In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

  And maybe not. Maybe they’d stay hostile and barricaded, fifteen black holes in classroom space.

  And my reward for completing class and walking outside would be Lowell Diggs, lurking somewhere even as I thought about him. I now knew his first name because my mother’s note about a perfectly lovely young man she’d met had been in my mail the night before. She’d enclosed a studio portrait that was so flattering, the photographer must have served a long apprenticeship with aging movie stars. Vaseline on the lens, soft focus, magnificently hazy lighting all made Lowell Diggs seem almost attractive.

  The letter and photo had arrived weeks late because the envelope had the wrong zip code. I wondered what Freudian repression or sense of underlying guilt or remorse had caused my mother to suddenly forget my full address.

  I sketched a calendar in my head and ticked off the first half day of it as I watched a slender, long-haired student go to the window and look out, as if checking the weather. Two of the toughs—the Model T Ford and the scowler, Woody—stopped en route to watch her from across the room. So did tall, gangly Miles of the nonverbal expressions. And he’d been correct about body language conveying a great deal. His said that he, too, was watching the girl—but watching the two boys observing her as well. And while he wasn’t exactly on the outs with them, they were buddies, and he wasn’t one of them.

  The girl turned from the window. She was quite lovely despite her worried expression. She glanced at the two toughs and, I thought, half nodded. It was a subtle gesture, if it was at all intended, and I couldn’t be sure. Then she came to my desk.

  “Miss Pepper?” Her voice was not much more than a whisper. I glanced at her almond eyes and down at the roll sheet.

  “Truong,” she said softly. “April. I introduce myself because I have five years here in the U.S., and my English writing is weak. I wish to learn that, also the history. And to go to college. I am older than my classmates. I need to learn fast. I hope I will not be a problem, Miss Pepper, because of my slowness.”

  A problem would never say anything like that. A student would say something like that. The summer now had possibilities, all contained in the slender form of April Truong. I reassured her. “And if you need additional help, we can arrange that,” I heard myself say. I decided I meant it. “An hour after school as needed, maybe?”

  “Yo, April,” Miles said from where he stood. “Want lunch?”

  She froze for a moment, then shook her head and waved him on. Model T Ford and Woody the sulker stayed put, looking quizzically at both Miles and April.

  “But I keep you from your lunchtime,” April said to me. “I should not do that. I will see you tomorrow.” She glanced at the two young men at the doorway. “Perhaps we could…if you mean that offer—after school? Tomorrow? Would you help me with how I talk?”

  I nodded, and she seemed so pleased and relieved that I allowed an actual frisson of teaching excitement to fizz through my system.

  As she left the classroom along with the two hulking young men, Five himself appeared outside my door, eyebrows raised. “With that grin on your face, you look like one of those ads for…” he said when I came out of my room.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know what to call it nowadays. For an old-fashioned kind of teacher. An old-fashioned kind of school.”

  I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or a put-down. Nostalgia for the good old days—which, if you really study them, weren’t, except for a handful of the privileged—makes me nervous. I must have looked wary.

  He chuckled. “I’m jealous! You obviously had a great morning, and I felt as if I were pushing at Mount Everest for four hours. It’s a good thing U.S. history is required, or nobody would take it. If it’s going to be history, they want knights in armor, assassinations in togas, or the little boys locked in the tower.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky. I felt just as frustrated, except for that young woman, right at the end. Sounded like her other course would be history. She’s so enthusiastic. Been here from Vietnam for five years and her English is amazingly good.”

  He looked dubious, then sighed. His every expression and gesture had an athletic grace and attractiveness. I wondered how aware of it he was. “Lunch?” he asked, and I nodded.

  “Oh, good, because I can’t remember where the faculty room is,” he said. “I’m having one of those first-day-of-school nightmares.”

