Hummingbirds

by Joshua Gaylor

  “No, it’s really good.”

  “Well.” She shrugs. It feels like someone is laughing at her. She wonders if there is someone watching from behind the curtain and laughing at her.

  “I don’t know how you can write things like that. How you can know what people would say just by thinking about it. I mean, it’s nice. I wish I could do it.”

  She smiles guardedly and shrugs again. She wishes she could stop herself from shrugging, but it seems that her shoulders have their own agenda. Autonomic shrugging. The natural defense mechanism of awkward girls in their traditional habitat. She wills her shoulders to remain still.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “You just make it up. It’s not a big deal. You could do it. Anyone could do it.” Then it occurs to her that she should be complimenting him too. “You’re doing a really great job. I mean, the acting. You seem really natural.”

  “Thanks.” But he doesn’t seem interested in compliments anyway.

  When she starts to walk away again, he calls her back once more.

  “So listen,” he says, actually approaching her this time. He takes his hands out of his pockets but then doesn’t know what to do with them, so they just disappear back into the pockets. “Do you think you would want to go out some time?”

  She’s not sure what he’s asking. She wonders if the point of all this is to embarrass her somehow.

  “With me,” he adds when she doesn’t say anything. “Some time.”

  She feels, as she usually does, as though the world is setting her up to be the butt of a practical joke. Each reluctant concession brings her one step closer to public humiliation. She ventures a response: “What about Dixie? I thought you two…”

  “We what?” Only Jeremy Notion would be unable to fill in that blank. Actually, it reassures her that he’s not putting her on.

  “I thought you two were…together.”

  “I don’t know. I think that’s finished. She only ever calls me Ivan.”

  She laughs at this, despite herself, her hand flying up to her mouth. She doesn’t like the look of her mouth laughing.

  “So what do you say?” he persists, more confident now, looking at her from beneath squinted eyes—as though challenging her to say yes.

  And that’s when she finds herself saying, “Sure. That would be nice.” When in fact, she’s not sure at all. But before she has a chance to change her mind or qualify the yes into something else—a maybe or a no—he nods and tugs on his jacket and walks with a swagger out of the auditorium.

  A freshman girl who is part of the stage crew overhears the entire conversation and immediately runs to tell her friend. Her friend is the younger sister of a sophisticated sophomore girl who has many friends in the junior class. Then it’s just a quick round of whispered exchanges, and in five minutes the story has made its way up through the class ranks and all the way to Dixie Doyle and her friends.

  “Can you believe it?” Caroline asks. “I can’t believe it. Can you believe it?”

  “What does he want with her?” Beth says, outraged. “She’s always hunched over. Like a hunchback.”

  “Hiding her chest,” Andie says offhandedly.

  “Yeah, what’s that about?”

  “The bigger question,” says Dixie, who has been looking sternly into space, “is what she wants with him. After all, he’s got the intellect of an ice cube, bien sur?”

  “Bien sur, Dixie,” Andie says with a hint of a smile in the corner of her mouth. The other three girls have the sense that Andie is laughing at them a little.

  “Anyway, let’s get out of here,” Dixie says. “I could use some coffee. I’m feeling brittle all over.”

  Outside the light is saturated through a gray blanket of clouds, and there are no shadows anywhere. It is still daylight so the streetlamps haven’t come on yet, but there is the penetrating quality of evening in the air. It is an in-between time. As the four girls stroll down the sidewalk in the direction of the coffee shop, glazed-eyed men and women push past them in a hurry to get home.

  At the intersection, Caroline, who is possessed by the sudden urge to spin herself in circles, spins right into the street and is almost hit by a cab. The driver hammers his fist on the horn—but when Caroline raises her arm to wave apologetically, she nearly topples over again in a mess of girlishness, and the driver’s face melts into some slightly sinister version of a paternal smile. He waves back and looks like he might pull over and stop halfway down the street—but then thinks better of it and continues driving.

