The English Teacher

FIVE

MEMORY DOES ITS WORK UNDERGROUND. BENEATH CONSCIOUSNESS, A PAST moment finds its kin all at once. Like a fish returned to its school, it frolics in remembered waters, and stirs up others. Above the surface, at first, there are only a few brief innocuous ripples which are all that you can allow yourself to know of the commotion below: a checked shirt, the white rim of a porcelain sink. The fluid sequence of moments seems, luckily, irretrievable; there is no line to follow with a finger, no story she feels able to tell. Yet even awful, unlivable memories want to be relived; the fragments yearn to be whole once more.

Vida stood immobile before the half-renovated house, its windows and doors blown out, and workmen, even today, a Saturday, running their tools within its gutted insides. All it took was this smell — the smell of a freshly built room — for the taste of his mustard breath to come into her mouth.

“It looks like they’re going to put a balcony off every bedroom,” Tom said.

Dutifully, Vida raised her eyes to the second floor.

“And some sort of turret over there.”

She followed his gesture to the left.

“I guess the moat will come later.”

She knew from the change in tone that a smile was expected, though his words fell between them unheard. Her ribs seemed to be straining inward, strengthening their cage against the growing panic inside. Her limbs felt light, as if they might break off and float away.

“This whole neighborhood was once just a huge field covered in Queen Anne’s lace in the summer and children in snowsuits dragging toboggans up there to Blake’s Hill in the winter. We used to take Stuart and Fran here nearly every weekend. And now look at it.”

Vida tried to concentrate on the circle of new houses and their even newer additions, their pools of asphalt out front, the freshly raked grass in back.

“What’s wrong?” This was a question Tom often asked, as if, having missed so many warning signs with Mary, he was determined to find the first one in her.

She always tried to give him an answer, even when there wasn’t one. But now, as they moved away from the house, nothing came to her and she felt depleted by the strain of trying to assure him that everything was fine.

“Hey?” He pulled her by the hands to him, forcing her to face him directly. “What is it?”

This was what he was always asking, in one way or another. What is it? What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you who I thought you were?

Her mind scrambled for a way out of a whole day of his scrutiny. Mercifully, something arose, not even a lie. “I completely forgot. I have this miserable computer tutorial at school.” She’d never planned to go. She’d gotten the memo and torn it up. “I’m sorry.”

She unfastened her hands and resumed the walk home. Beside her, Tom said nothing, though she felt him questioning her. She’d made quite a passionate speech at dinner a few nights ago about the evils of technology in the classroom, how it weakened the already weakening grasp on language, how it was the enemy of creativity and spontaneity and the fortuitous mistake. Tom had been amused by her rant; he’d taken her hand under the table. He’d looked at her for the rest of the evening as if he’d remembered why he married her, and that night she found the right equation of alcohol and forgetting and they’d managed, to his great delight, to have a form of intercourse. But now she was drained of words and she could feel his bewilderment returning. Was this how marriage was, bewilderment giving way to reassurance giving way to more bewilderment? Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?

She thought of that Hardy poem, the one with the young man walking at night toward the home of the girl he is to marry the next day. A spirit sidles up next to him, a beautiful woman who resembles his bride. She tells him she is the dream he has dreamed of love, and that he loves only her, not the poor girl he has been projecting his illusions onto. When the spirit finally convinces him, he insists on marrying her instead, but she says she cannot, and disappears. When he reaches the home of his bride-to-be, he finds that all the life has been sucked out of her.

“Vida,” Tom said softly, so softly she could pretend not to have heard. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Vida.” He stopped on the sidewalk and waited for her to turn to him.

She was still thinking about the end of the poem, straining to remember the last lines.

Her look was pinched and thin,

As if her soul had shrunk and died,

And left a waste within.

“What’s that from?”

She didn’t know she’d spoken the words aloud.

“A Hardy poem.” She felt protective of it.

“Which one?”

She didn’t want to explain. She wanted to think about this idea of love’s being cast onto someone like a spotlight, making her shimmer and glow for a little while, lending her qualities she doesn’t possess. Is this really what we do to each other, find a victim and shine the light of all our dreams on them? Angel Clare places all his fantasies of the pure innocent country girl onto Tess, and when she finally forces him to listen to her story of Alec and the baby, she becomes vile to him and he banishes her. As if her soul had shrunk and died, / And left a waste within. She could hear Tom saying her name again, but he seemed so much less important, so much more immaterial than this theory of Hardy’s, which she’d always taught to her students, but had never suspected would ever apply to her own life.

