The English Teacher

THREE

ON MONDAY MORNING VIDA WOKE UP ALONE. TOM HAD LEFT AT FIVE, off to some fabric sale in Massachusetts. She’d pretended to be asleep while he rose, took a shower, and returned to the bedroom to dress in the dark. The towel fell from his waist. It was like being in sudden possession of a horse, having this tall firm naked man beside her bed. What thin light there was fell on his pale buttocks and upper thighs, and she wished she could reach out and stroke them without him noticing and wanting to stroke her in return.

The loud nearly debilitating question that had pounded through her body like a pulse since the wedding reception — what have you done what have you done — subsided once he was gone, and she was able to fall back asleep until seven. She stretched her limbs in the enormous bed, her left arm and leg venturing across to Tom’s side, still slightly warm. She rolled over into his impression, and put her head just beside where his had lain. She thought of the grisly iron-gray hair at the end of “A Rose for Emily.” She would learn how to do this properly. “I promise,” she said into Tom’s absent ear.

The odor of food slipped through the cracks in the door: toast, bacon, something sweet but burned. Then voices, Fran’s and Caleb’s, not Peter’s, and the clatter and ping of utensils. All these voices, all this commotion, after years of waking to a silent house. Peter is fine, she told herself.

In the bathroom water hung in the air and smelled like Tom. She could see where he had swiped at the mirror to shave. The basin was clean of stubble but on the glass shelf above it a few tough bristles of his mustache were caught in a scissors’ bill. If only she were the girl she had once been. He deserved that. He deserved someone who would walk into this bathroom, breathe him in, and cave to her knees with joy and thanks.

But the sorry truth was she was eager to get to school where her life would resume its familiar course after this aberration of a weekend. Her body felt strange, like she might be coming down with something. The what have you done hammering was back. A shower and her school clothes would snap her out of it.

But her nakedness beneath the weak drizzle of water only reminded her of failure with Tom, and she hurried to wash and cover up her body again. In his damp towel she leapt across the bedroom to her boxes. Close to the top of one she found her favorite gray cardigan and deeper down a soft shirt and denim skirt. From another she managed to pull out a pair of tights and her moccasins. She was not the flashiest dresser on the planet — no rival for Cheryl Perry, who taught French in clingy pants and short furry sweaters that swung above her perfect little bum. As she dashed across the room with her armful of plain clothes she remembered the sky-blue velvet dress her grandmother had sent her from Boston, the matching hat, and how she’d worn them to threads, despite the teasing and the Texas heat. Back in the wet warmth of the bathroom, she toweled her hair upside down into a damp frizz, tamed it with Tom’s comb, then realized she had no clip. She couldn’t teach with her hair down. She rifled through every box but found nothing. She probably had a spare in the car, and the thought of being in her car with Peter, headed toward school, was a soothing one.

She moved swiftly down the corridor. They didn’t have much time — school was a good fifteen-minute drive from here, not the forty-second walk it used to be. Her wet hair thwacked at her back.

And today of all days she had to start Tess of the d’Urbervilles with her tenth graders. And Peter, too, was starting it in the other class with Lydia Rezo. She had always dreaded his reading Tess. And here it was.

In the living room, Stuart was curled up sideways on the sofa in a little egg, his eyes fixed on the morning news.

“This is some serious shit,” he said to the knees just below his chin.

Weren’t high school dropouts supposed to be sacked out until noon, instead of following international crises at 7:22 in the morning? Still, there was something self-pitying in his fascination with this aggression halfway around the world.

“How about a little air in here?” It was always so stiflingly close in this room. Only one of the four windows actually opened. What they need, she thought, shoving it wide open, is to toughen up a bit. People die — and die unexpectedly. Both her parents were dead. That was hardly the worst thing that had ever happened to her. People disappoint and horrify you in a thousand different ways, Stuart, that you cannot possibly imagine. You move on. You move on, she told him with her eyes as she picked up his cereal bowl and juice glass and bade him a good day, whatever that consisted of.

She pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen. Walt scrambled and strained on the slippery linoleum to rise and greet her.

“Here you go. Here you go,” she cooed. She got behind him and hoisted his quivering flanks level to his front shoulders. He bristled — he didn’t like her having to help him — and headed for the back door as if he’d lived here all his life. Before letting him out she squatted down by his face. “You didn’t sleep in my room last night. Why not?” He put his head on her shoulder and sighed. His nose was cold where it touched behind her ear. She ran her hands from his skull down his neck and along his long rib cage. His hair was coarse and camel brown except on his face, which was a silky, distinguished white. No one knew what kind of mix he was, though people loved to toss out suggestions. Shepherd, collie, retriever, boxer, Great Dane — she’d heard it all. He probably did have some Rhodesian ridgeback, because of how his hair tufted along his spine. She’d found him on the way out of Texas all those years ago, in a cardboard box at a gas station. He’d looked at her as if he knew exactly where she was going and why. She didn’t have those answers yet, so she paid the man five dollars and Walt slept on her lap as they headed East.

Walt sighed again, then lifted his head and pressed his face to the seam of the door, to the tiny wind blowing through. She let him out and when he just stood at the top of the back porch, she tapped at the window and said, “Go on, baby.”

He took the steps slowly, nearly sideways, his hind legs flopping together, then separating once on flat ground. He looked back briefly before trotting forward to sniff the snarled remains of a flower bed.

She had been aware, when she came into the kitchen, of others at the table, but once beside Walt she’d forgotten them altogether. It was as if all their noises had been suspended, and now, as she turned around, the memory of their chatter came back in a delayed but clamorous rush.

She was startled to see Peter among them, dressed, combed, with a plate of something in front of him. He usually emerged at the last possible minute. Relief rushed up, weakening her, relief and the awareness that her fear was just as strong here as anywhere.

Fran and Caleb were studying her, not with the respectful scrutiny of students on the first day of class but with cold, leery observation.

The smell in the kitchen was disarming. It was nothing like the slightly chemical, overcooked smell in the Fayer cafeteria in the morning.

“Good morning, early birds,” she said cheerfully, trying to establish that playful authority she found so easily in the classroom.

“How old is that dog?” Fran said.

“Sixteen.”

“Same as Peter,” Caleb said.

“Peter’s not sixteen yet.” Children could be so loose with their ages. Peter wouldn’t be sixteen until August. “Who’s the chef?”

“Fran is. Want some French toast, Mom?”

“Cup of coffee’s fine for me.”

“It’s over there.” Fran pointed to a percolator in the corner. “I just made a second pot.”

Vida hoped to find the mugs in the first cupboard she opened, but it took three tries. She scanned the counters and shelves for sugar.

“In the canister,” Fran said finally. She was clearly enjoying herself.

“You ready?” Vida said to Peter, scooping her schoolbag (the freshman quizzes uncorrected, Tess unopened, the junior author profiles untouched) off the hook with her free hand.

He nodded, but took his time with the few bites left on his plate. Fran slapped another piece of French toast on Caleb’s plate, then doused it with syrup.

Vida felt she should ask when their bus came and if they’d done their homework, but they’d been carrying on without her inquiries all their lives. She asked instead if they would let Walt in before they left.

Peter walked ahead of her to the car, his knapsack stuffed with books he hadn’t opened all weekend. He wouldn’t get away with it; he couldn’t charm his teachers with an elaborate tale and heart-crossed promises.

The temperature had fallen further and though the ground still gave slightly beneath her shoes, the hard dead smell of winter seemed to be rising up from it. The trees in the yard jerked in the cold wind, trying to dislodge the few remaining clusters of brown leaves. It was a dreadful time of year. She hated teaching Tess, though for years she had been told it was her signature book. The experience of reading Tess with Mrs. Avery sophomore year was reenacted in skits and referred to in yearbooks. It lived on in countless mentions by reminiscing alumni in the triannual bulletin. But for Vida, the book was a torture. She had never cared about that overly naive, peony-mouthed girl who is buffeted by a series of impossible coincidences from one gloomy town to another and across four hundred and sixteen pages before she gets her just deserts at the scaffold. She did have an appreciation for Hardy’s descriptions and his worries about the effects of the Industrial Age on the land and its people. She used to believe it was her discussions of this “ache of modernism” that made the book meaningful to her students, but she had come to realize that it was her own lack of sympathy for the girl that galvanized them. By the end their attachment to Tess herself was fierce, and their devastation at her demise profound.

They got behind a garbage truck. Vida lit a cigarette as the two men in back leapt from the runner, separated to opposite sides of the street, hurled bags three at a time up and over the truck’s backside, and hopped back on just as the truck jerked ahead. White steam streamed from their nostrils. They wore no gloves and drank no coffee and yet they seemed warm and full of energy. They’d probably been up since three, and soon they would be done. They’d go to a diner for lunch — Reubens, french fries, a few beers. Then they’d sleep — at a girlfriend’s, or their mother’s, or in their own solitary bed in a one-room apartment on Water Street, their muscles tired, their bellies full, their minds thoughtless as cows. The truck stopped again, and the man on the left, having caught Vida’s covetous eye, grinned at her. She glanced quickly away in what felt like fright. The truck veered off then, but the acknowledgment made her uneasy for several more blocks, as if a character in a book had addressed her by name.

