by Michael Oren
Perhaps that contrast, far more than their kindred desires, united them. Beatrice, a timid substitute just out of a Catholic junior college, terrified enough by the thought of a classroom of unruly fourth graders but also grappling with urges she could neither condone nor define. And Eleanor, ten years her senior, seemingly sure of herself and of the façades she needed to maintain.
So did the entire staff of Pleasantdale Elementary, all of them women except for the sixth grade’s Mr. Hatchwell, who was actually more womanly than the rest. The oldest were holdovers from the Depression years, when schools hired only single people who did not have spouses to support them. This left the unmarried women—spinsters, society branded them—who, behind the blackboards, forged secret, desperate, bonds.
And none was faster or more frenzied than Beatrice and Eleanor’s. The principal promptly took the newcomer under her protection and, eventually, during one drizzly Christmas break, into her bed. The flattery, if not the attraction, was mutual. If not drawn physically to the short, broad-hipped Eleanor, her features strictly functional, Beatrice admired her authority. She envied the diplomas on the principal’s office walls that boasted of a real education. But what Beatrice brought to the bed surpassed any stature or pedigree. She brought youth—sprightly, innocent, curious—and a thirst for untapped intimacies.
So it continued for many years, the two of them keeping proper distances during the school day and, on the weekends, slipping away to a bungalow in the mountains. There were some trips abroad—to Spain and the Grecian Islands—and many Thanksgiving dinners. Yet the most cherished passage of their lives came at the end of each summer, at the beach where the other vacationers had already fled the too-cold water. Often, they were the only couple strolling there, with no one to bother them or to wonder why two retired schoolteachers, their age difference now undiscernible, would sometimes hold hands.
And sometimes, too, they would argue. Bicker, mostly, but occasionally Beatrice would berate Eleanor for her slovenliness and Eleanor would dismiss her younger friend as immature. They could raise their voices, even swear at one another—not that it mattered, as nobody was likely to hear.
No one heard, then, when Eleanor, after several moments’ silence, sneered, “If I was less than a rock, you were…chalk dust.”
Beatrice laughed. She could still chuckle like a schoolgirl. “Why, because after that first year, I wasn’t afraid of you?”
“No.” A wave sucked loudly as it folded, lowering Eleanor’s tone. “Because you couldn’t resist her.”
“Oh, please, not her again.”
Eleanor bent, filled her fists with sand, and in front of Beatrice’s face, opened them. “In her hands, that’s just what you were. Dust.”
The “her” was Melanie. Another junior college graduate, complete with mini-skirt and beehive hairdo, vinyl boots and lip gloss, assigned to the second grade. Eleanor had her down as a ditz, convinced she wouldn’t last the year. But others hoped she would—most visibly Beatrice. Suddenly, the principal noticed, both women were missing from the teachers’ room. Little notes, even gifts—hairbands, Troll dolls—were left in their mailboxes. The small, black dents that Beatrice’s heels made in the linoleum lead straight to Melanie’s classroom, long after the recess bell.
Eleanor’s suspicions were justified. Beatrice was in love, or so she fantasized. Furtive embraces in the supply room, urgent stares at lunch; she and Melanie mimicked a romance. Over the phone, whispering on the weekends so that Eleanor wouldn’t hear, Beatrice would plan Melanie’s escape. The two of them would resign from Pleasantdale and move to Canada, to some small, ice-bound town where the locals would revere them as educators and never ask a question.
The date was fixed for the following summer, still several months away. But then Eleanor stepped in. It began with a summons to the principal’s office. Melanie’s dress was utterly inappropriate for the school, she was scolded, and would she kindly wear a colorless bra. Later, into her file went a complaint, purportedly submitted by a parent, alleging unspecified yet unbecoming activities. Other teachers started gossiping, and soon the young woman was all but banished from the coffee lounge.
No longer so innocent, Beatrice knew exactly what Eleanor was up to, yet she could say nothing. And didn’t, not even when Melanie failed to show up for school for an entire week, and another week after that. A month passed, and it was clear to everyone, above all Beatrice, that the student teacher had left town. Perhaps to that little schoolhouse in Canada. Beatrice might have followed her, tried to track her down. But perhaps she was not as in love, or not as grown up, as she assumed. Instead, she remained at Pleasantdale and, that summer, reunited with Eleanor on the beach.