The computer room had cost over five hundred thousand dollars. On Thursday evening there’d been an unveiling for parents and faculty, and on Friday the day’s schedule had been reorganized to allow every student in the school a chance to sit at the helm of one of these machines. Now, in one Saturday afternoon, the teachers were expected to learn how to integrate them into their curricula.

For two years, the administration had been aggressively brainwashing the school community, producing pamphlets with titles like “The Modern Miracle in Education” and “Learning Finally Becomes Fun!” The need was so great, they said, and money so scarce, that faculty members were being asked to give a portion of their salaries each month to the cause. Vida had heard that some of the younger teachers, in fear of not getting their contracts renewed, had actually agreed to the tithing, poor suckers.

Now they were all suckers, crammed in this room on a Saturday. There were not, thank God, enough computers to go around, so the overflow sat on metal chairs at the back. Vida took a seat next to Cheryl Perry, who smelled like cheese and handed her a few mimeographs, general instructions for the IBM System 370.

Mark Stratton, the computer guru, and Brick Howells stood practically hand in hand at the front of the room. Brick declared, in a voice far too loud for the size of the room, that what they were about to witness was nothing short of a revolution. And that no other school in the area, not even Hunt, Fayer’s wealthier rival, had implemented this kind of technology.

To Vida’s astonishment, her colleagues clapped. Then Mark asked everyone seated at a computer to turn it on by pushing the large rectangular button on the left. He said something else but his voice was drowned out by the sudden snap and whir of the machines. Vida waited for the noise to die down. It didn’t. A smell like burnt hair filled the room.

Then they were asked to divide up into their departments. The math, science, and history departments should all take seats at the computers; the arts and languages should find their own classrooms in order to brainstorm ways in which they could use their weekly lab time. This transition was as difficult and bitter as if they had all been third graders. Jose Costa refused to give up his seat: he’d been the first to arrive. And Leon, the frail Latin teacher, put up an equally impressive fight on the other side of the room. The art teachers seemed to have a difficult time simply identifying each other. When she and the rest of her department finally settled around the thick walnut table in the conference room, Vida added nothing to the list her colleagues chirped out, as she had absolutely no plans to ever bring her students into that awful place.

When her department was called back to the smelly, roaring room, Mark assigned them a computer and asked them to simply type onto the screen a paragraph. “You could begin a letter, a short story, or,” he said looking specifically at Vida, Lydia, and Liz, the three women in the English department, “a recipe. Anything. Then we’ll go from there.”

The first thing that came to her mind was Shakespeare. Even though it had been several years since she’d pulled her college typewriter out of the closet, her hands knew the keys immediately.

If it were now to die

’Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear

My soul hath her content so absolute,

That not another comfort like to this

Succeeds in unknown fate.

How ludicrous to see poor Othello in fluorescent yellow on a little TV screen in front of her. After a few minutes, Mark explained how to check the paragraph for mistakes. Vida’s computer bleeped seven times. It had opinions about not only spelling, but grammar and syntax as well.

Mark Stratton moved quickly toward her and nestled his upper body on top of her monitor. “Stumped already?”

“Mr. Computer’s style is pretty rigid.”

“It will only accept the best configuration.”

“You can’t expect a machine to have a sensitivity to the rhythms and nuances of the English language. Sometimes the least grammatically correct sentence is the best choice. I don’t want a computer holding back my students’ creativity.”

Mark laughed. “In fifty years, these babies are going to be writing better books than anything you’ve ever taught them.”

“You can’t believe that.”

“I don’t have to believe it. I know it, my friend.”

Before the creation of this room. Mark had been a part-time geography teacher. Vida watched him now, pacing the length of his royal-blue carpet, gazing with possessive pleasure at his hot droning monsters. She thought of the threshing machine, Hardy’s symbol for the Industrial Age, that despotic contraption that forced an inhuman pace on fieldworkers, separating their souls from the land forever. Her chest tightened. She felt it, right here, right now, what Hardy had felt, the ache of modernism.

They had left it that Tom would make dinner, but when Vida got home just before six, the house was empty. She called out into the darkness. Only Walt came, slowly, his back legs reluctant to separate after hours of napping. He sniffed her pants, then snorted out the smell, as if he, too, were disgusted by Mark Stratton and his machines. She called out again. Nothing.