  “What do you think she does,” Dixie asks to no one in particular, “when she goes home at night?”

  “Who, Dix?”

  “Liz Warren. What do you think she does? Do you think she just takes off her little boxy shoes and goes straight to her homework? What do people like her do?”

  “She probably reads books,” Caroline says, holding out her hand to a nearby wall to balance herself. She has made herself dizzy twirling. “She’s really good in English.”

  “She’s good in everything,” Beth sneers.

  “So where does she read her books?” Dixie says. “I can’t picture it. On the couch? Do you think she lays on the couch? She probably eats chips while she’s reading. How can anyone eat chips and read all afternoon?”

  She really wants to know. It’s beginning to bother her. If she wanted to be like Liz Warren, Dixie wonders, could she be? Would she know what to do?

  “Also, here’s something else,” she continues. “How much time do you think she spends thinking about boys?”

  “Boys?” Beth says.

  “Boys. Do you think she thinks about boys much, or do you think she’s too busy reading and eating chips?”

  “I’m sure she thinks about boys,” Andie says. She’s pulling her hair into a ponytail and securing it with a band. A little bit of a wind has risen, and she doesn’t like strands of hair blowing in her face.

  “Do you think she talks about them with that Monica friend of hers? Do you think,” Dixie says, jabbing her right forefinger on her left palm like a judge with a gavel to make sure that everyone understands the gravity of the question. “Do you think they talk about boys?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?” Andie says.

  “I just can’t picture it is all.”

  “She’s not a Martian, you know. She’s just like us.”

  Dixie thinks about this. “Yeah, I guess so.” Above them the streetlamp finally comes on, but no one notices. Two blocks away from Carmine-Casey, they have reached the coffee shop where they will wait for a table in the corner—the one they like especially because they can look out the windows in two different directions. One of the Hispanic counter men knows them by name and calls them “mis ángeles sucios,” which they have figured out has something to do with angels.

  “Sure,” Dixie says, mostly to herself. “If I wanted to, I could go home and lay on the couch and read and eat chips. I could read a different book every day. I could talk about boys with Monica Vargas. I could say things that would make people confused.”

  When they open the door to the coffee shop, their counter man is standing there grinning.

  “If I wanted to.”

  But, secretly, she isn’t so sure.

  chapter 17

  “Everything’s different now,” the girl says. She’s got a handful of tissue in a wad that she keeps pressing against her eyes and nose. Her face is all red and wet like the inside of a tomato. Every now and then a little translucent trail of snot crawls down her upper lip, which she takes too long to wipe away. She keeps looking up at the ceiling and shaking her head—a solid but uncreative demonstration of despair. He would give it a B-plus if such performances were available for assessment. Maybe an A-minus if she were to incorporate a story of disillusionment from when she was “young.”

  “Sure,” she continues, “I’m excited about college. I guess. But what about everything here? Everybody’s acting weird. Like they’re pretending we’re all going to sta
y in touch when everyone knows as soon as we go off to college we’ll have new friends, college friends—and who wants to hang out with your high school friends then? And then there’s the other people, the ones who are just mean all of a sudden, like they can’t wait to get out of here and start disassociating themselves from this place already—and it’s like, can’t they wait? I mean—”

  She puts herself on hold to breathe and rub the tissue ball across her face, which leaves little white tissue crumbles on her cheeks.

  Her name is Dorrie Connor, and she opened the conversation with Binhammer like this: “I know I’ve been out of it for a few days, so can we talk and I’ll explain why?”

  The truth is that he has barely noticed her all year. She’s one of those students who sits off to the side and kind of blends in with the furniture. Has she been out of it? Was she ever in it? The only thing he can think of right now is that he’d like to brush those little tissue crumbles off her cheeks. But they would probably stick to his hand.

  He grimaces.

