Teacher's Pet

by Andrew Neiderman

  And yet the four of them wore nothing special; they had no identifying symbol pinned to their clothing. Individually, there was nothing that would cause them to seem strangely different from the other teenagers in town, but collectively they affected one another so strongly that they were molded into a single entity: Mr. Lucy’s Kids.

  Johnny verbalized it as “the inner circle,” but he recognized that what they were and what they were becoming had a direct relationship to those parts of himself that Mr. Lucy had imbued within them. During the past few months, they had become so attached to him and so involved with him that any attack on him was an attack on them. That was why they had decided to go to his house now in unison. For Johnny, it would be the first “inner circle” meeting. He was filled with excitement, but he contained his enthusiasm well, remembering Mr. Lucy’s advice about control and power.

  “Inscrutability is the face of one who has self-confidence and knows victory,” Mr. Lucy told him. “Never show people what you are thinking and you will have the advantage. As we study karate, I will show you how that principle is translated into a physical advantage.”

  Actually, the visit to Mr. Lucy today had been Sandy’s idea. The four of them had been together in the cafeteria, as usual, when Sheila described her latest incident with Mr. Zola. On more than one occasion, the thirty-four-year-old science teacher had made some sarcastic remark about the “amazing changes” that had come over each of the four of them. The tall, slim man with the wavy, styled blond hair and fair-skinned, heavily freckled face seemed offended by their improvements in his and other classes. His bright, feminine lips curled as he turned his shoulders and lowered his chin. It was as though they had violated one of his cardinal principles of education—when doomed to failure, one should fail. He, like so many of their other teachers, had predicted their poor achievement.

  “He was really sarcastic,” Sheila said. “Nobody raised their hands, so I did. He would have just ignored me, but I called out.”

  “What did he do then?” Gary asked. He raised the left corner of his mouth and tucked in his cheek tightly. It looked as though an invisible finger were pressed into his face.

  “He said, with his hands on his hips, ‘Yes, Miss Cohen, do you think you know this one, too?’” Sheila said, blowing out her chubby cheeks to mimick Zola.

  “He did something just like that to me yesterday,” Sandy said, brushing her long, auburn hair over her shoulder.

  “At first I wasn’t going to answer,” Sheila continued. “Lately, he makes you feel guilty for knowing something. He hates overachievers, Erik Todd told me.”

  “That’s not it,” Johnny said, his eyes small. “I’ve been watching him. Go on, what did he do?”

  “I answered the questions and explained synthesis just the way Mr. Lucy explained it to me. All the other kids were looking at me. After I finished, they turned expectantly to Zola.” Sheila paused and tugged on her short bangs.

  “What’d he do,” Gary asked impatiently, “shit a brick?”

  “He said, ‘Is that another of your famous Mr. Lucy’s explanations, Ms. Cohen?’ I said yes. And then Zola started to nit-pick: that wasn’t exactly the way he wanted us to understand it. If we used my answer, it might confuse us later on…He went on and on, complaining about Mr. Lucy’s words. Then he said, ‘I suggest you confine your tutor to reviewing work we’ve already done and not teaching you new work. Fortunately,’ he said, turning to everyone else, ‘the rest of us don’t have that problem.’ Everyone laughed. They were laughing at me. He made them!” Sheila exclaimed, her eyes wide.

  “I know what you mean,” Johnny said softly. His calm tone drew Sandy’s attention. “He did that to me last week. I was going to tell him I wouldn’t need a tutor if he was an adequate teacher, but I remembered what Mr. Lucy said about verbal fights with your teachers—we can’t win when we battle them in the open. Even if they’re wrong, they won’t admit it.”

  “What’ll we do?” Sheila asked. She grimaced dramatically.

  They were quiet for a moment and then Sandy said, “Let’s go tell Mr. Lucy and ask him what we should do. He’s involved in this as much as we are.”

  “I can tell him this afternoon,” Gary said.

  “No,” Johnny said. “I’ve got a better idea—let’s all go to see him during Gary’s appointment. It’ll be better if we all tell him our experiences. He’ll see how serious this is becoming.”

