudly into her ear, and all the while his mother kept imperceptibly moving on. If he held his breath, she would look back at him. But she didn’t. She reached the stairs, kept her eyes forward, and disappeared beneath the floor.

He took a seat at a table with some children he didn’t recognize and their babysitter. The children were tying her wrists together with the strings of balloons and none of them noticed when he sat down. He swung his chair toward the dancers and sipped on a flat Coke someone had left behind. He felt suddenly grown-up, beside but apart from the screeches of the little boys, his right ankle on his left knee which made a box of his legs, the way most of his male teachers sat during assemblies. The babysitter was pretty and probably thought he’d come over to try and talk to her so he was careful to ignore her. All three of his stepsiblings were out dancing now: Fran, with her father, still shining like a star; Stuart, the oldest, old enough to be in college but for some reason wasn’t, glumly twitching with a fat cousin of theirs; and little Caleb up on the shoulders of Dr. Gibb, who had been Mrs. Belou’s oncologist. She had only been dead a couple of years and now his mother was Mrs. Belou.

Peter started to wish he’d invited Jason. His mother had told him to invite as many friends as he wanted, but he thought they’d get in the way of the beginning of his life with his new family. He’d envisioned the whole wedding differently, with him and Stuart and Fran moving through the day together, comparing parents, trading information like spies before a mission. He pictured them all sitting around one table, pointing out relatives and telling their stories. Well, Peter only had one relative there, his aunt Gena, but she had a good story. Years ago, she’d gone into the Peace Corps and fallen in love with a guy in her village in Africa. One of the guy’s wives had tried to strangle her with reeds from the river. She still had the scars on her neck.

As if beckoned by his thoughts, Gena took the seat beside him. “You look a little gloomy.”

“I’m not.”

“Really?”

She put a finger under his chin and guided his face to hers. Even though Gena was four years older, she was like looking at his mother through magic glass, the creases gone, the cheeks soft shiny bulbs above her big smile. His mother once said she wanted to skate on Gena’s skin it was so smooth.

“I’m just taking a break from dancing.”

“You glad she did this?”

“Yeah.”

“You like the steps?”

“I don’t know them really.”

They were all dancing together now. Stuart had tied a napkin around his head and was jutting his arms out like he was putting a hex on people.

“They must be pretty tough.” She meant because of their mother.

“I guess.” He didn’t like it when people dwelled on Mrs. Belou’s death.

Gena looked away. He was afraid she was preparing a move. He hadn’t been a great conversationalist, though usually he liked talking to her. He’d only met her twice before, but he felt comfortable with her. She said what she thought.

“What do you think about Tom?”

Gena watched Tom, who was dancing in that shoulder-bouncing way that people who did not grow up with rock music did, then turned back to him, as if he were the real subject of study. Finally she said, “He’ll call a spade a spade.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said with sudden defensiveness, as though they were in the middle of a fight.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what he’s going to find in there.” She looked at Peter and seemed surprised by his disturbed face. “Oh honey, for you this is fantastic. It’s a nice family. And you’ve got brothers and sisters now.”

“One sister.” He felt sulky. What did she mean by find in there?

“One sister.” She looked at Fran, twirling beneath the bridge of her father’s arms. “Who will hog the bathroom and torture you with all the gorgeous friends she brings home.” Her head fell back, laughing at her vision, and he could see the three ragged white stripes just below her chin.

The bass player, Mr. Carbone, struck the last chords of a song with a long flourish and an embarrassing scissor split, then announced the band would be taking a breather. Peter hoped his stepfamily would join him. There was plenty of room — the children were playing at the dessert table now, smashing pieces of cake faster than the babysitter could push the plates away. But the Belous drifted over to their side of the room where Tom’s friends and family all congregated. Peter scanned the top of the crowd for his mother’s hair, but she still wasn’t up from the bathroom. He had a flash of her climbing out a small window but he knew that was ridiculous. Where would she go? Their house on campus had been emptied out that morning; Mr. Hoyle, with his wife and new baby, would be moving in tomorrow.

Dr. Gibb took a seat on the other side of Gena. He leaned across her to shake Peter’s hand for the third time that day, then said something that made Gena smile. He was neither young nor old, but in that long dull part of life Peter dreaded. He had a squat face and an oxbow of hair just above his forehead, cut off from the rest of his scalp by the bald patches on either side.