The sun hung small and naked above the rooftops, unable to push itself fully through the pale cloud bank. They passed a 7-Eleven and a launderette. In both windows middle-aged women stared blankly out. She thought again of Tess and wondered whether she might like it better if she assigned it in the spring.

Ahead of them the bridge to Fayer rose up in a high arc, and its sides were a series of thin squat rails, allowing for a full view of the harbor and its boatyards on the right and the open ocean on the left, with a few fishing trawlers heading toward the horizon. There was often heated talk, especially in the weeks following an accident, of building a wall on either side of this bridge, but Vida was pleased the view had remained, unimpeded by safety and common sense.

It ran nine-tenths of a mile and she took it slowly, like a tourist. Light poured into the car from all sides, an opaque blue wavering light, as they rose toward the height of the bridge. She loved the carnival-like ride of it, the web of patina-green supports above and the false yet convincing sense of sheer solidity beneath her tires. She remembered the few times last summer when she had crossed the water back to Fayer after an evening with Tom, and though she had felt at the time confused and conflicted, the memory now was peaceful. She took a long sip of the coffee she’d wedged between her knees. They were falling now, falling through the early light over cold blue water. She felt happy and even slightly sexual until she remembered the two nights since her wedding, and the feeling recoiled.

“Why is your hair like that?”

Damn. Her hair. “Will you check in there for my barrette?”

Peter flipped open the glove compartment and plunged his hand into the mass of candy wrappers and receipts. “Nope. Nothing.”

Vida pulled out the ashtray, stuck her fingers into other dark cubbyholes of the Dodge’s dash, then slid her hand beneath the seat. “Damn.” In nineteen years, she’d never taught a class without her hair firmly yanked back.

“They have rubber bands in the office,” Peter said.

It was true. But she avoided the office, and Carol, now.

They drove through Fayer’s tiny center, a small deposit of buildings: a brick police station, a white clapboard church, a stone library, and a few green store awnings. Several people were out, tugged along by dogs or children. She had never known these streets well, never seen them at this time of day. And yet they beckoned to her now.

The road out of town clung to the ocean. Even when a patch of woods or a summer estate blocked it from view, it was always with you, in the wet morning mist, the sandy roadsides, and the seagulls crying out.

“Do you think those people will be killed?” Peter said. He reminded her of Tom already, the concern in his voice as if he personally knew each one of those unlucky paper pushers halfway around the world.

“Not a chance. It would be suicide for the Iranians. There’ll be some sort of negotiations today and by supper they’ll be free. These things wrap up very quickly.” She tried to think of an example and couldn’t. She was hopeless when it came to historical facts. The events didn’t adhere properly in her brain. She never understood why moments in novels were unforgettable, while in real life the details slipped quickly away. A few weeks ago she couldn’t even explain the Bay of Pigs to Peter. All she knew was that she was reading Middlemarch at the time. She remembered Dorothea and the wretched Casaubon, and how they had just arrived in Rome for their wedding journey when her mother called her in to listen to President Kennedy’s speech. But she couldn’t recall what he’d said or in what order the events had unfolded or exactly how it had been resolved. All that came to her when she tried was Dorothea and Will’s trembling kiss by the window at the end.

They passed through the stone pillars, Scientia carved into one and In Perpetuum into the other, and followed the slow-moving line of station wagons up the hill. She hadn’t been part of this carpool convergence for sixteen years. She glanced over the girls’ field to their old house and the path that ran across a ridge to the school. When he was younger, Peter had a small red canvas backpack that was never filled with more than a pencil and a few exercise sheets. He’d run ahead of her on that path to school, the nearly empty backpack bobbing behind him, stopping only to scoop up something from the ground and drop it into her hand, the soft brown ball of a frightened caterpillar or a long, sticky worm.

There was no ancestral tug as the mansion came into view. There never was. The oversized house, with its bays, turrets, and copper-plated mansard roof, was a school to her, just as it was to everyone else creeping up the long driveway this morning.

Vida pulled into her faculty spot beside the cafeteria. Through one window, a few students from Peter’s class hunched over their notes, cramming for something, and through another Marjorie and Olivia in their white uniforms and nurses’ shoes were already setting up for the lower school snack.

They sat for a moment in the stilled car.

“You have a test today?” she asked.

“Quiz.”

“History?”

“Yeah.” He was poised to bolt. He didn’t like to be seen walking into school with her anymore.

She could tell he was worried, but she couldn’t brush his bangs out of his eyes or lift his chin toward her. She couldn’t do that anymore, if she ever had. He was changing so fast and she was too scared to look at him for any length of time. “Did you get a chance to study last night?” she said gently.

He gave some sort of stifled snort through his nose and shook his head. It was rude — the snort, the aversion of his eyes, the lack of words. She wasn’t used to rudeness in him. But before she could correct him, he got out and slumped away around the building to the front entrance where he would blend in with the rest.

How dare he be disillusioned already. She slid her bookbag from the backseat onto her lap and shoved open her door. Screw it if he didn’t like it. He’d gotten what he asked for. Welcome to life and all its shitty little tricks. Her irritation at him rose, chafing hard against her affection. This was the nameless emotion she felt most in life, this abrasion of love meeting anger.

She walked up the scrubby knoll to the basement entrance, her tight fists bared to the cold, her head leading her body like a sledgehammer. She was a hard woman. Yet Tom said last summer, when he first kissed her, that she was like a heron, with her long neck and delicate bones.

In the vestibule outside the auditorium there was a bronze bust of her grandfather. No delicate man, he. His wild wiry eyebrows, suspended at the edge of his enormous brow, and his thick, nearly detached jaw belonged in a natural history museum. He had the childlike impatience of an old man who did not want to sit for a sculptor, who did not care about his house being transformed into a school, despite all the undeserved credit bestowed upon him. He’d been forced to sell because his only child, Vida’s mother, had married a dreamer who’d whistled through the family’s money within a decade. Though she had no memories of ever having visited this house, she did remember him, a crooked branch of a man, speechless from strokes, tufts of white hair growing from the tops of his ears. He was the one who named her. He hadn’t spoken for months but when her mother placed her in his arms for the first time, saying, “It’s baby Vivian, Grandy,” he smiled so wide her mother said she heard his face crack, and he said eloquently, seemingly proficient in a language no one had known he knew, “No, mi amor, su nombre es Vida.” Another crack, then “Life!” That was his final word, though it took him several more years and the loss of his house to die. When Vida left Texas all those years later, without a map or a plan, nothing surprised her more than finding herself in Fayer, at the enormous front door of her grandfather’s house. No one had told her it had become a school. Within a few weeks she had a job as a substitute English teacher, and by the next fall she’d been given a full-time contract and the gardener’s cottage.

Though she’d requested high school, they started her with the sixth grade and she’d had to push her way up a grade a year until she’d secured herself a spot in the English department of the upper school. Since then, she’d turned down every promotion offered to her: English chair three times, dean of students, dean of faculty, curriculum director, and assistant head of school. The only thing Fayer Academy had offered her that she’d accepted, above and beyond a teaching contract each year, was the Hutchinson Prize, chosen and awarded at graduation by the senior class for superior teaching, which she’d received four times, most recently last June. She didn’t know then, as she rose to accept another sparkling silver bowl, that a man named Tom Belou was seated in the seventeenth row. What she did know is that she was a fool at the podium, fighting back tears of all things, tears for the senior class with whom she’d formed a special, unexpected bond, and tears for her dear friend Carol whose son, she had learned that morning, had committed suicide. She’d pushed out a few platitudes of thanks and hurried back to her seat beside Peter, raw and embarrassed. At that moment, Tom claimed, Vida became the first thing since the death of his wife to disturb him, to make him anxious for the passing of time as one senior then another then another rose from a folding chair, ambled self-consciously across the grass to the lectern, received a diploma, and ambled back.

By the end of the ceremony he’d worked his way to her row of seats and was the first to congratulate her on her award. He was the godfather of one of the graduates, he told her. Could she join them for dinner? She didn’t like thinking back on this day and the breaks in her voice at the podium. What could he have seen in her then? Perhaps it wasn’t her at all but that crazy senior class whom she’d loved, who’d risen and hooted and whooped as she walked to the lectern, as if she were not a teacher but a stripper in nothing but high heels and tassels. Was it simply the energy of that moment, such a contrast to the wake of death he found himself bobbing in? Here was life, he might have said to himself; seize it now. Oh she would disappoint him. She was not life. They were all wrong about that.

