Master Class

by Christina Dalcher

  Ruby Jo doesn’t wait for an answer before explaining how to make chlorine gas, or how to create explosions with gummy bears, or how she wrote secret messages to her girlfriends with lemon juice. “There was one girl in my school who had real strict parents. I reckon they were half off their rockers. Anyway, when they took her out of the fourth grade to homeschool her, I’d send her blank pieces of paper and she’d read ’em when she did her ironing chores. Then she’d sneak a note back to me the same way.”

  Somehow I don’t think I could do as much damage, or be as sneaky, with biology and anatomy. What would I do? Send secret messages in blood and bones?

  Ruby Jo’s made up of ions and electrons and chemicals, too. She’s got more energy in her than—as she would put it—a rutting jackrabbit. It strikes me that the bus we’re on could have made it from Maryland to Kansas on Ruby Jo Pruitt power. She keeps talking, changing from one subject to another, keeping the conversation alive and keeping me sane. Finally, she stops and asks me a question.

  “Think you could teach me to talk nice like you?”

  “What’s the matter with the way you talk?” A list of epithets, every one of which I’ve heard from Malcolm’s mouth, floats up in a cartoon thought-bubble: cracker, yokel, redneck, hillbilly, white trash. Never mind that “hillbilly” might even make some sense, since half of the Scotch-Irish Protestants who set up home in the mountains named their firstborn sons after William of Orange. Maybe more than half. All these words Ruby Jo has probably heard at one time or another. I wonder how much they sting.

  “You know. Like what them folks from town call poor white trash.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Hell, I mean, we are poor. My granddaddies worked in coal mines and came home black as midnight for a sack of nothin’. But poor ain’t dumb.” Ruby Jo gazes out the window at another crappy, depressed town. “Well, not all the time, anyway. But the way I talk, that’s the first thing people think.”

  I want to tell her accents are pretty much fixed once a kid hits her teen years, but Ruby Jo beats me to it.

  “Look at Madonna. She’s from Michigan, right? But now she sounds all English.”

  “Sure, hon,” I tell her, thinking Madonna’s linguistic affectations probably necessitated a small army of dialect coaches. “We can work on it if it’s important to you.”

  Another smile, another one of those happy-warm-sunshine feelings floods through me.

  When we reach the Kansas state line, there are only three of us left on the bus. Ruby Jo, me, and an older woman who keeps her head down and her mouth shut.

  “About five hours to go,” the driver says.

  Five hours to go. Five more hours until I see Freddie.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Kansas is flat as a pancake. No, it’s flatter than that. It’s so flat, it might as well be concave. And I’ve never seen as much corn as I have in the past few hours. I can’t think how anyone could possibly use this much corn.

  We turn off about fifteen miles west of nowhere, onto a gravel road leading up to double gates. A low sun slices through the window where Ruby Jo’s head is resting. When the bus swings wide to the left, the light moves across the iron rails of the gates and rests on a small hut. A gatehouse.

  “Looks grim,” she says.

  “Grim” is a nice word for what this shithole looks like.

  “Just like my old granny said it would.” Ruby Jo shades her eyes and peers out toward the gatehouse.

  “Huh?” I ask, but she hushes me.

  A man heaves himself up from his chair behind the small building’s window, pulls open the door, and swaggers out, beer belly swaying in a rhythmic plop-plop over the beltline of his uniform. He’s dressed in gray, and the two patches on his left shoulder are familiar. One is the sunshine-happy Fitter Family Campaign’s emblem; the other is the Department of Education’s tricolor peace symbol with the words Intelligentia, Perfectum, Sapientiae. From where I sit, the guard doesn’t look intelligent, perfect, or wise.

  “All right, people. I need to see tickets and ID cards,” the guard says, like he’s addressing a mob of anxious concertgoers at Madison Square Garden instead of three high school teachers at the entrance to a crumbling complex of nineteenth-century buildings in Winfield, Kansas. He climbs aboard, checks the bus driver’s manifest, and looks us over, one by one. “Mm-hmm. You first.”