“Chalk dust, indeed,” Eleanor triumphed. “And I, I was a rock.”
Beatrice watched a seagull skimming the surf. What was one woman’s love—all human love—compared to the ocean’s vastness, she wondered. “Yeah, a rock,” she sighed, and picked up something from the beach. “Well, will you look what I found.”
Eleanor did not look. Still, Beatrice in her old teacher’s voice, pronounced, “A fossil is the petrified remains of a prehistoric plant or animal.”
“What are you babbling about?”
“Over vast stretches of time, tissues are replaced by minerals. The result is a record of that organism which is no longer alive but is now much harder.”
“Let me see that.” Eleanor snatched an eraser-sized object from Beatrice’s grip and studied it. Embedded in the coral-colored brick was a coiled shell whose contours were intricately preserved.
“Maybe I should save it to show my class,” Beatrice giggled.
“Maybe,” Eleanor snorted. “You should grow up.”
Beatrice went silent. She let the fossil drop from her hand and fall between the twin stitching of their footprints. Her bare feet, toes painted, dragged in the sand for a pace or two, until they touched another precious shell. Crouching, she retrieved it and brushed it clean. “I wonder what color I’d paint this?” she asked, seemingly to Eleanor, but really to herself. “Cobalt? Robin’s egg?”
“Cobalt.” Eleanor answered from several steps behind. Her own feet—ungainly, misshapen—had ceased leaving prints. Her thick hands reached down. “Cobalt, definitely,” she repeated as she retrieved the fossil and secreted it away in her smock.
Afikomen
The light in our living room looks as yellow as the little prayer books I can’t wait to get through. The pages are stained—bright red with horseradish, brown with gravy, and purple with the wine we guzzle this time every year. Passover? Passed out is more like it, from the shit-shaped piece of fish I can’t bear to look at much less eat, and the matzah I can’t swallow. And parsley? Supposed to remind us of the bitterness of Egypt, they say. Well, it does the trick. Stuck at this table, waiting too long to be served too much crappy food and forced to read words I can’t understand and listen to conversations I wish I didn’t, that’s just what I feel like. A slave.
Why is this night different from any other night? I’ll tell you why. On all other nights, my rich uncle is too much of a bigshot to sit with my father, who my mother just usually ignores. And Dad does his best to come home late. On other nights, I can watch Star Trek reruns or play with the model cars I steal just about every week from the department store but which no one around here ever asks me about. On other nights, I can press my ear to the bathroom door to listen in on what my sixteen-year-old sister, Carol, is doing in there with her dumbass boyfriend, or sneak outside and meet up with Randy and spray-paint stuff on the sidewalk. But instead of doing anything cool, tonight I have to sit here while dorky cousin Steven—thank God he’s younger than me—stands on his chair and sings the Four Questions. Why is this night different from all other nights, he croaks, and I’m dying to answer him. ‘Cause this night truly sucks.
There are some fun things, though. I can pretend to drop my napkin and reach under the table to get a peek at Cousin Marjorie, who’s fourteen an
d wears mini-skirts so mini her panties practically hang out. I can drink glass after glass of Manischewitz without anybody counting or dip my finger inside and zap the Egyptians with plagues. But the best part comes at the end, when my sister and my cousins and me go off looking for a broken piece of matzah that my mother hides somewhere in the house. I have no idea why we do this, only that my dad has to buy it back from whichever kid finds it. He has to “redeem” that cracker—so the prayer book says—for five or even ten bucks.
The matzah hunt feels like hours away and, until then, I have to sit here while Uncle Harold rails on and on about Watergate.
“He’s a fascist, that’s what our president is. A fascist and a crook.” He slams a fist on the table next to my dad’s fork, making it jump. “And you voted for him.”
Auntie Rita, Harold’s wife, looks on nodding while Mom spoons another matzah ball into her husband’s soup. Yet Dad doesn’t touch it. He doesn’t say a word but drinks his wine even faster than I do and gazes into the candles.
