Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  Mrs. Mayhew nods.

  For three more long minutes the two women sit in silence. Mrs. Mayhew is one of the matriarchs of the school—not only the chair of the English department, but also one of the three headmistresses, one of the triumvirate of broad-shouldered and hefty women who watch like perched carrion birds over the school. The three women are of the industrial age, their spines girded by steel and their faces ferrous with the ash and grime of harder generations.

  No one is comfortable around Mrs. Mayhew, who, indeed, seems like an algebraic counterfunction to the theorem of comfort. The only exception to this rule is Binhammer. Many people have said that Binhammer is able to evoke, alchemist-like, whatever half-smiling affection remains unincinerated in the furnace of her heart.

  At this moment, therefore, Lonnie Abramson is beginning to wish she had not been so eager to be on time for this meeting.

  “They’re quite some students I have this year,” she says, fixing her hair. When Mrs. Mayhew doesn’t respond, she repeats, as if remembering a distant dream, “Some students…”

  Finally Pepper Carmichael shows up, and even though the two are not the most intimate of friends, Lonnie wants to get up and hug her. Pepper is the one who, after Lonnie told her about a student who had the nerve to characterize her earrings as “grandmother jewelry,” said, “Oh, let the girl vent. The poor thing—already feeling the fingers of age, no doubt. Creeping along her skin, like they do.” Pepper’s specialty is empathy. She grew up in California. That’s the way people are out there. Lonnie can never entirely clear her mind of the image of a young Pepper sitting on a beach at night, in a circle of long-haired boys and bead-wearing girls, passing some narcotic cigarette to the person next to her. For Lonnie, Pepper is one person who represents many—she stands in for hundreds of people whom Lonnie will never meet.

  Right away the two fall to talking in hushed tones, as though they themselves are students and Mrs. Mayhew is the teacher waiting to begin class. They pull out their class lists and start comparing students.

  “Oh, her,” Lonnie says. “You’re going to have a time with her.”

  “Needy?”

  “If you can call it that.” Lonnie herself would call it being a melodramatic little overachiever. But she suspects that Mrs. Mayhew favors the grade-grubbers, that Mrs. Mayhew sees them as industriously pounding away at the door of the American dream—and so she keeps her mouth shut.

  Then she puts a finger on another name in Pepper’s class list and has begun to frown expressively—as though this one, well, this one needs no comment—when Sibyl appears in the doorway and starts apologizing in a way that makes everyone look at her at once.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she says. “I wish I could say that it’s not my fault. But I’m just such a goddamn mess today….”

  “What’s the matter, honey?” Pepper says.

  “Oh, it’s nothing, really.” Sibyl lets her handbag drop on the table, and it sounds like it’s filled with marbles. Her colleagues imagine that the inside of her purse must look like a cosmetics counter when you bring it all out into the open—even though Sibyl never seems to have a moment to put any of it on. Lonnie has observed her applying lipstick as though it were a timed event. Especially now that Sibyl has been separated for half a year and her divorce is imminent, as her colleagues know, she sometimes looks at the makeup in her purse with a smirk of resentment, as though the rouges and eyeliners themselves are responsible, at least in part, for the elaborate masquerade her marriage has been for ten years. “I’m just being silly. That’s all. The first day always sneaks up on me.”

  “Sure, of course,” Pepper says, shifting into demonstrative concern. “But you’re okay, right? I mean, it’s nothing to do with…”

  This is the first time that Mrs. Mayhew raises her eyes, setting her hammered gaze upon Sibyl. Everyone, even Mrs. Mayhew, knows that Sibyl’s relationship with her husband has been disintegrating for a long time.

  “Oh, Christ, no. Bruce is one thing I can count on. He’s the most consistent jackass I’ve ever met.”

  Mrs. Mayhew hmphs in satisfaction and looks back down at her plan books.