  “I mean, everything’s just weird, you know?” Then she starts crying in earnest—great big gulping sobs, her whole body hunched over so that he can see a little pouch of belly fat sticking out from under her shirt. It looks like a skin-colored balloon. One of those long balloons that circus people use to make animals.

  He looks at her as though through the wrong end of a telescope. She looks far away—tiny and insignificant. He thinks about her as being encased in a little glass sphere—one of those ribbons of color inside a marble, and that marble one of fifty knocking together inside some child’s chalk circle.

  He sniffs. Raises his hand and then lowers it.

  What does she want me to do? he wonders. What am I being asked to do now? Who is this girl? Who am I among the characters who populate her life?

  “Listen,” he says, leaning forward. Then he says some stupid conciliatory thing. Some small self-conscious truism that makes her nod bravely and purse her lips together with newly discovered inner strength.

  He thinks, Things are changing in her. She is surprised at how the world does not conform to her maturity. She is disappointed that her epiphany is only her own—that even though she is invited into adulthood, all the outfits remain the same. She thought she would at least get a new pair of shoes.

  “Thank you, Mr. Binhammer. Sorry about all this. Look, I went through a whole package of Kleenex.” She starts wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Here,” he says. “I’ll get you some more. Be right back.” This he can do. He can fetch tissue. He knows how to do that.

  It is also around this time—somewhere in this stumbling stretch of days—that Binhammer has begun to notice Sibyl taking more of an overt interest in Ted Hughes. So when he comes into the teachers’ lounge and finds the two of them sitting side by side on the couch, he and Sibyl share a brief glance in which he interprets a palpable sharpness, like a splinter that you can only feel when you brush your finger against it.

  He picks up a box of tissue from the table in the middle of the room. “A student,” he says. “Crying.”

  “What is she crying about?” Ted Hughes asks.

  But before Binhammer can answer, Sibyl takes Ted Hughes affectionately by the shoulder and gives him a shake.

  “But wait,” she says. “Finish your story.” Then, to Binhammer: “Ted was telling me the strangest story about a summer he spent in Turkey.”

  “It’s not much of a story,” he says to Binhammer apologetically.

  “Sure it is,” Sibyl says. “You’re a great storyteller. I bet that’s why all the girls love you. Girls love to be told stories.”

  Binhammer notices that she’s got one leg bent up underneath her and the other propped against the coffee table in front of the couch. He determines that he’s not going anywhere. So he shuffles around the teachers’ lounge, pretending to examine the calendar on the wall, rooting for something in his coat pocket, getting a cup of water from the cooler.

  He hears the end of the story. It’s a pretty good story.

  Then he remembers Dorrie Connor—that little shivering red-faced pup in the room down the hall. It’s been a good ten minutes. He takes the box of tissues and rushes out, but the girl is gone by the time he gets back to the room. He sees her at the other end of the hallway talking with two other girls. Their eyes connect and he holds up the box of tissues to show her. She smiles weakly and shrugs.

  The bottom falls out of whatever he and Dorrie had together. And she turns and goes down the stairs with the two girls. Leaving him standing in the empty hall, the box of tissues still held high in his hand.

  Back in the teachers’ lounge, Binhammer and Sibyl listen to Ted Hughes tell stories until a sleepy silence falls over the room. A random air bubble glugs to the top of the water cooler, and then it’s time to go home.

  Over the course of the next few days, Sibyl, observing the effect it had on Binhammer, decides to make a point of being seen with Ted Hughes in the hallways. Even to the extent that some of her students say to her, “I think Mr. Hughes has a crush on you, Ms. Lockhart.” She wonders if these same girls are speculating aloud to Binhammer—“Hughes and Lockhart, Lockhart and Hughes”—and the image of him shriveling up as he hears the talk makes her giddy with delight. She feels cruel and petty, but, honestly, she is through with making assessments all the time—she wants to be careless.