  I guided him to our makeshift lunchroom. The heat was even more oppressive in its undersized, crowded quarters. After today, I was sure we’d split forces and dine al fresco in the square across from the school, or in air-conditioned and student-free restaurants. But today it was important that we, along with the students, attempt to bond and become a unit.

  “Mandy Pepper!” Lowell said with a whiny sort of surprised joy. He was sitting at a long table with a vacant chair next to him, and he patted it meaningfully. Then he glanced at Five and scowled, as if I’d betrayed him.

  “Hey, Lowell.” I shrugged, and kind of rolled my eyes toward Five, intimating, I hoped, that etiquette forbade my dumping this man who had entered with me.

  Lowell’s face flushed. He picked up his sandwich and gave it all his attention.

  This was going to be a long hot summer. It looked as if the heat or student stress—and there should surely be an index of those combined factors—had already gotten to some of our more fragile peers. Phyllis-the-sibilant had angry crimson splotches on her cheeks and her hands on her hips as she faced Flora Jones, the wizard woman who taught computer courses at Philly Prep while working on her MBA at Wharton and running in marathons.

  Flora was capable of sounding calm and furious at the same time, a talent she now demonstrated.

  “I said the girl was handicapped, and she is,” she told Phyllis in a low, resolute tone. “She needs extra time at the computer because her arm is in a brace. Cerebral palsy, I think it is.”

  “She’s physically challenged,” Phyllis said. “Handicapped is negative. What will it do to her sense of self? What does it do to the others who hear it?”

  “What’s wrong with the word? Are golfers given a physical challenge nowadays instead of a handicap?” Flora snapped. “Words aren’t loaded unless you make them be, and after you do, then the new euphemism becomes loaded, and then the—”

  “Oh, you!” Phyllis said. “You’d think you of all people would show a little sensitivity to the power of language. If we stopped stigmatizing exceptional people through the violence of our syntax, if we—”

  “For Christ’s sake, why me of all people? Were you trying to say that I’m black? Well, hey, I’m aware of that,” Flora said. “And I feel sufficiently sensitive to issues of that sort, thank you. I’m not talking about insults or slurs or epithets or ugly slang. I’m talking about factual, reasonable language. Or, excuse me—did I identify myself correctly? Is black still acceptable, or should I be saying that I’m really white-challenged? Or you are differently melanined?”

  “A PC face-off,” I murmured. I directed Five to the two empty chairs at the end of a scarred table filled with munching teachers, all of whom seemed to be trying to ignore the battling women.

  “God, that stuff is tiring. And tongue-tying,” Five said, unwrapping a fragrant sandwich. “You can’t say anything anymore without somebody jumping down your throat.”

  The bland man whose name I had known I wouldn’t remember—Smith? White? Jones? Adams?—spoke up. “It’s out there, too, in Utah, is it?”

  “Idaho,” Five said.

  “All you Western states look alike,” I said. “We have been geographically insensitive.”

  Moira, the Romance language teacher, raised her lorgnette and looked meaningfully in our direction. “Oh, please,” she simpered, “forgive us, Mr. Five.” She pursed her lips and fluttered her eyelashes and might even have blushed, were it visible beneath her artificially rosied cheeks. “We’re being so rude,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Acting as if civilization
hasn’t moved west of the Mississippi when”—and now she gazed at the history teacher—“it so obviously has.”

  “You’re right,” Edie Friedman said. “We must sound like such boobs to you.” She smiled at him with terrifying neediness. I could envision her adding riding boots to her hope chest, and hoping for the eventual pitter-patter of little Sixes.

  It had taken no more than a nanosecond to move from political correctness, students, curriculum, anti-intellectualism west of the Mississippi, summer school, or any of the many other topics that might have been of concern to a group of professionals meeting a new challenge, to sex, or lust, or the power of great looks and charm on female teachers. Business as usual, summer or winter. Nothing was going to be any different.

  I was wrong on that last point. And naïve to yearn for change, any sort of change, as if different automatically meant better.