  In the pause that follows, Sibyl begins to sift through her bag. She’s not looking for anything in particular, but she doesn’t want to meet anyone’s eyes at the moment. So she stares into the shifting tangle of objects and thinks about the woman in today’s newspaper who was shot in the head by a mugger because she wouldn’t give up her purse. There must be something important in here, she thinks. There must be some important wedge of my identity that I would be willing to die for. But from here it just looks like so much confusion.

  Then she looks around the room and says, “So where’s our boy?”

  “Not here yet,” Lonnie says. “But I reminded him earlier, so he knows about it.”

  Pepper glances at the three other women, saying, “It seems so much smaller now. I mean without Maureen. Our department is perishing.”

  “How is Maureen?” Sibyl asks. “Have you spoken to her?”

  Pepper nods. “She called me last week. She seems to be doing fine.”

  “But she’s gotten into the habit,” Lonnie adds, “of using her baby and her book as metaphors for each other. She told me the baby’s growing a lot faster than the book. And that the baby is producing more dirty diapers than she is producing pages.”

  “But it is an adorable baby,” Pepper says. “Did you see the announcement?”

  “Oh god yes.” Lonnie’s hand flutters up and presses itself to her chest as though she has just had the first bite of some sumptuous dessert. “That baby is one in a million.”

  “Gorgeous,” Sibyl agrees, and then she tries to remember what the baby looked like. She is sure she received the announcement, but now she can’t recall. Did the baby have a lot of hair? That’s something people usually admire in babies.

  “And the size of that baby!” Lonnie marvels, which brings the conversation around to childbirth—Lonnie and Pepper sounding like the younger CC girls who come back from camp and want to compare their experiences.

  Then Lonnie turns to Sibyl and starts to say, “So when—” and realizes too late that it’s not the appropriate time to be asking Sibyl about her plans for children, now that her marriage is in the dumps. So she stumbles and checks herself, looking to the door and starting over with, “So when is Binhammer going to show up?”

  And it is at that exact moment that he comes around the corner and into the room, looking distracted. For a second he doesn’t seem to see anyone, and then he looks at the four women around the table and smiles. “Am I late?”

  “No, no,” Pepper says automatically, even though he is, in fact, quite late.

  “Just your regular,” Lonnie says.

  Each of the women has left a place open beside her at the conference table, and Binhammer has to decide who to sit next to. He does some quick calculations in his head and picks the seat next to Lonnie, who leans over and confides to him that he just missed a great conversation about childbirth.

  “Oh,” he says, “my favorite subject.” Then to everyone else, “Who doesn’t love a good childbirth story?”

  Pepper chuckles and makes a swatting gesture at him. “We were talking about Maureen.”

  “Oh, sure,” Binhammer says. “How is she doing? Do we have a replacement for her yet?”

  “That’s one of the things,” Mrs. Mayhew says, emerging from her rigid silence, “that we’re going to talk about today.”

  When Maureen left at the end of the previous school year to become a stay-at-home mother and novel writer, it was unclear whether it was just a temporary leave of absence or whether she was going to rely on her husband’s considerable income to leave teaching for good. Then, a few weeks before this current year began, she decided that she wouldn’t be coming back, leaving Mrs. Mayhew a very short period of time to find not only a temporary substitute but a permanent replacement.

  “We have found someone,” Mrs. Mayhew say
s now. “He couldn’t start today because we didn’t give him very much notice, and he’s out of town at a conference. But he’ll be here starting next week.”

  “He?” Binhammer says.

  “Uh-oh, Binhammer,” Sibyl says maliciously. “Looks like you’re not the only cock in the henhouse anymore.”

  Lonnie recoils from the vulgarity. Mrs. Mayhew appears not to have heard.

  “I think he’ll fit in just fine,” Mrs. Mayhew continues. “He hasn’t taught high school before, but he’s highly qualified. Highly qualified. And I think he has the characteristics the school is looking for.”

  The way Binhammer looks right now—Sibyl wants a picture of it—it’s obvious he’s looking right through Mrs. Mayhew and into his own future, looking ahead to the next faculty meeting where his won’t be the only male voice echoing through the room. Little by little, he’s shivering to pieces on the inside, she can see that. It’s a serious blow to his identity. If he’s not the only man on the faculty of the Carmine-Casey English department, then what is he? Just another teacher.

