The English Teacher

SEVEN

VIDA CIRCLED THE CLASSROOM SLOWLY, STOPPING AT EACH WINDOW, feigning interest in the bleakness below. Wendell was out by the pond, raking up the last of the slimy half-frozen willow leaves at its edges. Her freshmen were writing an in-class essay comparing “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” with “A&P.” If she looked toward them and not out the windows, their hands would shoot up with a hundred useless questions — Can I use purple ink? Where should I write my name? — questions designed simply to bring her over to their side where just the presence of her body was comforting to them. But they were in ninth grade now, and they needed to be broken of those middle school habits.

Stepmothering, she realized, was not all that different from teaching. It was essential to keep their intellectual development in mind at all times. You couldn’t get all wrapped up in their needs and whims. Stuart and his mysticism. Fran reading The Thorn Birds. They were too old now for that kind of material. A young man needed a hearty Byronic outlook, not this boneless Taoism. And if Fran began to believe in the characters in novels like that, real people were going to be a sore and sorry disappointment. She would have to, once again, urge Fran to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles; that would teach her exactly how far she could trust a man, even a seemingly well-intentioned man like Angel Clare.

Or Tom Belou, who had withdrawn since her blowout with Fran last week. He was angry in a way she didn’t understand — placid, wordless anger. He had behaved yesterday as if he couldn’t see her in the room. She figured that all marriages, if they lasted, ended up here in the land of quiet regret. She and Tom had simply arrived a little early. She had predicted it, but even her own conviction that she would fail did not protect her from the discomfort of having done so. In bed last night she had tried, her heart thumping stupidly, to make a small advance: one brave hand reaching up over the curve of his hip bone and down into still unfamiliar and terrifying ground — but it was soundly rejected and she lay awake for several hours cradling her humiliated fingers.

She moved to the windows at the back of the room. A dog she didn’t recognize trotted briskly up the driveway. A few years ago Walt would have charged out to meet it, smell it, inform it of whose territory it had trespassed. This morning she’d had to lift him up and hold him before his bowls as all four legs quivered and shifted desperately for a painless balance. He took a tongueful of water, then looked at her, confused by his lack of appetite.

Behind her Patrick Watkins cleared his throat. He’d let his raised arm fall unbent into the crook of his other hand just to let her know how long he’d been trying to get her attention.

When she was beside him he asked, “Is it okay if I call Seymour Glass Morie? I mean, just sometimes? My father’s best friend from college is named Seymour but we call him Morie so I’ve kind of gotten used to calling Seymour Glass Morie in my head.”

“That’s not okay, Patrick.”

“Really?”

As she weaved through the desks back to the perimeter of the room, she saw that Mandy Hughs was dotting all of her i’s with daisies. She’d only written half a page for all the time it took to make the petals. “No flowers,” Vida said as she passed. “Just letters.” How did those middle school English teachers sleep at night?

Finally the bell shook the floor. Her students dashed off their last thoughts and tossed their pages onto the pile on her desk. Everyone was suddenly free.

Peace returned to her classroom. She realigned her chairs, picked up flecks of torn notebook paper from the floor. She gathered up the essays, each page puckered on both sides from the ballpoint ink pressed on hard and nervously. If she were focused, she could get through half of these, then glance at the pages her sophomores read over the weekend before the next bell. But focus had eluded her lately. She was behind on her grading, and had been less than inspired in the classroom. Her students rattled her in a way they didn’t used to. And the material, once so easily intellectualized, seemed to writhe under her inspection of it. Even Hardy, whose theories on Darwinism, religion, and social codes were as cold and straightforward as mathematics, was becoming a sensualist, with all those disgusting passages she’d never noticed before about the oozing fatness and rushing juices of summer, the dripping cheeses in the dairy where Tess takes refuge after her baby dies and meets Angel Clare.

“Vida.”

A wild yelp came out of her as she spun toward the voice. It was Tom. Fuck him for sneaking up on her like that.

“I was just hoping …” he said, looking around, making sure they were alone. “I called to find out when you had a free period, and I thought we could talk.”

She couldn’t speak for the sudden thrumming of her heart. She’d heard nothing, no scuffle on the stairs, no crack of an old board in the hall. Fear, unable to hear reason, flooded her body.

“Is there someplace we could go? Someplace”—he looked around the dim, cavernous room—“smaller?”

The scare had heightened her perception yet dulled her reaction. She could smell the vinyl of his station wagon on him, but it took her a delayed moment to turn and lead him to her office.

He sat on the ratty green sofa and she moved to take her seat behind her desk. He patted the cushion beside him. It was the first attempt he’d made to be physically close to her in eight days, and she gave in. She regretted it instantly; the springs were shot, the cushions nearly featherless. She felt trapped in a rabbit hole.

How often, in September and October, she had conjured him up in this room as she worked at her desk. How often she had stared at the empty couch and wondered who he really was, and what he wanted with her, her blood churning at the memory of the slightest gesture from the night before. And now he had come and it seemed perverse to think back to that other time when his lips shook against hers, when he said things no woman should ever let herself believe.

“I came here to try and talk.” The sound of his voice in this tiny room that had been for fourteen years reserved for the dispassionate talk of books, made-up people’s blunders and heartaches, not her own, disturbed the very molecules in the air.

“Okay. Shoot,” she said, feeling the gulf between this smooth, teacherlike response and the mayhem inside her.