He and Gena plunged into a serious discussion. Their voices dropped to exclude him. Peter feigned disinterest and slowly turned his back on them so that gradually their voices rose again.

“I don’t know about that,” Dr. Gibb said. “Youth is very resilient. But it’s true that there are easy declines and difficult declines and this was a very very difficult one.”

“Slow?”

“No, relatively speaking, it was swift. But she fought it with her bare hands. This was a woman who did not want to die, who did not believe she could die.”

“My father always told us no matter what, die with dignity.”

Dr. Gibb took a deep breath as if to stop himself from saying something more acerbic. “There is not a lot of room for dignity with cancer of the brain.” He said “cancer of the brain” like it was a French delicacy. Peter felt a sudden hatred for this man who had brought death to his mother’s wedding.

Why did people have such a fascination with death? Once they’d found out Tom was a widower, everyone at school wanted all the details about how his wife had died. Wasn’t it wonderful, they all agreed, that Tom had found Vida. Like a rose in winter, his English teacher had said.

Peter had stopped himself from thinking about dying long ago. When he was much younger, for no good reason that he could remember, the reality and certainty of death struck him all at once. He went through a long scary stage of believing he would die in his sleep like in the stupid rhyme Jason’s mother always said before bed. Sleep itself began to feel like death, and he would jerk himself awake whenever it came over him. He felt, late at night, the pull of his father, the mystery of him that was as large as the mystery of death itself and all tangled up with it. He began to wonder if his father was dead, dead and wanting Peter to join him in death. It was the winter of fourth grade, with its short bleak days and long nights and everything snapping and cracking outside his window. Finally spring came, with its softening and loosening, and his mind loosened too, relinquished its grip, and he began sleeping again.

He tuned out Gena and the doctor after that, and looked around the dreary room for distraction. This restaurant they’d rented out was one of the summer shacks in Fayer right on the water. It would be a great place to go on a hot August night when you wanted to feel a breeze against your skin. It was not a great place to go in November when all the windows were covered with thick plastic which billowed out and collapsed back in loudly with the wind. He was filled suddenly with a familiar loneliness, and he stood up quickly, desperate to shake it, anxious to find his mother among all these strangers.

There she was, weaving her way slowly back across the room. She looked like another person today, all that hair everywhere and a faintly pink dress swirling down to her ankles. She lifted a flute of champagne gently from a passing tray.

Peter’s French teacher, Miss Perry, asked Dr. Gibb to dance and Peter was surprised to see how eagerly he accepted her, leaving Gena’s side without another word. His aunt turned back to him without a trace of injury.

“When are you going to come visit me?” she asked. When he didn’t answer she said, “I’m not worried. You’ll come. Someday, when you’re a little older, you’re going to get in the car and not even know where you’re going, and five days later I’ll see you pull up into my driveway.”

“I’d call first.”

“No you won’t. You’ll just show up. And I’ll be real glad to see you.” She gave him a rough hug, clubbing him on the ear with one of her thick upper arms.

What he had wanted to say was that every fall his mother promised they’d visit Gena during spring vacation, but when the vacation drew near his mother always had some excuse for not having bought the tickets — that senioritis was going to be bad this year, that not one junior was going to get into college at the rate they were going, or that it had been years since she’d taught King Lear and really had to do some thinking. That was her most frequent excuse for everything they didn’t do — she had to do some thinking. Peter understood that they didn’t have a lot of money compared with most of the kids at Fayer, since they lived off one teacher’s salary, but they’d never taken anything but the same three-day vacation every year. On the first weekend after school ended each June, they drove north to York Beach to stay at the Sea Spray Inn, an aquablue, three-story motel across Route 1 from a gray beach and gray water. During the day he would swim, going back and forth between the pool and the beach, while his mother sat upright reading on a towel near the rocks. They shared a room and if he woke up in the night there was often a bright orange circle of ash floating above her bed. He felt comforted by her wakefulness, the smell of her smoke, and the rattling wheeze of the ice machine down the hall. He always wished the trip was longer.

