The Tell

by Hester Kaplan

  “Mira’s a compulsive gambler,” he said. “An addict.”

  “Come on. You sure?” Mike dabbed his mouth, an uncharacteristically delicate gesture that spoke of his alarm. “No shit?”

  “No shit. I swear.”

  “Okay, okay. So what does a person do about that?” He was ready to fix this. Everything could be solved. “You get her into some program, some rehab thing, right?”

  “What does a person do? First a person begs and pleads and offers help and then a person moves out, because what else can he do? He loves her, but a person’s wife, it turns out, is someone he doesn’t know very well.”

  “Well, Christ, whose wife is?” Mike clicked his chopsticks again and looked across the highway at the Extended Stay, lit up in the cold dark.

  There was chair tilting, snoozing, and pencil chewing during last period. Owen read to his class long after he should have put the book down and had them working on their vocabulary lists. He took stock of their faces, but he couldn’t always tell who was listening and who wasn’t. His work in this room had contracted into a nut he could roll around in his mouth but not bite into. He looked at the ones who squinted, who needed glasses but couldn’t afford them. The radiators hissed. He put down the book and tried to lift a window. This and his groaning was a ritual by now that made the kids laugh.

  “One day I’m going to get this thing open,” he told them. “You’ll see.” When they tear the place down in the spring, he thought, and I can walk over the remains and smash them with my feet. When I’m either back with Mira—or not. He gave up and opened the classroom door. The air in the hall was cooler and silver gum wrappers eddied in a breeze near the stairwell.

  “Hey, mister.” Jacqui’s voice bounced down the hall. The tongues of her white high-tops flapped as she carried a baby, a flurry of pink in a car seat. “You want to see my baby, Crystal?”

  He stuck his head in his classroom and told the kids to read to themselves. He shut the door behind him. “Of course I do. Very much.”

  “You don’t want nobody to see me?” she challenged. Her clothes were too small, the blue denim pulled a taut white across her thighs. He wasn’t sure how she could breathe with her waistband cutting into her like that. She could be twelve or twenty with the lip gloss and the snap in her voice.

  “They’re reading,” he said. “But how are you, Jacqui?”

  She looked at the classroom door. “So what’s the book about?”

  He told her it was about a single mother sent to bed with cancer while her son learned to fend for himself and his younger sister. What was it with these idiotic books and their endless pairing of tragedy and optimism? Were they somehow supposed to be inspiring? He crouched by the baby and its glorious, squished face. Her lips mouthed the words of sleep. He touched the indent of her knuckles, and the smooth plain of her forehead, the sea-washed black hair in a flat whorl.

  He thought about how little he knew about Jacqui, who’d done this astonishing thing, having a baby, or any other of his students who opened for him only the narrowest view onto themselves. He wanted to know how they saw themselves in the world. Jacqui had been looking in the classroom and turned to Owen, who was still crouching. A comb had been plowed through her glossy hair and left perfect furrows. Having a baby hadn’t changed the skeptical, feisty line of her mouth, and some acknowledgment passed between them that for all the difference in their ages and stations, she had something he didn’t have, she’d experienced something he hadn’t.

  “She’s beautiful,” he said, and stood.

  “I know. They won’t let me bring her here, though. So that’s why I got to go to a different school. But I wanted you to see her, so I came.” She picked something off her sleeve, a woman’s weary gesture, a dismissal of men. “I was a good student, right? I was good in your class?”

  “I liked having you in my class. You always had something interesting to say. You’re a smart girl.” A smart woman? A stupid girl? What the hell have you done?

  She clamped her hands on her hips. “Then why didn’t you get me a card or a present or something?”

  Should he have delivered pink carnations and Mylar balloons? Mira would have said yes, that’s exactly what he should have done; this is Jacqui’s life, not yours, and it has nothing to do with how you feel and nothing to do with the scenario you’ve imagined for her.

  “I should have. I’m sorry. I have to get back in,” he said, his hand already on the door.

  “Yeah, you should have.” Hurt became accusation. Her head jutted at him in pursuit. “You don’t have nothing more to say?”

  “I’m glad you came by.” He gave her a chilled smile.