Disappointment flickered in his face. He began again. “I think we need to air out a few things. I came here because I thought it might be easier for you to talk in your own element.” His eyes traveled briefly around the room, which after all these years bore little evidence of her presence. The books on the shoulder-level shelf across from them could be found on the shelf of any high school English teacher in any state across the country: Norton anthologies, the Riverside Shakespeare, Melville, Dreiser, Brontë, Hawthorne, Cather, Faulkner. Nothing contemporary, nothing edgy, nothing out of print, nothing in translation. Not even a slight leaning toward a theme, a preference of gender or time period. The passionless shelf embarrassed her.

“All right,” she said, straining for the appropriate tone to cover up the hollowness she felt, as if all her emotions and the words for her emotions were scurrying to the farthest side of her brain where she couldn’t reach them. Years ago, her first year at Fayer, Gena had flown in for Christmas wanting to talk, wanting to know what had happened, why Vida had left home so abruptly, and though she’d planned, that whole fall, to tell her sister everything, when the time came her mind went blank. She had let Gena hold Peter, feed him a bottle, walk him around the pond in her arms, but she was never able, not even with an easy lie, to explain his presence.

Tom began talking. He had a lot of things to say, rehearsed phrases that he’d clearly refined over the course of days and maybe even weeks, phrases like “off on the wrong foot” and “between the sheets.” Her years at Fayer, with all their assemblies, banquets, and dedication ceremonies, had made her an expert in the art of not really listening. She let his clichés roll easily over her. She did not let their eyes meet, and instead looked at the cuff of his dress shirt, a wedge of which poked out from beneath his jacket sleeve. His clothes did not have tags. They were softer to the touch than regular men’s clothes; their colors were unique. The tweed of the jacket he wore today had bits of scarlet, bits of turquoise, though looking at it from a distance you’d never guess it had anything but shades of brown. And the jacket fit him in a way that men’s clothes off the rack wouldn’t. Even though he was sitting down, there was no bulge at the back of the neck. He was pleasing to look at, pleasing to touch, without trying to please at all. His clothes fit because he had been making them for himself since he was nine years old. There was something she resented about the comfortableness of his clothes, the comfortableness of his body in this world. Even now on the green sofa beside her he seemed to be pretending to be nervous, pretending to be awkward and wary of her reaction to his words, pretending to care about who she was and what would become of them. But no matter who she turned out to be, no matter what happened to them as a pair, if they could really call themselves that, he would be fine. In his soft tagless clothes in his little mouse house (he was talking now about the house, how it was a challenge, merging families, merging lives) with his precious, badly educated children, he was going to be just fine.

“Hey.” His eyes, squinted, fierce, accused her of not listening. He clutched her two hands, his fingernails stinging the flesh of her palms. “Please talk to me. Please.”

“I really don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I want you to share yourself with me. I want you tell me how I can make things better for you.”

“I’m fine. You don’t need to do anything for me.”

He dropped his face into his hands, rubbed, and then sat up again with a red forehead. “I keep going back to certain moments. At Emma’s, remember that night? It was the first time I’d spoken of my children, really. You had so many questions, so many insights.” He went on and on, each date, each conversation.

He was right. She’d been good at talking; she’d been good at listening. She had that English teacher’s ability to communicate, to draw out meaning, to produce the larger picture. She had taken great interest in his children as characters. But he had expected more from her when they became flesh and blood.

“Everyone said to take it slowly but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. When I saw you go up to that podium last June I knew. Honestly, it was all I needed to see. I felt I knew you, and I wanted to be with you.”

“I can’t be that person you saw. You’ve got to forget about her. She existed for a few minutes and then she sat back down.”

“But Vida—”

“That morning my friend Carol’s son hung himself in an apartment in Boston. My favorite class was graduating. It was an emotional day.”

“And you’re saying you’ll never be emotional again?”

“It’s not something I can turn on and off.”

“Just turn it on. Forget about off.”

He took her hand with the rings on it and cupped it in both of his. It quickly warmed to his temperature. She wished they could just stay like that. Why did relationships have to be so verbal? All day long she dealt with words, adjusting them, negating them, praising them.

“I know you’ve begun drinking to stop it from turning on.”

“Begun drinking?”

“From what Peter says this is pretty new.”

From what Peter says.

“When I was a little boy I watched my father disappear every night. He came in from the shop joking and laughing and by the time dinner was over that man had died. And a bitter disappointed man was in his place.”

Oh Lord. She couldn’t bear the cliché of it. Had he plucked it directly from one of Fran’s books?

“I can’t watch that happen all over again in my house. I know where it leads. I’d like to ask you to stop.”

“Stop drinking?” She was still incredulous.

He nodded.

She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Oh God. You’re way off track.”

“Am I?”

“I’m a hell of a lot better with a few drinks in me.” Didn’t he at least understand they’d never have sex again if he cut her off?

“I don’t think so.”

“Trust me.”

“I don’t, Vida. I don’t trust you at all.”

And then, like the junior boy who’d sat on this couch last week begging for a better grade, he began to cry. He made no attempt to stop his tears or cover his face or turn away. Her eyes, which had been locked on the sleeve of his jacket, drifted up toward his, and when they met she felt a shifting of the weight inside her and she could feel how it might be to speak about the falling falling falling feeling she got sometimes even when she was drunk and Tom was touching her, a feeling as close to feeling like you don’t exist, have never existed, as you can have in this life, like the whole universe is a joke, an enormous joke and you’re finally being let in on it, and how somehow this feeling was worse than the terror she had felt in that bathroom that afternoon all that time ago. How a memory could be worse than the thing itself made no sense but it was the remembering she was scared of, and if she unplugged that memory for him it would always be there between them. It would spread everywhere; it would spread to Peter, and then her life would truly be over.

