Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  He’d waited for Kathleen to invite the girls along, but she never did. She’d given up on the ski trip instead and had come to his house for dinner. Marty and Debbie had made a giant floral arrangement for the table, with daffodils and forsythia. All through the meal they’d kept fussing with it, moving it around, petals drifting like dirty snow into the serving dishes. He saw Kathleen grow tight-lipped and grim and headachy, or at least she gave that impression, list-lessly prodding at the turkey on her plate. Pressing her fingers to her temples. But she was a teacher, he reminded himself; she knew what kids were like. He remembered how he’d kept watching her, gauging her reaction. He’d waited for a little affirmation: What a fine job you’re doing here, Graham. Your daughters are a delight. He could see she was trying her best. After dinner, she applauded Marty’s halting piano rendition of a Beethoven sonata. She let the girls lounge on the arms of her chair in the living room, while she and Graham tried to talk. She even let Marty thread a few soggy pale daffodils from the centrepiece into her hair. The flowers were still there, jauntily wilted, when Graham walked her out to her car and they said goodbye.

  “Miss Pennyfeather,” Marty and Debbie called her. They held their heads and clutched their stomachs and said, “Please remove that revolting food from my plate. Oh, I have a headache. Please, please children, do try not to be so noisy.”

  “When is Miss Pennyfeather coming again,” they said. “We do so miss her.”

  “Are you going to marry Kathleen?” Marty wanted to know.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not. Anyway, it’s none of your beeswax.”

  “Sneezewax,” said Marty. “Beeswax, kneeswax, fleaswax.”

  After his daughters had finished school and left home, Debbie to study nursing at university and Marty to hike with friends around Europe, Graham had found, to his surprise, that he had no tolerance for a solitary life. His house was out in the bush, at the end of a lonely dead-end road. He had no neighbours. He’d dreaded the long winter evenings, when the forest had seemed to creep closer to the windows and there were noises out there in the dark he couldn’t account for. He became obsessed with the idea that if anything happened to him, if he fell down the stairs, say, or were taken ill, no one would find him, perhaps for days. He couldn’t sleep, he never bothered to eat. He marked papers and wrote report cards and stared at the walls. It got so bad he’d considered asking his mother to move in with him, but she needed more care, by that time, than he could give her. The house, with its stairs and long narrow halls, would be completely unsuitable. Besides, he knew she’d relish the chance to tell her friends that her middle-aged schoolteacher son was afraid to be alone. Finally he’d decided to sell up and move into town. When his realtor brought a young couple to view his property, however, he’d panicked and cancelled the listing. In response, the prospective buyers dispatched their own realtor to reason with him. That was how he met Sarah. One Sunday morning she drove into his front yard in a mud-splattered old grey Peugeot station wagon, two massive dogs barely contained in the cargo area. Graham had gone outside to talk to her. He noticed her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was wearing jeans and a red sweater and little pearl earrings, luminous as snowberries. She gazed around at the garden, the trees, and at the house, with its wide veranda and dormer windows. He began to see himself through her eyes, the owner of a fine house set on fifteen-plus acres of mostly second-growth forest, with a pristine creek that never dried up, and stands of alder, maple, wild fuchsia, not to mention the rare and inestimable attributes of privacy and quiet and clean, unsullied air.

  “I have to tell you,” Sarah was saying. “My clients are both lawyers. I don’t mean to intimidate you, but they’re threatening to sue if you renege on the deal.”

  “There is no deal. The deal is off. Let them sue.” He’d squared his shoulders. From the beginning he’d liked arguing with Sarah. It made him feel as if he’d run a hard, fast race and come in first. Even when he kept losing the arguments, he still liked it.