Assembly had already started. On stage, Greg Rathburn, the history chair who took every world occurrence personally, was explaining the events in Iran. Vida remained in the doorway instead of taking her seat with the juniors across the room. Greg asked for a moment of silence for the ninety Americans being held at the embassy. Vida bent her head but did not shut her eyes or think of the hostages. It was hardly silence with the irrepressible hum of four hundred and twenty-four students who had been separated for a whole weekend. It lasted a long time. After a while, she raised her head in impatience. As always, Brick Howells and Charlie Grant, headmaster and sidekick, stood at their podiums bathed in their own private spotlights. When Greg solemnly thanked the school, Brick jerked his head up like a choirboy feigning prayer while Charlie kept his head bowed for a second too long, as if the interminable moment had not been quite long enough for all of his good thoughts. Phonies to a man, she thought.

“On a much happier note,” Brick said, glancing down at his notes as young Greg, heartthrob, former Fayer swimming star, swung himself off the stage. “A little bird has told me that our very own Mrs. Avery was married this weekend.” Bursts of applause as surprised heads craned toward her usual seat and then, after a struggle, found her at the door. The applause was stronger now, accompanied by repetitive grunts as if she had made a touchdown. Vida endured the attention, wishing she could see through the heads of the upperclassmen to the front where Peter sat with the rest of the tenth graders. What expression would he have on his face? Why had he been so angry this morning? Brick spoke through the clapping: “You will be courteous enough to call her Mrs. Belou from now on.” More cheers, as if replacing your identity were some great achievement.

The presumptuousness of Brick Howells. What right had he to change her professional name without asking? And here, before the whole school, when she hadn’t even thought to mention her marriage to her students, let alone present them with a new label for her person. “Have a fruitful day,” the old git concluded. Vida spun away from the auditorium before anyone could catch her.

Her classroom was the only one on the third floor of the mansion. Brick had put her up there nine years ago to teach an unruly group of eighth graders, and the next year she’d insisted on teaching all her classes in the room. Her students made a fuss about the steep climb, but Vida loved those old uninstitutionalized back stairs that carried her from the loud reverberating blend of instruction, curiosity, and resistance that could be heard down the long hall of former bedrooms on the second floor to the musty silence of her attic. All they’d had to do to make a real classroom for her up here was punch out a wall. The ceiling was high, and the series of long lean windows at the far southern end brought in so much light Vida rarely had to switch on the fluorescent bars they’d installed.

The rest of the mansion, despite the sweeping front staircase and many fireplaces, no longer looked or smelled like anything but a school. Up here, however, Vida felt the old house. She could hear the rustling haste of the servant girls as they dressed in these rooms before dawn, just seconds ahead of the summoning bell of her mother’s impatient ancestors. Other teachers did not understand her insistence on remaining on the third floor, especially now since the science wing was finished and there were classrooms to spare. She didn’t understand how they could bear the distractions of first- and second-story teaching: people idly peered through the eye-level window on each door, interrupted for chalk or Kleenex, or delivered thoroughly unurgent messages, all as if forty minutes were not already a totally insufficient amount of time in a day to plant a few new ideas in the heads of these students. No one barged in on her classroom up here unless it was dire. If one of her colleagues ever made the journey up, they would inevitably complain about the smell. It was so moldy, they all said, like a wet wool blanket left for about a hundred years. But Vida loved that smell. It smelled the way Texas never could. And most important, she had her own private bathroom with a dead bolt she installed herself.

It was a dark morning and Vida reluctantly turned on the overhead. She pulled out Tess from her bag, set it on the desk, then went to the board and wrote

Sir John

green malt in floor.

blighted star

It was all completely rote. This was her thirteenth year of teaching the book. The bell rang. Up here it was more a vibration than a noise, followed soon after by stronger tremors as every student in the building headed to their first class. Soon she could hear her tenth graders heckling each other up the stairs.

“Nice boots, Frizz.”

“He parked his Harley out back.”

“Walk much, Lindsey?”

“Eat much, Tank?”

“Jesus, Michael. Quit touching me.”

Slowly they began to fill the room with their insults and self-consciousness, their collective hours at the mirror, and all their elaborate, transparent airs. They exhausted Vida with their attempts at self-possession, the boys and their cynicism, the girls and their shiny smelly lips.

She heard a girl whisper to another, “‘Green malt in floor’?”

The second bell rang and by the time it had finished the great mass of them had divided like cells into individual seats.

Harry Knox, an earnest young man with a feeble frame and large head, addressed her. “Forgive me, Mrs. Avery, but I’m not sure I under—”

“Mrs. Belou!” someone bellowed beside him.

This gave Harry pause. He looked at Vida, then down at his notebook. He seemed to have forgotten his point. Then he flipped his head back up at her. “How do you spell that?”

She sucked in a breath and wrote Tom’s name on the board. BELOU. Then she put a MRS. in front of it. It seemed to stare back at her, mocking her in some way. What had she done?

They were all looking at her, not as their teacher but as a woman who had just gotten married. Married. She felt heavy and mealy, like there was wet sand beneath her skin.

“Hey, now you’re like Vida Blue, the baseball player.”

“She’s Veeda, not Vyda.”

“Why aren’t you on a honeymoon?” someone in back asked.

“Let’s talk about Tess. She’s far more interesting.”

“So far in this class I’ve liked what we’ve read.” Amy said.

“Everyone struggles with Tess at first,” Vida said.

“When do people start liking it?”

“Around page four hundred and sixteen.”

Amy flipped through the fat paperback. “I knew it. The very last page.”

“Tess is a rite of passage,” Vida offered, and they wrote it down in their notebooks. Only a few would know what she meant, but she felt impatient with them for stepping behind the curtain of her private life. They could look it up themselves.

“Why do they have to describe everything so vociferously?”

“First of all, Andrew, who is ‘they’?”

He looked on the front of his book. “Thomas Hardy.”

“One person, singular. And do you really mean vociferously, or might you be referring to another word in the V section of your PSAT study guide?”

Vida could see the long lists of words twisting around in Andrew’s head. The class offered him other choices.

“Verbosely.”

“Voluminously.”

“Vacuously.”

Andrew nodded. “All of the above. They go”—she gave him her eye—“he goes on forever.”

“Example, please?”

“Here. Page twenty-two. ‘The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor aforesaid’—if he already said it why’s he saying it again? ‘The Vale was known in former times as the Forest of the White Hart, from a curious legend of King Henry the Third. …’ Oh my God, the guy can’t stop himself.”

“Okay, Hemingway, I want you to remember that paragraph when you get to page four hundred and sixteen.”

“I can’t conceive of getting to page four hundred and sixteen in this book.”

“You will, because you’re going to need a good grade in this class to balance out your abysmal verbal test scores. And when you get there, I want you to go back and read that passage and you’ll see Hardy has managed to stuff most of the plot of this novel into that description of Tess’s hometown.”

“Does Tess die like the white hart?”

You couldn’t get much past Helen Cavanough. You could only throw her off with a flat-faced lie. “Of course Tess doesn’t die. Now take out a piece of paper.” The class groaned. “Not for a quiz. I want you to write four interesting detailed sentences about your hometown.”

They liked this kind of exercise, and began writing immediately.

Vida moved to the other side of her desk. She sat in the uncomfortable captain’s chair with the school’s insignia stamped in gold at her back, and opened her own notebook to a blank page. Lydia Rezo, who also taught the creative writing course, always did the exercises she assigned her students and even read what she’d written aloud to them. Vida never did, but she felt agitated today, and the act of sitting and holding a pencil was soothing. Norsett. Though it had been her town for less than forty-eight hours, as she began writing the word she felt she had a lot to say; but once it was there on the page her thoughts evaporated.

“Don’t think, Mrs. Belou, write,” said Brian, mimicking her when she caught her students staring into space for too long during essay tests.

Vida wrote. I got married yesterday. I am married. Hello my name is Vida Belou. She stopped again. She was a hopeless writer who taught writing. She was like Joe Cox, Fayer’s beloved lacrosse coach, who’d never heard of the game when he took the job. Like Mitch Calhoun, who taught Moby Dick year after year having only read the first page. I am a fraud. She wanted to try and write one beautiful sentence. What to her was beautiful? This morning the bridge stretched out over the Atlantic like a … Some kind of bird? A diver? Something more abstract like a promise or a long-awaited answer? Her mind burned in frustration.

Michael cleared his throat and Vida looked up to find every student watching her. How long had it been? She had no idea.

“Okay,” she said, closing her notebook, rising. “Let’s hear a few.”

No one raised a hand. She was used to this. She scanned the room for a solid start. Danny had his head tucked into his neck, which meant he liked what he’d written. She nodded at him. “Let’s hear it, Dan.”

The boy looked stricken, as if he never imagined having to share these words. He wasn’t the kind of student who would ever dare refuse, though his eyes begged her to choose again. On another day she might have relented and shifted her request to Helen beside him. But today she did not. Danny was from Norsett, too, and she was curious to know what he’d say about the place. “Go ahead.”