Once she got ahold of herself again she grew bored by his performance. She had the impulse to get up and grade a few papers until he had finished. Then she understood that he wasn’t going to stop until she stopped him.

“All right,” she said. “If it’s so important to you.”

“Not just to me. To all of us. Stuart, Fran, Caleb, and Peter.”

“Peter has nothing to do with this.”

“Peter has everything to do with it.”

“I’ll see you at home.” She got up off the couch, sat down at her desk, and swung the stack of freshman essays around to face her.

When she looked up again, he was gone. She was soothed again by the sensation she’d had in her kitchen the day he proposed, that this was practice, and that the real event, the one that counted, the one that would be graded and put in the book, would happen later, when she had studied harder and knew her lines.

Her sophomores were in the midst of some intrigue. She could tell at once by the sound of their feet, which were clustered together and moving quickly as if trying to keep up with the pace of their gossip. Even the boys were in on it, their voices cracking with surprise. By the time they reached her door they had all composed themselves somewhat, greeting her with their usual blend of resentment that people like her existed and reassurance that the world, dastardly as it was, had not changed over the weekend. Peter seemed out of the loop. He was the last to enter the room and took his regular seat, which was removed from the froth of gossip. She admired him for this, and tried not to think about Tom’s words.

Whatever it was had gotten them all stirred up, and they took longer than usual to get settled. Lindsey scribbled something and handed it to Brian, who giggled like a third grader.

Karen was the only one who’d gotten out her book. “God, Mrs. Belou, why did she tell him?”

“Why did who do what?” She wished she’d had time to review last night’s reading.

“Tess! Why’d she have to tell Angel?”

So they had gotten there already. “All right,” she said to the most agitated corner of the room. “Give it a rest now. Why don’t you take out”—the commotion stopped and she could hear them breathing, waiting—“your book.”

A ripple of relief spread through the room, though there were a groaning few who had read carefully in hopes of a quiz to boost their grade.

“Brian, could you give us a little summary of what happened last night?” she said. Then, as an irritating little grin grew on Brian’s face, she added, “In the book.”

“Well,” he began, clutching the unopened novel like a football, “after a lot of talking talking talking Tess finally agrees to marry Angel. On December thirty-first, which I think is a really weird day to get married. And then she tells him about the Alec dude and the baby and it’s all over.”

Vida was surprised he’d understood that much of it. “Anyone want to add anything to that?”

“She tells him because after the wedding he tells her about some woman in London he was with for a while and he asks Tess to forgive him,” Harry said. “She is so psyched because she thinks now it will be easy to finally let out this secret she’s been keeping from him, but when she tells him he has a completely different reaction.”

“What does he say?” Vida felt an energy returning to her, an energy she’d begun to suspect she’d lost. Lately, she found herself vacillating between anger and lassitude, unable to find the vigilance and rigor she once had. But today she would talk about the ill-chosen location of the honeymoon, the crumbling d’Urberville mansion, and how Hardy plants his Darwinian theories of social determinism in the faces of Tess’s two ancestors on the wall (paintings built into the wall that cannot be removed), one representing treachery, the other arrogance.

“At first he wonders if she’s joking or going crazy, and then he gets mad.”

Helen raised her hand. “He doesn’t get mad, exactly. He’s kind of in a state of shock. He tells her that he can’t forgive her because the woman he has been loving is not her, but another woman in her shape. It’s just like that poem we read by Hardy last year — about the guy who meets that ghost on the road.”

“‘The Well-Beloved,’” Vida said quietly, wondering exactly who she was, that woman Tom had seen going up to the podium in June.

“I think she was so stupid to have told him. They could have gone to a different part of England and he never would have found out,” Kristina said.

“But it would always be there in her heart, eating away at her,” Helen said.

“I think it was selfish of her. She like ruined this guy’s wedding night.”

“He ruined it. He couldn’t forgive her.”

Vida interrupted the two girls. “You have to understand Angel’s point of view. Tess was a poor, uneducated, unreligious girl. Purity was her only asset, the only way he could justify her to his parents.”

“She wanted to start the marriage honestly, no secrets.”

Vida was sick of Helen’s whining. She looked to the back, careful to avoid Peter in the corner, who actually seemed to be paying attention. From what Peter says. She felt a burning on the underside of her arms. Caroline was beside him and hadn’t spoken in several days. She caught the girl’s eye. “What are your thoughts, Peter?” Peter? Had she truly said Peter?

Caroline, whose mouth had opened slightly in preparation, turned in relief to her left.

“I don’t think you can have a real relationship with someone without being truthful.”

“But Tess’s ‘truth’ isn’t true, Peter,” Vida said calmly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He glared at her, defiant.

“The subtitle of this book is A Pure Woman. Tess is no less pure for her encounter with Alec d’Urberville. In fact, it is what she learns from her experience with Alec and losing her baby that makes her so intriguing to Angel. He doesn’t love her for her innocence. He loves her for her depth of feeling and knowledge, which comes from her experiences. ‘Tess’s corporal blight was her mental harvest,’ Hardy writes.”