But Gena probably didn’t want to hear about almost-visits, and Peter was glad when his mother joined them. He leaned closer to her, ashamed of his need of her, that secret ache he kept expecting to grow out of.

“How much longer are we going to stay?” he asked her.

She turned to him but didn’t answer.

“Mom?”

She was looking right at him, with that smile that had been fixed on her face all day, but she still didn’t reply.

“Mom!” He waved a hand at her. “I said, how long are we going to stay?”

“You can stay as long as you like.”

“But how long are you going to stay?”

“I don’t know, Peter.”

“Are we going to have dinner all together when we get home?”

“We just ate.” She spread out her arm at all the round tables still covered with dessert plates and coffee cups.

“Wasn’t that lunch?”

“It’s past six.” She was irritated with him and looked off toward Tom, who was making his way to her. He passed a table of Fayer teachers, all women, and Peter saw them admiring him.

When Tom reached them he said, “I feel like Lindbergh in Paris the way people are carrying on.”

“You smell a little better,” his mother said. “He was soaked in urine.”

Peter noticed how Tom’s fingers, like organisms separate from the rest of him, folded into his mother’s as they spoke. It was weird, much weirder than he expected, to see his mother standing there holding hands with a man, a husband. And she had an unnatural expression on her face, like she knew the whole thing was weird, too. He wondered, for the first time, if his mother was in love with Tom, really in love, the way he was with Kristina. She couldn’t be — she’d only known him since June and he’d known Kristina since sixth grade when she was new at Fayer. They sat together at study hall. They became partners in earth science. Neither was popular; they didn’t get asked to meet at the beach on weekends where their classmates smoked cigarettes and made out behind the rocks. In the spring, Peter tried to kiss her when they were alone in the woods, collecting salamanders for their terrarium. He’d caught one, fluorescent orange like a bike reflector, and she bent over to watch it scramble in his palm. Her hair was loosely woven in a braid, strands curling free in the damp air. Even now he could remember how he wanted to press his lips to the pale skin beneath the braid as she stood there so still. But he thought you were only supposed to kiss a girl on the lips so he buried that desire and tucked his head around to find her mouth. She screamed in fright. She said she’d thought he was a bird, a crow come to snatch up the little glowing salamander. She seemed really sorry for the confusion and Peter knew that if he tried again she would have kissed back, but he’d used up all his courage in the first attempt, and they walked back with their salamanders to the science wing in silence. He never got another chance that year, and by the next fall she’d cut off her braid and grown breasts and became the most popular girl in their grade. She still was, and he still loved her.

Peter remained beside his mother and Tom, though they were as far away as stars. Even if they had both been shorter and spoken audibly, he wouldn’t have understood half of what they said to each other. It was like that with couples. Kristina was like that with Brian Rossi now. Gena had gotten pulled into a conversation with three tiny old ladies Peter didn’t recognize. Beside him, their backs to him, Miss Rezo and Mrs. Shapiro, two of the other English teachers at Fayer, were talking quietly.

“No, I never did. No one did. When she interviewed she said her husband would be joining her, but then he never came. I don’t think anyone dared mention him after a certain point.”

“It’s like Lena Grove showing up in Jefferson looking for Lucas Burch. Where’d she come from exactly?”

“Texas, I think. I can’t recall for sure. But there was never a mention of him, not even to my cousin Lucy who sat for them for years.”

“Really? The one with the wired jaw?”

And then they launched into a long discussion of jaw-related dentistry. It seemed to him teachers often did that, picked the least interesting angle of a story and pursued it like bloodhounds, leaving behind all the more promising trails. It’s why he hated school, history in particular. The past had to be more intriguing than what they were given to learn.

“He’s no longer in the picture” was what he remembered his mother saying the first time he asked about his father. Another time she said, “He was a man,” and he waited for her to go on because she liked talking about people and what she noticed about them. But she said nothing else and he knew by her changed expression not to ask more. The two times Gena had visited, he asked, when he got her alone, if she knew anything about his father. She said his mother had never confided in her about things of that nature.

Tom turned to him. “You ready to go home, Peter?”

It sounded so normal, as if Tom had been asking him that for years. “Definitely,” he said.