“A fascist, a crook, and an anti-Semite, if you ask me,” Uncle Harold’s still shouting. “Haldeman, Ehrlichman—sounds like the goddamn Nazi party. Except for that Kissinger shmuck, the ass-licker. Feel good about that, Artie? That’s who you wanted in the White House?”
And still no answer from Dad. Instead, he slumps further down on his chair. The prayer book says we’re supposed to do that, slump, or at least lean, for some reason to remind us how free we are. But Dad’s not looking too free. He’s looking caught between his brother whaling on him and his wife heaping a second lump of fish on his plate.
I look at my dad and feel funny about him. Sad and angry. Embarrassed and afraid. In old photographs yellower than these prayer books, he looks a lot like me. Not too tall but no shrimp, either. No fatso, quick with any ball, probably, or at sneaking model cars under his sweatshirt. Same hair, shorter maybe, but just as kinky, and the nose like a tipped-over question mark. Not the kind of kid who Laurie Finkelstein would go steady with, no way, but no one you’d want to piss off.
Then why is everyone messing with my father? Is it because his belly’s gotten bigger, the nose, too, while the kinks are mostly gone, his head shining in the candlelight? Why, when Uncle Harold yells at bad guys in court, does my dad get yelled at when all he wants to do is sell furniture? And why does my Mom, every night except this one when she has to put on a show for the relatives, treat him like Laurie Finkelstein does me, like he doesn’t deserve to breathe?
Those are my four questions, but no one bothers to answer them or even listen. Uncle Harold’s still ranting, “Invaded Cambodia. Fire-bombed Hanoi. Fire-bombed—what are we, in the Middle Ages?” His face is the color of those stains in our prayer books. “All that you’ve got on your conscience.”
Dad takes another gulp of wine and nods at me. “Your turn to read,” he says, and from too much wine, maybe, I groan.
“No, please,” he practically begs me and for a second sits up in his chair. For a second, he looks almost happy, the candles for once sparkling in his eyes. “You’ve got a Bar Mitzvah coming up in a year or so. It’s good practice.”
I think about the Bar Mitzvah, all the gifts I’ll get and the chance to slow-dance with Laurie. Shrugging, I read. I read about the wise son and the simple son and the son who did not know how to ask. I can’t really tell the difference between them—they all sound clueless about what we were doing around that table talking about plagues and eating crackers. Which was why I kind of liked the wicked son, the only one with guts. “What’s all this weirdness about,” he wants to know, “and do I really have to put up with it?”
Finally, it’s mealtime. Chicken with matzah stuffing that makes the chicken taste like talcum powder. Dad hardly touches it but that doesn’t stop Mom from giving him second helpings, even thirds. More wine. Auntie Rita, making moon-shaped motions with her pocket-mirror, checks her hairdo and makeup. Carol and Marjorie play with one another’s hair, whisper to each other, and giggle. Steven’s curled up in a corner—six years old and still sucking on his thumb. Jesus. And I’m about to conk out myself, thanks to Mr. Manischewitz. Thank God, then, when Mom announces that it’s time to search for the matzah.
Stevie’s a no-show, and the girls complain that they’re too old for silliness, but I’m already hunting. Behind the couches, under cushions, inside the magazine rack. Mom may not do much during the day—she’s a secretary who can type, she says, eighty words a minute—but she’s a demon at hiding matzahs. Once, I found one lying beneath the television antenna only to have her tell me that she hid it there two years ago.
I pretty much cover the dining room and kitchen and so make my way up to the bedrooms. There’s Carol’s with its pink telephone and posters of the Grateful Dead and my own, a mess of empty spray cans and broken model cars that I’m always being told to clean up. Not even Mom would think of stashing things there. Which leaves my parents’ room.
The satin blanket, the puffed-up pillows, the lamps growing out of vases and the corner’s porcelain dog—nothing looks disturbed. I go through their drawers only to come up with socks and t-shirts and Fruit of the Loom underwear. But no matzah and no five or ten bucks to redeem it. So I set to work on the closets.