She’d never been in this house alone. She tossed her shoes down the hall toward her room and sat in one of the wing chairs facing the sofa. When she shut her eyes, the head and neck of a computer monitor lunged at her. Brick had drained the scholarship fund to pay for the lab. The board of trustees had just stood back and let him do it. And now she was expected to take each of her classes down there once a week. They wanted her to become the engine man, the half-human, coal-grimed creature who kept the threshing machine running. The undersides of her arms burned with anger. It was time for a drink. But she could wait a little longer, wait until everybody got home.

The mud-gray screen of the TV gaped at her. Had she ever been in this room when it was not on, when it was not blaring its garbage? The hostages. The hostages. How much more could we take of the hostages? Every now and then a few were trotted out onto the embassy steps, a tattered white rag tied tight around each face, beards growing in clumps like bad grass on their necks. Every day the newscasters seemed shocked anew that it was still going on. It irked her how they had begun to count, numbering the days since the takeover and her wedding. Today was Day 33. She didn’t even know how she knew. They had programmed her, like a computer. These babies are going to be writing better books than anything you’ve ever taught them. What kind of viper would want to believe that? And where was everybody? Fran and Caleb, she remembered now, were at friends’ houses for the night, but Peter, Tom, and Stuart? It was too dark to see out to the driveway now. Should she start making something? The thought of making another damn dinner pinned her to her seat. She hadn’t realized how good she’d had it on campus. Every meal had been made for them. Except for the first and last weeks of summer and a fortnight at Christmas, she’d never had to cook. And when she did, Peter had expected so little — a bowl of soup, scrambled eggs, he didn’t care. But the Belous were different. They asked at breakfast what she’d be making that night. They came in while dinner was cooking to lift up the lids and smell. They had begun to make suggestions, one at a time, choreographed hints about what to cook and how to cook it. They liked to set the table. They enjoyed, in fact, all rituals. They were like some prehistoric tribe, the way they found meaning in the repetition of acts. Once Vida had read “Annabel Lee” to Caleb before bed and now he wanted a poem read to him every night. She had driven Fran to the mall last Friday afternoon and now the girl wanted to go shopping on the first Friday afternoon of every month. Stuart still wanted nothing to do with her, but even that had its own pattern. He always sat in the chair farthest from her, and was sure to be out of the house on Saturday mornings and Sunday evenings when she did her grading in the kitchen. She felt grateful to Stuart for one reason: his presence in Peter’s bedroom. If she had that dream, he’d be there — and most likely awake — to stop her from hurting Peter.

She had planned to just turn on a light or two and sit back in the wing chair, but her legs kept moving, into the kitchen, into the pantry closet. She brought out the bourbon, the glass, the ice, then shoved them all away. She sat down at the green table, not in the seat at the far end where she did her grading, and not to the left of Tom’s place where she usually sat at dinner, but to the right of him, Mary’s old seat. It was an odd choice, pressed in close to the wall. Vida felt a little suffocated in it even without the kids on all sides. Mary, she imagined, was part Mrs. Ramsay and part Marmee March, intoxicated by her role as Mother.

The red hands above the stove were clutched at six-thirty. Where the hell was everyone? She imagined the station wagon skidding into the headlights of a monstrous truck. I’m sorry, ma’am, the cop at the door would say. Her heart raced at the thought of a man at the door with a gun.

She pulled out a saucepan, remembering As if her soul had shrunk and died, / And left a waste within and Tom’s fake-earnest question “Which one?” As if he knew the title to even one of Hardy’s poems. Opening a can of tomato paste she had that feeling again that this was not the real moment, that she hadn’t married him, that she and Peter didn’t actually live here. It startled her, how easily reality could slip off her shoulders. She put down the opener and poured herself the damn drink.

After a few sips it was easy to make the paste into a sauce, put the water on to boil. She sat back down at the table, in her seat this time. She stirred the ice with her fingers, thinking of Davis Clay and that awful trick his wife played on him a few summers ago. She’d called people all over the country, childhood friends, aunts and uncles, even his ninety-two-year-old granny, everyone the poor guy loved, and they’d all snuck into his house while he was out playing golf and when he got back they surprised him not with a party but with accusations that he was ruining his life and his children’s lives. They pushed him into a car and drove him to this place in Connecticut for a month, the remaining month of his summer vacation, to dry out. Vida never forgot the way the guy looked in September. Old Clay went to Auschwitz for the summer, Vida said to someone in the lunch line, and the joke traveled around school. He’d never recovered from it, as far as Vida could tell. He still had these gray hollows under his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept since, and he’d completely lost his sense of humor.