From the backseat of the Belou station wagon Peter could see the heads of his mother and stepfather in the Dodge ahead. It was strange to see her in the passenger seat of her own car, the car she’d had all his life. She looked small. Tom’s head was turned to her and he was driving very slowly.

“We might as well get out and walk,” Stuart said, slamming his palms against the steering wheel again. “What’s wrong with him?”

This was the first time he’d ever been alone with the Belou kids without his mother. He’d imagined this moment differently, too. He thought their stiffness and reserve with him — and with each other — was due to his mother’s presence, but except for Stuart’s occasional outbursts, no one said a word, and Peter’s ears rang in the silence. Fran sat up front, her arms locked over her wool coat. Caleb was with Peter in back, turned away from him, breathing onto the window, then squeaking letters into the brief fog.

The Belous lived across the bridge from Fayer in Norsett. Fayer was technically an island, though no one called it that. Norsett was on the mainland, a bigger, poorer town than Fayer with abandoned processing plants blocking most of its water views. There were a few shabby summer houses on the southern edge, but the year-round residents lived in small capes along an inland grid of streets. To Peter, who had lived in the same cottage in the grass sandwiched between playing fields all his life, a normal road lined with houses was deeply exotic. Even the sidewalks were part of a dream come true.

As they crossed the harbor, Peter felt the same surge of anticipation of the wedding that he’d had each of the times they’d driven to the Belous’ house in the past month. But this time it was cut short by the recognition that it was done, no longer something still ahead but slightly behind. It was only now, in the backseat of the Belous’ car above the cold black water, that he let himself admit disappointment. Yet, as they headed inland, turning one unfamiliar corner and another, each street looking so similar Peter wondered if he’d ever find his way out, the realization of disappointment about the day (except the two dances with Fran, which he would treasure even if she never spoke another word to him) had no effect on his anticipation of their arrival at 81 Larch Street, where he would begin his life as a regular person who ate his meals not in a cafeteria but in a kitchen, whose neighbors were not his teachers, and who on weekends would not find himself moving furniture or passing hors d’oeuvres to alumni. Most of all he looked forward to siblings, and even their withdrawal in the car now did not chase away his image of what that would be like. There was bound to be some awkwardness at first, but in a few weeks they’d look back and laugh at how shy they’d all been.

He wondered what Tom and his mother were talking about. She would be thinking about their dog Walt and how long he’d been left alone at a strange house. She would be thinking about all the papers she couldn’t grade this weekend. She didn’t like any disruption of her routine. Even their dinky three days at York Beach threw her. He could count on her being ornery (one of her favorite words to describe herself) for the rest of the month. But what she would be saying was a mystery. He’d never, before this summer, seen his mother in the company of a man.

Stuart pulled into the driveway behind the Dodge. Peter got out last, and waited a few seconds for his mother, but she and Tom remained in the front seat, windows rolled tight. He followed the others into the house.

Not to Peter, not to anyone in particular, Fran said, “Thank God that is over.” She collapsed onto the sofa in her coat. Stuart, who didn’t ever seem to wear a coat, went to turn on the TV. He turned the dial from channel to channel and when he finally stopped, he muttered, “Jesus, look at that,” but he was blocking the set and no one cared enough to ask him to move. Caleb snuck into the recliner in the corner, a chair so enveloping and puckered it looked like an enormous cupped palm. He picked up the library book on bats that had been left facedown on the arm, snapped on the standing lamp over his shoulder, and began to read.

Peter stood alone near the door. He heard steps on the porch. Once his mother was inside it would become his house, too. There was shuffling and whispering but they did not come in. He picked up a Lucite cube of photographs from a table next to the sofa. He hoped Fran would notice him turning it over and narrate, but she just stared at Stuart’s back, as if she could make out, from the flickering edges of his body, the images on the screen.

The pictures were only of Stuart, all taken when he was much younger. In each one he had the same enormous smile. They were all typical scenes from childhood: riding a tricycle, frosting a cake, building a sand castle, fishing. Peter turned the cube from side to side to side, trying to catch him without that smile. That smile bore utterly no resemblance to this Stuart who stood muttering and shaking his head in front of the TV. This Stuart had no expressions at all. It was as if all his facial muscles had been snipped. His mouth hung flat and motionless, even when he spoke. But here in these snapshots, the smile covered his whole face, a combination of joy and shock and love, his forehead wrinkled in surprise and his head bent to one side affectionately. The pictures spanned seven years or so, and his joyful face was the same in each one.