“But she was miserable, Mrs. Belou!” Vida let Helen override any noises Peter had begun to make. “She had to tell him. She was never going to be happy otherwise.” It was the first stupid thing Vida had ever heard come out of her mouth.

“Well she sure as hell ain’t gonna be happy now.”

“Don’t tell us!” several of the girls squealed.

“This is what is known as a tragedy. It says so right there on the back of your book. I don’t teach fairy tales, folks.”

“Does something terrible happen to Tess?” Karen asked quietly.

Peter’s neck had splotched up. He was still glowering at her.

Vida nodded, then pulled on an invisible rope around her throat as her head fell limp against her shoulder.

“She dies?” they gasped.

Helen’s voice was cold and serious. “But you said she wouldn’t die.”

“Of course she dies.” She looked down at their faces and for a moment she couldn’t have said who any of them were or how she knew them; even Peter fell away from memory. All she knew was that she wanted to hurt them somehow for all they didn’t know. “We all die.”

The lunchroom of a high school is a disturbing place. Everyone’s neuroses gather here. The combination of food and voluntary seating releases uneasiness into the air like a gas. At Fayer Academy, the teachers suffered no less than the students. Of the sixteen tables in the lunchroom, two were designated for faculty. Brick always came to lunch first and stayed through all three periods. He sat at the table closest to the door, making it, for the twenty-four years he had been headmaster, the desirable table. The rules of the lunchroom seating for faculty had never been uttered, yet every teacher, within days of arriving at Fayer, understood where he or she belonged. Somehow, without words, Brick made it clear who was in and who was out. In the course of one’s career, adjustments were made. Mark Stratton, when he was a part-time geography teacher, would have never dreamed of sitting at the first table, but the computer revolution changed all that. Davis Clay had sat at Brick’s table for years until he stopped drinking and lost his sense of humor. There were more teachers popular with Brick than there were places at the table, but room was always made, chairs borrowed from other tables to accommodate them.

Today Vida arrived for the second period of lunch. As she stood in line, pressed between students she had never taught, she was not aware of discrete thoughts but of an inaccessible roar that tossed up every now and then, as if from the depths of the sea, some image or phrase to antagonize her. The bright flecks in Tom’s jacket. We all die. From what Peter says.

Vida looked down at her tray. Shepherd’s pie, wax beans, and sponge cake. A meal like this was perhaps the most humiliating part of her job. But at least she hadn’t had to make it herself. She was hungry and moved swiftly to the faculty corner.

It happened so quickly that later she wondered if she’d imagined it all. She approached the crowded table, knowing she’d already been seen: Brick and Cheryl Perry and Greg Massie had all been looking in her direction while she’d been filling her glass from the teat of the milk vat. But now, at the moment for hellos and scootching over, her tray hovering over the table, no one looked up. So this is how it’s done, she realized. Without breaking her pace, she traveled the arc of the table to the one behind it, joining the librarian, the substitute Spanish teacher, the school nurse, the head of development, and the entire math department. They all stared at her as if she’d dropped down from Neptune.

“Mmm mmm good,” Vida said, lifting the first bite of the pie to her mouth. “And people wonder why there’s a shortage of teachers in this country.”

“Actually,” the librarian said, “I read three days ago that a large percentage of teaching positions will be cut at the end of the year.”

“I read that article, too!” Bob Crowse said, pressing his small chest into the table in his excitement.

“You did?” The librarian blushed.

Vida looked around for someone to share her cynical mirth, but these misfits were either unnaturally engrossed in their meal or smiling jealously at the coincidence.

At the other table, Brian Rossi was whispering something in Jerry Poulk’s ear. Jerry frowned, tossed his napkin on his tray, and stood abruptly. Vida, watching his surgeonlike urgency with amusement, was startled when, as he passed, he said, “Heard there’s been a lot of drama in your classes lately. Tryouts are coming up — we could use you.” This last sentence was tossed over his shoulder, his absurd little ponytail flipping into the air. If she’d had a retort, he wouldn’t have heard it.

Halfway through her sponge cake, she felt a familiar pressure on her arm, then Brick’s ranch dressing breath at her neck. “Swing by my office when you’re done, will you.” Before she could give an answer he, too, was gone.

“Vida,” he said, manufacturing surprise while sliding a slip of paper beneath his fingertips toward the center of his clutterless desk. “Have a seat.”

Every April, before the next year’s contracts were distributed, each teacher was called into this office for what Brick called “The Chit Chat.” Carol, who had to type up the notes from these meetings, called it “The Shit Shat.” It was an evaluation of sorts, though Brick had trouble complimenting people and relied on oblique references in the passive voice. “Word is,” he said to her last year, “you’re only getting better.” But it was not April yet and Vida sensed the word was no longer good.

She stroked one of the gold tacks pressed into the leather of the chair she’d chosen while Brick warmed up.

“How have you been, Vida?”

“I’ve been fine, Brick.” She mocked his unnatural earnestness with her own. He didn’t like that, and took a moment to rethink his strategy.

“You and Tom have been married how long now? A month?”

A quick, quivering pain traveled through her at the sound of his name. Though she knew it wasn’t April, she couldn’t think which of the other months it was. “Something like that.”

He removed his fingertips from the yellow piece of paper and leaned back in his larger leather chair. “Marriage is a curious institution, isn’t it?”