These babies are going to be writing better books … She felt sorry for Mark Stratton, really. His wife had left him several years ago, taking their six-year-old son with her to Minnesota. He was a pitiful character, someone, despite the irritation he provoked, you had to feel sympathy for, a Robert Cohn. Perhaps she should have been kinder to him after his wife had gone. They’d only had one conversation about it, in the lunch line. He didn’t even mention her or the kid, just that he missed his cat. Vida had earnestly commiserated with him, imagining if something ever happened to Walt, but she’d deliberately separated from him when they’d gotten their food, feigning interest in the salad bar. Now she wished she’d handled it differently, for clearly he’d wanted to talk that day. Carol had been one of his confidantes at the time, and though she and Vida used to gossip nearly every afternoon, Carol would never divulge the details of Mark’s situation. Vida respected her for that, among other things. She acknowledged the familiar shame about Carol and the unfinished letter as it rose, but she didn’t feel it, didn’t let it overwhelm her as it often did. That was the beauty of a good drink at the end of the day.

On his rug in the corner Walt twitched and whimpered. Did he picture her in his dreams? How would she appear to him — in fragments? A pair of legs, a long hand, a soothing voice? Did he have nightmares about her, in which she transformed into a hollering, dog-kicking old crone? The thought of nightmares did not scare her right now. She could even think of her own without panic. The checked shirt, the mustard breath, and her chasing him down the hallway with only a book for a weapon. Every time she lunged for him he got smaller until, when she reached the room he’d veered into, Peter’s room, he was gone. Only Peter was there, in his crib — he was always only a few months old in the dream — but when she drew close to check on him he leapt to his feet, agile, angry, no longer a baby at all despite the body, and grabbed her. She raised her book and smacked him off. She beat him and beat him until he was finally still.

Vida felt pain in her hands and looked down to see her fingernails cutting into her palms.

She made the next drink stronger, then stirred the sauce with a fork. She wondered if the clock had stopped; it wasn’t even quarter of seven yet. She thought of Fran on her sleepover in some bedroom right now with her girlfriends talking about their hair. She had had enough experience with teenage girls like Fran to know what little went on in their heads. She didn’t understand it. The girl wasn’t stupid by any means, but she’d never read more than a few pages of any of the books she’d loaned her. When she was Fran’s age she devoured books. There had been no better feeling on earth than being under her pink blanket on a Saturday afternoon with a new book in her hands. No reality competed with the reality of those books. If her mother’s hounding grew too persistent she took the book and the blanket to the car and locked herself in. She would spend days — a whole weekend and then Monday and Tuesday if she could convince her mother of a stomach bug — prone, engulfed, gone. She didn’t understand a girl like Fran who found this thin life enough, especially after losing her mother. Why wouldn’t she want to enter a better world every now and then, a world with a little more sense to it, where even tragedy had luster and resonance to it?

Her sister Gena had been like Fran, probably still was. California attracted that kind of person, social, unreflective. Gena had never spent a minute more in the house than necessary, always off with some pack of girls, or, later, boys. Their mother had despaired. She’d wanted good girls who would marry early and well, like Jane and Elizabeth Bennett. Instead she got one who never came home at night and another who never left the house. One of us finally got married, Mother, Vida said to the ceiling. Was it possible she hadn’t even thought of her mother since before her engagement? Her mother knew everything, now that she was dead. It probably didn’t feel so good to know everything.

She heard the thuds of car doors. She put the bourbon back in the closet. She didn’t remember making a third drink but there it was and she polished it off. She put her glass in the dishwasher, and the spaghetti in the water. Half of the water had boiled off, but she pressed the stiff noodles into it with a spoon, cracking most of them. After they sank, the water became a white fizz. Vida leaned her face into the steam. It felt old and dry. Tom’s voice rang through the house, calling her. There was no apology in it.

He and Peter came into the kitchen carrying big brown bags.

“Chinese takeout!” Peter said, as if he and Vida didn’t used to pick up a meal from the Lucky Star on occasion, as if Tom himself had invented Chinese food.