His face splotched red and he inched closer to his page. “Norsett is an old fishing port from which in the nineteenth century sailors traveled as far as the Bay of Fundy to bring back tuna and cod. Behind the old white church lies the graveyard, the flattest patch of land in town and enclosed by iron gates with iron roses on each handle, where the town’s seafaring dead are buried.” He took in a wobbly breath. “My mother’s body is an anomaly there, a thirty-two-year-old woman who never learned how to swim.”

She had known this child since he came to the school in fifth grade. She had taught him three years in a row. How did she not know that his mother had died? Had she once known, then forgotten? She was aware of the spreading length of her silence.

“It’s only three sentences,” he said.

“Three incredible sentences,” Helen said.

Nearly everyone in the class grunted their agreement. Vida knew something more was needed, something that recognized the quality and sophistication of the writing. She felt incapable of those words. She hated it when students got so personal, and she never expected it of Danny. She hoped Fran and Caleb weren’t writing things like this in their English classes, tying up the tongues of their teachers. “Most of those fishermen didn’t know how to swim either.” she offered.

“Oh,” Danny said, without looking up.

“Would anyone else like to read?”

“After that? No thanks,” Lindsey said.

Perhaps it was cruel to have forced only Danny to read, but the thought of another soul bared this morning was more than she could tolerate. “Hold on to these descriptions, and when we’re done with Tess we can go back to them and see if you can see how you’ve been shaped by your geography the way Tess was shaped by hers. Now, let’s look at all that voluminous verbiage again.” She looked down at her copy of the book and the twelve years of notes crammed into the narrow margins in different colors and shades of ink. “Can you describe the Vale, or as we say, Andrew, the valley?”

Heads bent over books. Then a hand shot up. “It’s different from other places nearby.”

“How?”

“It’s nicer, prettier.”

“Where does it say that?”

“Page three. ‘Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale.’”

“Okay. Different from others, nicer, prettier, more delicate …?”

“He’s describing Tess, too,” Helen offered.

“How do you know?”

“When he introduces her he says something about her lack of experience. She’s sort of sheltered like the valley.”

“Good. What else?”

“At the dance, that boy notices her and then at the end regrets that he did not dance with her,” Danny said. “She stands out to him.” Vida felt there was forgiveness in his voice. “Like the Vale of Blakemore stands out among the others.”

“Excellent,” she said, thanking him for understanding her. “What about Hardy’s insistence that the Vale is not brown and dry but green and fertile?”

Heads dropped again, even Danny’s and Helen’s. They were deliberately avoiding this part. Pages rustled, but no one responded.

Vida lifted her chin to the back of the classroom. “Kristina? What do you think?” Here was a girl who should know. She’d been caught this fall in the shower of the boys’ locker room.

But Kristina was saved by a knock. Vida’s students sat in perfect stillness as she went to the door. Whatever it was would be serious, and the only way to hear the whisperings between teachers was to stop breathing.

Vida stepped outside the classroom to find Charlie Grove in the dim attic corridor.

“Jesus, Vida, it’s like the House of Usher up here. I can’t believe you actually choose—”

“What’s going on, Charlie?” She was aware of noise coming up from the bottom of her stairs, some sort of clanging down on the second floor.

“We’ve just had a call from the hospital. It’s Lydia. She fell getting into the bathtub this morning and broke her leg and I don’t know what else.”

“In the tub? She broke her leg in the tub?”

“There may be some head injury as well,” he said, as if to preempt further ridicule. He didn’t like ridicule, probably having suffered, like most teachers, so much of it in school as a child.

She realized that the clanking below was from the chairs that Lydia’s students were already carrying up her stairs. “But Peter’s in that class.”

“It will just be for a few days at most. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Why have them disrupting the library when you’re teaching the same thing up here?”

It was hardly the same thing. Lydia didn’t teach, she emoted. She was incapable of thought. She was only interested in the characters’ feelings, particularly the female characters’ feelings as they related to their oppression by men. Lydia was Fayer’s lone feminist. But arguing with him about stylistic differences would just mean losing more minutes. “Okay,” she said. “Send them up.”

And so the other section of sophomore English staggered in, lugging their chairs with the thick flat right arm that served as a desk. Lydia liked to arrange her students in a horseshoe, but Vida kept hers in rows. She maintained it was in nobody’s interest to allow teenagers to ogle each other’s bodies. She directed the newcomers to the back and had them make three new, albeit tight, rows. Peter was the last to come in, and put himself at the end of the back row, the farthest point possible from her. The only thing she had ever asked of Brick was that she never have to have authority over Peter, not even for forty minutes, not even for a study hall. How do you break your leg in the tub? She was careful not to look directly at him and yet she was aware of his every movement. He leaned down and tugged a notebook impatiently out of his bag, then the book. He hadn’t even started it; the binding was unbroken. He got a pencil out of a side pocket, then slumped even farther down in his seat. They were equally miserable that he was here.

“What page are you all on, Caroline?” Vida asked one of her best students from last year.

“Forty-six.”

She couldn’t resist. “And what have you been discussing?”

“We talked about upward mobility and downward mobility, how some families are on their way up, like a lot of ours, and how the Durbeyfields were on their way down, having once been rich d’Urbervilles.”

“I see,” she said, chastened. Maybe there was more teaching happening in Lydia’s classroom than she had realized. “Well then, you’ll be able to help us. We were just talking about the parallels between Tess and the Vale of Blakemore, the way she emerges as a sort of living doppelganger, if you will, to the land itself. The Vale is sheltered and set apart, constructed on a more delicate scale, and — this is where we left off — not dry but green and fertile. Kristina, you’ve had a few extra minutes to think about that, what say you?” She didn’t know if it was Peter or a sudden sense of competition with Lydia that was making her show off a bit.

Kristina peered into her book.

“Let’s hear one of Hardy’s descriptions of her.”

She tussled with a few pages but came up with nothing. Here was an intelligent girl who’d let her boobs grow bigger than her brain.

Vida glanced at the clock. Half the period was over. She hadn’t taught them a thing. “Here. Page twenty-six. ‘As she walked along today, for all her bouncing, handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.’” She looked up from the passage to see if there were signs of comprehension anywhere. A piece of her hair had fallen across her cheek and she pushed it away. By mistake she caught eyes with Peter, who seemed to be not just looking at her but seeing her, seeing through her taut face to one of her own younger selves, the seven-year-old who lost her two front teeth at the same time and never stopped smiling about it. She remembered exactly how it felt, the two tender pockets in her gums and the noises she could get her tongue to make with them. She forgot where she was going with this. “Can anyone find anything else about Tess? Mark?”

“It says, ‘She was a fine and handsome girl — not handsomer than some others, possibly — but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to color and shape.’”

“How old is Tess?” There. That’s where she was going.

“It doesn’t say,” Michael said.

“Take a guess,” Vida said. She was aware of speaking only to the side of the room Peter was not on. It was utterly unnerving, having him in her classroom. Without saying a word, he seemed to bring a sort of skepticism to the place, the only place where she was truly comfortable.

“Sixteen?”

“Why?”

“You said guess.”

“She’s part woman and part girl,” Helen said.

“Good. And her mouth is a peony. Know what a peony is?”

“A flower?”

“Yes, a fat red flower. This girl is blossoming. She’s ripe. She’s fresh. She’s like those green fields of Marlott.” She was trying to look past them all, out the window, but again her gaze fell on Peter’s. Why was he looking at her like that? Briefly, unwillingly, Vida saw herself at sixteen reading a book on a porch, and felt for an instant that lost intoxication of youth, that faith in life. Then Peter looked away.

“What about those?” Karen asked, pointing. She was not a strong student, but she was highly organized and didn’t like to leave class with any loose ends.

Vida glanced at the board behind her. “Okay, good. I was just getting to that.” She’d completely forgotten about the three terms she’d put up there. “Let’s start with Sir John. Anyone?” She watched how students like Helen and Danny didn’t bother with easy ones like this, waiting instead for the more intricate puzzles only they could solve. “Peter?” She needed to establish to the class that she would not play favorites, even if it meant humiliating him.

“It’s Tess’s father. He’s walking along and that guy”—he quickly corrected himself before she could—“that parson”—(clearly he had no idea what the word meant but pushed on—“passes by and says, ‘Good-night, Sir John.’”

“And?”

“And?”

“How does Tess’s father respond?”

“I’m not sure.” He hadn’t even read the whole of the first page.

Without looking at her book, Vida said, “‘Then what might your meaning be in calling me “Sir John” these different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield the haggler?’” To a group of tenth graders in New England, her nineteenth-century Dorset accent was quite authentic. Even Peter laughed.

Lindsey raised her hand. “Once he finds out he’s a d’Urberville, he starts acting differently, even though he doesn’t have any more money than he had before.”