“There’s not going to be a quiz at the end of the period, Peter,” Fran said without looking at him.

He put the cube down. Where was his mother? He didn’t even know where his room was. He didn’t know where anything was, except the kitchen, where he’d had dinner twice. But he liked it here. It was a real home, lived-in, with soft carpet everywhere and lots of places to sit. Even the smell was better.

Something brushed against the front door. Peter waited for it to open, for his mother to help him begin his life here, but nothing happened. Another scuffle — an attempt at a knock?

“Answer it,” Fran barked.

Peter swung the door open and found his mother limp in Tom’s arms.

“Oh my God,” Fran said, disgusted.

Caleb lifted his eyes briefly from the bats. “What are you doing?”

Tom took a few small steps into the house. “I’m carrying my bride over the threshold.” His face was flushed from either strain or embarrassment and he lowered Vida feet first to the ground, steadying her carefully as she took back her own weight. It was such a delicate, silent motion, and Peter felt comforted by it. It was, in fact, the first comforting moment he’d had all day.

“Congratulations,” he said, the sound lingering unfinished because he’d wanted to add “Stepfather” or just “Father,” but at the last moment couldn’t say either. Father was such an unused, alien term. He thrust out his hand like Dr. Gibb.

Tom encased Peter’s hand in two warm palms. “Thank you, Peter, thank you.” He, too, seemed to want to do something else then — give him a hug or ask him an important question. Peter waited, his hand hot and buried, but nothing came.

When he was released, he turned to his mother. “Congrats, Mom.” He felt, in the presence of the Belous, that he should hug her. They had gotten into a bizarre habit of performing in front of them, pretending they were another breed of mother and son. At their first dinner all together his mother, in the middle of the meal, had stroked the top of his head while bragging about his interest in writing. She’d exaggerated completely — he’d won a stupid poetry contest in seventh grade, that was all.

He stepped toward her and they raised their arms. It was a show; they hugged without pressing. He remembered this from childhood, this weak hug, as if he were made of paper.

“What the hell?” Tom said, stepping toward the TV. “Oh, no.”

Peter tried to make sense of what he saw: fires, screaming, mayhem. Every few seconds the TV camera itself seemed to be struck by a passerby. The jolted footage made him slightly nauseated. Then it rested on one image, a long lean Uncle Sam, his striped pants in flames, surrounded by dancing, chanting men whose robes flipped in and out of the fire.

“Those lunatics are going to burn themselves up, too, while they’re at it,” his mother said.

“They’ve seized our embassy,” Tom said gravely. “Goddammit they’ve taken our embassy.”

Peter didn’t know who they were. He glanced at his mother for an explanation but he could tell she didn’t know either. She didn’t follow the news very carefully. All on-campus teachers got a paper delivered to their door every morning but theirs usually ended up in the trash can, the rubber band still fastened around it.

“Why did they agree to let him in?” Stuart said. “He could have had that operation in Mexico. They knew it would stir up trouble.”

“He’s been our ally for many years. We owed him.”

“Ally? He’s been our stooge. Our oil guy.”

“What are you talking about?” Fran asked.

Tom began explaining about the Shah of Iran. Peter tried to focus on what he was saying but a man on TV came up to the camera shouting angrily through brown teeth, then spat at the lens. The spit was thick and green. A hand reached around quickly with a cloth and wiped it off. It was eerie to Peter, the hand and the cloth, like a taboo had been broken. He’d missed Tom’s explanation.

“Is President Carter in there?” Caleb asked from his chair. Peter was certain that when he was seven he’d had no clue who was president.

“I doubt it,” his mother said, though what did she know. “It’s probably just a bunch of functionaries.”

“What’s that?”

“Good decent hardworking diplomats who were brave enough to remain in the country during a revolution.” He’d never heard Tom use that tone of voice before.

“Mom?” he said quietly. “Do you know where my room is?”

“I don’t even know where mine is.”

“I’ll show it to you, Peter.” Caleb slid dramatically off his chair.