“I made spaghetti,” Vida said.

“Oh, no.” Tom frowned, and she heard in his tone some facile expression like A little trust goes a long way. He’d said that one before. He slid his bag onto the counter, brushed the steamed hair from her forehead, and asked how it went with the computers. He was using a gentle, patient voice, the one he used with Fran or Caleb when they were on the brink of unruliness.

“Awful. They raised five hundred thousand dollars and hired that troll to burn it.” Gone was the fellow feeling for Mark and his divorce. “It was a complete waste of my unpaid time.” She felt her rage rising, with its insatiable appetite. She wished he’d stop touching her head.

“I’m sorry.” But despite the soft voice and caress, he was quite unsorry. He seemed quietly accusatory.

“I wish you’d called,” she said.

“I left this.” He held up a piece of paper next to the flour canister. How was she supposed to have seen that? “Always check there first.” Why was he speaking to her like this?

He bent over the stove. “Mmmm,” he said to the sauce, and then, in one dramatic gesture, flipped the whole pan over.

“What are you—” Nothing spilled out. She’d forgotten to turn down the heat and it had caked on the bottom. The pasta, however, bubbled in happy ignorance behind it.

The food was, though she wouldn’t say it, delicious. Chicken with cashews, shrimp lo mein, fried rice, beef and broccoli. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Stuart was at the table, though when he’d come in she couldn’t say.

“Earth to Ma.” Peter never used to be so rude. “The rice?”

“How about an old-fashioned ‘please’?” She never used to be so clichéd.

Tom and Stuart were already arguing.

“Tell me our military couldn’t figure out a way to go in and get them if they wanted.” Stuart spoke with his mouth full, his fork in his fist.

“They couldn’t. They’d be bringing those people home in body bags if they tried.”

“That is so naive, Dad. If we wanted them out we’d get them out. This is all about oil.”

“Oil?”

“Yes. Don’t you even read the paper? We need that oil. We don’t want to jeopardize the sweet oil deal we have with them. That’s why we’ve supported the Shah and his brutal regime for so many years. That’s why we had to take him in last month.”

“We took in the Shah because he needed medical treatment.”

“Spare me the sob story. A lot of people say he’s faking it. And would we take in Pol Pot or Idi Amin if they needed treatment? No. We only take in the mass murderers who are selling us oil at a good price.”

“Say you were head of the U.S. military, Stuart. How would you rescue those hostages? How would you go into the center of the capital and get inside that building without being seen? Because once you are seen, everybody’s dead. What would you do, take an invisibility pill?” He was angry now.

They went on and on. Eventually Stuart put up two hands in mock surrender.

“Speech which enables argument is not worthy,” he said.

“What?”

“These aren’t the important things.”

“What are the important things?” Vida heard herself ask. He was such a coward, the way he ducked at the last minute behind his mystic baloney.

Stuart put his hands in his lap. “The true self, the inner life, a harmony between heaven and earth.”

This last surprised her. “Do you believe in heaven?”

“In a metaphorical sense.”

“How is heaven metaphorical? Either it exists or it doesn’t.” He was like one of her weakest students, tossing up a big word and hoping it landed in the right place.

“Its existence is not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“The point is”—he paused to look at each of them in turn, and it angered her to see how worshipfully Peter looked back—“not to care about the point.”

“Spoken by a true Sophist.”

“Sticks and stones, Vida.”

“I’m not trying to insult you. I just think it’s too easy to believe in nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. It’s the opposite of nothing.”

“But every time I try to coax a declarative sentence out of you, you twist away in a puff of smoke.”

She saw how calmly he sifted through the words in his head. “To you it appears as smoke.”

“But to you it’s the truth?” She was aware of the absence of sifting in hers.

He nodded.

“Describe what it is you believe. In your words.”

“That which is nameable is not the Tao.”

“Those are not your words. But let me name it for you. Crock of Crap.”

Tom was hushing her but she didn’t care. Someone had to stand up to this Buddhist bully.

“What do you believe in, Vida? In your words.”

So he could get angry. She was glad to see she’d cracked the surface. She felt her own creed assemble easily. “I am a humanist. I believe in man’s creative—”

“And woman’s?”

“That’s a semantic argument for another day.”

“Are we having an argument?”

“Are you interested in my answer?”

Stuart bowed his head.

“I believe in the imagination and its striving toward truth and beauty, toward the ideal, through accurate and penetrating representations of our world.”

