by Meg Wolitzer
“It’s like something came over me,” Dory said with difficulty. “One night, all of a sudden, I just couldn’t do it. And I still can’t, Leanne. It felt so familiar to me. So depressing! And I felt the need to sort of destroy it all.”
“‘There will be retribution,’” murmured Leanne.
“What?”
“Just a phrase I heard.”
“I don’t want retribution, that’s the thing. I was happy. And now I’ve just said, okay, goodbye to all that, no more of it. And there’s nothing now, not even as a release. You’d think I’d want that, wouldn’t you? Even just to get rid of tension? I feel twinges still, but I swear it’s only like . . . what do they call that? Phantom limb pain? Why would I act this way?”
“Act what way, exactly? I don’t understand.” Leanne reflexively tilted her head like a bird on a branch, the way she did when someone came into her office to talk.
At that moment Abby Means approached, wearing a cherrybright skirt with squirrel trim, and she said, “Look what I just discovered I can do,” and then she bent her thumb backward so that it touched her wrist. Leanne and Dory just looked at her. Dory, who’d been about to express some specific and real unhappiness to Leanne, forced her face into improvised amusement.
“How did you just discover you can do that?” asked Dory. “That’s the kind of thing you discover when you’re nine.”
“I guess I just never tried it before,” said Abby with a little laugh, and Leanne realized that Abby Means was sort of drunk, and that most of the other teachers in the room probably were as well. Maybe Dory was drunk too, and that’s why she seemed so miserable; maybe she had been having a sad-drunk moment, the kind that Carlos told Leanne he witnessed all the time at work, and which had very little significance. People became expressive and full of regret, but as soon as they sobered up, they returned to their inexpressive, regret-making ways.
Drink was in the air now, falling hard upon this party. Usually the high school faculty barely drank, but tonight, because of work, or the snow, or the darkness that had begun to descend each day before the afternoon was technically over, the crowd from Elro guzzled down bottle after bottle of the Langs’ pleasingly decent wine, both red and white. Robby, Leanne saw, kept going over to a carton and pulling out more bottles.
“Screw tops,” she heard him say to Mandelbaum.
“Ah,” said the Spanish teacher. “That sounds dirty.”
“Dirty would be nice,” said Robby.
“Where’s McCleary?” Dave Boyd asked the room. “He get here yet?” Leanne whipped her head around so sharply that something in her neck cracked like a gunshot.
At sometime past nine, Leanne went over to the table and had a look at her hummus, which, still untouched, had formed a pitted, lunar surface. Robby Lang tapped on a glass then and said, “Everyone, listen up.” He liked to make announcements and small speeches, Leanne knew.
“People!” called Dave Boyd, and the other teachers laughed.
“Yes, people!” said Robby. “We have something really special for you tonight, people.”
“A quiz,” said Dory.
“Actually, a little musical interlude,” Robby said. “It turns out that Fran Heller basically knows every show tune ever written. So please come to the piano, if you’re so inclined.”
The Langs had a small upright, which sat flush against one wall in their living room. It was made of blond wood, roughly the same color as their yellow Lab and their floors and their sofa. A few teachers headed to the piano and consulted seriously with Fran about what they might all sing. Someone begged her to play Sondheim—anything by him at all.
“That might be out of my league,” Fran said. “Robby’s definitely oversold me.” She tried to sound modest, but it was easy to tell that she wasn’t really modest at all.
Soon, with their wineglasses on all surfaces, the assembled faculty of Eleanor Roosevelt High School began to sing. They sang songs from Guys and Dolls and My Fair Lady, and even the shyest among them could be heard. Abby Means became less detestable when it was revealed how terrible her voice was. She had been going through life wearing garish vintage skirts and singing and speaking thoughtlessly, and as a result being thought badly of, but she really had no idea of her effect on people. Maybe, it occurred to Leanne, she had Asperger’s syndrome. Yes, maybe that was it, and it explained so much—the moment in the teachers’ room with Fran Heller and the Diet Splurge, and many, many others. Leanne suddenly felt tender toward Abby Means, and slightly irritable toward Fran Heller. Go back to where you came from, Leanne would have liked to whisper to the drama teacher. But the aggressiveness of this thought made her understand that she herself must be as drunk as everyone else.