She knew this was how he behaved with students in deep trouble; he took the time to indulge them, to pamper them, like drawing a warm bubble bath before tossing in the toaster. Vida had always thought this a cruel tactic until now, when to her surprise instead of barking at him to cut the crap, she egged him on. “It sure is,” she drawled.

“It is quite frankly the most challenging experience any of us will ever face. As you know my daughter Betsy got married last summer. A nice fellow. We’d waited for what seemed like decades for him to ask her, and then when he did, suddenly I felt she was too young and what was the rush. I’ll be honest with you. They’ve had a rough year. He never told poor Betsy about his allergy to cats.”

“Cats?”

Brick looked disappointed, as if Vida, having known Betsy since the girl was eight, should be able to fill in the blanks. He took a deep breath, not having wanted to stray this far from the point. “All her life, Betsy has loved cats. She begged for one every birthday and Christmas. But Charlotte was firm. She always told her, ‘When you marry and you have your own house, you can have as many cats as you like.’ So on the first morning of their honeymoon in Paris, Betsy went out and bought a kitten. Brought it back to the room. Within minutes, that husband of hers, his eyes puffed up and his windpipe shrank and, well, they’ve had a rough time of it.” He looked at Vida expectantly and again seemed disheartened. He shifted in his chair. The leather cracked. He took another breath. “Charlotte and I have certainly had our differences. I don’t play bridge. She doesn’t like cake. Twenty-three years and a cake has never been baked in my own house. But we’ve made our allowances, shifted our priorities, relaxed our ideals a bit.” He paused, pursed his thick lips, then said, “I’ve never betrayed her, not once.”

But not for lack of trying, Vida thought, remembering the lick on her neck and the many other equally inept passes he’d made at other teachers over the years. Who did he think he was talking to? But he needed soothing now; this confession had made him vulnerable.

“There aren’t many men who could say that, I imagine,” she said.

He puffed up instantly. “No, I can assure you, there are not.” He looked at her with a mix of love and confusion. Where was he headed? He remembered, and aimed perhaps a little too directly. “Is Tom treating you well, Vida?”

Had he orchestrated this? Had he arranged for her to be laughing privately at him and his self-deception when he zinged her here? It was the first time anyone had asked her such a specific question about her marriage. “Yes, of course,” she answered, too automatically. Even she heard the falseness of it, but she could think of nothing to add to change the effect.

Finally he spoke. “You are one of the very best teachers we’ve got here, Vida. And you haven’t seemed yourself lately. And since the only change I’ve known about is your marriage, I just assumed. But perhaps there’s something else.”

Let’s have it, Vida thought. “How haven’t I been myself?” Was anything more foreign than this self other people believed you could maintain?

“Frankly, I haven’t noticed all that much myself, but there have been reports.” Careful not to glance down, he folded his hands atop the yellow sheet. He was still willing to negotiate. If she would just confide in him; he’d much rather be daddy than boss. He prodded her with sleepy sympathetic eyes. It might feel nice to say a few things out loud. She could be careful not to reveal too much. What a relief it would be to utter a complaint or two to somebody, even if it was Brick. And it would make him laugh, the accusation that she, whom he had always teased for not being able to keep up, had a drinking problem. A warm bubble rose in her chest and she waited for it to settle before she spoke.

But Brick saw her fighting laughter and decided he was through waiting. He’d given her more than enough time. His hands separated and he read out the list in the stentorian voice he reserved for his worst offenders. “‘November sixth: allowed discussion of abortion to go unchecked in the classroom.’ We’ve got Catholics here, Vida, in case you’ve forgotten. ‘November eighth: gave ten demerits to Julie Devans in study hall for picking her nose.’ Ten. To the daughter of a trustee. ‘November thirteenth: referred to Mark Stratton’s computer lab as Jonestown and asked students if they had enough Dixie cups.’” Brick’s mouth curled slightly after this last one, but the next sobered him. “‘November sixteenth: told American lit students that,’ and I quote, ‘God is in my underpants.’”

“Apart from this last, I simply see a bad attitude. I can accept that. I understand your resistance to the computer and the weekly lab day, which Mark tells me you haven’t once shown up for. It’s nearly the end of the term. I’m sure a lot of us are giving out some negative vibes to our students. I’m sure each comment had its context. But Vida, I’ve thought long and hard about this and I cannot imagine any context for ‘God is in my underpants.’ A teacher, especially a female teacher, should never, not in any situation, be talking about her underpants.

“I should fire you. Anyone else with this sort of a list and they’d be out. But you’ve been here too long and I like you too much. So as of right now, you are on probation. One more report like this and I’ll have to inform the board.”

Vida gave Brick the solemn nods he required, and was released.

Climbing the two flights to her office, she had that brittle, eviscerated feeling she normally didn’t get till the end of the day. When she reached the top she smelled the must and mold that everyone always complained about. She opened the three windows in her classroom and a violent wind cut through the room. She erased her nearly illegible words from the board. God is in my underpants. She laughed out loud. Had she really said that? In American lit? She imagined her juniors in their seats, then she remembered. A discussion of transcendentalism had turned into an argument about the role God should play in one’s life. John Swiencicki said he liked Emerson’s idea of trying to achieve unity with the universe, and Gretchen O’Hara asked what was the point of believing in a God that isn’t separate from you, that isn’t in every part of your life, controlling everything. Vida had suggested then that there be God-free zones. “For example, I don’t want God in my underpants.” That’s what she’d said. Not that He was in her underpants, but that He wasn’t. Her first impulse was to go down and clarify it with Brick, but she knew it would only stir him up again.