  Yes, this is a picture she wants to keep. Maybe that’s what she would like to find at the bottom of her purse, underneath all the confusion. The poor suffering boy. The little soldier, knocked over like the slow-moving king in a game of chess. There’s something beautiful about him when he’s damaged. Men are like phoenixes: their tragedies are gorgeous because everyone knows how lovely they will be when they rise. When he rises.

  She has seen him run his hand through his hair, when he thinks no one is looking. She has seen him lean against the window frame in the teachers’ lounge and rub his eyes until they are red and tired-looking—desperate and private. So small, his shoulders hunched against the cold glass of the windowpane. His gaze sunken into himself with the gravity of distant, objective despair. As though he were watching a film reel of his own past. She has seen his hands, knotting themselves together, disclosing things he would not like disclosed.

  Times like this, she would watch him until he would notice her gaze and straighten himself up with immediate and smiling rigor. Clicking back into place, click, click, snap, ready again to tell everyone his stories.

  “Hey,” he would say. “You wouldn’t believe what I just saw.”

  “What? What did you just see?”

  “Down on the sidewalk, these students…” Then, shrugging, fixing himself, soldering up all the seams. “It wasn’t anything, really. Listen, you want to get out of here for a while? I need some coffee.” That’s what he would say.

  Now, she thinks, looking at him across the conference table, now I will watch his hands. What will he tell me with his hands?

  He leans back in his chair, putting the weight of his upper body on his left elbow against the arm of the chair. He leaves his right arm extended and resting on the table, his long forefinger casually following a scar in the wooden surface. He never writes on the board in his classroom, so his hands are never dry and chalky like the rest of theirs. Then she sees Lonnie staring down at his hand, and she knows that the other woman wants to reach out and cover it with her own, to pat it softly with maternal affection.

  And so Sibyl looks away, hating herself.

  But Mrs. Mayhew has said something to her and seems to be awaiting a response.

  “I’m sorry,” Sibyl says. “What was that again?”

  “Mentor. I wonder if you could mentor him. It would simply involve your being available if he has any questions.”

  “Oh, sure. Of course.”

  “Well,” Binhammer says, raising himself to his full seated height and leaning forward across the table. With the look of brave determination in his face, it might appear as though he were going to scale a mountain. “I’m looking forward to meeting him. It’ll be nice having another man on the faculty. Maybe we’ll go hunting together. Or work on his car.”

  Lonnie smiles and swats his forearm.

  “What’s his name, anyway?”

  “Well,” Mrs. Mayhew says, and her eyes squint as though in distant memory of girlishness. “That’s something you’re not going to believe.”

  chapter 4

  Ted Hughes. That’s the name. Ted Hughes. As in Ted Hughes, the husband of tragic suicidal poetess Sylvia Plath. As in Ted Hughes, husband of not just one but two women who took their own lives. Shockingly handsome Ted Hughes—the face to die over. Ted Hughes, the poet laureate of England. Ted Hughes, who is buried in Westminster Abbey and once wrote about the “maggoty deaths which poison our lives.” That Ted Hughes. Except for one thing: Ted Hughes the poet is really named Edward, and this Ted Hughes is a Theodore.

  So who is this person who would use the nickname Ted, knowing, as he must, what literary baggage it carries?

  A week after the department meeting, Binhammer still has visions of Ted Hughes reincarnated, strong jaw and dark hair, wandering the halls of Carmine-Casey and teaching the poetry of e. e. cummings to his girls. His girls. He imagines Ted Hughes, a scarf draped around his neck and a pipe in the corner of his mouth, standing wistfully in front of the classroom—smugly unselfconscious about his own masculine beauty. Ted Hughes is the smart girl’s dream—the vaguely snobbish nonchalance, the inspirational intellect, the hint of despair behind the eyes of clear, electric blue. He will leave a trail of Carmine-Casey girls in his wake—girls writing morbid poetry in their journals at night and feeling suddenly uncomfortable in their starched clothes.

