“Maybe you’re right. How is it that you see things so clearly?”
She shifts in her seat and decides she would go to bed with him if he asked. She wonders what he would do if he knew it were that easy. All he has to do is ask. And she would lie there smiling politely and acquiescing. He could move her all around like a rag doll.
She bites on the edge of her thumb.
Mrs. Mayhew is chugging forward, saying something important, leaning over the podium in her paisley blouse with sweat stains under the arms.
“…Integrity. We like to think of it as a philanthropic quality, a moral stance akin to empathy and generosity. Why cherish integrity? So that we do not give ourselves an unfair advantage over others. So that we do not take advantage of the good faith of our fellow men and women. We do not cheat, for example, because it makes the playing field unfair, and others will suffer. But this is only half the story. All too often we forget the other, infinitely greater value of integrity: the impact upon ourselves. Why ought we not cheat on an exam? Why ought we not plagiarize an essay? Because of the subtle and insidious damage it does to ourselves. It is a luxury to think that our moral crimes only impact our fellow students, our community. We discover too late, only when we are older and we look back and see pieces of ourselves strewn on the road behind us—irretrievable crumbs of our identities—only then do we discover that it is a luxury we cannot afford….”
What do they want from me now? Binhammer thinks. What are they asking of me now?
The girl, Dixie Doyle, is staring at him. He sees her out of the corner of his eye, sitting there in the middle of that undulating sea of girlhood. Biting on her thumb. Orally fixated. That used to be the joke when he was in high school. He wonders if it still is now. She has her hair up in pigtails, a T-shirt pulled taut over those big breasts of hers. Somebody in the teachers’ lounge was talking about an article, something about the hormones in the milk we drink, new in the last twenty years. As a result the girls develop sooner. Develop bigger.
At least Dixie, buxom, silly Dixie, is better than that Liz Warren with her constant scowling. He has given up on her, having decided that he will never be able to win her over. There she is now in the back row—always in the back row—looking miserable.
These little girls like screaming merry-go-rounds—that hot, high-tempo calliope. These little girls like panicked birds.
Then he spots Sibyl Lockhart, giving him a stare like a hypodermic injection. There is no going back there either. He remembers his stomach like a bagful of acid—bent over double after she left that night—wanting to throw up. Thinking, She’s right, she’s right, she’s right.
He hears she has been talking about him to the students. But that doesn’t bother him. The girls are fiercely loyal to men, he’s found. Plus, he feels sorry for her. She is not the center of anything. Instead, she is herself the fallout from larger relationships—the dust kicked up in a yelling match. The dust that gets in your throat and makes you cough. And down she settles, pale and ugly and nothing left of her to speak of.
But she has things to say—and when she says them, she is usually right.
Mrs. Mayhew has stopped for a dramatic pause. She gazes down over the faces of students and faculty alike. She is more listened to for her silences than her words. What is the woman talking about? Binhammer thinks.
In the opposite corner of the auditorium, Ted Hughes leans back against the wall and gazes up at the tangle of light fixtures on the ceiling. The man with the impossible name. A snake charmer. His slow movements hypnotic and seductive to all the smart girls of the school. A magician on the stage, drawing your attention to one minor prestidigitation while there are always some other machinations taking place behind his back. No. No. He is not so much of a performer. Not so crass and artificial. No, Ted Hughes is just a man who people pay attention to. A guy with uncommon charm.
The things that Ted Hughes has stolen from him. His perfect wife. His angry near-mistress. His position in the all-woman Carmine-Casey English department. His reputation as a favorite among the students.
Binhammer gives up. The man can have whatever he wants.
Then he sees Ted Hughes letting his gaze fall tiredly from the ceiling of the auditorium and dance with overwhelming disinterest across the mass of faces between them—until he spots Binhammer and, eyes locking, gives him a wide, eloquent grin, as though the two of them know something that no one else in the world can understand.
Binhammer grins back. The man can have whatever he wants.
“A quarter of a century ago,” Mrs. Mayhew continues, drilling her voice into the ears of the girls nodding off before her, “integrity was something we talked about quite a bit here at Carmine-Casey. Founded on a tradition of palpable truths, we knew how concrete goodness and decency could be. That was before such notions became abstract—before we conceded to the prevarication of the age. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that our age is retrospective, constructing itself on the sepulchers of our fathers. He then went on to ask why it seemed impossible to enjoy our own original relationship to the universe. Well, Emerson had the luxury of blind anticipation. As it turns out, the sepulchers of our fathers were not so bad after all….”
Sibyl Lockhart feels like she’s watching a game of chess. In fact, she frequently feels that way—watching the people around her move pieces forward and back, advancing and retreating with their eyes, seizing with their words, creating boundaries that cannot be crossed and pockets of opportunity that seem to invite danger or at least confrontation. And every now and then she feels herself being picked up and placed on the board among all the other pieces.
Look at Binhammer and Hughes, grinning at each other like two little kids who don’t know their mother is watching. All these girls—the entire auditorium full of the glowing bodies of ridiculous virgins—and the two of them gazing at each other as though they are playing marbles, the click-clack of little glass baubles being shot and ricocheted elsewhere until there’s nothing left between them but an empty chalk circle.