“Our world? What is our world? We’re here for two seconds. Blip. Blip. Then we’re gone forever.”

“I believe”—she was surprised by the pleasure she took from saying those two words—“there is a transcendence through acts of creation.”

“You mean writers and artists can achieve immortality if they’re good enough?”

“Not just them. When I pick up Tolstoy, for example, I am instantly connected with his world, his mind, and therefore both of us have transcended. And my world has become richer for the new layer his perceptions have added to it.”

“The goal of the Tao is to detach from this world.”

“Why on earth would you want to do that?”

“Because our attachments to it prevent us from seeing beyond it.”

“You know, Stuart, I’ve heard a lot of stupid theories in my life, but that really takes the cake. If you want to believe that, be my—”

“What’s so special about your world, Vida?” He had a way of saying her name that made it sound like she’d made it up. “Teaching books your students will never remember? Keeping them pinned to chairs they ache to get out of? Does that have meaning? Driving home. Making lousy dinners.” He pointed to her glass. “Measuring out your precious bourbon. Fucking my father while you’re—”

“Stuart, that’s enough,” Tom barked.

Stuart looked at his father and finished: “shit-faced. Is that the height of existence, of consciousness?”

A teacher needed at all times a face impervious to shock or insult, but twice in her career, a student had done or said something so unexpectedly awful that her skin reddened. Each time was a surprise — the prickling in her cheeks, then the pulsing heat — and she had resented it deeply. She felt it now; within a few seconds her face would be a flaming carnation. Far more than his words, what angered her was that he was going to make her blush.

“You’re not going to find your mother this way, Stuart,” she said.

True to his convictions, Stuart seemed perfectly detached. “I’m not trying to find her, Vida. I’m trying to let her go.”

She watched Tom close up the white boxes of leftover rice and lo mein and carry them by their perfect wire handles to the fridge. He slid her plate out from beneath her without a word. He was pursing his lips, a sure sign that he was upset. She wondered why he didn’t go have a talk with Stuart. He usually scampered so quickly back to the children’s hallway if there was any tension at dinner. She hoped when he did that he wouldn’t be too hard on the boy. An apology to her would suffice.

He was at the sink now, scraping and rinsing. She heard a huge plop into the garbage disposal. Someone had hardly touched the food. She wondered if it was her. Or Peter. Where had Peter gone? She couldn’t even remember him sitting at the table. She collected what remained on the table and brought it to Tom. He dropped the forks he was rinsing and wheeled around to her.

“Where does all that anger of yours come from?” He grabbed the bottle from the pantry closet. “From inside here?” He shook it at her. She was surprised by how little was left. “Or is it in here”—he poked her in the bone between her breasts—“all the time, crouching, waiting?”

Vida was stunned. The scene was like the nightmare in which one of her best-behaved students hurls obscenities at her. The poke on her chest stung and spread.

“The boy is simply trying to cope.”

“But he’s filling himself with illusions.”

“We’re all filled with illusions.”

“No we’re not.”

“Taoism is one hell of a lot less harmful than practically all the other ways of dealing with grief he could have latched onto.”

“I’m not so sure. Actionless action. Blankety blank. He’s negating himself from his own life. He’s disappearing.”

“Why does it upset you so much? It’s just a way of looking at the world.”

“It’s a way of not looking at the world. You heard him. He wants to detach. You might as well give him a shotgun so he can blow his head off.”

“Jesus Christ, Vida.”

There it was finally, the glare, the tone of voice he’d been denying himself. He saw her now for what she truly was; he saw the waste within. She needed to get out of the house. She threw on a coat and whistled for Walt.

“I don’t know why you’re trying to push us away. All of us. Ever since you agreed to marry me, you’ve been—”

“Pinched and thin?”

“I don’t understand what happened. I thought you were—”

“Someone else?”

“Stop it. Stop finishing my sentences. Stop looking at me with that smirk like you can see all around me, like I’m a character for you to analyze. You don’t have to be a goddamn English teacher all the time. Just be yourself.”

“And who do you think that is?”

He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “I don’t know. I think it’s the woman I first saw at a podium, in tears, clutching a little silver cup. It’s the woman, the first woman, who let me talk about Mary without feeling threatened in some way. God, what’s happened to her? You’ve gotten so hard and closed and—”

“Let’s leave our sex life out of it.” She couldn’t resist a little humor. And these memories of his — where did they come from? She certainly wasn’t in tears at the podium.

