At the door, I turn back. “Do you actually like your job?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” she says.
I get the whole high school principal persona. Or the state school headmistress persona. When you’re dealing with hundreds of hormonal adolescents on a daily basis, you need to put on your hard-ass mask and let the world know you won’t take any shit from it. Personally, I’ve always suspected there’s a course in education programs the rest of us don’t know about. Something titled How to Be a Bitch and Still Keep Your Job 101.
Martha Underwood, M.Ed., seems to have elected to retake that course ad infinitum.
With nothing else to say to her after a second try at inquiring about Freddie, I leave the office with my own bundle of coarse gray fabric and explicit instructions that uniforms will be washed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
“We’re not running a fashion show here. It’s a working farm,” Mrs. Underwood says as I close the door to her office. No kidding, I think, taking a last look at her. I’m not sure what I feel for the woman inside. Maybe hatred, maybe pity. Maybe a bit of both.
FORTY
Outside in the hall, Ruby Jo and Mrs. Munson shake their heads at me.
Yeah. She’s a bitch, I say silently to them. But I’ve missed the point.
“Do you have a mobile phone?” Miss Gray says. “Or a laptop?”
Stupid me takes out my phone, waiting for a Wi-Fi log-in and password.
It takes all of five seconds for me to regret what I’ve done.
“You won’t get reception out here,” Miss Gray says, plucking the phone from my hand.
My connection with the outside world takes its place behind another closed door off the hallway, presumably next to Ruby Jo’s phone. I don’t know whether Mrs. Munson is plugged into the world of portable electronics. She doesn’t look the type.
“She took mine, too,” Mrs. Munson whispers as we follow Gray through the hall toward the rear door of the admin building. “Brand-new iPhone. One terabyte of storage. My entire Johnny Cash collection, including the live concerts. And all my movies. I’m Melissa. Lissa for short,” she says, extending her hand and pumping mine with a firm grip. Seeing the look on my face, Lissa adds, “What did you expect? Agnes or Mildred?”
Alex is waiting outside to take Lissa’s bag. Once again, he reaches for mine.
“I’m okay,” I say. And we start walking as Miss Gray escorts us to, as she puts it, “our quarters.”
Even though we’ve only been inside for half an hour, the open space beyond the building’s back door is now shrouded in darkness. I can’t pick trees out by looking ahead of me; only moon-silhouetted shadows over my head hint that some form of vegetation grows in the empty space among the state school buildings. Ahead of us, if I’m right about the placement of its corners against the night sky, stands a structure of monstrous proportions, a goliath of stone and mortar if the rest of it matches the granite blocks at its base. In the light of a freestanding lamppost, the cornerstone reads 1895.
“This is the main education building,” Miss Gray tells us. The information, if not her bored drawl, reminds me of my sister’s first college tour. I was gobsmacked by the buildings, one for every subject I knew of, and way more than that. An entire city devoted to teaching and learning, with windows lit up even late into the evening and heads bent to serious work, as we saw when we took a stroll through the campus.
Universities are like beehives, I thought at the time.
We pass two smaller buildings, twin brick blocks with light glowing through their windows. Inside, most of the walls are bare white, no posters, no decorations, nothing to say Hey, kid, this is your room. All yours.
And the light makes the vertical bars outside each window all the more obvious.
“Jesus,” Ruby Jo says. “Granny was right.”
“Dormitories.” Miss Gray waves an arm toward one building and then the other. In my head, I hear a game show host shouting, Fail your test, and you can win one of these! “Boys to your right; girls to your left,” she says as we walk between them.
“Look more like cells to my eyes,” Lissa whispers.
I turn to squint at the buildings.
They can’t be bars, not really. Or if they are, it’s only because they were built that way back in 1895. By now, the iron will be rusted through, porous and easily breakable, nothing more than an architectural artifact, a historical remnant that preservationists in some other brick building decided to keep in place.
The things we make ourselves believe.
Our little parade of five plods on for another hundred yards or so. Smaller buildings of the same style as the dormitories wait ahead of us. Miss Gray, still in tour guide mode, points out the dining hall to our left and the faculty residences to our right.
I realize I’ve just traded my three-thousand-square-foot home for an apartment.
Our escort stops when we reach the door to the faculty residences. “We eat dinner at six. So there’s just enough time to check your bags and get keys to your room. You three will be sharing,” she says, confirming my suspicion. “Ground floor, to your left through the double doors. Hold on one minute there, girl,” she tells Ruby Jo. “Bags on the table.”
Before I have a chance to take in the entry hall, two men appear from behind a glass partition. They have no name tags and don’t bother introducing themselves before swinging our bags onto a steel table. And opening them.
“Hey!” Ruby Jo says. “What y’all think you’re doing with my stuff?”
And my stuff, and Lissa Munson’s stuff. One by one, our bags are unzipped and rifled through. My underwear sees more action than it has in years of marriage. Ruby Jo’s box of tampons is scrutinized like it’s a box of Cuban cigars. Lissa flinches as one of the men inspects three framed photographs, sliding the backing from each one, checking between layers of cardboard stiffener and glass.
