It didn’t feel crazy until I was at the bottom of his drive, idling by the parked trucks. I’d never thought of him as popular, but it seemed like the whole school had come to his birthday party. The house was all lit up, and there was a bonfire in the yard. I could feel the vibrations of the music where I sat in my car. A couple of kids tumbled from the doorway, arm in arm. They were laughing or sobbing; I couldn’t hear which. They started down the drive towards me. I wondered what would happen if they got close enough to see my face. I wondered if they were Mariposa kids, and if they’d recognise my car. By the time I’d played out all the scenarios in my head I was halfway home.
III
I fought with the head of department over the books. I took it out on Lux and the house, slamming the cutlery drawer, setting all our things rattling in the refrigerator, making dinner.
‘It’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard,’ I said. Lux took the jar of spaghetti sauce from my hands, emptied it into the saucepan. She was wearing a black singlet. I could see the vertebrae of her neck. She spoke to the stovetop.
‘You think you’re maybe patronising them? I mean, you’re talking like they’re idiot hicks. It’s Gatsby, it’s not, you know, Hamlet. I’m sure they can deal.’
I fell back against the bench. I was irate. I started on about retention rates, their mock SAT scores, the kids smoking dope in the parking lot between classes.
‘It’s just dope, Joanna.’ She gave a little laugh. She glanced up at me. ‘I’m sorry. I just think it’s funny.’
‘What is funny?’
‘You’re so invested in them,’ she said. She’d moved to the sink to rinse the empty jar. ‘Like, you’re having this Dead Poets Society moment. It’s this saviour complex of yours.’
‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’
‘Oh, fucking nothing, all right? I’m sorry I ever said anything, Jesus—’ and then the jar hit the cupboard above my head and the glass splintered. Three big pieces, and some smaller ones too many to count. It looked worse than it was but we both shook and she held my face in her hands and said, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, and kissed the cut, she kissed the glass, there was blood on her lips and in my eyelashes. I sat down on the floor. My peripheral vision was starry. I hung my head between my knees. I said, ‘You know what, Lux, you fucking come and teach those kids. Come and teach them.’
She said nothing. She drove me to the ER with one hand on the wheel and the other pressing a cold compress to my forehead, saying nothing the whole time.
It was too late for the clinic so we had to go all the way to Madera. I told the nurse I’d tripped on the stairs holding a glass. Lux stood with her arms crossed and her lips pressed together. When we got back into the car she pulled her shirtsleeves down over her hands and looked out at the hospital.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, baby.’
‘It’s fine. You saw. It was only a couple stitches.’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t believe I did that.’
‘Hey. It’s okay. I came home salty. I was in a foul mood.’
‘What if it had been worse? I’m sorry.’
‘Please stop saying that,’ I said.
‘I’m scared of myself,’ she said. She was pressing her hands together between her thighs. Her arms were shaking. I touched her hair.
‘Why don’t you let me drive home,’ I said. She shook her head again. All I could think was that I was letting a teenage boy fuck me from behind, and she was the one who was feeling bad.
At home the spaghetti sauce was cold on the stove. It seemed funny now. Neither of us wanted it anymore. Lux threw the entire thing into the trash can, saucepan and all. I couldn’t stop laughing. I told her it didn’t hurt.
‘Maybe we should buy some plastic tumblers in case I freak out again,’ she said. She looked so destroyed that I started to kiss her mouth, her neck. The glass was still in pieces. There was blood streaked, dried brown on the linoleum. I said, We can worry about that tomorrow. We went to the bedroom and loved each other very hard.
In the morning Lux redressed the cut like an expert. I said, Thank you, nurse and we fucked again and I was late to work. In the parking lot I parted my hair on the wrong side to cover the bruise. I put on some lipstick. It was a cheap drugstore brand I’d bought without testing, and when I saw my face in the rear-view mirror my mouth was pale and cadaverous. I dug around for a tissue to wipe it off. Perry tapped on my window.
‘Jesus.’
‘Nope, only me,’ he said. He grinned.
‘I don’t think it’s good for you to stand here,’ I said.
‘I’m not coming to your class today.’
‘Okay.’ I got out of the car, slung my bags over my shoulder, shut the door.
‘Can I come over after school?’ he asked.
I looked at him. ‘Do what you like.’
‘What happened to your face?’ he asked. I thought he was going to reach out and touch me. I flinched. He hadn’t moved. The bell rang. It was like an air-raid siren.