  “Right.”

  Jacqui picked up the car seat and it banged against her leg as she made her way down the hall. Back in the classroom, he looked out onto the street and saw a dusty gold minivan idling in front of the school. Jacqui’s mother was at the wheel and she flicked her cigarette onto the ice. The kids, unusually quiet for the moment, watched him. He told them to take out pens and paper and shut their books. Those who hadn’t already done so slapped them closed for maximum bang. There was rustling and griping, things dropping on the floor, pens that suddenly didn’t work. If you were in a classroom long enough, you’d begin to see how entire chunks of time were thrown away.

  “I want you to describe yourselves twenty years from now,” he said. “What you’ll be like and where you’ll be and what you’ll be doing.” He sat on the edge of his desk. He wanted to know that they’d be okay in the future. He knew not all of them would be.

  “How are we supposed to know?” Lily asked.

  “You don’t know,” he said. “You have to imagine, look ahead.”

  “So it’s not true?”

  He smiled. “I don’t know. It might be true. It might not. You’ll have to wait and see.”

  Hadn’t he, at their age, always tried to imagine his future?

  A few puzzled faces looked at the ceiling, while others had already started writing. The more they cared about what they were doing, the tighter they drew in an arm to protect their work. What he had in mind was for them to envision something beyond this afternoon. He would read their sentences later in his room at Extended Stay, and he’d try to get some measure of the distance between what they said they’d have—because it was always, in part, about having—who they said they’d be, and who they were now. In the past what his students wrote was sometimes confessional, sometimes fantastical, and there were times when he hadn’t been able to tell the difference. Many of their stories had shocked him with their lists of tragedies, but the sunny stories had shocked him equally with their optimism. Marcel looked up and gave him a charming smile. He was a smart and resolute kid, perplexed by his rowdier classmates. Next to him, Oscar, back from a day of suspension for fighting, hung over his paper with his head on a fist. Owen bent down next to him. His paper was blank except for the words “I want.”

  “You want what?” Owen asked.

  Oscar’s shoulders lifted. “I don’t know.”

  If you lacked everything, what did you want most? The boy didn’t pick up his pencil again. I want. Did that say everything? In ten minutes, the bell would ring and the kids would explode out of the building. It was a long time for the kid to stare at I want and not be able to go any further.

  Owen returned to his desk. It was ancient, heavy wood, scarred and stained and burned in spots from the days of classroom smoking. Teachers who’d once sat at this desk had left their marks in the drawers, talismans, souvenirs, things taken from kids and never returned: a butter knife, pepper spray, a flip book of a woman undressing. Owen didn’t know what he would leave at the end of the year. When he looked at the kids, he felt like he was by the pond on a breezeless day, trying to detect the unseen forces that touched the surface and made the water ripple and tap the shore.

  He sat in the Bright opposite Anya’s apartment. It was just after five o’clock, and he hoped to catch her coming back fro
m class. He wanted to say something about the kiss, but he wasn’t sure exactly what. Across the street, a man sold fish from the back of his pickup. This was the same guy he’d bought fish from years before when he’d lived in Fox Point. Glistening, black-eyed fish, on the cheap side, smelts lined up like slices of greased metal on beds of ice. Owen had scribbled down a recipe the man had recited for him. It was the first dinner he’d made for Mira in her kitchen. She’d been fascinated by the way the bones pulverized between her teeth.

  At the front counter of the Bright, a woman whose dark bangs shaded her forehead stumbled on a corner of the threadbare rug and tipped her mug of coffee. She yelped and spun her hand around like she was trying to unscrew it from her wrist. Owen jumped up with some napkins. She thanked him, and then sat at the table farthest from him where she took a textbook from her bag and began marking it with a highlighter. The place was scattered with people like her, students of something, hybrids, transplants, gentrifiers who might live in the neighborhood but clearly weren’t from it. No native would enter the place, with its bad neon art for sale, its gluten-free brownies. Even the name wasn’t right. He knew what it was like to be in Fox Point, but not of it. When he’d lived there, the neighborhood had been comfortingly cool to him, as though it already knew he wouldn’t be staying long. It had been indifferent to his despair, its pride and dark dealings undeterred. It was still that way.