“What’s this?” the first man says. He’s holding up a clear plastic case filled with bottles and tubes.
“My makeup kit,” Ruby Jo tells him. “You know, mascara and foundation and things to dye my hair with. Wanna try it out?”
His only response is dropping the case on top of the packing chaos in Ruby Jo’s duffel bag and zipping it back up. Compared to these two, the average TSA officer should win a medal for congeniality.
Miss Gray points us in the direction of our room, and Alex follows as far as our door with the suitcase. “I’ll see you at dinner.” He turns and walks to the far end of the hall, disappearing behind another door.
Ruby Jo rolls her eyes.
I’m the one with the free hand and the key, so I catch the first glimpse of our apartment. It isn’t as bad as I expected, but then again, I was expecting a five-by-nine Alcatraz cell, the kind you can stand in the middle of and still reach each side wall. This is more like a scaled-down Motel 6 suite: one large open living area with a kitchenette in one corner, a round table with four chairs, and a crowded sofa–love seat combo arranged at the back wall. There’s a window, but no television.
I wheel my bags to an empty space, checking out the bedroom we’ll be sharing. It’s as scantily decorated as the main room. Three beds—two bunks and a twin—draw the walls in closer. Everything in it is a shade of institutional beige.
“I’ve seen trailers better decked out than this,” Ruby Jo says.
It’s Lissa who goes to the window first, pulling back the brown blinds and coughing as a cloud of dust rises from them. She doesn’t say a word; she doesn’t have to.
There are bars on the windows.
In my experience, bars serve one of two purposes. They either keep people out or they keep people in. I wonder, with an ill feeling building in the pit of my stomach, which purpose these bars serve.
FORTY-ONE
We take turns using the bathroom, a cold a
nd sterile cube on the other side of the kitchenette wall. If State School 46 had a decorating budget, it didn’t stretch as far as the faculty residences.
While I wait for Lissa and Ruby Jo to finish up, I read through the information binder left on the round dining table.
Not surprisingly, it’s more a list of rules than information.
“There’s a lockdown every night at nine,” I read aloud so my roommates—soon to be extremely intimate friends—can hear. “‘Main door secured. Emergency exits’—and this is underlined—‘will sound an alarm if used.’ What the fuck?”
If my cursing bothers Lissa’s ears, she doesn’t say so.
“What the fuck is right,” Lissa calls from the bathroom.
“Wait until you hear this next part,” I say. “‘Faculty must keep to their gender-assigned floors. No exceptions. Rooms are equipped with smoke detectors.’”
“So where can we smoke?” Lissa says.
“We don’t, apparently,” I tell her, leafing through the binder’s five pages. “Nothing in here about a smoking area. Oh, and by the way, alcohol is another no-no. Maybe that’s what Tweedledum and Tweedledee were looking for in our bags.”
Ruby Jo giggles.
“What?”
“Tell you later,” she says. There’s mischief in her eyes. “Anything else? They gonna give us them military haircuts next?”
“Just a class schedule,” I say. “And we have to wear our uniforms at all times when we’re not in our quarters. Quarters. Jesus.” I keep reading all the you wills and you musts and you will nots, pages filled with directives and warnings. Nowhere in the binder is the word “please.”
Twenty-four hours ago I was on a bus, trading jokes with Ruby Jo and moving forward one seat at a time until the smell of urine and disinfectant was as far behind us as the dimensions of our ride would allow. Twenty-four hours before that, I was eating roasted chicken and drinking Spanish sparkling wine while my husband pretended his brilliant family was still intact.
I feel somewhat less brilliant now as I trade the softness of my blue jersey dress for a skirt and jacket combo that hangs heavily on me, irritating my skin.
“Penny for ’em,” Ruby Jo says.
I don’t have pennies’ worth of thoughts. I have hundred-dollar-bill thoughts, starting with how much Anne must hate me and ending with what brand of temporary insanity made me pack a bag and board a bus and travel halfway across the country without a clue as to what I was getting myself into.
Maybe all mothers are semi-insane. Maybe that’s part of the deal we make when we decide to let our bodies become hosts, when we lie with our legs spread and our insides knotted in pain and push and push and push until we think we can’t push anymore, when we hold vigil during sleepless nights in rocking chairs and recliners, sweating over the slightest changes in a tiny creature’s appetite, body temperature, weight.
I was insane to come here. I would have been equally insane to stay at home.
And anyway, the choice doesn’t matter, I think, as we pull on our coats and walk back down the empty hall, pass the two Tweedles, and leave the faculty building. Choices don’t matter when they’ve already been made.
We’re the last ones to join the crowd in the dining hall, and draw scowls from Mrs. Underwood. I glance at my watch and see that we’ve arrived five minutes late. A dozen or so men and women in gray uniforms are already seated in groups of four; two middle-aged nurses slide chairs out at the table up front, where Underwood and Miss Gray seem to be keeping an eye on the entire room; and over a hundred children sit cheek by jowl on long, backless benches, plates in front of them.
I’ve seen tens of thousands of school cafeteria scenes. They run and bleed into one another like a montage of film clips: third-graders peeling slices of bologna from bread, folding it just so, and biting a hole from the middle; varsity basketball players practicing their dribbling skills with one hand while taking monster bites from Red Delicious apples; eggheads sitting alone, poring over algebraic equations. And, of course, the requisite food fights.