  The old woman with the bent head stands and picks up her purse. She’s not too steady on her pins, but neither the driver nor the guard seems to give a shit. I stand up, tossing the bunched-up fast-food bag on the empty seat next to Ruby Jo, and walk toward the front of the bus.

  “I didn’t call you, lady,” the guard says. “Sit down.”

  I really hate being called “lady.” A lady is fine. That lady in the green coat is fine. May I please speak to the lady of the house is fine. But this fat slob isn’t fine calling me anything other than Dr. Fairchild.

  “How about you sit down,” I tell him, “since it seems that’s what you do all day anyway. And I’ll help this woman get off your bus. Sound good?”

  I’ve learned about bullies in my lifetime. Any teacher has. The taller they stand, the taller you have to stand. And, even without heels, I’ve already got a good six inches on Mr. Beer Belly here. He backs off, as if no one’s ever spoken back to him, as if no one has stood her ground.

  Good.

  But I wonder why this should be so surprising to him.

  The lady with the bent head is Mrs. Munson, she tells me. Mrs. Munson. What a name. Still, if her legs don’t work so well, her mouth makes up for it. “You tell him, honey.”

  Once Mrs. Munson’s on the ground, I climb back aboard and collect my briefcase and the snack bag. All that’s left in it are the packs of cookies I took out of the kitchen cupboard over the fridge and brought along for Freddie.

  Twenty-eight hours ago.

  It’s always interesting to think of yourself as a ghost, an invisible fly on the wall, an unseen observer.

  So I do that now, and picture myself in my own kitchen at four o’clock yesterday afternoon. Anne is home from school, backpack stuffed with books, stomach whining with the late-afternoon munchies. Teenagers are like hobbits: breakfast, second breakfast, that odd prelunch snack the Brits call elevenses, lunch, and so on. They’re all their own private little internal combustion engines.

  She’s in the door, having let herself in with the key Malcolm and I entrusted her with only last year. Shoulders slumped with the weight of books—more slumped with the weight of other, less tangible things—Anne unloads her books on the living room sofa, washes her hands in the kitchen sink like her father’s told her to do since she was six. Right now, at this moment, everything is normal. Nothing has changed.

  Her mother will be home in thirty minutes. A half hour at most. There will be banter and bickering and reminders that this house feels empty.

  Or not.

  Anne kicks off her shoes, shrugs out of her Harvard Crimson school jacket, goes to the fridge. She does this automatically, as she does every afternoon. At first, her mind is so intensely tracked on food she doesn’t see the note. Why would she, when yogurt or fruit salad or a slice of Swiss cheese calls to her like a wind-tossed plastic bag calls to a sight hound? It’s only when she goes back to forage for something else and put the wrapped hunk of cheese where it belongs that she closes the fridge door a second time and sees my note.

  For the next five minutes, she’ll read and reread my scribbled apology, the news of my leaving, in the same way a jilted GI rereads a Dear John letter from his stateside sweetheart. Confusion mixes with disbelief and denial. It can’t be. She’s not really gone. This is a dream, a nightmare, a lie.

  Mothers don’t just walk out.

  In my imagined fly-on-the-wall position, I can see her tapping numbers into her phone, screwing up the sequence, trying again when
the first call is answered by a hair salon. Then, “Dad? Mom’s gone.” And again, the cycle of confusion and denial starts.

  Wives and mothers don’t just walk out.

  I want to materialize in my kitchen, take Anne in my arms, and tell her I’m not gone, not really, but then Ruby Jo tugs at my coat sleeve because it’s time to collect our suitcases from the belly of the bus and start the long walk from the double gates to the low redbrick building that says Administration on its facade.

  “I don’t have a good feeling about this place,” Ruby Jo says.

  And we walk on.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The path leading up to the admin building might have been laid three-quarters of a century ago, and weeds older than that poke out through the crevices and cracks. Mrs. Munson nearly trips on a nasty tangle of withered vegetation, and I take her suitcase. It’s the nonrolling kind, the hard-backed Samsonite that went out of style in the seventies. And it must have bricks inside it.

  “Just a few books, dear,” Mrs. Munson says.