“I’m not joking, Vida. I don’t give a flying fuck about the sex. It’s our marriage I care about. You have to work at marriage. It doesn’t come easy to anyone. But it’s like you’ve already given up on it. Before you even gave it a chance. You’re like that student of yours who decides he hates the book before he’s opened it.”

“I’m going to take the dog for a walk.”

“I’ll come,” Tom said.

He actually believed they could talk their way through it. “Screw you,” she said, and slammed the door, nearly catching Walt’s tail.

She wished she’d glanced at Tom’s face. He’d probably never been spoken to like that in his life. “Little goody-two-shoes,” she muttered, then laughed at her childishness.

It was freezing out. Walt looked up at her as if asking her to reconsider, then he bowed his head into the wind and they set off. The cold felt good; escape felt good. She was trapped, trapped like Dorothea with Casaubon, like the new wife at Manderlay.

“Ma!” Peter called from the front steps, yanking a sweatshirt over his head. “Can I come?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s cold,” he said, his breath hanging white between them. The sweatshirt added bulk to his frame. His shoulders never seemed so wide to her before.

They followed Walt as he trailed a smell down the strip of grass inserted between the sidewalk and curb, carefully shifting his nose for oncoming trees and poles, then shifting back again. Her arm began to ache and she let go of the leash. They had to move swiftly to keep up with him.

“You’ve got some beans in you tonight, old man.” Her voice was distant and unnatural. Nothing seemed recognizable out here tonight. She wasn’t sure which street Walt had led them onto. Had they turned right back there, or left?

But Walt knew where they were going. He swerved into the same driveway they’d stood in that morning. The house was just a house being fixed up. The smell had retracted in the cold.

Peter stood beside her, too close. He had something to say.

“He asked you to come with me, didn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is that?”

“He was worried, I guess.”

“Worried that what, I’d hang myself on a tree with Walt’s leash?” She hadn’t meant to be so specific.

“Worried you wouldn’t come back.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake where am I going to go?”

“Ma—”

“I don’t want to be called Ma. Stop calling me that.”

She could smell the wood now, the new doors and floors. But it was mild, unmenacing. Now she could follow Walt up the steps, stand here and look at the sawhorses, breathe in the dust from all the new floors. None of it provoked any reaction. It almost felt like she was remembering someone else.

Walt disappeared through a doorless opening. Peter called to him, but not with the urgency Walt responded to. They waited for him on the porch. The street was quiet, with only the thin hum of a streetlight and a faraway squeak of a car frame going over a speed bump. She had a mind to tell Peter right here, tell him everything. Tell him about the porcelain sink and the fresh boards on the floor and the sound of the football game across the street rising and falling and rising again and how all the other teachers and even the workmen had left their work to see the last half of a close game, left their tools scattered in the hallway, the only witnesses to her steps from the classroom to the bathroom, her last fearless steps in life, one two three four five and her thoughts on the toilet as simple as hoping that her mother would be making chicken for dinner and the water running warm now from the sink — before the renovations there was only cold — and she kept her hands under it too long. At first she thought the lights had gone out, the way in the mirror the room darkened behind her. He brought her down quickly, smashing her chin to the sink, her lower teeth cutting clean through her tongue in two places. She heard a grunt as he turned her over, the clang of his belt buckle, the rip of fabric, then skin, her own gagging on the blood in her mouth, and a horrible boarlike snorting — but she never heard the sound of his voice. In some memories she is clawing, hitting, writhing, but in others she is perfectly still, save the blood pouring out of her mouth. Her dress was badly stained. I bit my tongue, she told her mother, who had in fact made chicken, when she got home.

“Walt!” she called, and he came immediately, head lowered by the sharpness in her voice.

Peter knocked the railing with his sneaker. “Tom loves you, you know. If you could just lighten up a bit.”

So this is what he had to say to her. That she should lighten up.

Walt pushed the side of his face against her thigh, then, finding her hand, nudged his way in against her palm. The shape of his head beneath her hand was the most familiar object in her life.

Peter waited for her to respond but she didn’t. That there was a burning hole in her chest was all she could have told him. He walked ahead of her and Walt, his gaze following the smoke rising from chimneys, following people as they flickered past their windows. He peered hopefully into every house, as if he were looking for someone he knew.