In her office she looked down at a pile of junior quizzes. She fished out her best student, Henry Lathrom’s. He’d scrawled his name at the top of his paper, as they all did, though none of her students needed to label their work anymore; their handwriting was more familiar to her than their faces, and far more expressive. Henry’s letters were minuscule and virtually without curves, so that an essay looked like thousands of tiny sticks painstakingly laid out. She read a sentence three times, then shoved the quizzes away, threw on her coat, and drove down to the gym. This was Fayer Academy’s newest monstrosity, with two sets of locker rooms, nine offices, a tennis bubble, a swimming pool, a volleyball court, a weight room, and three turquoise basketball courts. Peter was practicing at the farthest of these. Vida took a padded seat in the bleachers.

They were doing drills. A pair of boys were released from the center, one dribbling toward the net, the other flapping away in front of him, guarding him. Then, when the dribbler approached striking distance of the basket, another boy came shooting out from the side to take the pass.

Gary Boyd coached the team, the thirds. His Fayer sweatpants were barely held up by a brown necktie and billowed out at the knees, even when he was standing straight. Vida doubted they’d ever been washed. Gary lived alone in an apartment above the post office in Fayer. In the nine years they’d worked together, they’d never spoken more than a few sentences at a time, and always about a mutual student, but when word of her engagement leaked out, he’d given her a forlorn congratulations one night in the parking lot, holding her hand a few seconds too long, as if there’d been an understanding between them she hadn’t quite understood.

When he noticed Vida in the bleachers, he slapped his hands together a few times and called out, “This should be easy, offense. If you’re not making the points, there’s something wrong with you.” This encouragement made the next two groups miss their shots.

Peter stood in the line at the side. She knew from the way he’d shifted his torso away from the bleachers that he’d seen her. He had a large dark bruise on his upper arm. Had he been in a fight? He was doing what all the other boys were doing, letting out a hoarse grunt when a basket was made, then slapping the guy on the back as he sauntered past. Vida enjoyed seeing him like this, in a group, barely distinguishable from the nine others in dress or gesture. Here, he was just a boy, not her hefty personal responsibility. He was looking to someone else to tell him what to do and how to do it. He did not need her. He sprinted out now for the pass. He caught the ball badly, then took a shot. It fell far short of the rim. She was only making things worse by being here. She stood, then sat again. It wasn’t even four o’clock. Where was she going to go? She couldn’t be alone in her office one more minute today. She missed Carol. She tried to remember where she’d put all her notes for that letter. How was it possible she still hadn’t sent it? Tonight she would find the papers, pull it all together. By now Carol would know about her meeting with Brick. What a good laugh they could have had about it this afternoon. God is in my underpants. She knew Carol would be hooting at that one.

Gary blew the whistle and hollered out another drill formation. He glanced up at the clock on the scoreboard in the corner, and his face sank a bit. Fifty more minutes till cocktail hour, she felt like yelling out to him. He liked his martinis, she knew that. Every teacher on this campus was going to be able to sit down to a good healthy drink this evening. Every one of them — except her and Davis Clay. An unfamiliar tingle crept up her arms and settled in her chest. She breathed deeply, and paid closer attention to the scene below.

The boys now stood in three lines at one end. Every ten seconds or so, Gary blew his whistle and a set of three was released. The boy in the middle passed the ball to the boy on the left, then ran behind him and took his place. Now the one with the ball was in the middle and he passed to the right, then ran behind that boy. Like this they weaved quickly and fluidly down the court. She didn’t watch Peter when it was his turn. She didn’t have to watch him to know he was the weak link, that a pass to him had to be exact, and a pass from him would be unpredictable. She saw how the two other boys, younger boys, compensated without annoyance, and felt grateful to them. She’d hoped with her being there he’d try harder, which he did, but trying harder didn’t translate to playing better. Again she felt the impulse to leave and half stood, then worried that her departure would be interpreted as disgust, and sat. She’d slip out once he made a basket. But even though Peter had three turns to make an unopposed layup, he missed each time. Then Gary called them over, tossed half of them red pinnies, and they all took their places for the jump. Vida was surprised to see Peter on the court and not on the bench. Before he threw up the ball between the two tallest boys, Greg flashed an eye at Vida and she realized he’d put Peter in solely for her benefit.

She could endure it no further. Finally she gave her legs the unambiguous signal to stand and they carried her off the bleachers, back along the narrow sidelines, and down the fire stairwell to the parking lot, where she sat in her car with her tingling chest for the remaining twenty minutes.

But removing herself from the scene, putting a windowless wall of concrete between her and Peter, didn’t prevent her from seeing him. His feet were fast; he had no trouble getting free of an opponent. He would be darting in and out of the key, always open, gently calling to the teammate with the ball, “With you, with you,” his eager arms out and ready, always ready. His hair would have fallen over his eyes but he wouldn’t brush it away, wanting to keep his arms out for the pass. His mouth would have that desperate, beseeching shape to it as it became clear to him that his teammate was stalling, dribbling in place, until someone more reliable broke free.

He was the very last boy to emerge from the locker room. He walked out well behind Jason and a few others. And it was only at that moment, when she did not feel the urge to tell those boys to include him, that she realized how angry she was that he was in cahoots with Tom.