  Of course, the fat guard is back in his gatehouse now, probably watching crap TV and stuffing his face with corn chips. Every step I take with the heavy Samsonite makes the path seem longer.

  We pass a small parking lot to the left, partially hidden by a line of scrubby hedges in need of a serious trim. On our right is a dense row of conifers masking what used to be a playground, but when I look closer, it’s overgrown, a jungle of sagging tire swings and rusted monkey bars. Not a single kid plays in it, even though the school day must have ended at least a couple of hours ago. I find it eerie.

  “Maybe there’s a new one out back,” I say, not really believing it.

  “You reckon?” Ruby Jo says. “Get a look at this place.” Then, under her breath, “Just like Granny said.”

  “You keep saying that. Why?”

  “Tell you later.” She points a freckled chin, scrunched with worry now, toward a spot in the path ahead of us.

  I don’t know who I was expecting. Maybe another fat guard; maybe Mrs. Martha Underwood, the headmistress; maybe even Malcolm. He could have taken a last-minute flight from Washington Reagan to Kansas City and waited for me.

  All the possibilities tumble around in my mind: Malcolm calling my school—my former school. Malcolm snooping around the teacher database for clues. Malcolm pissed off as he sits on a cramped plane. Malcolm driving out here to pick me up and take me back home before I get the chance to see Freddie.

  “Rules are rules, Elena,” he would say.

  But the figure walking toward us isn’t fat, isn’t a woman, and isn’t my husband. His long, easy strides, not rushed but not slow either, belong to someone else I know.

  Next to me on the path, Mrs. Munson draws in a sharp breath. “Wow,” she says when she recovers. Ruby Jo seems not to notice the man as he reaches forward for the Samsonite, his fingers brushing mine as he takes it from me.

  “Thanks,” I say, though I groan a little on the inside.

  I’m not a weak woman. I work out, running treadmills and hefting free weights a few times a week. I don’t need a man to carry my luggage or put me on a pedestal or worry over whether I might break a nail. But man, that fucker was one heavy suitcase. I’m glad to see it go, less glad to see the face of the person who takes it from me.

  “No problem,” he says. Hanging from one tanned and tennis-muscled arm, the Samsonite might as well be stuffed with feathers. “This is yours?”

  “No. It’s Mrs. Munson’s,” I say, pointing to the older woman, who hasn’t closed her mouth since the man showed up. “I didn’t expect to see a familiar face here.”

  Alexander Cartmill is one of those men who is handsome and knows it. I spent Sunday at breakfast watching him preen himself between sips of decaffeinated cappuccino while Malcolm bragged over last week’s tennis scores.

  “I’m out here doing some doctor business for the week,” he says, extending his free hand to Mrs. Munson.

  The three of us follow him through lengthening shadows cast by the admin building. He could be forty, I think. Or fifty or thirty-something—it’s always so goddamned hard to tell with men. They don’t change like we do, don’t go through the same desexing hormonal flips and flops, don’t grow hair where they shouldn’t and watch their waists thicken into nonexistence. He offers help taking the rest of the bags up the steps, but I hold on to mine, as does Ruby Jo.

  She falls back a few feet and whispers to me, “I don’t think I like him, Elena.”

  “Neither do I.”

  And I didn’t like the absence of surprise on his face when he recognized me.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Alex leaves us in the hallway with a brief I know I’m hot smile and the same suddenness with which he appeared on the weed-choked path outside. It’s a warm room the three of us step into, wide and deep but decorated to minimize its size, to make visitors feel cozy. Chintz-upholstered wing chairs and polished wooden tables bring the walls closer, and the bulbs in their sconces are incandescent, yellowish, not that hard blue-white of modern LED lighting that washes out its subjects until they look like week-old corpses. Refinished oak doors lead off the hall, presumably to staff offices. The entire room smells of lemon oil and potpourri.

  If I weren’t tired as hell and wearing permanently wrinkled clothing from a twenty-eight-hour bus ride, I’d think I was back in the stately women’s club–turned–high school just off Dupont Circle. Still, the hall doesn’t match the untrimmed hedges or the abandoned playground we passed on our way from the gate.