“So by simply calling out ‘Good-night, Sir John,’ instead of ‘Jack,’ the parson sets the whole novel in motion.” She watched them scribble. That sentence would appear on nearly every essay next week. “Okay, moving on. Blighted star.”

“But what about ‘green malt in floor’?” Karen said in alarm.

“Anyone?” She had hoped to skip over that one. She didn’t feel like discussing sex and its repercussions now that Peter was in the classroom.

They all turned to the page and pretended to think.

“Why would someone say that Tess is so pretty her mother should mind she doesn’t get green malt in floor?” Let’s just say it and be done with it, she thought. But they kept their heads tucked down into their chests like sleeping pigeons. “What would make people in the late nineteenth century worry about a sixteen-year-old girl with a mouth like peony? What was the one thing that could ruin her?”

“If she got knocked up?” Kristina blurted.

Knocked up. The expression startled her, and she only managed a nod.

“What would happen to an unmarried girl if she got pregnant back then?” Jennifer asked.

The whole room began speaking at once, including Lydia’s students, who’d been so quiet up to now.

“She’d be a total outcast.”

“She’d be like an untouchable.”

“She’d never be able to marry.”

The class was galvanized by the subject, by its proximity to sex. Peter wasn’t looking at her now. Nor was he speaking. He was wagging his pencil between two fingers, making it thump like a tail on his notebook. He was smirking at Kristina. It was something in the smirk that brought it on, or in the steady, nearly hostile whacks of the yellow pencil on the page.

“And the guy? What happened to the guy?”

“Nothing would happen to the guy. He was a stud.”

“Just like nowadays.”

It began so small, small as a pinprick, in her chest. It was the familiar sting of fear but then it spread, its great wings opening all at once, her breath gone, her mind seized like an animal caught in a trap. It was the terror of the mornings and the terror of dream — a terror that had never ever visited her in her classroom before.

She was only partially aware of a new boy from Lydia’s class saying something about his cousin. “She was in eleventh grade. Now she’s in a mental hospital.” Kevin, she suspected his name was.

“What about the baby?”

“They made her get rid of it. That’s why she went crazy.”

Peter seemed to love the disruption, the cacophony, the mutiny in the room. The pencil looked so small in his hand. When had his hand grown so big?

“Can abortions make you go crazy?”

She looked at the other hand, nestled near his knee. It seemed smaller, weaker. Like a wave, her fear of him began to pull back.

“This one did her. She’s a complete nutcase now.”

Her own class was watching her, waiting. Never were they allowed to pursue a tangent like this.

“Oh for crying out loud,” she said finally. “That’s enough.” She could feel cool dots of sweat on her forehead. A warm weakness spread over her limbs like a balm.

“It’s true, I swear, Mrs. Avery.”

“Mrs. Belou!” several of them said.

“It’s utter nonsense. Let’s move on. Why does Tess claim they live on a blighted star?”

The clock spooled out its remaining minutes as she led them through the thicket of their own language, through Tess’s first recorded day and into the dawn of the next when, delivering the load of beehives her drunken father could not, she falls asleep while driving the cart and kills the family’s only horse.

The bell reverberated at their feet. Vida marveled at how easily they shut their books, stuffed them brutally back into their bags, their minds having moved on to the algebra test or a crush in the hallway or an urge for a particular candy bar inside the vending machine. Vida bid them good-bye from her perch on the desk, unable to dismiss the image of the girl in the narrow lane beside the family horse, trying to stem with her hand the strong stream of blood spurting from its chest. She had always balked at Hardy’s heavy hand, the way he put Tess on a conveyor belt of tightly orchestrated events that led to her destruction. But Vida could not find that resistance now. Hardy had all but disappeared, leaving this inexperienced girl to carry on alone.

Peter left without a glance, in a cluster of boys, their voices like the low grunts of large animals, their laugh on the stairs sharp and sinister. Then they were gone, and silence, having been kept at bay for forty minutes, rushed back in.

As she turned to erase the board for the next class, she was aware of the thoroughly irrational hope that this time it would turn out differently for Tess. When she reread tomorrow’s forty pages, Tess might not meet Alec the fake d’Urberville, or fall asleep in the bed of leaves he gathered for her, or allow him to lie beside her. And in a week or so, perhaps Angel Clare would not mind about her past, would not reject her for so long with such dire consequences.

Her seniors came in, the boys with their size 12 feet, the girls in their mothers’ expensive blouses, slapping down their copies of The Sun Also Rises on their desks. She was grateful for the shift to Hemingway, to Spain, to characters who would remain characters, silly drunken characters who mattered nothing to her.

Vida picked up the eraser. At eye level were the words MRS. BELOU. With one stroke, they were gone.

At break she went down the two flights of back stairs to get a cup of coffee. Once the servants’ pantry, the teachers’ lounge, with its buckling linoleum squares and wall of tin sinks, was not the coziest in the mansion. There was a couch and an end table and some desks and chairs for the math and science departments, who could easily correct their multiple-choice tests in the midst of gossip and complaint, but it needed a rug and standing lamps for real comfort, and most teachers only lingered for a few minutes to read their mail or wait for yet another pot of coffee to brew. Today, however, the place was jammed. Faculty crowded around a card table, loading flimsy paper plates with smoked salmon, croissants, muffins, and cubes of fruit. It was the time of year, a month and a half before first-semester grades came out, that the mothers of less than stellar seniors grew frantic and tried to bribe the faculty with expensive food and a little place card in the center of the table declaring, above their carefully written names, their deep appreciation for all the teachers at Fayer.

Vida’s first impulse was to sneak down to the cafeteria kitchen, where she knew Marjorie and Olivia would have a pot on, but the smell of baked sugar sucked her in with the rest. She’d just slip in, fill up her mug, grab a muffin, and get back to her office.

“Vida Belou!” Brick Howells bellowed from the middle of the room, the great boom of his voice mostly unimpeded by the minibagel halfway down his throat. He placed his pile of food on the table, swallowed, and made for her, carrying his weight as if he were a larger, taller man. His arms reached out for her well before she was within reach. Over the years Brick had tried to fix her up with various men: his wife’s brother at a Christmas party, his college roommate at a faculty-trustee luncheon, and his freshly divorced physician at an athletic banquet. And then, a few years ago, having given up on his friends, he licked her on the neck while she was pouring rum into their Cokes in this very room during a Valentine’s dance they were chaperoning together. She’d twisted out of his grasp and said, “C’mon, Brick, you can do better than me.” He was drunk — they both were — but her words seemed to sober him and he withdrew in agreement.

But here he was now, ready to gather her up in a public, avuncular hug. Thinking fast, she clasped his hands in hers, keeping him two arms’ lengths away but preserving the facade of a strong collegial bond. Her fellow teachers cheered. Vida flushed in anger — hadn’t the applause at assembly been enough? — which they took for embarrassed thanks, prompting them to clap even louder. Heads of curious students appeared in the door’s small window.

“Stop,” Vida said, more harshly than she would scold a rambunctious class, but to no avail.

After the clapping, she was unable to escape the warm wishes, the hugs, the dreamy smiles. A new teacher, one of the many young hires this year, tossed up Vida’s unclipped hair and said, “I like it. Get married and let it all hang out.”

They had, every one of them, misunderstood her entire life. She had never yearned to marry as these people apparently thought she had. Brick Howells was hardly the only person to have attempted the fix-up. How many times had she accepted a dinner invitation from one of them, only to find in their living room some recently devastated fellow wiping his palms on his slacks? You have so much to offer, she was often told, as if she had a tray of cigarettes and candy perpetually strapped to her waist. But these setups had stopped a few years back. Vida realized now, from their relieved, astonished expressions, that they had all given up.

Her life with Peter had been enough. It had. Why had she tinkered with it? She felt incapable of piecing the events of the last five months into any fluid, comprehensible sequence.

“So, you married your fighter pilot,” Paul Gove said to her at the coffeemaker.

Men chose the strangest ways to debase each other. Tom had trained in the air force, but by the time he got to the Pacific, the Korean War had ended and after a few weeks they sent him home to resume his work with his father at Belou Clothiers. Exactly how Paul had gleaned this information about Tom was a mystery to Vida.

“I did,” she said, with far more conviction than she’d had in the past twenty-four hours. Paul always had this effect on her. His confidence with women made her defiant. In all the years they’d taught together, she’d felt like a horse he was trying to break. Her falling in love with him seemed to be his prerequisite for friendship. She had never complied, thus they had never been friends, but now he wanted to play jilted suitor, not because he had loved her, but simply because she had not loved him.

“Short courtship.” He took a sulky bite of a chocolate croissant. “You pregnant?”

It should have been funny — a woman her age having a shotgun wedding — but she couldn’t muster a small retort or even a smile, and she turned away from him with her coffee to the plate of banana muffins, her throat inexplicably twisted shut.