  He took his father’s book from his bag. On the cover was a photograph of the ocean during a snow squall, and he recognized the tiny speck to the left as the shingled, porched house that was on the highest bluff above the sea in Truro. One winter, the ocean had surged over the dunes during a storm and wiped out the road leading to the house. It had also buried the parking lot that teemed with cars jockeying for spaces in the summer. The next day, his father had taken him out—to see the earth changing, he’d said. They’d hiked up through the cold sand to the porch so they could look back and measure just how far the storm had pushed the land. The dunes slid into the marsh. Owen was more interested in peering through the seams left between the glass and the plywood of the boarded-up windows. Inside, there was a single chrome chair in the middle of a room. Owen knew he’d seen something he wasn’t going to forget. “Look,” his father had urged him, pointing to the road, “it’s going to be a major job to clear all this.” A new landscape would emerge. But inside was the story of a life—whose chair, whose marooned house? Every inch and detail had been someone’s intention. Now Owen realized that this was what the empty rooms in Wilton’s house had first reminded him of, the inability to ever know all the facts that make up a person’s history. Mira’s rooms were crowded, and still she was unknown to him.

  Outside, a few shivering teenagers loitered in the well-lit playground. A skittish man, fists jammed in the pockets of an army jacket, came inside. This was the man from Brindle’s party, the same man who’d stolen the clay dog. Persecution thickened his gaze, and Owen could see that he carried an ancient, wordless grudge. The woman who’d spilled her coffee glanced at him. It must have been the flash of her purple scarf or her cherry-red glasses that made the guy veer toward her.

  “Do you mind?” she said. “Moving back a bit, giving me a little space?”

  “I’m not doing anything.” The man sounded like a pissed-off kid and took a step closer.

  “Just move back. A few feet. That’s all I’m asking.” She returned to her book, but her knees bounced under the table.

  People glanced up and then down again, ever curious, but never really moved these days. The man flexed his hands in his pockets. Owen pushed back his chair. He felt none of his old reluctance. He liked the fact of his height.

  “Maybe you should just leave,” he said.

  The man was instantly acquiescent, no fight to him at all, which made Owen an instant bully. He put his hands up and backed up. “I’m going,” he said. “Calm down, big guy.” He gave Owen the finger. “Cocksucker.”

  The bells on the door barely spoke when he closed it behind him. A couple of people shook their heads and went back to what they’d been doing. Out on the sidewalk, the man drifted across the street where the teenagers cut him a bored glance. Owen turned back to the room, but no one would look at him. The girl behind the counter scowled.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” the woman with the purple scarf said. “He’s a pain, but he’s harmless. He would have moved in a minute. I think you kind of have a problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Forget it.”

  “No, I’d like to hear it.” Was he going to bully everyone now?

  She took off her glasses. Lines appeared at the corners of her eyes. She was older than he’d imagined. “You’re one of those self-appointed defender types. Look, someone would have bought him a cup of coffee eventually, and he would have left. That’s how it works here. He’s a regular, and who are you? I mean, have you ever even been in here before you lay down the law and act like an asshole?”

  “You looked like you needed help.”

  “But I didn’t.”

  Owen had confirmed for her and for everyone else in the place what they’d suspected about him from the minute he walked in: that all big men are aggressive dogs straining at the leash. When he looked outside again, the man in the army jacket was on the corner talking to someone in a buttery suede coat, long hair whipped up by the wind. It was Wilton who fished some bills out of his pocket and handed them over. Wilton’s approach to the door was as theatrical as the other guy’s departure, and the bells played a cascade of sound. He surveyed the place long enough for a few people to acknowledge him. Wilton was a regular, it appeared.

  “This is a surprise.” He gave Owen’s shoulder a squeeze. “May I sit with you? I’ll be right back.”

