“Fahn educations?” I mimicked. The man couldn’t even speak properly.
“And since you did ask, I’ll tell you. Epictetus said, ‘Men are tormented with the opinions they have of things, not by the things themselves.’”
“Men!” I said idiotically, as if it were some kind of considered response. “What is it with you people, always quoting other people to me?”
He raised an eyebrow. He didn’t have to speak. Even I knew how stupid I sounded. If only I had a better memory, I’d have quoted people whose ideas I liked. “His observation is so obvious,” I said—just in case I didn’t sound bullheaded and stupid enough yet. “It’s like apparent temperature. Not the heat but the humidity, too.”
He stopped sautéing and looked at me with genuine concern.
“You know what I mean. What we make of the weather, how it feels, not just what some thermometer says.”
I’d lost the man’s sympathy. I’d had it for a few seconds there, but now it was gone. In the most elegant of ways, via Eppa-whatsis, he’d told me I had an attitude problem. Obviously, he couldn’t cook and be sympathetic at the same time. Or at least not cook, be sympathetic, and recuperate from a maiming. I almost felt sorry for him as he added chopped vegetables and ground herbs to the saucepan and sipped at a drink, a set of crutches propped against the nearby wall.
But I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. Besides, providing dinner had been his idea, and he’d declined my offer of assistance. “I’m stir crazy,” he’d explained. “No pun intended. I’ve degenerated to readin’ the food section of the paper, an’ this orange-sauced pork sounded good. Willin’ to be part of an experiment?”
So I was doing my part, and offering, in return for dinner, my miseries. He was not impressed.
“Two classes,” he murmured, bending over the saucepan and inhaling with histrionic admiration. “Thirty kids total, you said. Two weeks gone, almost. A little more time and it’ll be over.”
“Think about it. Thirty kids times eight hours. Four hours a session. That’s two hundred and forty kid hours a day. That’s worse than the normal year, when there are five one-hour classes with twenty kids each, which totals only one hundred kid hours.”
He turned, favoring the leg that was mending from a bone-crushing gunshot wound. “Kid hours?”
“As based on the KHI, an important index I just made up. Like Apparent Temperature or the Windchill Factor. A way of measuring precisely how miserable you feel and explaining why you feel so rotten.”
I sipped the incredibly good margarita he had offered me at the front door. “Great drink,” I said. “The fresh-squeezed limes really make a difference.”
“Thanks.” He didn’t sound as if fresh limes were enough to make his life worthwhile. Frankly, I didn’t think he was taking his enforced hiatus with good grace. Life was really unfair. I would have been jolly about accepting a pin or two in the leg in exchange for a large bottle of painkillers and an honest-to-God release from work. A summer of ease, reading without guilt or deadlines and no adolescents or Lowell Diggs waiting around every corridor turn, ready to say, “Hi! Mandy Pepper.” Sounding mildly aggrieved. “Haven’t seen much of you today. Where’ve you been?”
“Teaching,” I’d say. And he’d chortle as if we’d just exchanged brilliant repartee. His laugh was explosive and deadening, producing an irresistible urge to squelch it, make him miserable and silent and certainly never to encourage it.
“Is this to be the noon we dine together?” he’d ask every noon. Luckily, he never dared ask in advance, so it was easy to express regrets over plans already made.
So I’d love to be an invalid for a while, to discover the joys of peeling shallots and squeezing limes. I wondered if I could arrange for a mugging of my own. I might not even have to exert myself much, given my current students.
But getting hurt was the easy part. Maurice Havermeyer and Philly Prep were not going to be as generous with time off for battle wounds as the Homicide Division was being with Mackenzie.
Mackenzie swigged his margarita, smiled at the skillet, and hummed. His kitchen was the only part of the apartment he’d personalized. His pots and pans were carefully chosen and maintained. He ate at home perhaps once a month, but when he did, he did it right. This was doubly amazing given the rest of his abode, a large loft that had been a warehouse for Oriental rugs before Old City became semiyuppified. It had a skylight, one interior door leading to the bathroom, a half divider symbolically marking a sleeping area, and a permanent FOR SALE sign outside.