She felt Paul’s hand on her arm. “I wish you and Tom the very best. I really do.”

“Good God. All these best wishes. You all make me feel like I’m entering a battle armed with a feather.” She tossed a muffin onto a napkin and climbed back to her office on weakened legs, glad for this free period before another set of seniors.

She sat at her desk in her office, unable to touch the coffee or muffin or her work. She was aware of the black phone to her left, which she only used when Peter was home sick or once when a student fainted and she couldn’t revive him. It was a direct outside line, with an unpublished number and no connection to the office, so no parent could reach her here. It never rang. She could pick up the phone now and call Tom. She had his work number in her book, though she’d never used it. And he didn’t even know she had a phone up here. Just the idea of calling him made her heart race. What would she say? What had she done?

She thought of all those wary smiles at the wedding reception, some guests not even bothering to hide their astonishment. How did this Vida Avery, boyfriendless as far back as anyone could go, how did she receive this stroke of luck? A mere high school English teacher who wore old moccasins and drank too much at parties — who had suddenly aligned her stars? The same surge of victory collided with the same certainty she would fail.

For lunch Vida had to descend the two flights, then cross the length of the mansion and the two added wings to reach the cafeteria. Because there was not the room or the staff to feed the entire school at once, lunch was spread out over the three middle periods, and fifth-period classes had already begun in many of the rooms she passed. Through the window of Sally Haynes’s history class, three juniors stood before a homemade map, tracing what looked like the Silk Road. Next door, Roger Graver sat in the middle of his psychology elective, mouth open, eyes closed, while his students walked around him in a circle. In ninth-grade English, Yeats himself read “Innesfree” from a tape recorder: “… shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, dropping from …” His voice was old and Irish and lovely.

Students past and present hollered out hellos in the hallway as they passed, some sticking to her old name, some trying out the new.

At last she reached the theater, her favorite place to spy. She wedged the door open a crack to hear the two actors on stage beside a kitchen table. To her surprise, the girl was Helen from her sophomore class. It was impossible to reconcile the private, contained Helen with the Helen now hollering at her stage husband, slamming cabinets, hurling a pot against a wall. Within seconds, however, the incongruity was gone, for the Helen on stage obliterated any memory of any other Helen, obliterated the stage itself, forcing you to believe that this was the only reality, right here beneath these lights, these acts, this pain.

“Ticket, please.” The voice just behind her ear made her leap. Jerry Poulk held up a plate of french fries floating in ketchup. “They don’t seem to need to eat, but I was starving.” He bit off half a fry, then nodded toward the stage. “What do you think?”

Vida had assumed he was down there in front, but they had been performing alone, for themselves. They still were, sitting at the table now, Helen crying softly.

“It’s a one-act for this Friday’s assembly. They ready?” he asked. He was standing too close to her, chewing, the odor of ketchup coming out of his nose.

“She is. Adam, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that she outshines him.”

“Girls always do at this age.”

“Do they?” She shot him a sly eye. He was careful to ignore her.

Jerry had come to Fayer six years ago. He became the new novelty with all his energy and charm and the ridiculous little ponytail that hung over his tweed jackets. From the start, Vida understood his game. He made his students need him emotionally. In his classes he churned them up, then broke them down. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he was never again seen eating lunch, walking a hallway, or leaving the building without some student pressing beside him, the two in a deep, closed conversation. He built an extraordinary drama department. The spring musical, formerly a one-night embarrassment, now ran two weeks, attracted audiences from out of state, and earned the school nearly twenty thousand dollars each year. And each year, Jerry Poulk was screwing around with a member of the cast. At first, it was hard to tell which one. But Vida caught on to his method after a few years: it was always the girl in the fall that he was hardest on, the one who didn’t seem to be enjoying the class all that much, the one who wasn’t ever seen in fierce private talk with him. But by February she’d have a good part in the musical, if not the lead, and she’d often be found alone on his stage or belting out a song at his piano. By graduation the entanglement would be over, Jerry refueled, spouting off about some European vacation he was planning with his wife and children, the girl underweight and withdrawn. Whether Brick was aware of this pattern, whether any other teacher had caught on, Vida didn’t know. She’d decided long ago it was none of her business.

Without answering her, Jerry headed down the center aisle with his plate of fries. Helen and Adam moved downstage, where they stood close to each other in quiet conversation. Helen managed to convey, all the way to Vida at the back of the theater, that weary acquiescence in the wake of an argument, the listening and not-listening, the acceptance of the failure of real communication. Then her husband made a joke and she kissed him so impulsively it seemed impossible that even Helen knew it would happen.

“No!” Jerry barked from a seat in the third row, and Vida closed the door before he could destroy what she had seen. She was alone in the hallway with the smell of boiling oils and overcooked meats. Her lunch period was already half over. How she wished she could go back in and hop up on that stage in possession of new words and new impulses, a truly new identity and not just a different name. Instead she’d have to squeeze in at a corner of the faculty table, forced to listen to the petty November complaints about the soggy fields or disgruntled parents, or to her own mind full of yearning for youth and talents she did not have — and the unpleasant discovery that Helen Cavanough would be Jerry’s spring victim.

On Mondays, Vida finished teaching at 1:40. She monitored an eighth-grade study hall in the library from 2:25 to 3:05, where she intercepted notes, separated disruptive elements, and corrected a set of Macbeth quizzes. On her way back up to the third floor, where she would work until Peter’s soccer practice ended at five, she stopped in the lounge for more coffee. It was empty now. Nearly all of her colleagues had afternoon obligations: coaching, tutoring, supervising volunteer work or independent projects for the growing nonathletic population. It boggled her mind, the extra hours her coworkers would put in for a few extra bucks in their paychecks each month. On weekdays, she liked to have all her work done before she went home.

There were a few tablespoons of slow-cooked sludge at the bottom of the pot. She rinsed it thoroughly and began again. It was a pleasant place to be, the teachers’ lounge in the afternoon when the light, too weak to pass through the windows, clung quietly to the panes, and no voices were there to drown out the hiss and plock of the fresh coffee being made. Vida sat on the brown corduroy sofa and let her head fall back upon the soft lip. She was tired.

“Congratulations, Mrs. Belou.” It was the one voice she dreaded hearing. “You probably need a little shut-eye after this weekend.” Carol, Brick’s secretary, slowed but didn’t stop her trajectory to the closet, where the extra office supplies were stored.

Vida sat up straight. Had she slept? The coffee was still and silent in its pot. Carol’s knees cracked as she squatted to reach the mimeograph paper in the bottom cabinet. It was never too late to offer condolence. She needed to say something. If only she’d been able to finish that damn letter. She thought of the opening line, Shelley’s “Grief awhile is blind …” What good were her own small words if she uttered them now? The letter had so much more strength to it, centuries of wisdom. She’d worked on it for days at a time last summer; she had pages of notes filled with gorgeous quotes from everyone from Shakespeare to Bishop, but no coherent letter. If only she could just hand Carol those sheets of paper and be done with it.

She watched her old friend retrieve the reams of paper, balancing on the balls of her feet, her camel-colored skirt stretched tight. Her son had died. Her son had killed himself. And yet little about her had changed. Vida avoided the front office now, but she could still hear Carol’s laugh occasionally, spilling down the hallway. Within moments she would rise and pass in front of Vida once more. What could she possibly say to her now, now that she’d missed the funeral, neglected to call or write, had been unable, that first week of school, to catch her alone, though she had tried, she really had. Carol couldn’t know about the pages of notes, the hours of research, the pleasure she had taken in finding just the right line. Because of this terrible misunderstanding they had barely spoken all fall (she’d sent her a wedding invitation and Carol had checked the regret box, offered no words at all), and they used to be such friends. Carol used to arrange her lunchtime around Vida’s schedule. She wished she could follow her back to the office, pull up that green chair in the corner, and gossip as they had before at this hour of day. Carol might even ask about the wedding night and maybe Vida could have implied something, maybe Carol could have given her some sort of advice. She’d been married nearly thirty years. But Carol was rising now, her heels sinking back into her shoes, paper in arms, and Vida had yet to say a single word to her. Something would come, she knew, when their eyes met. Carol backed out from the closet and, a few feet from the couch, looked directly at her with a tight smile. The windows were behind her, two pale panes like wings on Carol’s back. Vida smiled far wider, opened her mouth, and heard the word “Angel” come out. Carol nodded and vanished around the corner.

Angel? Had she really said the word angel for Christ’s sake?

Vida poured herself the largest mug of coffee on the shelf and slunk back up to the uncomplicated solitude of her third-floor suite.

At five, she drove down to the gym parking lot and waited in her car with the other parents for the JV soccer players to trickle out the locker room door. Peter emerged with his friend Jason. Both boys were bent over from the weight of their knapsacks and talking in that way that made boys so distinct from girls of the same age: brief remarks, no eye contact. It was hard to tell, when they separated near the hood of the Dodge, if they had even said good-bye.