  Sibyl thinks the other women in the department, Pepper and Lonnie, are behaving like simpering little girls. Before meetings they can be found, as usual, in the faculty women’s room putting on makeup in front of the mirror—which they have always done in the past, but now with Ted Hughes in the picture the practice has an even more acute quality of a girls’ dorm room on Saturday night. Two men to garner attention from where before there was only one. They are mothers, both of them, mothers who remember girlhood. As a result, they do not seem to know whether they want to sleep with the two men or feed them grilled cheese sandwiches with the crusts cut off. The affection they lavish is hopelessly confused, desperately flip-flopping back over onto itself with glistening limpness.

  When they make room for her in front of the mirror, Sibyl digs through her bag to find a tube of lipstick, which she applies with two quick and decidedly self-confident strokes. The color is a deep, brownish red. She rolls her lips together and draws the fingernail of her pinkie around the corner of her mouth. Then she purses her lips slightly to see how she looks—which is a silly habit because she never purses her lips in real life. Next to her, the other two focus on their cheeks, their eyes. They have foam sponges that they use to pad on powder. They scrape and scour. For them, cosmetics are about disguising imperfection—cleaning up the canvas. For Sibyl they are about accentuating, highlighting, dramatizing. She is not afraid to have men look at her lips. She is not afraid.

  And she will go into the faculty meeting and sit next to Ted Hughes and refuse to look at Binhammer. And she will tell Ted Hughes again how much the girls love him, because that’s really the only thing these men want to hear. And then she will go home afterward and eat baby carrots from the bag and wonder why she is doing any of it anyway.

  Except that on the last day of the week before Veterans Day, Ted Hughes bursts into her class when she’s in the middle of teaching Jonathan Swift, and he’s got a wild look in his eyes.

  “Chalk!” he says. “I need some chalk!”

  “What?”

  “Chalk. I need to make a”—he gestures with his hand as though he were drawing on a blackboard—“a diagram.”

  She picks up a broken piece of chalk from the tray along the bottom of her blackboard. Meanwhile, he seems ready to burst—standing there wringing his hands and looking as though he is trying to do a complicated math problem in his head.

  “I just thought of something,” he says as he takes the chalk from her hand.

  Her students are silent, transfixed. They know how to pay attention when they see something happening.


  “The Wife of Bath,” he says, smiling gleefully. “She’s a man.”

  That’s when, chalk gripped in his fist, he puts an arm around her waist, seizes her body up against his so only her toes are touching the ground, and plants a big smacking kiss right on her lips.

  He’s gone before she knows what happened, and the girls in the class are screaming with satisfaction, waving their hands in front of their faces as though they have just taken a bite of something hot.

  She knows the whole thing is ridiculous and inappropriate, but she can’t help smiling. And she thinks maybe there is something to this Ted Hughes after all.

  Later, when he comes to apologize between classes, his hair is all out of place—like he’s been running his hand through it anxiously. She has seen him do this many times. It gives him an unfinished look, as if he were pleased to be jostled about.

  “It was inappropriate,” she says, aware that she is trying too hard to be chastising. “I mean, the girls—I’ll never hear the end of it. How am I supposed to teach Henry James after that?”

  “You’re right,” he says. He’s got his hands in his pockets, and he looks downward, even kicks the ground once or twice. “I’m sorry.” But he glances up from beneath his tousled, bowed head, and he grins.

  He’s not sorry.

  “You’re not sorry at all.”

  “No,” he says, straightening up. “But it would be great if you could forgive me anyway. Listen, here’s what we’ll do.” He seems to have forgotten all about his recent remorse. Now he puts an arm over her shoulder and uses his other hand to gesture toward the horizon, where he indicates a magnificent idea is on the rise. She has been witness to his explosive charm before—but it has never been directed at her with such focus. It is as though all that mercurial charisma is blossoming out, to be laureled all over her. “I’ll buy you a drink. No. Even better—I’ll buy you dinner. And I’ll tell you about the Wife of Bath, and we’ll talk about school. Because there are a couple people around here I want to get to the bottom of—and I think you can help me.”