I know all the sounds and all the sights and all the smells of school lunchrooms, and one look at the dining hall of State School 46 tells me this one is wrong.
One man, slight and semi-hunched over his plate, shifts his eyes from left to right and back, like he’s watching a rapid-fire tennis match. When he lifts his fork, I count three fingers on his left hand. The woman next to him has shocks of gray running through her black hair. She also has a scar on her lip, a souvenir of cleft palate surgery. Otherwise, she’s beautiful.
There are fat men and balding women, hook-nosed profiles and recessed chins. In the far corner, four acne-scarred complexions lean into one another, whispering, then draw back when Mrs. Underwood’s eyes sweep the room. Tucked under a table closer to me are the wheels of a motorized chair.
It’s as diverse as I’ve seen, except for one thing. Everything about the diversity in this room tilts toward fifty-seven flavors of imperfection.
Lissa sees it, too, because she leans close to my ear and says, “I wish I could say we’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“No kidding.”
The kids range from wide-eyed first-graders to lanky teenage boys who are still growing into their manhood. In the middle of a line of girls is Freddie.
Time stops when I see her, and everything that happens next is in slow motion, a film reel clicking from one frame to the next by the measured crank of an invisible projectionist’s arm.
My legs move first, right, then left, then right. Step, step, step. A smile stretches sideways until it seems to reach my ears. Maybe I make a sound, maybe I don’t—the soundtrack of this movie is a series of garbled underwater noises. My hand reaches inside my jacket pocket for the package of cookies I’ve brought. Freddie’s favorite, I think.
Step, step, step. Freeze frame.
I see her shoes first, then the fine, downy hair on her calves, then her knees with the small, faded scars of childhood spills. I take her in my arms and inhale her, smells of plain soap and child filling me up. When she says that one word—Mommy—it’s everything I can do to keep from breaking into tears.
When she tells me she loves me, I break into a million bits. I want to tell her all the things, even if they’re lies. I’m taking you home. Nothing bad is ever going to happen again. We’ll go live with Oma and Opa. Everything will be wonderful.
Freddie takes in these words as if I’ve said them. For once, she’s more than a wall, more than a stiff cardboard cutout of a girl, and she squeezes me back with small arms.
If only we could stay this way.
But.
I feel the pressure of a hand locked tight on my wrist, hear the crunch of a plastic wrapper as something is taken from me, pulled out and away from my grasp.
The scene speeds up around me and in front of me and inside me. Mrs. Underwood stands firm, blocking access to my own daughter, who is, if I’m seeing things right, shivering inside a gray pinafore that’s two sizes too large.
“One thing you’ll understand while you’re working for me,” Mrs. Underwood says, leading me away from Freddie and steering me toward the serving counter. Her words are slow and deliberate and horrible as she slides a tray from the stack and sets it down much too firmly on the metal surface. “And you will understand it, Dr. Fairchild. No one is special here. No one.” In her hand is the package of cookies meant for Freddie.
But she’s taken so much more away from me than that.
FORTY-TWO
THEN:
I was fourteen when I met Malcolm. I ate lunch alone in my second week of high school, a book in one hand and a cheese sandwich in the other. Every five minutes, I’d have to put one of them down and push my glasses up from the tip of my nose to the bridge where they belonged. It looked as if I were reading and eating, but what I was really doing was counting the eyes of ot
her people watching me and wishing I could vanish, blend into the linoleum floor and plastic chairs.
Malcolm, bucktoothed and skinny, an Adam’s apple he wouldn’t grow into for another few years bulging at his throat, brought his lunch to my corner. There were whispers, loud enough to make out and sharp enough to hurt, circling in the air between the other tables.
“I don’t know about you,” Malcolm said, setting his tray down opposite me, “but I deal with them by playing a game.”
“Good for you,” I said. “I deal with them by wishing I’d disappear.”
“That’s not a very good game. I’ve got a better one.” He pointed to a table of cheerleaders, their impossibly short skirts flaring out over impossibly tanned thighs. “Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.” With each word, his chin moved, like he was counting them out. “If the building erupted in flames, I think we could let those three burn. What do you say?”
“Yeah.”
His eyes roamed across the room to the jocks. “Total waste of life,” he said, nodding toward one of the basketball stars. “Burn or save?”
“Burn.”
“Okay. So you know the rules. Now you pick one.”
I scanned the cafeteria, landing on a girl two years older than me who laughed at a dress I wore twice in the same week. “Her. The one with the big earrings. Little Miss Richie-Rich.”
“Good call.”
And it went on, until we’d burned every single body in the cafeteria except ourselves and one kid from the math club who Malcolm didn’t consider completely useless. In fifteen minutes, we got rid of the assholes, the idiots, the “uglies” (as Malcolm called them), and pretty much anyone else we could find an excuse to hate. We even took out the lunch ladies, just on account of them being fat.
“Feel better?” he said when we were, hypothetically, the last ones standing.
“I do. But we can’t burn everyone.”
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