Peter followed him out of the room and down a corridor to the first room on the left.

“We dragged your boxes in this morning.”

“Thanks.”

Caleb slipped his hand behind a bookshelf. “The switch is a little tricky to find.”

Peter waited, surprised by his desire to be alone, when just this morning being alone was what he’d hoped to renounce for good.

“There.” A single bulb, painted green, cast the small room in lime-colored light. At first glance, it looked like a decorated storage room. The walls were covered with pen-and-ink drawings of body parts: ears, fingertips, knees. Some had Chinese characters beside them; others had typed-out English quotations Peter couldn’t decipher. There was only one full-size poster, also handmade, of a pair of closed eyes and below it the words

What is one is not one

And what is not one

Is also one.

There was nothing in the room immediately identifiable as furniture. It simply looked like a huge mound of junk — notebooks, winter coats, football pads, coin wrappers, a stapler, a fishing rod, balled clothing, a rubber Richard Nixon mask, a bike pump, a rumpled suit — that spread from the doorway to the far wall. As Peter leaned closer, he could see, beneath the only window, jutting out through all the crap, the flowered corner of a mattress.

“So that’s my bed?”

“No. That’s Stuart’s bed. You’re here.” Caleb pointed to the near wall, which was stacked with boxes — his own boxes, Peter realized. “It folds out of the wall. It’s pretty cool. Look.” Caleb pushed into the cluttered center of the room all of Peter’s boxes, then lifted a metal lever and caught the bed as it exploded out of the wall. “Ta da!” he exclaimed, gazing at the whole room — at the exploding bed, the warty cactus, the burnt thumbs of incense in a dish — with un-disguised reverence.

“So why didn’t you move in here?”

“He didn’t want me to.”

At this Peter felt a small bit of pleasure mingle with his horror, but it was short-lived. No one had told him he’d be sharing a room with Stuart. Stuart frightened him. Stuart didn’t even speak to him.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

“Right next door,” Caleb said, still eager to please.

Peter stepped into the little bathroom and locked the door. He stood at the sink, a hand on either side of the basin, as if he were bracing himself to throw up. Maybe he’d feel better if he threw up. He tried to coax something out. Then he noticed a tiny little screen fastened to the drain and a clot of moist hair caught in it. With his fingernail, he pried up the screen, tapped it empty on the side of the plastic bucket below, and snapped it back in place. All this he did without thought. He was in a state beyond thought. In the mirror he saw, for an instant, the real Peter, the Peter he was when he was not conscious of looking. But after that all he saw was his mirror face, flattened out by self-awareness. Usually, when he looked in mirrors, he tried to figure out what it was about his face that no longer attracted Kristina. He’d read somewhere that handsomeness was not the result of a certain combination of features but of symmetry. The human eye gauged the degree of symmetry of the two halves of a face because, research had shown, people with symmetrical faces tended to be less prone to disease — thus a better biological choice. But tonight Peter did not try to find the asymmetry in his face. He knew that wasn’t it. He wasn’t unattractive. Girls who didn’t go to Fayer often thought he was cute at first, before they spoke to him. It was something else. He was undeveloped in some way that was not physical and seemed beyond his control. He suspected it had to do with being an only child, or having only a mother, and there was a part of him that had hoped the Belous would help him change. Now he feared they would only make it worse.

“Are you all right?” Caleb said through the door.

“Yeah.” His voice came out funny, more a breath than noise. He wasn’t sure Caleb had heard him, but after a while his feet scuffled away back down the hall.

At the toilet he unzipped his fly. He had already begun to pee when he saw her photograph. She was looking right up at him, grinning. Love, she seemed to be saying. Yes, he replied. All this happened in the interval between conscious thoughts, between recognizing that this, this woman tying the shoelace of her sneaker on an overgrown path, was Mrs. Belou, the real Mrs. Belou, and remembering that she was dead. When that last thought came, his stream of urine stopped abruptly, painfully. She had died in this house. She had stood right here, and there by the sink, and in his room. She had touched everything he would soon touch. There was no place he could ever be in this house where she had not breathed. He put down the lid of the toilet seat and sat, the black and white tiles on the floor flashing in time with his slamming heart. He didn’t want to live here, in the house of a ghost.