  In the end, he hadn’t sold and Sarah’s clients hadn’t sued. To make up for the trouble he’d caused her, he’d taken Sarah to dinner. Afterwards, they’d gone to Sarah’s house, where he’d spent the night. The next morning he went directly from her place to school, exhausted, euphoric, his clothes scratchy with dog hairs, his shirt collar buttoned to hide the little blotches Sarah’s teeth had left, nip-ping at him repeatedly, like a badly trained puppy. Two months later, she’d sold her house and moved in with him. She painted the living room celery-green and put an antique rosewood table with a plant on it in the front hall, at the foot of the stairs, to keep the good fortune from flying out the door. That was the thing about Sarah: she was forthright and energetic and did what she liked.

  Last summer, ten months after they’d met, he and Sarah were married. The ceremony was held in the garden behind his house, beneath a hastily constructed rose arbour. Graham’s mother, in a cream linen dress and matching duster, was the guest of honour. Marty hammered out “Mendelssohn’s Wedding March” on the old piano in the living room with the doors and windows thrown wide open, so the music would carry outside. Sarah’s dogs wore little blue bow ties and went around sniffing at crotches and demanding a share of the smoked salmon canapés. Sarah admonished them, saying, sit, sit, but they refused to sit. They acted like it was their big day. When Graham kissed Sarah, the dogs growled menacingly. The wedding guests laughed nervously and stepped out of the way. “Doggy people,” his mother had commented, when he drove her back to the nursing home. “They’re not like normal people, are they? They let their dogs jump up on people and piss on everything. I have always been suspicious of May-December marriages. I just hope you know what you’re doing, Graham.”

  One day in April when Graham got home from school, he saw the dogs were penned up in the dog run, pacing in tense little circles, like stranded commuters. Sarah’s car was not in its usual place in front of the garage, either. Graham went into the house, he put his briefcase on the kitchen floor. He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of a chair, he got a beer out of the fridge. He checked the answering machine, but there were no messages. He finished the beer and opened another.

  The book he’d been reading at breakfast was on the table. It was a present from Sarah, something she knew he’d like because it was set in South America. He’d told her he always regretted not having travelled to South and Central American years ago, but when they’d had to cancel their trip to Costa Rica, he’d been secretly relieved. He was almost happier picking up second-hand travel guides at flea markets and simply reading about places like Costa Rica, one of his favourite imagined destinations because it had no army and ranked third in the world for longevity, due to a traditional diet of fish, fruit, and rice. Sarah had vacationed there once. She’d gone white-water rafting and had got an infected mosquito bite, even though she’d been assured there were no mosquitoes in Costa Rica. She’d seen a three-toed sloth in the branches of a trumpet tree, or at least that was what the guide had told her she was seeing. The rest of the trip was a kind of blur, she said; it was too much crammed into too few days. It’s no big deal, she kept telling him; everyone goes to Costa Rica.

  Yes, he’d said. But to him travel was a big deal. Tourism, in his opinion, disrupted fragile ecosystems and violated habitat. He didn’t especially want to see a tour guide’s version of a country. He wanted simply to wake one morning in an isolated, unspoiled village, in a small room containing a cot and maybe a chair, one window, one door.

  He opened the novel, leafing through a few pages. What he liked was that much of what happened in it was realistic, but then something fabulous and unnatural occurred, and these events were made to seem infinitely more acceptable and satisfying than ordinary life. Beautiful, fragile women gave birth to precocious, delicate children who survived against the odds and had the ability to see everything, in every corner of the house, as if the walls were negligible, transparent. The men were gangsters, priests, poets. Hardly eve
r, it seemed, were they schoolteachers. Nevertheless, Graham had the feeling the book was, in a way, about him. He, too, had a house full of memories; he, too, had a sense of impending doom, which he carried with him always, like a piece of costly, unlucky jewellery he couldn’t bear to part with.

  In the jacket photograph, Graham noticed, the author bore a striking resemblance to Elvis Presley, if, say, Elvis had survived into late middle age and had studied creative writing at some southern university.