  “I’ll go,” Sheila said.

  “Me, too,” Sandy said.

  And so they had gathered at Gary’s house and headed for Mr. Lucy’s. As they walked through the village now, Johnny felt a change coming over him. It was as though he were growing taller, wider, stronger. It wasn’t just the improvements that had occurred in school or the development of a more outgoing personality. It was almost as though he had become an entirely different person. Familiar things now looked unfamiliar to him, and what he had tolerated in the past now disgusted him.

  For most of his life, he had viewed the village as being a force, an entity onto itself, almost another living thing that breathed and grew and spoke to him in private ways. When he used to take nightly walks alone, he thought of himself as having a more intimate relationship with the place. Perhaps it was strange, but he thought of the village as naked at night. Without the light of day, without its business and people, its traffic and noise, it seemed smaller and much less intimidating, just as would anyone in authority who had been stripped of his clothing.

  He felt they had much in common then, he and the village, for both of them were naked and alone, vulnerable and small. That was why he enjoyed his solitary walks at night. The darkness that diminished the village made him feel comfortable and inconspicuous. He was like a blind man who had been placed in a dark room with people who had sight. Now, they were on more equal footing, but because he had always been accustomed to the darkness, he had a distinct advantage.

  What Mr. Lucy had done for him, he thought, was take him out of the cover of night and make him strong enough for the brightness of days. He no longer needed the shield of darkness to make him feel adequate. He could look directly at the village in its daylight face and feel unafraid. In fact, as he walked through it now, it seemed as small and as vulnerable as it used to be at night.

  Centerville had grown in odd ways. Mostly, it had been grafted together in afterthoughts that took the form of small, single dwelling houses, new low income apartment complexes, and upper-middle-class town houses. Many of the apartments and stores in the downtown area were once rooming houses and small hotels designed to serve the tourists who frequented the Catskills.

  For Johnny, the village’s personality came from these many incongruities. In the past he didn’t mind the decrepit structures beside the modern ones; he didn’t care about the worn-down and chipped-out sidewalks and poor storm drains in front of Miller’s modern department store with its computerized cash registers; he didn’t think about the store owners who did little or no maintenance and left their front windows cloudy or their sidewalks unswept, even though the village was supposed to be a resort town and attractive to visitors.

  Suddenly it changed. He saw things he never saw before, and his reaction was quite different. Mr. Bienstock’s butcher shop with its sagging room and cracked window was a disgrace. Why hadn’t the Chamber of Commerce forced him to do something about it? Why was the bank’s parking lot still not repaved? Look at the potholes and cracks. Mr. Pauling’s drugstore was a joke. The windows and the aisles were so cluttered with merchandise, a customer practically had to claw his way to the prescription counter. What kind of planning was that? And the police station…that was the most comical thing of all—a two-by-four office in the same building that housed Biltmore’s Miami Fashions.

  For the first time, Johnny thought, how could the people in this community take themselves seriously, his father included? This place was nothing compared to some of the places Mr. Lucy had visited. After Johnny had listened to some of the tu
tor’s descriptions, he realized what a silly mistake this hamlet was. Some developer should buy it and bulldoze it all down, he thought.

  He put all this from his mind when they turned down Highland Avenue. Mr. Lucy didn’t seem at all put out by the arrival of the four of them, instead of only Gary. Johnny was impressed by that. His tutor never lost his cool and never seemed to be at a disadvantage.

  “What’s this?” Mr. Lucy said cheerfully, “Gary needed an escort today?”

  “We have to talk to you,” Johnny said. “We have a problem. Gary was willing to donate some of his scheduled time for it.”

  “Generous of you, Gary, but you’re still going to have to do some grammatical constructions,” Mr. Lucy said.

  Sheila laughed the loudest and they all entered the old Taylor house. Johnny saw Mr. Lucy look down the street as if to check whether or not they had been followed or whether or not they were being watched. It never occurred to him that there might be something suspicious in their group arrival, but then he thought, with the kind of snoops in this town anything looks suspicious.