What is it she wants? To be a part of that gaze? To be a member of that secret inner circle of grinners?
There are men who want her. Men who would love to take her home and lavish her with the attention of their eyes, their hands, their voices. How did she end up with these two? They really believe sometimes, she can tell, that they are interested in her.
And then there’s Bruce, her ex-husband. She does not hate him. She has never hated him as much as she feels she should. A long time she waited for the vitriol to rise in her throat. She waited, closing her eyes and feeling around inside herself for some seed of resentment that might nurture itself into full-blown wrath. But she never found anything like that. Just twangs of regret for a hundred different things that didn’t mean anything.
There were nice times. Moments collected like matchbooks. A bright sun coming through the blinds and tying up his sleeping form in cords of light. Him sitting on the kitchen counter watching her attempt some complicated recipe. Putting up a picture, his voice muffled by the nails he’s holding between his lips. The pressure of his thigh against hers, sitting next to each other on a subway train.
The recognition, at distinct moments—moments like framed pictures—that she is happy.
And then she stops herself. Embarrassed by the petty dramas of her own heart. She chuckles softly and looks around as though to see if everyone else is in on the joke.
To shake herself out of this, she thinks about what she needs to do. She needs to stop by the grocery store. She needs to get her watch battery replaced. She needs to change her sheets and do the laundry. She needs to go through her shoeboxes of photographs and put them into albums. She needs to finish grading last week’s papers.
She scans the audience of girls. There, in the back row next to her friend Monica Vargas, is that Liz Warren girl. She hasn’t taught her since the ninth grade, but everybody knows about Liz Warren. The jewel in the crown of Carmine-Casey’s senior class.
The favorite daughter.
She found Liz staring at her the other day—out in front of the school. Sibyl was smoking a cigarette and turned to find the girl standing at the top of the steps gazing down purposefully at her. She looked as though she were going to say something, her mouth opened then closed. As though Sibyl were a mathematical equation that needed solving. Sibyl could see the girl’s mind working, the machinery of that fevered little brain chugging overtime, adding and subtracting and shifting numbers from one side to the other until x = Sibyl Lockhart.
And, damn it all, wouldn’t Sibyl like to know what that x is?
So she smiled at the girl and the girl smiled back, but the moment was over and Liz, seemingly satisfied with her solution, hefted her massive backpack over her shoulder and loped away leaning sideways.
Mrs. Mayhew finally seems to be winding down her sermon. Integrity. It’s the kind of speech Mrs. Mayhew excels at. She seems to be fluent in the secret language of universal values—and listening to her, you begin to wonder what it’s like in that foreign land where the language is native. Maybe you’ll visit there one day.
“As Christmas quickly approaches, do not forget what the holiday stands for. Whether you are Christian or not, whether you are religious or not, Christmas is a time for kindness, generosity, and the strength of character to forget about your own problems for a while. And with that, on behalf of the administration and faculty of the school, I want to wish you all a very merry Christmas.”
There is a light smattering of applause, which becomes louder as the faculty see that they need to fill in the empty spaces by clapping themselves. Some of the girls who have been sitting with their heads on their arms, leaning against the seat in front of them, now look up, squinting against the light.
“And now,” Mrs. Mayhew says, waiting a few moments for the sudden chatter to die down again. “And now it is my pleasure to present the Carmine-Casey Choir.”
The curtain behind her rises to reveal thirty-two girls standing in escalated rows and wearing gold robes. Mrs. Clarkson, the music teacher, stands before them and raises her hands.
O holy night, the stars are brightly shining;
It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth!
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.
This hymn. The first music ever broadcast over radio. Liz Warren heard that once. She imagines the hymn coming through all that static. It must have seemed miraculous. Like the gates of heaven opening up, the light coming down in sharp beams between the clouds the way it always does on the covers of those pamphlets advertising God. She herself does not believe in God—but she can appreciate the aesthetics of it all. Those huge, arching cathedrals. The candlelight and the chalices. The music of voices breaking through the grinding static of the very first radio.
It is her secret that she is susceptible to such clichéd forms of beauty. When she feels her throat clenching—“Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices! O night divine…”—she swallows down her emotions with a sneer. It’s not that she’s embarrassed. It’s just that…it’s just that there are some things better enjoyed privately and not as part of some big, aching, weeping audience of stupid teenage girls.
Behold your King; before Him lowly bend!
Behold your King; before Him lowly bend!
Music like that is designed to grab you, designed to take you by the neck and throttle you until you see God. It’s times like this when she begins to think about what she has instead of God—times like this when she could almost be convinced of a whole assortment of sentimentalities. Even from the back row, where the auditorium is nothing but a mass of jaunty hairstyles, she could almost look kindly on Dixie Doyle, Beth Barber, and the other members of the Carmine-Casey Kit-Kat Klub. Now that things with Jeremy Notion have been aborted (the universe clicking itself back into proper realignment, is how she thinks about it), she wouldn’t begrudge Dixie anything. After all, the girl knows how to do things Liz herself could never do. Dixie has, Liz is happy to admit, little firecrackers of wisdom popping off in her head every now and then.