  He tried Sarah’s cell phone, but she didn’t have it turned on. The kitchen was very clean. The dishwasher had been run and emptied, everything put away, and there was an unmistakeable sense of absence, of someone who should be here gone. He drummed his fingers on the counter. He went outside and let the dogs out of the run. They circled him suspiciously and began to gallop around, chasing leaves and the shadows of birds. They kept glancing down the lane, as if expecting Sarah to appear. Graham found himself doing the same thing. He thought he heard the phone ringing and raced into the house, but he was too late, there was no one there. He stood in the front hall for a moment, staring at the telephone, a little nauseous with anxiety and a gut full of beer. Then he roused himself and went back outside, letting the screen door slam shut behind him. The dogs Sarah called baby and precious and hand-fed buttered toast were not there. They had gone.

  The dogs were Rhodesian Ridgebacks, powerful, golden beasts Sarah had got through a rescue society in San Diego. They were abused once, abused and neglected, and they were still mistrustful and a little unstable, puppies one minute and big, neurotic dogs the next. They looked at Graham with their animal eyes and he looked back with his human eyes and tried to convey a sense of command without condescension, kindness without undue meekness. Their names were Hamlet and Quinn. Hamlet was older and bigger than Quinn. Quinn was shyer than Hamlet, and even less predictable. As a boy, Graham had once stolen a dog from a backyard. He and the dog had spent most of a day together, roaming the streets and nearby fields. He remembered the way the dog had hunkered down with him in the shade of a tree, panting, its eyes bright with curiosity and fear and what looked like deep sadness, an exact mirror of the tumult in Graham’s own heart. He threw a stick and the dog brought it back to him. He gave him a drink from a water fountain in a park. Late in the afternoon, as he and the dog had started walking back to town, a gang of boys had appeared and trailed them, shouting insults and obscenities and every now and then making a run at Graham. One of the boys threw a rock that caught Graham in the shoulder and he spun around in time to see a bigger rock strike the dog hard in the flank, causing his hindquarters to collapse. The dog wore a collar with a tag that said Jake, but Graham had already given him a new name: Pedro. Graham had charged headlong at the boys. He was outnumbered, but the boys were unbelievably stupid. He could kill them all with his bare hands, if he wanted, and he realized he wanted to do just that. He anticipated the satisfying crunch his knuckles would make as they smashed into someone’s teeth. Maybe the boys could see how angry he was, or it could have been the sudden appearance of two men on the other side of the street, but the boys turned and ran. Graham walked back to Pedro. The dog looked up at him, cowering. He thumped his tail ingratiatingly on the sidewalk. It’s okay, Graham had assured the dog, petting him. But they both knew it wasn’t okay, the world was basically a shitty place and for animals the situation was worse than for people.

  Pedro had been an affable golden retriever, a different species, practically, from Sarah’s dogs, which seemed to Graham more closely related to the gang of two-legged brutes that had attacked him and Pedro. Sarah was always telling him, in a prideful way, that if her dogs ever got loose they’d run until they caught up to something warm-blooded and they’d rip it to pieces.

  Graham stood at the edge of the forest. The piercing whistle he’d perfected in years of P.E. classes got no response and neither did his no-nonsense teacher voice. He hesitated to walk into the woods at this late hour. Darkness fell quickly in April, and the nights were still cold. The dogs would get hungry and come home soon of their own accord, anyway, he thought.

  Last Sunday he and Sarah had mulched the flowerbeds and spread lime on the grass, and then, as part of his ongoing, environmentally friendly battle against incursions by woodland insects, he’d sprayed insecticidal soap on the Japanese plum trees. Sarah stood at the foot of his stepladder and held up her hand for him to see her blister. “Look at this,” she said. “This is too much work. For two people this is just crazy.” She said perhaps, while the market was hot, he might want to reconsider selling.

  “I’m not selling,” he said. “Not as long as I live.”

  “People always say that,” Sarah said, picking at her blister. “You’d be surprised how many people say that. But sooner or later, they sell. They always do.”

  “Not me,” Graham said. “I’m staying here. I’m never leaving.”

  “You think you won’t leave,” Sarah said. “But you will. You’ll see.”

  “If you’d wear gloves,” he said, “you wouldn’t get blisters.”