  Johnny didn’t like coming to the Taylor house during the daytime. He noticed that it looked quite different. With all the curtains wide open and the shadows gone, the house looked its age; it even looked weaker to him. All of its imperfections were more clearly visible—the many worn spots in the rugs, the faded paint on the walls, the tears and holes in some of the furniture cushions. Much of the woodwork was scratched and the unpolished tables and chairs looked feeble. The rooms looked smaller, too, their dull wallpapered walls making them appear dreary and sad. He was always sorry when he came here in the daytime.

  Although Mr. Lucy wasn’t diminished by this setting, in Johnny’s eyes he did appear different. Of course, he was still as handsome, as tall and as strong-looking, but there was less mystery to him. Johnny had gotten to like the eerie, almost supernatural air that characterized Mr. Lucy and the house at night.

  Whenever he came down Highland Avenue and saw the old Taylor house with its windows lit in a pale yellow and orange and the top of it swallowed in darkness or silhouetted in the moonlight, he felt as though he were entering another world, crossing into another dimension where voices and faces changed, where words echoed down the long corridors of his imagination, where things of which his dreams were made could be seen and heard and felt.

  Johnny studied the others to see if they had a similar reaction to the house in daytime, but apparently they didn’t. No wonder they didn’t see Mr. Lucy the way he saw him, Johnny thought, and they didn’t have that extra sense of power that came from knowing his secrets. These were the secrets that could be told only at night when the house was no longer a part of the neighborhood, when the darkness encased it like a protective wall. These were the secrets that lived within the shadows and the whispers. They lived like bats, hung in the caverns of the mind, coming alive only when the sun went down and the stars and the moon called to them.

  “Let’s go into the kitchen,” Mr. Lucy said. “I’ll make some tea and we’ll talk.” He looked directly at Johnny and Johnny knew he was searching his face for some signal, some unspoken message. With his eyes and his nod, Johnny told him, “There’s no problem with you.” Mr. Lucy smiled.

  They followed him and took seats around the table. All eyes were on Mr. Lucy and everyone was still.

  “So,” Mr. Lucy said, “everyone for tea?” Everyone nodded even though they rarely drank it on their own. After all, it wasn’t just having tea, it was doing something intimate with Mr. Lucy, being part of the conversation and fully participating in the rituals. “I’ll brew it,” he said, “so we’ll have real tea, tea the way it should be made. There’s too much instant this and instant that, nowadays.”

  How could he go on like this about tea? Johnny wondered. If I were Mr. Lucy and four of my students came by like we just did, I’d be dying to know what it was about. He had to admire his control. Control is power, he recited to himself, remembering the way Mr. Lucy always phrased it. Control is power.

  “My mother wouldn’t even know what you’re talking about,” Gary said. “She’s the worst cook in Centerville. My father says she can burn water.”

  “My mother would know,” Sandy said. Her eyes softened with the memory. “My real mother, that is. When she was into one of her Far Eastern religions, she used to brew tea like that and burn incense and sit in the yoga position in the middle of the living room and ‘Ohm.’ I can still hear her chants in my sleep.”

  “I do that sometimes,” Mr. Lucy said.

  “You do?” Sandy looked confused.

  “But unlike your mother, and unfortunately a large part of our population in this country, I don’t treat religions and philosophical concepts like products in a supermarket. I don’t shop around for the truth. Everyone expects instantaneous results or he or she drops it. That’s your computer age for you, Johnny, hit the buttons and watch the knowledge zip out. Huh?”

  They all turned to Johnny to see why Mr. Lucy had directed his last remark only to him. Johnny offered one of his famous shrugs.

  “I never said I liked it.”

  “No, you never did. So, while the water’s boiling, who wants to begin? What brings you all to Ivory Castle on a night like this?” he asked, imitating the voice of Boris Karloff. That finally brought a smile.

  “I’ll begin,” Sandy said quickly. She eyed the others to see if anyone would challenge her, but no one did. “It’s about Mr. Zola.”