He went back out to the living room.

“Mom?”

She wasn’t listening. “We need air in here,” she was saying, lifting up a window near Caleb’s chair.

“I don’t feel well.” He didn’t know what he wanted, what he expected from her. I want to go home, he wished he could say, even though he didn’t completely mean it.

“Go rest on the couch for a bit,” she said without looking at him.

“Could have been the shrimp,” Fran said. “I spat mine out.”

“Maybe that was it.” He was unsure which cushion to choose — the middle one right next to Fran, or the far one, so far away it felt rude, unsibling-like. Finally he sat between the two and now they lifted like wings to either side of him and their stiff edges were not comfortable beneath him. But still he felt frozen, unable to choose a direction. Everyone else was focused on the TV. His mother had never allowed TV. Even now by Tom’s side she wasn’t watching. Her eyes were wandering off — to the lamp, to the curtains, to the little dish on a table in the corner. She wasn’t interested in the present. For all her reading, she never bought a contemporary novel. The books she read always had some gloomy old portrait on the cover. He couldn’t ever remember having a conversation about a current event with her. And here were the Belous, every one of them, even Caleb now, transfixed by this indecipherable mayhem that had not changed in the hour since they’d been home, Tom looking as if the hostages had been seized from his own house.

Time passed, Peter wasn’t sure how much. Fran scooped up Caleb, who’d fallen asleep with his head on the arm of his chair, and took him down the hallway. He could hear the water running and Caleb moaning about having to brush his teeth.

Having been interrupted the first time, Peter still had to go to the bathroom. He didn’t want to return to Mrs. Belou, didn’t want to run awkwardly into Fran back there. Did you say hello to your own siblings in the hallway as you passed them? He didn’t know the first thing about how regular families behaved. So he went down the other hallway instead. There was only one room here, at the end, and he went in. Tom’s bedroom, he determined, from the size of the bed and his mother’s boxes in the corner. He found a bathroom off to the left, but the light was out. He shut the door anyway and pushed open the curtain of the small window to let in a wedge of streetlight. He peed, then stood at the window. There had been no street lamps on campus. He tried not to miss his house, tried not to think of Mrs. Belou either, that this was her bathroom and she’d stood right here, too, at times thinking about the past, with maybe her hand on the sill just like this. He put his hand in his pocket and looked across the street into another family’s life. They had the TV on, too, and there was lots of movement — a woman carried a bowl into the room, a child hopped on one foot, a man stood up and fiddled with the antenna, the woman ran out, perhaps to answer the telephone. Were they friends with the Belous? Had they been at the wedding? He couldn’t see them well enough to know. Maybe the phone call was someone wanting to hear all about it. What was she like? Did they seem happy? And what about the kids, those poor kids?

When Peter had learned Tom was a widower, he’d been relieved. It meant his kids lived with him full-time, and didn’t just visit every other weekend like Craig Hager’s stepsisters. It meant, ultimately, a real union, a true synthesis, without any loose ends. He’d put their mother in the same category with his own father: permanently absent, wholly and completely unpresent. How mistaken he’d been. He could feel her. It was like she was standing beside him here in the dark, saying, You’re touching my flowered curtains, you know. I know, he said back. I’m sorry.

Through the closed door, out in the bedroom, he heard footsteps on the carpet and then breathing, long, whistly, staccato breaths. Inhuman breaths. Then a final heave out, nearly a whimper, and his mother’s voice: “I can’t do this.”

For many more minutes there was only silence. Peter kept his hand on the knob, to prevent her from coming in and finding him lurking in the dark of her bathroom.

Then he heard the bedroom door shut. He relaxed his grip, deciding to wait a few seconds before escaping.

“Hey.” It was Tom’s whisper, playfully loud and exaggerated. “What’re you doing in the dark?”

“I thought I’d get out of this dress.”

“Oh no you don’t. I’ve been waiting all day to take this dress off myself.”

Please no. Peter looked around for another exit from this room. His bathroom at his old house had had three different doors. This one didn’t even have a closet, and the window was too high and too small. He’d make a racket just hoisting himself up. Maybe he should at least hide behind the shower curtain.

“You look so serious.” Tom’s voice was closer now, on the bed with her, only a few feet from where Peter stood.