Outside, snow fell heavily, and in here, the teachers sang and sang. Leanne Bannerjee leaned against the piano and heard her own voice threading through the others. During a pause, when everyone was trying to come up with another song for Fran to play, Mandelbaum said, “It’s too bad that Lysistrata isn’t a Broadway musical.”
A few people laughed, and Dave Boyd, in his beautiful gray Shetland sweater, said, “Come on, sing it, Fran. Sing something from your own musical version of Lysistrata.”
“What am I supposed to sing, exactly?” Fran asked.
“Oh, extemporize,” said Dave. “Make something up.”
The drama teacher, lively, zealous, and given a chance to show off, ran her hands up and down the keys, stalling for time. “They never asked me to do this at the faculty potlucks in Cobalt,” she said, and then she paused, closed her eyes, and began to play the galloping opening strains of “Oklahoma!”
When she started to sing, her voice was pure and piercing. She had changed the lyrics on the spot, and now she squeezed syllables to fit properly, and she sang, “Lyssssssss-istrata, where the women go turning down the men . . .”
The laughter was immediate, and everyone insisted she keep going. “Till the war is stopped,” she went on, “there’ll be no cherries popped . . .”
Here, everyone laughed again and clapped, and Fran finished off the line, shrugging, singing, “And . . . da-da-da-da-da-da-da-daaa . . .”
Then she segued into a standard doo-wop chord progression and began to sing:“Here’s my story, sad but true . . .
About a girl that I once knew . . .
She took her love and withheld it from me . . .
She stopped a war through . . . chas-ti-ty . . .”
The teachers helped her along, and they all offered giddy new lyrics, some of which made no sense at all. Abby Means sang a line about Lysistrata wearing “a feathery hat and lookin’ mighty proud.” Fran Heller, poised on the piano bench, seemed composed, almost rhapsodic in the middle of this attentive crowd. She had an interesting marriage, Leanne knew from Dory. Fran almost never saw her husband, who lived in Michigan. You didn’t need an on-site husband to be happy, Fran Heller seemed to suggest, and of course Leanne agreed with this. You could be a feisty little drama teacher and move to a suburb in New Jersey where you knew absolutely no one, and you could swoop down upon everyone there, and soon you would be directing the school play and gathering the theater crowd of the school around you. They would admire and worship you, and maybe fear your wrath, and then you would have a similar effect on the faculty, and you would sit around a piano entertaining them on a Saturday night. Some of them would be helpless before you.
Leanne began drinking more red wine now, and through the big bulb of the glass she saw Gavin McCleary appear in the hallway, snow in his hair and on the shoulders of his overcoat. He was a strangely commanding figure, like the captain of a seafaring vessel whom you would trust even as the vessel ran aground.
Leanne reflexively put her glass down, as though she could rush over to him, but of course she knew she probably shouldn’t even go near him. She watched as he turned to look behind him, so she looked there as well, and then a woman stepped into view. For a moment Leanne let herself think this was a teacher she somehow didn’t reco
gnize; Elro was a big place, and this could be someone from the art department, or even a computer-science person.
“Gavin. Wendy,” said Robby. “Both of you!”
Dory looked right at Leanne; the expression was what Leanne, still not comprehending, noticed, for it was searching, sympathetic. McCleary, Leanne finally understood with a slow awareness, had brought his wife, she who was supposedly too ill to show up anywhere. She who didn’t even really exist, except of course she did, and now here she was. Gavin and Wendy, together at last. Didn’t Gavin think Leanne would be thrown by this? Wendy stood in front of her husband in the hallway, waiting for him to remove her coat.
Behind her glass of wine again, unwilling to lower it, Leanne watched. All around her, everyone continued to drink and to gobble bits of food. Abby Means said to Bev Cutler, “I see that Wendy McCleary is here. That’s nice. She’s had such a hard time.”
“I was just reading about chronic fatigue syndrome,” said Bev. “They say it’s one of those silent epidemics, like lupus. And it affects a lot of women.”
“We have reason to be chronically fatigued,” said Abby Means.