Mackenzie’s digs were living testimony to buyer’s remorse, a generic habitat with no personality, no visible preferences, no evidence of ideas. Indeed, it had been “decorated” by a rent-a-room firm that furnished your space in sixty minutes or your first month was free.
The first time I’d seen his mostly mauve Santa-Fe-Meets-Philly decor, heavy on cockamamie fake-Navajo motifs, I’d reconsidered our relationship.
“I refused the howling coyote accent piece that came with the suite,” he said in his defense. “They had four choices. This was brighter than the Colonial Homestead and better than the Marie Antoinette or the Spanish Inquisition. I meant to replace it. But why get things for here? Maybe they won’t fit wherever I wind up.”
The only signs that a breathing and sentient person was in residence were on the walls. First, in an enormous Howard Schatz photograph of an orangutan, arms flung to the sky. “It makes me happy to come home and see him,” Mackenzie said. “He’s got somethin’ figured out.”
Then there were the renta-shelves holding twelve billion CDs, heavy on Cajun and jazz, and zillions of books. Poetry in dog-eared paperbacks, scripts of plays, sociology, criminology, and psych texts. Classics, books about computers and the Internet, and anything that had to do with his home turf of southern Louisiana. Plus his current interest, Colonial U.S. history. There was also audio equipment with sufficient dials and gears to launch a space shuttle. I would call it a tape deck and disk player. People with lots of testosterone refer to it as a sound system.
When he first moved north, Mackenzie had thought that owning property would represent commitment to change. It had turned out to represent only a commitment to change housing. Fixing up the large loft required too much effort, work, and money.
But nobody else wanted the place I called the Waiting Room. The real estate market had fallen into the toilet, and though Mackenzie lamented it, I secretly appreciated the shelter impasse. It provided a guilt-free impediment to our combining households, a topic we now and then sashayed around. To my surprise, on our last do-si-do, I’d discovered that I was the more terrified of the two of us about such a move, but as long as Mackenzie thought he was in transit, and as long as my place, which was rented, was too small and cramped for both of us, I didn’t have to deal with my ambivalence.
I settled down on Mackenzie’s silly sofa and dared to look at the day’s essays.
I pulled one out at random and felt a bone-marrow weariness that had nothing to do with physical fatigue. It’s easy to call a course Communications, but impossible to teach such a subject. The real material of the course was learning how to think logically, then getting those thoughts onto paper in the same fashion. However, saying that out loud would make it too clear that what we had here was not an eight-week kind of learning task.
I had asked them to write an editorial, their opinion on any topic of the day. Why something should or shouldn’t be or happen, why something was good or bad. The assignment was supposed to build skills in how to develop an argument without using semiautomatic weapons.
Predictably, I suppose, the paper I now held argued that there should be no such thing as summer school. The second essay passionately, if quasi-literately, argued against the writing of essays.
I did not want to read a third. I didn’t want to face teens tomorrow in the muggy schoolroom, and didn’t want to stay up half the night marking their insincere attempts to communicate. Most of all, I didn’t want
to be this kind of disillusioned, cynical teacher.
“Tomorrow, I’m buying a copy of What Color Is Your Parachute?” I announced. “I’m going to find a happier, easier way to make a living.”
“How about a career in design?” Mackenzie suggested from his home near the range. “Startin’ here. Then you can write What Color Is Your Living Room?”
“Just because you’re lame doesn’t mean your sense of humor has to be, too.”
“At least I have one. You’re spendin’ entirely too much time grousin’ about nothin’.”
“It isn’t nothing.”
“A double negative?”
“There’s something creepy there, bad chemistry. The kids seem to be waiting for something to happen, something wrong. And the tension’s contagious. You know what I feel like? A fleck in a sink near a drain. I have nothing to do with the work of the drain, but I’m getting sucked in nonetheless.”