Truly He taught us to love one another;
His law is love and His Gospel is peace.
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother,
And in His Name all oppression shall cease.
The damn song. She wishes she could stop thinking of Christmases in the 1930s—children gathered around radios, hymns breaking through static, unlikely Depression-era joy and peace. Ugh. She has to stop before she feels the desire to braid friendship bracelets to distribute to everyone on graduation day.
Next to her, Monica Vargas seems to be doing calculations in her head. So instead she turns and focuses all her attention on Mr. Hughes, who is standing like a statue in the aisle, looking casually up at the ceiling as though God himself were sitting up in the rafters, dangling his sandaled feet. Mr. Hughes, so mildly bearing the fascination that all the girls have for him—entirely oblivious to the fact that he is so different from everything else in their lives. Like a paper-doll cutout stood in front of a painting, casting its shadow on the figures behind it and making it all look painfully two-dimensional.
It is true that he is something beautiful. She could stare at him and do nothing else and be quite content. She is aware—how can she put this?—she is aware of how aware she is of him.
After the first week of school when Binhammer mentioned, with implicit criticism, that Mr. Hughes shared his name with a famous poet, she went to the library and read everything she could find by Ted Hughes and then by Sylvia Plath—hating how everything about them was perfectly dramatic and perfectly beautiful and perfectly artistic and perfectly impossible. What she wanted was to be able somehow to see her way into this chaos of artistic tragedy. But tragic heroines have sharp, steely names like Sylvia Plath—a scalpel of a name. Not slurring, muddy puddles like Liz Warren.
Still, what she did find, in a poem that Hughes wrote about Sylvia, and which Liz copied out in tiny script on a scrap of paper and folded up to keep inconspicuously on her desk in her bedroom, was this:
There is no better way to know us
Than as two wolves, come separately to a wood.
Now neither’s able to sleep—even at a distance
Distracted by the soft competing pulse
Of the other….
What Liz feels for Mr. Hughes isn’t anything so ordinary as love or lust. Instead, it’s the feeling of him standing behind her when she’s writing something, or his voice speaking the words as she’s reading the hypnotically long and filigreed lines of Virginia Woolf. Catching a glimpse of him at the other end of the school hallway and feeling her spine go taut, instant erasure of all those other bodies between her and him. She imagines she can hear him breathing even above the screeching voices of all her “peers.” Not love. And certainly not the diminished form of the word that people like to use when they’re talking about teenagers: the crush. Not love, but just awareness. His presence always in the back of her mind, thudding away like a headache.
She knows though, that he is not so aware of her. She suffers no such girlish delusions. Though on one occasion, after having turned in a story about an aristocratic southern gentleman and a prostitute in a hotel room in Georgia (she was proud of her title, “Our Year of Moving Slowly”), she caught him staring at her in the back row of the room, could feel his gaze as she straightened her hair with her fingers. And then, when he handed back the stories at the end of class, hers was at the bottom of the stack—which is where teachers put your paper if they want to talk to you about it—and he stopped her as she was slinging her bag over her shoulder to leave.
“Your story was phenomenal.”
“Thanks.” She could feel herself rolling her eyes. She has been told that she doesn’t know how to take compliments.
“I don’t know how you do it,” he said, his eyes, all that weight, crushing her—the increased gravity of intimac
y that brings you to your knees. “You write like someone twice your age. A lot of moxie. Like an ex-stripper.”
So she writes like an ex-stripper. She has never received a better compliment. Honestly, she doesn’t think she would ever like to be a stripper, but she wouldn’t mind being an ex-stripper. The bells of tragedy ringing all around. The fallen honor. The smoky voice of experience. She covets that compliment, writes it down on the same piece of folded paper where she has inscribed the Ted Hughes poem.
And for a few days afterward, she thinks she can feel his awareness of her—two wolves come to a wood—him distracted by her pulse in the back row of the class.
Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices!
O night divine, O night when Christ was born!
O night, O holy night, O night divine!
The voices of the choir reverberate to a finish, and she is woken from her reverie. She straightens her hair and presses her palms into her eyes. She is supposed to have been learning about integrity. Those human values lost and regained. But she hasn’t been listening very closely, and she feels bad because she doesn’t want to be just another one of those fidgeting girls who can’t sit through a twenty-minute speech.
She glances over to where Mr. Hughes was standing, but he’s already gone. And as the girls begin to file out of the auditorium, she thinks maybe next time she’ll write a story about an old radio and things you can hear on it beneath all the static.
chapter 29
It is the last day of school before Christmas vacation when things come undone.
The Carmine-Casey faculty holiday party is an annual event organized by the members of the faculty council and held in the auditorium at seven o’clock in the evening on a day when all after-school extracurricular activities have been canceled to make sure that every last student is expunged from the building before the teachers start drinking. This year the sky is clear and cold and someone has decided to wrap the leafless sugar maple in lights—even though you would only catch a glimpse of it through the windows on your way to the auditorium.
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