Without a word, he opened the door, kicked down his knapsack to make room for his feet, and breathed flatulently through his nose. She did not, as she had done every day since he started pre-kindergarten, ask him about his day. She did not offer him a greeting at all; she simply turned left out of the school driveway and headed fearlessly toward the great test of her character they had plotted together.

Like any decent protagonist, she would pass it. But that, she told herself, did not in any way mean they would have won or gotten the better of her.

By the time they reached Larch Street, their silence was no longer tentative but an established fact. As they approached the house, Vida saw that Tom’s car wasn’t in the driveway yet, which meant hers would be blocked in when he came home. Like the carpet cleaners, like gloomy Mrs. May, she parked alongside the curb. She could feel Peter wanting an explanation but she didn’t give it. They walked up the driveway single file.

From the smell of the house Vida knew that Fran and Caleb had snacked on raisin toast and Stuart had a girl in his room. She heard the window in his bedroom shudder shut; now the girl would be creeping off behind the house. Seemingly oblivious, Peter headed down the hall to his room, which would be thick with sex and incense.

She whistled for Walt. When he didn’t appear, she called, “Here, baby.” She thought she could hear his front paws scraping the floor of the kitchen, trying to get up, but the kitchen was empty. So was the backyard. She checked under the table and in the pantry. Her new bottle of bourbon, still three-quarters full, was there. Walt was not. Stuart had probably taken him into his room as some sort of seduction accessory, but she headed to her bedroom first. It was an unlikely place to find him. The room was dark, and it took her many seconds of stroking the wall to find the light switch. He was lying right in the spot where he had usually lain in their old house: beside her bed, waiting for her to wake up. Perhaps he’d been waiting there all day. Such a long awful day. She thought of the bourbon on the shelf. Just as she was about to call to him, she saw that his head was at an odd angle against his right paw. For a moment she thought it was another dog, some sort of prank of Stuart’s, some misunderstanding, some confusion in the universe. She crouched beside him and swung his head, his beautiful head, on her knees.

He was stiff, even his hair felt stiff, but she knew she could pull him back. She heard herself crooning in his ear, luring him home with sounds that weren’t her words but new words, a sort of dog talk, like in her dreams about him, that she was finally fluent in. He would listen. He’d always done anything she told him to. Such an easier child than Peter, never recalcitrant, never moody. Walt was her best friend, her partner, her lover. She heard him laugh. Don’t laugh, she told him in their language; it’s true. You are my love, my deepest love. She began to laugh with him. She pressed her face to his, though his eyes were looking off toward the nightstand. Didn’t you know that, baby? Didn’t you know? I found you at a gas station. I rescued you. And you rescued me. We drove across the country together, just you and me. What would I have done without you? Where would I have gone?

She was still trying to coax some movement out of him when she felt a hand on her shoulder. At first she thought it was Brick, asking her to have another talk.

“He’s gone, honey. He’s gone.”

“He’s just so tired.”

“He’s dead.” He said it as if he enjoyed the word.

“Please, just go get Peter.”

Peter stood several feet back. “What happened?”

Vida wanted to raise her head and reach for him, pull him down beside her, but she couldn’t bring herself to let go of Walt’s head.

“What happened to him?”

From far off, Tom said, “He was old and in pain. His heart probably just gave way.”

She felt Peter’s fingers on her back briefly. “I’m sorry, Ma.” That’s all he said. He did not squat down with her, mourn with her.

He left. After a while Tom left, too. She thought of the bourbon on the shelf. She continued to talk to Walt in their language. She wanted to cry but he wouldn’t like it. She shut his eyes and stroked the velvety fur of his eyelids. She apologized again and again for not having been home, not having been on her bed when he came in to find her, to spend his last minutes with her, his only love. He had never warmed to Peter. Peter had never loved him. They’d never had that boy-dog thing.

Occasionally there were voices behind her. “He was a nice dog,” she heard Fran say.

“He’s finding his new form now,” Stuart said. “Something more elegant and powerful.”

He’s perfect the way he is. She didn’t know if she’d said this out loud. She caressed the length of Walt’s body, her hands remembering how strong it once had been.

Tom stood at the door and spoke of dinner. Later it was Peter, urging her in to eat. But she was so tired. Maybe it was time for her to die, too. She was so very tired. She could hear them at the table, clattering, chattering. All their voices chittering along, while she sat on aching knees with her dead dog. I need a goddamn drink, she told Walt. If she’d married Brick they’d have a minibar in the bedroom.

Then they were all there, surrounding her with their platitudes and garlic breath. Tom had, of course, formulated a plan.

“He needs to be buried. We could call the vet or we could just bury him here.”

“Here?” Fran said, disgusted.

Tom shushed her. “Which would you like to do, Vida?”

“I just want to pat him.”

“We can have a little ceremony. I’m going to start digging a grave out back.”

“You can’t do that,” Fran screamed as if expecting this all along. “Not in my mother’s garden.”

“To the side, near the compost.”

“You’ll break all the roots of her lilacs. You will.”

“I won’t. I’ll be careful.”

Fran followed him out of the room. “It’s just a dog, Daddy.”

Vida wanted to scream at her, but Walt told her to not to bother.

In a few minutes she heard them in the back, rummaging through the shed, calling out to each other, laughing.

“That’s a snow shovel, you dingbat.”