The passenger door creaked, the enormous bag thunked onto the floor, and Peter slumped in.

“Hey there, big guy.”

“Hey,” he said at the end of a breath. He shot her a quick glance, then stared straight ahead as if the car were already moving.

“How’d it go?”

“What — practice?”

“Practice, history quiz, the day in general.”

“Okay.”

“Just okay?”

She put the car in gear and headed down the school driveway, relieved to be moving away from Carol, from Tess, from the classroom in which suddenly Peter was a student.

Peter didn’t answer. She was afraid he was going to bring up the class, the way she had let things unravel. That horrible new boy, Kevin, and his cousin in the mental hospital. It was physical, the mortification this memory produced.

“How’d French go?” French was always a safe subject; they could make fun of Cheryl Perry. His mediocre marks in that class never bothered her as much as they did in other subjects.

“It was stupid. She showed us this movie about this sort of lonely kid. One day he’s walking through a kind of junkyard and he sees this painting of a girl. He looks at her a long time, and then this real girl just appears out of nowhere. She’s supposed to be the one from the painting, but she doesn’t look anything like her. Why do they do that, act as if you can’t tell the difference?”

“Suspension of disbelief. They want you to use your imagination.”

“In a book maybe. But it’s so stupid in a movie.”

The car weaved through the unlit narrow roads, then the lighted stretch of the town center and on toward the mainland. The black surface of the water held the soft yellow light from shore, the bluish neons on the bridge, and the slow red and white streaks from the crossing cars.

“Where are you going?’ Peter said, slicing through their silence when the car didn’t take the right toward Larch Street.

“We need groceries.” The word was strange in her mouth.

“Oh.” A trace of delight in his voice.

She had come into this store only once before, with Tom last summer before a picnic. They had bought egg salad sandwiches and lemonade. Every person in the place had greeted Tom: the teenager shelving soup, the woman buying toilet paper, the old man laying out the fish on crushed ice. The cashier and the bagger barely let him out of the store with all they wanted to talk about. Out in the parking lot Vida had glanced back to see a line of them at the plate glass, gawking, all their mouths moving at once.

“Be right with you,” a man shouted above the gnarl of the meat grinder, then, upon recognizing her, quickly cut the machine, wiped his hands on a rag, and hurried up to the counter. “What can I do you for?”

She looked down into the case of purple meats. In fourteen years she’d made nothing more elaborate than a cheese omelet. “Any suggestions?”

He chose a small roast. In one long complicated gesture, he wrapped it in a fresh sheet of white paper, tied it tight with twine, and marked the side with a black hieroglyph only his daughter at the register could read. “I was really happy to hear about you and Mr. Belou,” he said, sliding the package at her. “Mrs. Belou — the former — she was a customer of ours from the very beginning. Special lady.” His pale eyes swam unsteadily. “He’s a lucky man. Twice blessed.” He looked unconvinced.

Vida thanked him, set the roast in the child’s seat of the cart, and headed for produce.

“You’ll want to put that in at three-fifty for an hour and a half,” the butcher called out to her before turning on his machine once again.

In the vegetable aisle, she pulled the string off the meat and tied up her hair.

Peter was waiting for her at the magazines. He looked at the roast, the eight potatoes, the bag of string beans, and the bottle of bourbon. “That’s it?”

“I need to get the roast in.” Maybe tomorrow night she’d have more stamina for all the choices and the scrutiny.

Larch Street made Vida uneasy. All these houses pressed together seemed to demand something of her as she drove past — a normalcy she couldn’t deliver. She hated the curtains in the windows, the decorations at the door. She still had to look carefully at the house numbers to find the right one. She pulled in behind Tom’s wagon and cut the engine. The car shook a little, then was still. Above the squat little house, long clouds floated pink in the dark sky, as if it might snow. Here, too, lights were on in every window; everyone was home. Her throat had seized up; she couldn’t even swallow her own saliva.

“Aren’t you getting out?” Peter’s voice was shrill. He had some fear in him, too, and she wished she found it reassuring. All those years they had been alone together and yet she couldn’t turn to him now and ask, What have we done?

They walked up the steps together without speaking.

Walt made happy circles around her as she moved from the front door to the kitchen with the grocery bag. Fran and Caleb were at the table spreading peanut butter and fluff onto eight slices of bread.

“Those for lunch tomorrow?”

“Dinner. Tonight,” Fran said, glancing at the clock.

“I’ve got dinner. I’m about to whip it up right now.”

“That’s okay, we can just have these,” Caleb said, bouncing, all sugared up just from looking at that crap.

“We’re going to have a roast.”

“But—”

“It will be ready at seven-thirty.”

Fran sunk her knife deep into the peanut butter and left the room. Caleb tried to do the same with the fluff but both jar and knife tumbled to the floor.

“Sorry,” he said, squatting to pick it up and then, thinking better of such a reconciliatory gesture, scrambling off with a small whimper, as if she might chase him.

Vida piled up the heavy slices of bread and dumped them in the trash. Walt was making as much noise with his arthritic limbs as he could, demanding to be fed.

“You’re home.” It was Tom. She’d nearly forgotten about him.

“I am. In all my glory.”

How had it all led to this, his leaning in the doorway looking as if she had broken in through a kitchen window? She brushed the crumbs off her skirt but didn’t know what to do with her hands after that.

“I’m glad.” He came toward her with a face she recognized from the beginning of their dates, when she’d answer the door and there he’d be, grinning as if every moment since he’d last seen her had been spent in anticipation of seeing her again. But now that he’d gotten her, brought her to his house to live, how long could that grin — a grin that expected so much — really last? He kissed her, his tongue reaching for hers. He seemed to have no plans to stop kissing her. Hadn’t he seen Fran storm off or heard Caleb squeal? And the roast had to get in the oven or supper wouldn’t be ready till midnight.

“Later, cowboy.” Where did she come up with these phrases?

“Promise?”

He seemed not to remember last night or the night before. He swung a chair around to face her as she unwrapped the roast and set it in a pan. He wanted to talk about her day. He had a thousand questions. She fought them off with short answers as she cut up potatoes, trimmed beans, and boiled water for the gravy mix she’d found in a cupboard. She glared at the clock; at this time in her old life she’d have eaten in the dining hall already. She’d be home in her slippers under a blanket, reading.

By the time she managed to get dinner on the table, no one seemed particularly hungry. Even Tom, who always polished off his meals at restaurants, picked at his plate. Vida couldn’t understand it. The roast had turned out well; the slices looked just like Olivia’s at school.

“So, Stu, what went on today?” Tom tried to be light, but he was worried, deeply worried, about his oldest son.

“Not much. Got up, went to work, came home. Same as you.”

“Where’s that?” Peter asked.

“At E. J.’s.”

“Are those people free yet?” Caleb asked his father.

“It’s a used record store downtown.”

“In Iran? No, sweetheart, I’m afraid they’re not.”

“You have to be really cool to know about it. There’s no sign or anything outside,” Fran said, trying to provoke her brother and insult Peter all at the same time.

“They’ll be out of there soon, I promise,” Tom said. He was too soft with Caleb, as if he were a girl.

“You don’t know that.” Stuart glared down at his plate.

“Only druggies go into E. J.’s. Everyone knows that,” Fran said.

“Who said that?” It was exhausting to watch Stuart fighting on two fronts.

“Mom did. One time we were walking past it and I asked her what was in there and that’s what she said. Drugs.”

“She did not.”

“Yes she did.”

“You’re full of it.”

“Stuart,” Tom said.

Vida got up to make herself another drink. Usually she only had one on weeknights, but there was the problem of that promise. She mixed the soda with the bourbon slowly.

“Why can’t we just give them a bunch of money?” Caleb asked.

“They don’t want our money. They want the Shah and their money,” Stuart told him.

“The what?”

“The American pawn who used to rule their country until the revolution.”

“Where is he?”

“In New York.”

“Why?”

“He’s at some hospital.”

“Cornell. In the city,” Tom said. “He’s got cancer.”

“What kind?” all three of his children asked at once.

He didn’t know.

“Is he having an operation there?” Caleb asked.

“I think so.”

Caleb looked at his father until he explained. “Hers was inoperable. They couldn’t operate.”

“According to one American doctor.”

“Stuart, please.”

You could see around Tom’s mouth the effects of the pain of the last three years. She had found that pain reassuring at first; it had filled her with a sense of security to know that he had been through loss and survived, that he was the type of person who would survive. And wasn’t there a sort of lucky protective coating around people after such a calamity? She had believed that by attaching herself to him she would be protected as well. But now, in his house, perched on a hard chair in his kitchen, she felt like she was back in her parents’ house with all its claustrophobia, all the old inexplicable resentments pressing down on them. She took a long sip of her drink. It kept her from screaming at the top of her lungs.