Mom’s rattles as I open it, with the belts and necklaces hung on the back of the door. She’s got a jungle of dresses in there that are thick with her smell but nothing else. Dad’s closet, on the other hand, brings up this cool pair of army binoculars, a wooden box of tie-clips and cufflinks, and piles of sweaters he never wears. Climbing up the cubby holes on the far wall, I reach the highest shelf. Here he keeps his high school album and a bowling ball and then, under some old furniture catalogues, a leather folder.
Magazines. That’s what’s inside. Two fistfuls of magazines with crinkled covers and a couple pages that are hard to separate. Picture magazines of men without clothes on and doing things that I imagine Carol and her boyfriend do in the bathroom. Things I can’t even daydream about doing with Laurie. But these are men and the magazines are in a folder way in the back of Dad’s shelf.
My head feels like it’s spinning. Not from the wine anymore but something else. Confusion. Excitement. I want to look longer and don’t want to look at all, ever, and while I’m deciding, I hear my name being called.
Back into the folder the magazines go, but not before I tear out a single page and fold it into my pocket. How much would that be worth, I wonder. Fifty dollars? One hundred? My name gets hollered again and I holler back, “All right, already, I’m coming!” and head downstairs.
I’m already thinking about the model cars I can buy for once and not steal, and a charm bracelet for Laurie. I’m thinking about my father’s face when later, after everyone’s gone home, I show him what I’ve got in my pocket. I’m thinking about it still when I enter the dining room and its stained, yellowed light.
They sit there—Mom and Uncle Harold, Auntie Rita and the girls—all growling. Tired, bored, too full and drunk to move, but desperate to get it over with. Only my father smiles at me as he places his wallet on the table.
“What’ve you found, my little man?” he asks me. “And how much will it cost me to redeem?”
Metaxis
Captain A. Biddle, at Skookum Bend, To Samuel Rutledge, Colonel in command of Fort Prudence. Dispatch communicating details of the Caracal Canyon massacre.
Headquarters of the Blackstone Redoubt
March 30, 1841
Sir—I have the honor, if such a word here applies, to record the events surrounding the arcane case of the mountain man Howell, an innominate being, and the deaths of eight of my men.
The concatenation began approximately three months ago, in the depths of a winter dark even for these crepuscular regions and cold enough to freeze one’s bones. Shortly after reveille, I was bestirred from my quarters by the westward watch. Scaling the stockade, still buttoning my tunic, I refused the picket’s offer of a glass. What I saw was easily ascertainable by the naked—I
might say denuded—eye.
It was a mule, Sir. A scrofulous animal favored by the natives as well as by those misanthropes who prefer primitivity to civilization and the company of varmints to people. Only this mule was unlike any I had seen and hoped never again to witness.
Spasmodically it whirled, pasterns kicking up snow, snorting steam and sprouting white beards of foam from its muzzle. The eyes, if not anchored by their cords, might well have leapt from their sockets. Admitting such a brute within our confines was unthinkable and, fearing some rabid contagion, I ordered it destroyed. A single ball from Pvt. Keaton, by far the garrison’s best shot, straight to the heart at one hundred yards, sufficed to fulfill my command.
The incident might have been forgotten, even in the lassitude of this post, but for another that fell upon us some evenings later. Once more the sentry’s bell sounded and drove me from my bunk. Once more, I gained the parapet to peer through the ramparts and espy yet another four-legged creature wobbling from the tree-line and into our field of fire. The mist that nightly shrouds the mountains served to obscure my vision but only for moments before I discerned that here was not another raving ass but a pair of savages staggering across the snow.
Buckskinned beggars, they were, from one of the surviving tribes in these ranges, sickly and starving and with none of the nobility imagined them by people back East. Except for some off-beam missionary, they endangered nobody and certainly not the town of Blackstone, whose inhabitants I often wished scalped.
Nevertheless, in accordance with our orders, Sgt. Moriarty called the men to arms. The dragoons mounted and the infantry, all twelve of them, stood with rifles presented as I motioned for the gates to open. Into the compound, barefoot and blue from the cold, the Indians shuffled.