“We should rig flashlights up on our foreheads like coal miners.”

“How much do you think grave diggers make an hour?”

They were all outside.

She placed Walt’s head carefully down on the carpet. Neither of her legs could hold her weight so she leaned on the bed, then the doorknob until she could get herself down the hallway alone. The bourbon in the pantry was gone.

It wasn’t that she needed a drink. It was the principle. It was not getting bossed around. She had a boss, a boss who’d put her on probation after sixteen years of indentured servitude. No one else was going to push her around — not tonight.

He would have hidden it somewhere. He was such a Yankee he wouldn’t have been able to throw it out. In the basement she groped around for the string that hung somewhere near the washing machine. She was always helplessly searching for the goddamn lights in this house. Her finger brushed it briefly, then it was gone again. “Fuck it,” she cried out. At that moment there was no one she wasn’t furious at. She was even pissed at Walt for dying on this lousy day. Finally she felt the soft twine in her hand and yanked. The string snapped off the chain, but the light was on. She went through every cupboard, every box, everywhere except the one place she guessed he’d put it. Finally, she had to look there, too.

She unzipped the garment bag, separated the flaps, and reached in. The dresses parted easily, as if they’d been expecting her. She ran her hand along the cardboard bottom. On one of their dates, probably that date at Emma’s he’d been going on about, Tom had read her what Fran had written for her mother’s funeral. It was a poem, and he kept it in his wallet. “She smelled like hyacinths and rain” was one of the lines. Vida remembered asking afterward if Fran had been reading T. S. Eliot at the time. She remembered, too, that this response had disappointed Tom and she didn’t understand what he could have expected. She’d never known Mary, had yet to meet Fran, and Tom himself was hardly more than a stranger who’d taken her out to dinner a few times. She didn’t know until now, until she’d buried her head in a rackful of Mary’s clothes, how accurate the description was.

But there was no bottle of bourbon.

She went back to the kitchen, trying not to think of poor Walt abandoned on the bedroom floor, to get Tom’s keys. The only place left was his car. She still had the goddamn string in her hand, and when she went to put it in the trash she saw it. Neck-down, nearly buried. She lifted it out. It had been drained and tossed out. Not such a skinflint after all.

She rummaged around for her old mushroom-colored raincoat beneath the pile on the hook and went out the back door. The padded right shoulder of the coat bobbed at her chin. She made straight for the half-dug grave.

Tom was in the hole up to his waist, crouched, spraying up dirt. Above the grave, they’d tied a flashlight to a tomato post. Fran stood beside the post, still shouting about roots. She stopped when Vida stepped into the flashlight’s faint outer ring.

The first thing Vida noticed when she stopped moving was that it was not raining. It hadn’t rained all day. The sky was clear and full of sharp stars. She had added this detail. In books it always rained while graves were being dug. Or perhaps it was Fran’s poem. Hyacinths and rain. She looked at Fran now, in her silver-studded jean jacket and fake fingernails. She hardly seemed capable of such a line.

Tom raised his head. He looked as if he’d been shoveling the dirt directly into his face.

A part of her wanted to laugh. Are you the First Clown or the Second, she might have said. But it was overruled by the anger that pinched and clawed with every molecule of her body. She didn’t know where to start.

Fran glanced at her with her usual disdain. “Your coat’s all twisted.”

“I don’t give a shit, Fran.”

She’d been so good up until now, but she was done being good, trying to squeeze into the little box they wanted to keep her in.

Tom leapt out of the hole as if she were holding a gun.

“Get the fuck away from me!” She remembered Helen on stage a few weeks ago, hollering, throwing pots. It felt great. It felt grand, stepping out of character in front of them all.

“Vida, come here. You’re upset.” He was reaching his arms out for her, arms that he’d withheld for so long now, tucking them tight under his body in bed in case they tried to wander. She wished she could chop them off.

“You fucking touch me I’ll kill you.”

She was aware now of Stuart, Peter, and Caleb staring at her from across the grave. Caleb had been crying. But Stuart and Peter had obviously been having a mud fight; their clothes were covered in splats of dirt. They had played like insensitive beasts while a grave was being dug.

What was her point? What had she come out to say? They were clustered together now, bewildered together at the edge of Walt’s grave, this family she did not belong to. She swung back toward the house. Her bag was by the front door. Keys on the hook. It was so simple to leave. She’d never been able to leave Peter before, never let herself fantasize, even momentarily, about leaving. But that feeling of wanting him away, that wretched feeling of him inside her, stuck to her, had always been there. Wanting to leave him was one of her most familiar but unrecognized impulses. Perhaps all these years of fearing she would kill him in her sleep were all about getting free of him. Exhilaration flooded her as she moved toward the front door. There was her car out on the road. She pressed her face against the front window. Had she known she would do this? Had she known it even when she issued her bewildering yes to Tom’s proposal? Had it been there all along, a tiny hopeful seed in the cold ground?

First stop would be O’Shea’s on the way out of town, where Tom had taken her once, back when he didn’t fuss about her having a drink. She hoped the same Irishman would be behind the counter. “What’ll do you?” he’d said. She loved that accent, right out of Dubliners, though he’d never read it, never even heard of Joyce, poor man.

Good-bye, Walt, she whispered and shut the front door. Her feet took her swiftly across the grass. She felt like one of Stuart’s girls, young and weightless, with nothing but mysteries ahead.