  “Zola, Zola. Where did I hear that name before?”

  “He’s our science teacher,” Sheila said, and grimaced emphatically.

  “Oh yes. Well, what about him, Sandy?”

  “He’s been giving each of us a hard time in his class.”

  “Oh?”

  “A really hard time. And only because of you,” she added, lowering her voice dramatically. She leaned toward Mr. Lucy and they all tightened the circle.

  “Me?”

  “I think I know why,” Johnny said softly. Sandy’s melodrama influenced him. His heart began beating rapidly as all of them turned to him.

  “You do?” Sandy said. “Why didn’t you say something before?” she asked quickly, resenting the way Johnny stole Mr. Lucy’s attention from her. She sat back skeptically.

  “I thought I’d wait until we all met with Mr. Lucy. I said I think I know.”

  “Go on, Johnny.”

  “I think he’s jealous of you, Mr. Lucy. I think some of the other teachers are getting that way, too, although they don’t do the things Mr. Zola’s doing.”

  “Why should they be jealous of him?” Sheila asked. She shrunk back quickly when the others glared at her disdainfully.

  “Because he’s so much better-looking than all of them,” Sandy said. “I mean…”

  “That can’t be it,” Gary said. “Most of them haven’t seen Mr. Lucy, right, Mr. Lucy?”

  “They’re jealous of him because he’s succeeding where they are failing,” Johnny said matter-of-factly. “And not only with us, but with most of the others,” he added. For a moment no one spoke.

  “You might have something there, Johnny,” Mr. Lucy finally said. “That’s good insight.”

  Johnny beamed. The others were jealous of the compliment so all of them began talking at once, offering information that might confirm Johnny’s theory.

  “Hold it, hold it,” Mr. Lucy said, holding his hand up and smiling, “one at a time. But first let me get this water into the teapot.”

  After he did that, Sheila related her recent incident, elaborating on it a great deal more than she had when she first told it to them. Gary, in characteristic style, dryly described a similar one, and Sandy then told hers, taking the longest of the three.

  “The same kinds of things happened to me,” Johnny said and left it at that, confident of the power of understatement.

  Mr. Lucy had listened attentively to all of them. He poured the tea and said nothing. They watched him intently, waiting for his wo
rds. Only Johnny seemed to be able to be patient. The others looked from one to the other nervously.

  “How’s the tea?” Mr. Lucy asked. “Notice the difference?”

  “It’s the best tea I ever had,” Sheila said. Her face was flushed. Her voice trembled as if she had just made love instead of sipped tea.

  “I don’t drink tea so I don’t notice the difference,” Gary confessed. That made Mr. Lucy smile and they all relaxed.

  “All right,” he said, sitting back in his chair, “we have a bad situation developing. I’ve seen it happen before. My guess is that this Mr. Zola, for whatever reason, is instigating the others against me. You know how teachers talk about students when they all get together in the faculty room. How long has he been a teacher in your school?”

  “Only two years,” Johnny said. Mr. Lucy was silent a moment.

  “So then he’s not on tenure. That fits the pattern.”

  “He thinks he’s some kind of Romeo or something,” Sheila said.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not that he thinks he’s a Romeo,” Sandy said. She pulled her shoulders back and lifted her bosom. She wanted to be sure Mr. Lucy saw how much more sophisticated than Sheila she was. “He thinks he’s debonair,” she explained.

  “How so?” Mr. Lucy asked, but Sandy seemed unable to go on.

  “What Sandy’s trying to say, I think,” Johnny said, “is he tries to act like one of us sometimes. You know, he talks about music or television stars, just to show us he keeps up. He wears tight designer jeans and gold chains. He goes to all the school dances and tries to be Mr. Cool.”

  “Interesting.”

  “He’s not married,” Gary said. “Actually, I think he’s a fag.” He held his wrist up loosely, but only Sheila laughed.

  “Why do you say that?” Mr. Lucy asked quickly.

  “Just the way he is around boys. I don’t know.” Gary looked to the others for support. “He’s nicer to boys, isn’t he?”