Stuart scraped back his chair and stood.

“Dinner isn’t over,” Tom said.

“I’m just going to the bathroom,” Stuart said, halfway there.

Peter doodled with his fork in the gravy. He’d said nothing since they’d sat down. She had done this to his life, bound him to this seat at this table with these strangers. She glanced at Tom again for a memory of why, of how, but he was intent on cutting through a piece of meat.

Stuart returned, not from the bathroom, Vida guessed, but from a little toke beside an open window. His eyes weren’t red but his lashes glistened, from Visine no doubt, and he slipped into his chair with the catlike movements she recognized from the students she busted at school dances.

Finally it was over. Fran helped her clear without having to be asked.

“What’s for dessert?” Caleb asked.

Thank God she hadn’t gotten any. Another course at this table would do her in. “It’s probably not a great idea to have sugar so close to bedtime,” she said. The clock on the stove confirmed that it was nearly nine.

“We’ve always had dessert,” Caleb said to his father, tears already slipping beneath the round glasses he wore.

Fran, scraping dishes into the trash, said, “I can’t believe you just chucked all those sandwiches. What a waste.”

“I have a candy bar in my bag,” Peter said to Caleb. “You want that?”

Vida opened her mouth to protest, but Tom covered her hand with a squeeze.

Caleb nodded, and wiped his face. Peter got up and came back with a mangled package of Reese’s Cups.

“May I please be excused?” Stuart asked Vida, perfectly politely, the contempt well hidden. It was the first time he’d looked directly at her. His eyes were a pale brown set below soft swollen lids. They were the only part of his body he was unable to make hard and angry. She’d had several students like him over the years, seething, humorless, unattractive boys who made few friends and suffered, again and again, the humiliating passion of unrequited love.

“You may.”

The rest fled behind him. The TV went on and she imagined Stuart hulking over it even before she heard Fran tell him to get out of the way.

Tom still had his hand on hers. He lifted his face, and for a moment, before he could master it, she saw the question, her own pounding question. She wished she could offer him the answer but she couldn’t, and in her fear she turned away, and when she looked back it was gone. Still holding her hand, he asked her to follow him.

He led her past their children to the bedroom. All her boxes had vanished. Her clothes were in drawers, her dresses on hangers in the closet. In the far corner, on either side of her desk, were two tall bookcases. All her books stood neatly on the shelves.

“I knew you needed them, since you had all those built-in ones in your old place. I just put everything in alphabetically, but you probably have a much more sophisticated way of arranging your books.”

“Yes, much.” She tried to smile at him. She hadn’t realized how much she’d counted on her boxes remaining packed, things remaining temporary, reversible. “How did you do all this?”

“I got back from Springfield at three. And I’d already stained the wood last weekend.”

“You made these?” She ran her fingers along the edge of a shelf. She couldn’t identify the wood but it was a lovely burnished color and sanded to silk. Each side of the top shelf had been carved into long narrow birds. “Herons,” she whispered.

Behind her he shut the door and flopped onto the bed.

“They’re beautiful,” she said, still standing.

“You’re beautiful.” He sat up and pulled the butcher’s twine from her hair. He spread the mass of it (how she had always hated this bulk of frizz, so inexpressive of her and her love of order) from shoulder to shoulder and stroked it with his wide warm hand from the top of her head to the middle of her back. He eased her down on the bed and continued to touch her head and face. This time, he didn’t speak at all. His kisses were gentle on her cheek, her neck, her shoulder. Even his mustache was soft. She could feel the bourbon in her system protecting her, obscuring the path back. He rolled her nipple between his thumb and fingers carefully, as if it might break, and desire, that elusive bird, fluttered faintly. Then he got up, snapped the lock in place, and everything died inside her once again.

“I love you, Vida,” he said when he finally gave up. “We’ll figure all this out.” He pulled her naked chest to his and closed his eyes.

Maybe she slept, she wasn’t sure. The light was still on. Tom was still beside her, though his grip has loosened. His eyes were open, staring straight ahead at a framed drawing on the far wall she’d never noticed before, a pencil sketch of an infant wrapped loosely in a blanket and held low in its mother’s arms, its head resting heavily on her bent wrist, her breast depleted at his cheek. The mother had no head; her figure began at the small knobs of her shoulders and disappeared at the waist, behind the blanket’s folds. Her hands were her most expressive feature, the fingers longer than possible, spread carefully above and beneath the sleeping child. Vida understood that Tom had drawn it, that the wife and infant had once been his.

Draw him! Draw his face, Peter had cried all those years ago, and when she refused, tears soaked his collar and bright blotches appeared on his neck but he wouldn’t give up. Please! She’d grabbed the pencil and made three thick lines of hair then, her fingers shaking by now, smashed the lead to the paper four more times — first the mouth, then a low bent nose, and finally the eyes, two short vertical lines that nearly punctured the page, eyes that conveyed not cruelty or pain or whatever had made that man do what he’d done to her but surprise, as if he himself were startled to have suddenly been drawn by her. She had wanted the drawing to be uglier, more frightening; even if Peter was only five she wanted him to stop asking and understand that this was a man you must forget, not remember. The picture was cartoonish, the head too round, but when she moved to correct it he snatched it from her. She’d never seen it since.

She remained still. If Tom saw that she was awake he might want to try again. He would keep trying. That was the sort of man he was. So she waited for his eyes to shut, his breathing to thicken, before she pulled on her shirt and slipped quickly out of the room.

The rest of the house was dark. Walt’s tail pounded the carpet as she crossed the living room, but he didn’t get up. He refused to come into the bedroom now that she shared it with someone else. She needed to see Peter, needed to know he was all right. The door was open, the way Peter liked it. The boys hadn’t pulled the shade and a street lamp cast a fan of light across the room. Peter was asleep on a narrow bed that came out of the wall like an ironing board. She glanced over to Stuart’s by the window, hoping he slept as deeply as Peter. It was empty. The clock on the bureau read 12:52. She moved quickly back down the hall. No one on the sofa; no one in the kitchen. Where was he?

If he was gone, he’d have taken her car; she’d blocked in Tom’s. She headed for the window by the front door that was closest to the driveway, already angry. She needed that car to get to work in the morning, to get more groceries, to drive away from here if need be. She pushed aside the curtain. The Dodge was there, behind Tom’s, just as she’d left it. The anger clung. Her eyes scanned the rest of the driveway and the small yard. The grass and bushes seemed frozen in place. It was a winter’s night. Fall was over. Another season gone. She could feel the cold on her face through the glass.

Then she saw them. Stuart and a girl. Had they just appeared, apparition-like, or were they there all along? Stuart was leaning back on his elbows against the trunk of her car while the girl performed a trick that made her arms momentarily whirl together like a pinwheel. Vida couldn’t hear them but she knew Stuart was saying That’s so easy as he brought his weight back down on his feet, freeing up his weedy arms to show her. But they just flopped in front of him unmagically. The girl was laughing and said something that made him laugh too. He reached out to grasp her wrists but she was too quick and spun a few feet away from him.

She was a lovely girl, the kind Vida remembered from a decade ago: long, untampered-with hair, silver bracelets, and a skirt of printed cotton. She had a small, foxlike face which helped magnify her round eyes. Stuart hopped up on the car and patted the spot beside him. The girl took a few moments to decide, then scrambled up beside him. He pointed up at the heavy pink clouds and watched her as she watched them move. Just like his father, Vida thought with shock, never having seen a similarity before.

She meant to turn away from the window, but the scene was as compelling as the performance she’d glimpsed on stage at lunchtime. Like Helen, Stuart had transformed himself, and Vida could no longer find the sullen child from dinner in this spry fellow wooing a girl on her car.

They played like kittens; she nudged him off the trunk and he feigned injury until she came to his side, then he leapt up and ran off and she chased him, catching him by the shirttail and zigzagging with him across the yard as he tried to free himself from her small clutch. Then he twisted and stopped and she slammed into his chest. Vida thought they would kiss then, but they just stood there, close and coatless on the frost-stiff grass.

When the girl left, she moved in a slant across the lawn as if pushed by the wind. Just before she turned from the driveway she called out something. To Vida it was a thin underwater sound, but it made Stuart laugh deeply as he walked toward the porch. Though he was only a few yards away from where she stood at the window, he was oblivious to an audience, even as he raised his face to the house. On it was Tom’s grin but wider, his eyes nearly forced shut by the bulge of his cheeks. She saw them each simultaneously, Stuart and Tom, as they once were: exuberant, unbridled boys, untouched by grief.

And then the faces fell away, instantly, as Stuart’s foot landed on the first step. Vida was relieved. They had frightened her, those faces, two ghosts of what had been. The knob on the front door clicked and Vida, having nowhere else to go, fled down the hallway toward the slit of light escaping beneath the bedroom door of the man she’d just married, toward the hope that he’d remain asleep.