“Marriage is serious.”

“Not all the time.”

“It’s like teaching a class. You have to make all the right choices at the beginning or it’s a wash.”

“Trial and error.”

“No, no errors.”

He laughed. “Maybe not on your part, but I’m going to make some.” Peter heard the beetlelike buzz of the long zipper of his mother’s dress. “But not tonight. I’m not going to make one mistake tonight.”

“Maybe I should go say good-night to Peter first.”

“Not yet.” His voice was muffled.

“Quickly, I promise.”

The zipper went back up, the door opened and closed. He had to go now. His mother would call the police when she couldn’t find him. But Tom was pulling off his shoes. Item by item his clothes fell to the floor. Now he was going to come into the bathroom. Peter held the knob firmly, readying himself for the fight he would surely lose with one shoulder shove from Tom.

Instead, his mother returned.

“How is he?” Tom asked.

“Better.”

Better?

“What’s he up to?”

“They’re all still glued to the tube.”

“Where’d you find that?”

“In the fridge.”

“Must be vinegar by now. Now let’s get this thing off and see what’s going on under there.”

“One sec.” A pause, then a glass being set on the bedside table.

The dress was unzipped all the way down this time. Peter heard it rustle to the floor. He moved in swift silence to the other side of the room and stepped into the tub. His shoes squeaked but the sound was drowned out by Tom, whom he could still, unfortunately, hear clearly. “God, you are beautiful. So long and smooth. You’re like an oboe. I’m finally going to learn to play an instrument.” After a while he said, “Do you know how long I’ve waited to have you, have all of you? God, we’ve been living like teenagers.”

At first Peter tried to fight the great and horrifying waves of words, but soon he surrendered and let them crash over him. At least he could hear none of his mother’s responses, and it became easy, after a while, to imagine she had left the room. The problem was, once he got his mother out of the room his disgust abated, and other feelings began to creep in.

“God I want to fuck you.” Tom started laughing, then said in a wholly different, tender voice, “Oh, Vida, you are the first thing I’ve wanted in so long.” He said other things, some vulgar, some tender, and suddenly Peter understood the word juxtaposition, a term Miss Rezo had introduced recently. Juxtaposition of words, of tone, of mood. He understood it all now. He felt it in his body.

“Are you ready now, Vida? Are you ready for me?” There was shifting, rustling, Tom laughing. “I can’t quite. Let’s … Is this hurting? Am I hurting you? Let’s try a different.” More shifting and swishing. “Oh Vida you are so. I just want. I can’t seem. Let’s try.”

Peter didn’t know it was so complicated.

“Let’s try some of this stuff.” It was quiet for a long while, then, “Oh sweetheart, I am so sorry. It’s all my fault. We’ve got to get you relaxed. I’m so sorry. We should have taken a honeymoon, a big fancy hot-weather honeymoon. I did this all wrong. All wrong. Here, there’s a little more wine left. What can I do? Let me give you a back rub. God, you are all clenched up like a big fist.”

When he left the room, he no longer cared if they heard him. He didn’t even try to be particularly quiet. His mother was lying on her stomach, her arms bent beneath her like tiny wings. Tom’s big arm lay on top of her. Defeated soldiers. He’d never known sex was such a battle, and that people who wanted to win could lose. He slid out the door. The glow of the TV, like moonlight along the living room wall, and the murmur of voices, Stuart and Fran’s, and the smell of something warm like toast or muffins, all seemed like things from another era of his life. His legs were stiff.

Stuart was sprawled on the floor. “Holy shit, where have you been?”

There was no hiding where he’d been. There was only that one room down the hallway he’d come from. “I got trapped. In the bathroom.”

“No way.”

“I did.”

“We thought you’d gone to bed,” Fran said.

“I wish I had.”

“They didn’t know?”

Peter shook his head.

“That’s fucked up.” Stuart chuckled.

“Yeah, it was.” At the sound of Stuart’s chuckle, he felt suddenly a huge well of laughter inside. “It was really fucked up.”

One after another they began laughing, and their laughter fed upon itself and slowly became that airless, throat-clicking, stomachaching kind of laughter Peter had imagined only in the very best of his Belou dreams.