Leanne drank and drank. She was surprised at her own anxiety right now; it wasn’t as if she was in love with Gavin, and it wasn’t even as if he was the only man she was seeing. She reminded herself that it was interesting to be able to get a look at Wendy McCleary from across a room. It was like watching wildlife from a distance, and there was no need to leave. Leanne could stay; though if she stayed, at least she would keep drinking.
Gavin had described his wife accurately, Leanne thought as she poured another glass. Wendy McCleary was a shrimp; she even resembled one. Her sweater was coral colored; she seemed strange, not quite ready for human company. Now Dory stepped forward to greet the principal and his wife. “Hi, Gavin. I’m glad you came. And Wendy, this is great,” she said evenly. “We’ve got lots to eat and drink. Fran Heller is playing the piano, and she’s cracking everyone up.” After Dory spoke, she turned to Leanne, making sure Leanne knew she was just saying this, and that if it were up to her, she would never have said two words tonight to Lady Lazarus-McCleary.
Leanne watched as Gavin and his wife made the rounds; soon they had entered the living room and pierced the circle of teachers. The principal looked over his shoulder and nodded blankly to Leanne. He ate some food and drank some of the Langs’ wine, while his wife stood shrimpily nearby, talking to a few of the other women, who made a fuss over her. Only Dory hung back, and when she went past Leanne on her way into the kitchen, she made sure to brush her hand against Leanne’s shoulder.
“It’s a Chinese herbal remedy,” Wendy McCleary was telling the teachers. “I think it’s made from the ground root of the autumn lotus plant.”
“Where did you get it?” Ruth Winik asked. “The Internet, I assume?”
“That’s where I found a Diff ’rent Strokes lunchbox,” Abby Means said pointlessly.
“No, you know that place right next door to Peppercorns?” said the principal’s wife. “That store with no windows, and with the sign out front that says ‘DVDs and Chinese Specialty Items’?”
“Oh, the scary store,” said Dave’s partner Gordon, and everyone agreed that, yes, yes, it was scary, what the hell was that place? Chinese mafia? An opium den? They’d all seen it, but none of them had ever gone in over all the years they’d lived in this town. “I’m afraid of it. I always think they shoot snuff films in there,” said Gordon. “They have no windows. Why would they choose not to have windows?”
“Don’t you think this is a little xenophobic of us?” Dory said. “Because it’s a foreign place, it freaks us out.”
“Doesn’t it disturb you too?” Gordon asked.
“A little,” she admitted. “But I’m not proud of it.”
“Well, I actually went inside,” said Wendy. “By myself. It’s two stores, really. Up front they rent DVDs and it’s entirely Caucasian, but I swear it’s a front for something else. I told them what I wanted, and they pointed toward the Chinese part of the store,” she said. “It was a separate room. Smaller. There were a few shelves that were mostly empty, except for a couple of old jars of hoisin sauce and some Pond’s cold cream. Then, in the very back, there was a plywood door. And I knocked on it, and a voice said, ‘Come in.’ So I walked in, and inside a tiny room there was a really old woman. She had all these containers of herbs around her, and ginseng floating in bottles of liquid, and things bubbling on a hot plate. It reminded me of a meth lab.”
“That’s because it probably is a meth lab,” said Dave and Gordon at the same time, and then they smiled at each other, pleased.
“No, no,” said Wendy McCleary. “It’s a legitimate non-Western pharmacy. I told the old pharmacist what was wrong with me, and she looked into my throat and my eyes, and tested my reflexes, and then she gave me some powder in capsule form, and told me to take it every morning. So that’s what I’ve been doing.”
“I cannot believe you just took it like that,” Bev said.
“Who knows what they gave you,” said Ed Cutler. “It could contain lead.”
“I was desperate,” said Wendy McCleary simply. “I had no life. But now I do.”
Leanne wasn’t proprietary about Gavin, but this was too uncomfortable for her. She went upstairs, ostensibly to go to the bathroom, but the first door she opened turned out to be Willa’s bedroom. “Ooh, sorry,” Leanne called out, but no one was in there. Willa was almost certainly out with Eli.