  “I lost them,” she said. “They wore out.” She picked up the rake. Graham got off the ladder and started carrying it toward the garage. One of the dogs was stretched out on the grass next to Sarah, the other rooted around nearby in the tulip bed. Those dogs adored Sarah. She’d once told Graham they were her family. And now he’d lost them.

  In the house he sat down with his book, turning pages, unable to concentrate. At ten o’clock, Sarah phoned. He clutched the phone. All this time he’d feared a knock at the door with bad news: we regret to tell you. Thank God it wasn’t bad news. Sarah was in North Vancouver, with Darla, who’d called that morning to say she’d just undergone emergency outpatient surgery for an ovarian cyst. “Poor Darla, she’s still groggy from the anaesthetic,” Sarah said. “I’m going to stay with her tonight. I’m going to try to get her to eat something. Graham, are you there? How are Hamlet and Quinn?”

  “They’re fine, I guess,” he said. He hesitated. In the mirror above the telephone his image surged up, dank and full of deceit. You little liar, Marty and Debbie used to accuse each other.

  “You guess.” Sarah laughed. “What does that mean? Have you given them their dinner? Did you take them for a walk?”

  “They’ve had some exercise, yes,” he said.

  “Don’t forget to bring them inside tonight, okay? Tell them I’ll be home soon. Are you there, Graham?”

  “I’m here. I miss you,” he said.

  “I miss you, too, sweetheart,” Sarah said. “See you Saturday. I’ll let you know what ferry I’m taking.”

  During the night he woke. He went to the window and saw the dogs in the yard. In the moonlight, they appeared pale and insubstantial, yet they were real enough. He raised the window; they stared up at him, their eyes glinting in the moonlight. Or perhaps it wasn’t moonlight. Perhaps this was the light of dawn. He staggered back to bed. He told himself the dogs would be on the front porch in the morning, waiting to be let in. But when morning arrived and he went downstairs, he found they had, once again, disappeared.

  He read to his class the poem “Ozymandias,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley: “The lone and level sands stretch far away.” What this poem tells us, he said, is that even our most enduring monuments crumble and dissolve into nothing. Given time, all things will end. The Earth and its creatures and Earth’s brightest star, the sun, and even the universe, unimaginably immense as it is, will wind down, run out of energy, cease to exist, at least in any recognizable form. He told his class that when the news came on the radio that Elvis had died, he was finishing work on a deck he’d built on the back of his house. His wife, Annette, had gone into the kitchen for a couple of cold beers and when she came out she told him: Elvis is dead. And they had both sat there, disbelieving. August 16, 1977.

  Another thing: the poet Shelley died at sea, in Italy, in a sudden squall. His friends cremated his body on a beach. At the last moment someone leapt forward and
plucked the poet’s heart — which must have seemed immortal, or at least capable of immortality — from the flames. It was also said that an Englishwoman who’d known Shelley later met him on a street in a little Italian seaside village. He had looked well and cheerful, she’d reported and had smiled graciously as he passed by.

  Graham sat at his desk with his head in his hands, picturing the dogs, the damned dogs, at that very moment loping home with burrs in their coats, their tongues hanging out, flecks of foam on their muzzles. If he willed it to be so, it would be so. They would have had some kind of doggy adventure and then, satiated, their animal lusts for space and distance and conquest satisfied, they would have returned home and even now, even now, they would be sleeping on the porch in the morning sun.

  He’d phoned Marty — she lived not far away — and asked her to call by the house later this morning and let the dogs in. I’m pretty sure they’ll be there, he’d said, and Marty had said they’d better be, hadn’t they, and he’d said yes, they had.

  Kathleen walked into his classroom and took a look at him and said, “Graham. Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” he said. He tried to smile at her.

  “Are you sure? You don’t look so good.”

  “Well,” he said. He began to tell her everything, not leaving out the painful fact that he’d seen the dogs at dawn and had failed to bring them inside.

  “Have you phoned the animal shelter?” Kathleen said. “The police? Did you talk to your neighbours?”