  But I was only a half day into summer school. I had a whole lot left to learn.

  Four

  APRIL TRUONG LOOKED AT THE CLASSROOM CLOCK AND gasped. Five-fifteen. Our after-school session had run late. As of the second week of summer school, we’d decided on an extra hour of tutoring three times a week. I was disappointed by what wasn’t happening in the classroom, but April was the exception. She was so motivated and bright that the after-school hours had become my favorite part of the week. I would never have believed I could feel this way about additional, unpaid teaching.

  We always stopped promptly at five so that she could get to her after-school job, but we’d forgotten today. April had been talking about Juliet’s options—as good a topic as any on which to practice tense and syntax, and interesting, because her view of the world was very different from mine and from most of her classmates. Family obligation was extremely important, and April worried at length about the morality of Juliet’s refusal to bow to her family’s wishes. We had both ignored the clock.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Are you going to be late? I can drive you there if that would help.” I was on my way to dinner at Mackenzie’s. A detour wouldn’t be any trouble—Star’s Café, where April worked, was in Chinatown, en route to Mackenzie’s place in Old City. Besides, even if it had been out of my way, April Truong brought out whatever residual altruism I had left. I didn’t think that was a bad thing.

  “No, thank you. I am fine,” she said, but she rapidly pushed papers into a backpack, looking concerned. I, too, gathered my things and flicked off the lights as we made our exit.

  I always felt hulking next to her. She was tiny, barely five feet tall and made of reeds, not bones, and she dressed simply, a study in black and white. She wore black jeans that had to be sized in the minus range, and a white T-shirt floated over her slight body, as did a fall of gleaming black hair that reached almost to her waist.

  Halfway down the marble staircase, she dropped her backpack, and stopped to retrieve papers. I looked back. “It’s fine,” she said. “I have everything.” I continued down—and gasped. She was behind me, but now I saw her in front of me as well, standing by the front door of the school. A double, except that she had short hair.

  April laughed softly—behind me. “You’re frightened?” she asked.

  “For a second I thought—do you have a twin sister?”

  “That is Thomas, my older brother.”

  A brother. Had I just been grossly insensitive? As in the all-Oriental-folk-look-alike school of jerkiness?

  “Many people think there is a resemblance,” she said, “although I cannot see it.”

  I was sure she’d said that to let me save face, but even at second look, the figure by the door seemed her double. It wasn’t until we were close that his harder features were apparent, their masculinity unmistakable.

  “My teacher, Miss Pepper,” April said, introducing us. “My brother, Thomas Truong. He drive—drives—me to work on these late days. And he picks me up, too, when I am finished at eleven.”

  “How nice!” I said.

  He nodded brusquely at me. “You’re late,” he told his sister in an annoyed voice. “I been here long. Everybody else gone. I thought maybe you don’t want me to see you, that you were with—”

  “No!” she said.

  “She was with me,” I said. “We were working hard. My fault, sorry.” His powerful effect on his sister worried me. Her normal calm self-possession seemed to have dissolved the moment she saw him, or before, when she’d seen the clock and realized we were running late. All I could assume was that her job was of enormous importance to the family, and that tardiness was a potential disaster. I would have to make certain that we completed our sessions on time from now on.

  Thomas Truong scanned his surroundings, like a bodyguard might, and then, with another curt nod in my direction, he took his sister’s elbow and ushered her away. It was a brotherly, helpful deed, this chauffeuring her to work, so I couldn’t figure out why it bothered me so much, why his gallant gesture seemed so much like that of a warden, or a guard.

  *

  I dipped a chip in salsa and munched on it as I downloaded—I love sounding high tech, and it’s such a reach, given my field—the day’s grievances onto the chef. “The class is like a jigsaw puzzle nobody wants to put together,” I said. “They obviously arrived with old alliances—and old angers, too, I think—and there’s a tension, a fragmentation, that has nothing to do with academics.”