  “Fancy,” Mrs. Munson says, taking it all in. Ruby Jo emits a skeptical little hum, same as she did with Alex. It’s hard to tell which is the sixty-five-year-old and which is the girl who’s a year out of her master’s program.

  The door closest to us swings open, and a small woman comes out. Her dress is the first clue something is wrong; the mountain of a woman seated behind a credenza inside the office is the second.

  Both of them wear the gray skirt-and-jacket combos I’ve seen on the Fitter Family’s child welfare representatives and, only yesterday morning, on Mrs. Flowers and Mrs. Parks. Neither uniform fits the body inside it. The greeter’s hangs on her like a sack, turning her dark complexion sallow; the desk woman’s strains at her ample breasts and makes her pale face look as if she’s a candidate for rosacea meds. They’re unhappy outfits for unhappy-looking women.

  “I’m Miss Gray,” the greeter says, not greeting any of us. Of course you are, I think. “You can leave your bags here while you’re processed.” Processed. Like tuna.

  One by one, we’re called in. Mrs. Munson goes first, and stays inside the office for ten minutes before she emerges with a bundle of gray fabric over one arm and a mask of incredulity on her face. She’s told to wait while Ruby Jo takes a turn.

  “What’s that?” I nod to the dishwater-colored material.

  “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” she says softly, and her eyes move toward the diminutive Miss Gray, who is standing watch at the oak door.

  So we pass the next ten minutes in silence until Ruby Jo slips out with another armful and a look in her eyes like she’s seen this all before, and Miss Gray reads my name off her clipboard.

  My turn with the headmistress.

  The meeting takes longer than ten minutes, maybe because of the ring on my left fourth finger, maybe because Mrs. Underwood can’t conceive how I’ll be useful here, maybe because I ask her about my daughter.

  “You’re married,” she says. It isn’t a question, but I suspect her voice is as flat as the Kansas plains even when she’s excited. And I have serious doubts Martha Underwood, M.Ed., has set any records for excitedness in her career.

  She sits back in her chair, which barely helps to narrow the gap between her bosom and the edge of the desk. Her hands stay folded over her stomach, flaccid and unmoving. They’re man’s hands—
thick, ringless, and unmanicured. If she hadn’t spoken, I’d think she was a mannequin, a mute statue.

  “Yes,” I say. Or I was twenty-four hours ago. Who knows what Malcolm might do after discovering I’ve done a runner?

  “Mm-hmm.” Her eyes, but not any other part of her, slide to the computer screen that’s hidden from me. “And you teach science?”

  “That’s right.”

  Mrs. Underwood’s eyes slide back to me, narrowed. “Which field?”

  “Biology, anatomy, genetics. I can also teach art.”

  The eyes widen. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “No. It’s what I did before. Like a lot of people.”

  From the look in her eyes, I can tell she’s thinking the same thing Malcolm did while I was working my ass off in college, poring over thick volumes of color plates. She’s thinking the student of art history has about as much chance of earning a living as a buggy whip maker in the twenty-first century. Less than that, maybe.

  Mrs. Underwood moves her hands and starts typing. “Basic horticulture and language arts,” she says, tapping away at the keyboard. “See if you can at least teach them to grow vegetables and write in paragraph-long chunks.”

  “When can I see my daughter?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, ‘When can I see my daughter?’ Frederica Fairchild.”

  She finishes whatever she’s typing and stiffens. “Mrs. Fairchild—”

  “Dr. Fairchild,” I say, meeting her eyes above the thick lenses that have been creeping down her nose since I walked in.

  “Right.” She doesn’t bother correcting herself. “Let’s get a few things straight. You’re staff here. I’m the headmistress. I’ve got dozens of students, twenty teachers who hate that this is the only teaching job they can get, and five former school principals already lined up to take over if I don’t run this place like Washington tells me to. I don’t know how a parent and child ended up in the same school, but I can’t make exceptions. So you do your job and let me do mine.” She stands up, signaling the end of the conversation.