  On his way to the counter, Wilton said something to the woman with the purple scarf and she glanced at Owen. Wilton nodded. At the counter, he leaned on the glass display case and rested his chin boyishly in the web of his fingers as he flirted. He came back with a cup of coffee and pulled out a chair, angling himself in order to get a view of the street—and Anya’s apartment. “Now, tell me why you’re here.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Ah.” Wilton sipped his coffee. “Sometimes I wait for Anya at this hour. If she wants to see me, she comes in. If not, she pretends she hasn’t seen me. No more dates, no excuses or standing me up. None of her waffling. I’m done with that. Even a masochist has his limits. That’s one of Anya’s classmates over there, by the way.” He motioned at the woman with the scarf. “She thinks you’re a menace. I told her you were a pussycat.” He laid both hands flat on the table, and his expression turned to concern. “How have you been? We haven’t talked in a while.”

  As a kid, Owen had been tossed around by the strongest ocean waves, and for those moments underwater he couldn’t tell which way was up. That was the sensation he had now, caught in some dangerous tumble with this man.

  “How the hell do you think I’ve been?” he said.

  Wilton sat back. “Well, yes, Mira told me that you’d left. I’m very sorry to hear that. You love each other very much, that’s clear. I know you’ll work out whatever it is.”

  “Whatever it is? You know exactly what it is.”

  Wilton pressed his hand to his mouth, one of Mira’s gestures, and shook his head, but his attention was drawn to a car that pulled up across the street under an oily column of light. A young guy got out and stood on the sidewalk while his passenger hauled something from the backseat. There was Anya’s bumblebee hat bobbing above the roof of the car. Her friend was talking, clearly urging her in some way, and she kissed him on the mouth to quiet him.

  “That’s the son of a bitch who’s sleeping with my daughter,” Wilton said. He wasn’t thinking about Mira at all, and maybe never had been. She’d been a diversion—they both had been—while Anya was the real thing.

  Anya ran across the street and into the Bright, spotted her friend and waved, and then
turned as if someone had whispered behind her to pay attention. Distress crossed her face. She pulled at her earlobe. Her eyes met neither man’s, but lingered instead on the space between them before she turned and left. Wilton gave Owen a cool, competitive look.

  “Now we’ll never know which one of us my daughter doesn’t want to see anymore,” he said and got up to leave.

  Owen shuffled. He was late to his first class, having once again mistimed his waking, his showering, his Monday morning commute from Extended Stay, but in no real hurry either. What kind of trouble could he get in anyway? At the far end of the lockers, Mrs. Tevas was taping up a poster that said: Reading Is Traveling Without Ever Having to Leave. The words floated above something that looked like Emerald City.

  “But don’t you think leaving is a good thing sometimes?” he asked, holding up a corner for her.

  She glanced at him, patient but not particularly playful. She took in his wrinkled shirt, the crumbs from the donut he’d gobbled in the car. “I hear you need a place to stay for a while.”

  If he passed her desk in the library at certain times, her eyes looked gold. Now they were dark and exacting, and she was the holder of information about him that she showed no discomfort in having. Information, gossip—an entitled and potent Rhode Island mix that flowed from certain taps. Mike obviously had told his friend, the principal, who’d told her friend Rosalie Tevas.

  “That’s true—for a while, nothing permanent.”

  “You hope,” she said.

  “Yes. I hope.”

  She finished taping up the poster and swung the roll of tape around her finger. She knew of a furnished apartment, top floor of a house in Fox Point he might be interested in. “Nothing permanent,” she stressed again.

  After school, Owen went to the Ives Street address. Mrs. Tevas answered the door. She hadn’t told him this was her house. She’d changed out of her work clothes into a purple warm-up suit. He felt as if he were seeing something he wasn’t supposed to see. Without her heels, she was even shorter, which only made her more commanding. He remembered how he’d seen her fiercely confront a student who’d threatened her. She’d pushed the kid up against the wall, grabbed the neck of his shirt, stuck her face in his. Her husband, George, passed behind her and gave Owen a cursory look. As she opened the door to the apartment upstairs, the late winter gray fell into the concern on her face. The furniture belonged to her son, she explained, as did everything else in the three rooms. The poster of the World Series–winning Red Sox. The URI beer mugs on the bookshelf, the cacti in tiny pots. This was his place, spotless, with the caustic odor of Ajax in the air. Even the old chenille bedspread with little white balls was perfectly even.