  Mackenzie made a polite noise that meant, I hoped, Go on. “One of the kids,” I said. “Woody Marshall. All he does is glare, four hours straight.”

  “At you?” Mackenzie carefully peeled a shallot.

  “Not exclusively. At his classmates—except his good buddies, who do their own separate glaring. At his hands. At the textbook. This morning, while we were having the most innocuous class discussion—we’re staggering through Romeo and Juliet, how much less urgent can you get?—the glare became nuclear-force. I didn’t know what to think. He’s like those traumatized vets. Something waiting to explode just behind the eyes, and anything could set him off.”

  “He do anything besides glare?”

  “Not really. Not yet. Besides, he’s only one piece of the problem. That whole morning class… Like a miasma. I could handle it if it were them versus me. I’m used to that. There’s a point at which a class becomes a unit and acquires a personality, even if it’s a rotten one. But the only personality this one has is of a paranoid schizophrenic.”

  “Prob’ly ’cause they aren’t a class. They aren’t an anythin’ except an assemblage. Short-timers, together for five more weeks, then they’ll go their separate ways again.”

  “Six. Six more weeks.” My time already served felt interminable, but in truth, only two of the eight weeks were partially completed, a fact that horrified me. I mentally shook the calendar the way I would a watch, to make sure it was moving at all. “And it isn’t because of their ‘ethnic diversity,’ to use a Havermeyer. It isn’t because they are strangers—some of them know each other from before, are even from the same high school.”

  “You had a bad day,” Mackenzie said, “and you’re only seein’ the worst of them. You’ve told me good moments already. Lots of them. The funny kid?”

  “Miles. Miles Nye.”

  “He the one makes up songs?”

  I had to smile, despite my fervent desire to stay sour. But during the first week, Miles had burst into class in top hat and tap shoes and performed a routine based on grammar exercises. I wish I had taped it. Even seeing was barely believing, but maybe Mackenzie could get some sense of his performance if he could see a tape of Miles’s curly carroty hair as he performed, his comic body language, his hands raised, feet tapping double-time as he belted out, “And maaaake…” (shuffle, shuffle) “your syntax—” (shuffle, shuffle/tap, tap) “cleeeeear!”

  I didn’t know how he’d do academically, but I hoped Miles wanted to be an entertainer, in which case he had a brilliant future. Meantime, he treated my course—and every other course he’d ever had, I gathered—as an independ
ent study in a performing arts school. He wasn’t fond of assignments, except the ones he gave himself, which tended to take twice the time and four times the creativity.

  Most of his audience didn’t get it. Still, they cheered him on and applauded because he was a diversion from the assignment, and that seemed enough to power Miles’s batteries.

  “An’ that little girl who wants to learn everything,” Mackenzie continued, “April?”

  I hate it when this happens, when Mackenzie pays closer attention to my life than I do. And of course, this focus was more intense than ever lately, while he was on medical leave and his own active life was virtually nil.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “But even with her…her brother was at school today, picking her up, and she was fifteen minutes late and there was something wrong there. Something’s going on with her. Some kind of tension…”

  “I din’ think that was our topic,” Mackenzie said in a mild, infuriating voice.

  “She really is quick,” I said. “I enjoy those extra sessions with her.” She absorbed whatever was presented as if she were porous, but still she worried that she wasn’t moving quickly enough, that she wasn’t “learning to be an American,” as she put it, speedily enough. “So it’s April Truong versus the entire rest of them. If, for example, you saw how X—”

  “Who?”

  “His name is Robby, but he insists on X, and he hangs out with Peewee Smith and Abdul from my afternoon class, and they—”

  “’Spect you’ll live through it. It’s about attitude, not reality.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, like what Epictetus said?”

  I controlled an urge to kick him. His leg had already been done sufficient damage. “No,” I said, “I don’t know, but I bet you do. And why do you, anyway?”

  “Because despite Yankee prejudice, some of us Southerners received truly fine educations.”