“They’re kids, Mandy. Kids confined to a creaky old building and—face it—boring lessons when they most want to be outside. Kids who must feel out of place at your expensive private school. Gettin’ their short fix, then bein’ shipped back to wherever while other kids get to stay in the posh halls of learnin’. Relax. Give ’em an inch. You’re bein’ overly dramatic. Nothing bad or unusual is going to happen, an’ dinner is ready.”
He wasn’t completely wrong about everything. Dinner was, indeed, ready. Score him one out of three.
Five
FLORA JONES MANAGES TO LIVE WITH BOTH PRECISION and speed. She’s in graduate school, getting her MBA, teaching computer science, whatever that is, at Philly Prep, and living a life, and she never seems overwhelmed. I’d like to think it’s because she hadn’t opted to be an English teacher. A computer, odd life form though it may be, operates on a logical system, unlike our language. A computer does not produce semi-intelligible essays to grade. A computer knows how to spell and how to process words. My students do not.
And Flora’s long-term, if low-wattage, relationship is with a copyright lawyer, and surely it’s less troublesome and time-consuming to deal with somebody interpreting the law than it is to cope with someone enforcing it. Do copyright lawyers ever have to break dates because an offender has brutally violated a brand name?
Or was all of this a rationalization of my inferior capabilities? Mackenzie’s lack of empathy for my teaching woes echoed through my system, so the next day, as Flora and I sat on a sunny bench in the square across from the school, having lunch—and avoiding Lowell—I decided to ask her.
In typically overachieving, easygoing, but distinctive style, Flora usually brought a clever Japanese lacquer box instead of a paper or Ziploc bag. Today the box was filled with cold salmon, grilled and marinated vegetables, and a chunk of crusty bread. She also had a marketing textbook, in case she wound up eating alone.
I’d brought a flip-top can of tuna and a fork, and I’d been proud of remembering the fork. I’d forgotten a napkin. My pitiable lunch seemed symbolic of an inability to handle my life, Flora’s stunning repast equally telling of her expertise with everything. “What’s wrong with me?” I asked.
“Is that some kind of rhetorical question? Or are you saying you feel sick?”
I shook my head. “Not sick.”
“Then your question is a setup, girl, and I’m not touching it with a ten-foot pole.”
“I feel like I’m not really living my own life. I’m going through the motions, but I can’t get into it. Or I’m in it, but it doesn’t fit anymore.”
“What happened? You outgrow it? It shrunk, or what?”
“Don’t push my imagery too far,” I said. “The truth is, I don’t know what’s happened or what I’m saying. The other thing I don’t know is if I want to be here, doing this, anymore.”
She looked at me with a curious absence of expression, as if it wasn’t exactly my voice she was hearing. The lacquer box sat open on her lap, its contents untouched. When a fat fly started drooling over the salmon, I was the one who waved it away.
“What made you think you don’t belong anymore?” she finally asked. “Somebody say something? Something happen?”
I shook my head yet again, like one of those wobbly-neck dolls. “It’s only a feeling. It isn’t about anybody else.”
She squinted at me, as if I might have been lying, then exhaled audibly, shook her head, and lifted a fork full of salmon. “Why make up troubles you haven’t been given?” she said.
One nice thing about Philly Prep was its location across from the leafy-green square. And another nice thing was that our students, many of whom were also having picnic lunches, were not the sort to spend free time cozying up to teachers. They flirted with each other, munched, and smoked in apparent obliviousness to us. We were given privacy by default.
“I don’t think I’m making it up,” I said. “There’s something wrong about this summer session.”
“There’s something wrong about this summer,” Flora said. “Half the kids in the city have shot the other half within the last two weeks, for starters.”
“How else could we have won our infamous hostility title?” I asked. “What a claim to fame. But maybe I’m a part of the problem. Maybe I’m the whole problem.”