Leanne slipped into the room and first sat, then lay, on the pink bed in the darkness. She could smell some honeydew perfume that had saturated the coverlet. Through the floor, she heard her colleagues talking, and singing, and then a few plinks of glass. Someone finally knocked on the bedroom door, and Leanne assumed it was Dory, making sure she was okay. But then the door opened, and framed in the bright hallway was the principal. He ducked into the dark room and sat down beside her, and Leanne sat up.
“I want you to know that I was as surprised as you,” he whispered. “She hasn’t been to one of these faculty things in years. I didn’t have time to warn you. I’m so sorry.”
The music kept coming up through the floor, and it seemed to get louder. Fran Heller was once again making up lyrics about Lysistrata and her sex strike; it was unusual to have such a funny, ballsy woman at one of these potlucks, or even on the faculty at all. Gavin bent his head down and began to kiss Leanne’s neck and collarbone, and she took his head and pulled it away from her, then kissed him hard, feeling how easy it was to respond to him, just the way she’d done when she’d come into his office in the spring.
She heard the start of a creaking moan in her own throat, but as it came forward the room seemed chilly, and she wondered if Willa had left her window open. Leanne opened her eyes and looked to the side, trying to see the window, but the room was too dim. Was there an actual breeze flowing through here? No, of course not. But there was. A wind practically lifted Leanne Bannerjee’s hair from her neck; the spell it carried encircled her efficiently, freezing her, changing her, making her realize that one day, not terribly long from now, she would be older, and she would be considered someone a little wild and embarrassing. A cougar, perhaps. “A Bengali cougar,” another teacher would titter meanly behind her hand in the teachers’ room.
Men could get away with sleeping with various women, but not the other way around. Get out now, she thought, or at any rate the spell seemed to tell her this. Get away from the men you’ve been seeing. All of them. She closed her eyes against the cold and felt her teeth snap together once, decisively, as though she were biting down on a rag during electroshock, and then Leanne Bannerjee gave in to the spell without even knowing.
Gavin McCleary’s mouth on hers now felt overeager and brash. A funny song about Lysistrata wafted upward, and Leanne was impatient, and had lost all excitement.
She pulled away. “God, Gavin, enough,” she said.
“What?”
She looked
at him and shook her head, knowing what she had to say. She was done with men for a long, long time, perhaps forever. “I know that this is apparently the only way I can do it—seeing a few different men—but one of these days it’s going to look bad,” she said. “And I’ll seem like this predatory person. And that will be terrible and humiliating.”
“What are you saying?” he said. “We enjoy each other.”
“We did.”
“You’re ending it?” he said, and she nodded. “But why?” he asked, shocked.
“I told you why.”
“Is it because Wendy showed up tonight?”
“No,” Leanne said. “Yes. I don’t know. Everyone becomes part of a couple. Everyone. And if I don’t want that—and if I stay one of those women who never marries, how will that look? What will it say?”
“It will say that that’s your choice. Leanne, if you break this off,” he said, “I’m telling you, I’ll lose it, I swear I will.”
But no matter what he said, he could not sway her. The spell had taken her, and she was already under a snow dome of enchantment, lost to him. Gavin McCleary slumped back onto the bed and closed his eyes. If someone were to come into the room now and find them, there would be no explaining what the principal and the school psychologist were doing together on a teenaged girl’s bed in the darkness. But no one came in, and the sloshing, lurching, sing-along party continued downstairs, with the teachers drinking and eating and dropping little pieces of broken chips all around the Langs’ living room; and with witty, improvised songs played harder and harder on the upright piano. In various musical idioms, Lysistrata rallied the women of Greece against the men in order to end a war, and they did what she commanded.
Leanne Bannerjee stood up, her heart fast, and left Gavin McCleary on the bed. She hurried down the stairs, almost stumbling over the Langs’ dog, who lay at the bottom. The dog picked her head up and gazed at Leanne, then returned to her licking; the sounds of wetness were always being emitted from her like a white-noise machine, or a wet-noise machine. Leanne stepped over her and kept walking. Down the hall, she went past the kitchen, where Dory stood sticking toothpicks into small baked and caramelized things.