  He imagines what will happen.

  The place will become a literary powerhouse. The girls’ poems will be published in the New Yorker and Granta, and people will start talking about the Carmine-Casey phenomenon. How is it that so many vast poetic talents have emerged from a small prep school on the Upper East Side? Interviewers will come to the school and find the girls in the courtyard, practicing their expressions of disdain—one eyebrow raised, but not too much, because there’s pain and experience in that eyebrow as well. They will take a picture of the girls, twenty-seven of them, grouped together in grainy black and white, all with deadpan expressions and many of them not even looking at the camera.

  None of them will say anything about Ted Hughes, because each one will believe in her heart that her own relationship with the man is secret and supreme. The critics will be mystified. The Carmine-Casey girls will become the cultural renaissance of a literary form thought dead—other girls around the country will start wearing their hair like the CC girls do.

  And that’s when the suicides will start. Because no girl loves Ted Hughes for long before she has to kill herself from an overdose of passion. And their suicides will be equally literary. They will stick their heads into ovens. They will load their pockets with rocks and walk into the ocean. They will throw themselves beneath trains or have the local pharmacist mix up a suspension of arsenic so they can quaff it.

  They will be beautiful and tragic and wasted. And Binhammer won’t be a part of it.

  Sitting now in front of his classroom, he looks up at the ceiling to continue the scenario and sees tiny cracks emerging in the paint. People at dinner parties will say, “Oh, you teach at Carmine-Casey? Did you know any of those girls who killed themselves? I heard they were all in love with the same teacher. Did you know him?” The cracks in the ceiling. He thinks, This place is falling apart. What do they want from me now?

  The students staring at him believe that he is considering a point just made by a girl in the front row. She claimed that Edna Pontellier, heroine of The Awakening, is like the mockingbird in the first scene—all she does is parrot back the things she’s told by others. The girl looks pleased with herself, but after a few moments it’s clear that Binhammer has gotten distracted by something.

  “Mr. Binhammer?” Dixie Doyle says.

  He looks down from the cracks in the ceiling. Before him is a class full of girls with eyes variously wide and tired.

  “Yes, definitely,” he responds suddenly. “No, that was a good point. A good point about Edna…”

  Then he sits and r
uns his eyes up and down the rows of girls, noticing something.

  “Wait,” he says. “What’s with all the straight hair?”

  Today, for some reason, all the girls are wearing their hair in absolutely dead straight locks. They look like swamp vines. An everglade of teenage girls. There is something alien and unnerving about it—twenty straight-haired teenage girls looking at you with silent expressions.

  “It’s for our yearbook pictures,” Dixie explains. “They’re being taken today during lunch.”

  “Yearbook? But it’s only the second week of school.”

  “I know, but when you’re a senior…” She trails off as though it were self-explanatory.

  “Yes?” Binhammer says. “What about seniors?”

  “You know,” Dixie continues, rolling her eyes. “The senior pictures are in color. And they’re bigger. You have to look really good. It’s our senior year, Mr. Binhammer. Some girls have to have their picture retaken four times before it comes out right.”

  “Oh,” Binhammer says, nodding. Then, “But why straight hair? I mean—”

  But the bell rings before he can finish his thought, and the girls pop up from their seats as though they were on some mechanical trigger. He watches them march out, Liz Warren sullen as ever and refusing to even glance in his direction, Dixie giving him a wide, toothy smile. At the last minute Dixie seems to remember something and comes back to his desk.

  “By the way, Mr. Binhammer, do you think you have time to meet with me some time? About my paper, I mean?”

  “What paper?” he says. “There’s not a paper due for three weeks.”

  “I know,” she says, “but I had some ideas I was thinking about, and I don’t know if they’re any good or not.”

  He stares at her. He wonders how long her hair can stay straight like that. He always liked her hair before: big curls that seemed to hold together like winding ivy on a wall. He could always pick her out of a crowded hallway, even from behind. He could call her name—“Dixie!”—and when she turned around, there would be her face, all lit up and puckered with the redness of girlhood.