“For the city?” she asked. “For gangs? For drive-by shootings? For hate mongers on radio and TV? For—”
I put my hand up. “For my own problems. I can’t get in synch with most of these kids, and I keep wondering what I’m doing there, aside from needing a paycheck. And then I see you, and you’re always self-possessed, elegant, on track…”
She put down her fork before it reached her mouth. Flaky pink salmon was still attached to the prongs. She looked at me as if I were insane, and then she looked overwhelmingly sad.
“What?” I asked. “I only said… What is it?”
Her hair was close-cropped, her only ornamentation amber hoop earrings and dark coral lipstick that contrasted with her café au lait skin. She was starkly chic in the way only beautiful women can manage.
“Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I was stunned, how you could think I’m cool and collected.” It was her turn to shake her head, slowly, with wonder. Her earrings swung back and forth like double metronomes. “I’m going through a…I can’t believe it doesn’t show. I try not to let it, but I was sure it was obvious. But no point to talking about it. It has nothing to do with your teaching problems. Nothing to do with school. I think.”
She thought? There was an invitation to further probing if ever I’d heard one. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I didn’t mean to imply you’re incapable of having problems. I apologize if somehow I’ve hurt your feelings.”
She shrugged. “It’s nothing you did. It’s reality. Look, even in the City of Brotherly Love, not all brothers are equally loved. Things happen. To sisters, too. It’s not like I’ve lived my life without being aware that some people have problems, and they think their problems have to do with my skin’s color.”
For a moment all the air disappeared. We had suddenly hit something way beyond my capacities for assistance. Something so deep in the fabric of our society, I wanted to pretend it was dead and buried, the way it should be.
The way it looked to be in the square today. On every side people were enjoying the day and the site. I wanted to deny Flora’s obvious statement of fact. I wanted to say “Don’t be silly—look. Right here.” An old-fashioned Norman Rockwell cover for the Saturday Evening Post. Only the outfits had changed.
Elderly women, wrapped up despite the heat, slowly made their way on the walkways. Summer students, including April and Model T and Miles and X and Manuel, sat on the lip of the fish fountain, talking and laughing, their feet immersed in its cool waters. Nearby, three younger boys spun a Frisbee across a corner of the square as a young child and his uniformed nanny watched. One of the Frisbee players had freckled milky skin and white-gold hair, a second was olive-skinned and heavy-featured; the third had skin the col
or of smoke and wore dreadlocks. The little boy was Asian, with gleaming black bangs above chubby cheeks, and the small uniformed woman caring for him had the broad, strong features of a sunny Latin country.
Reader’s Digest would make a cunning anecdote out of this sliver of Americana. Except the reason the sight had so impressed me was because it was rare. It was how it was supposed to be, more or less, but not how it was. And next to me I could feel Flora struggle for words to suggest that this was illusion and not the picture at all.
“That’s horrible and true,” I said. “And unfortunately not news. But you seem shaken up by something less abstract—something more personal. Did somebody say something? Did something happen to you?”
“More or less.” She looked at me. “I’m not trying to be oblique or coy. It’s just that I don’t know what’s going on. It could be a fluke, a crazy kid prank, even. I remember all those crank calls asking if your refrigerator was running, then saying to go catch it. Maybe this is somebody with a really bad sense of humor.”
“Somebody phoned you?”
“Somebody has been leaving messages on my answer machine the last few days. Several bodies. Male voices, all of them, although maybe not full adults—one voice broke in the middle of his big macho putdown—and I didn’t recognize any of them. Pretty similar messages. They all used my name. As in, ‘Go back to Africa, Flora,’ to quote one of the milder ones.” She said her own name with contempt, imitating the voice, spitting it out as if it were a curse. “Obviously, they didn’t know I was born in Cincinnati,” she said dryly. But she blinked several times and bit at her bottom lip.
Across from us, the group around the fountain abruptly fractured. X pointed and shouted at a thin figure partially obliterated from my sightline by a tree. April immediately swung her legs over the edge, picked up her shoes, and ran barefoot across the street and into the school. I thought of how, every day before lunch and after each tutoring session, she looked out the classroom window. I’d thought she was checking the weather, but perhaps that wasn’t it at all.
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