‘I tripped on the porch,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to go. I don’t want to be up here with you right now. Come by after five if you’re going to.’
We walked our separate ways across the parking lot, him towards the running track and me towards the faculty room. The straps of my satchel cut into my shoulder.
There was a scuffle down the end of the hall, teeming with kids. I could hear the sharp cuts of the boys’ voices. Why you gotta be so up in my ass about this? I craned to see what was going on. A pair of hands to the chest. I’ll break your fucking neck. I’d never understood their berserk violence, their energy for threats. My last school had been the same.
‘Hey,’ I called, ‘it’s too early for anyone to do any neck-breaking, okay? Get to first period.’ A few heads turned, a few yes ma’ams. But the bodies kept swarming. They were directionless, circling. Someone fell against me, hard. I stumbled sideways into a row of lockers. Immediately a space cleared around me. Everything went quiet. A blonde kid, the one who’d knocked me into the lockers, held up his hands in a don’t-shoot gesture.
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ he said.
‘That’s okay, Ty. It was an accident, right?’
‘Right.’
‘Okay, so don’t worry about it. Get to class.’
I went to the bathroom and locked myself in a cubicle. I was shaking worse than last night. The cut on my head throbbed. I’d known the kids were just messing around. I never thought anyone was going to get hurt. There’d never been any threat. Still my blood was rushing.
In the faculty room I put on a fresh pot of coffee and checked my phone while I waited. Lux had already called to ask how I was. Perry kept his word. He wasn’t in my English class.
But that night he came round the back wearing his Grizzlies sweatshirt and jeans, a half-hour after Lux had gone to work. He left his sneakers by the door. We fucked first in bed, my face pressed to the pillows. He said, I’m close, when he was about to come. I took him out of me and rolled away to the edge of the bed. He lay gasping like a fish on a beach. It had been a week. We fucked again in the bath, slower that time. I thought about saying, I want to swim in your blood, I want to swim inside you, but it would have been wasted on him, and, anyway, it wasn’t true.
We lay in the tepid bath, skin gone soft under that milky water.
‘I seen you and your girlfriend down at the Dirty Donkey last weekend.’
‘That’s got to be the worst name for a place, doesn’t it?’ I said. ‘I don’t remember seeing you there, anyway.’
He grinned. ‘I wasn’t there for long. It’s kind of funny seeing your teacher knocking back two-dollar PBR and shooting pool.’
‘Lux got off work early,’ I said.
‘Y’all could get married,’ he said. ‘It’s legal here now.’
‘I know it.’
‘My mom told me. She thinks it’s a good thing.’
‘Does she now.’ I couldn’t keep from grinnin
g.
‘What? What’s so funny? I just meant, if you wanted to, you could—’
‘Perry, it’s okay.’ He smiled from under his hair. I settled against him.
‘It’s funny when you call me Perry,’ he said.
‘It’s funny when you call me ma’am,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I’m not going to call you Tonto.’
He touched the freckles on my shoulders with damp fingers.
‘Everybody calls me Tonto. My mom calls me Tonto. Can’t be racist if she does it.’
I twisted round to kiss his neck. I tasted sweat, and it made me think that this was all hard work. I looked at our knees, mine smooth and pink between his, bony mountains covered in fine black hair.
‘How do you know how to do it?’ he asked.
‘Do what?’
‘You know, do it with me when you’re…’
He wanted to be a man, but he was as curious and open and dumb as a child.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I had boyfriends before.’
I’d seen photos of him from only a year ago, in the halls at school, in the old yearbook. He’d been younger even then. All lashes and boy bones, a crew cut I don’t know why, I’d had no cause to ever ask him. He had a football player’s body these days.
I sat with him while he laced his sneakers on the back porch.
‘You doing anything on the weekend?’
‘Just working for my dad.’ He straightened, blinked. ‘Smoke a bowl with the guys.’
We both laughed. He backed away and climbed into his truck. He flicked on the lights, horror movie high-beams. I lifted a hand to my face for the glare.
I always imagined we’d get caught but it never happened.
He wrote me notes on his composition pages in very light pencil so that I could erase all trace of him. Meet me at the cornfield, meet me at the parking lot, meet me at the hardware store, meet me at the creek, meet me at the bleachers.
Blue twilight at the running track. He made as if to leave when he saw me approach. He slipped under the bleachers.
The ground was grey and brown. It was foolish and risky to meet there. Everything we did was foolish and risky. I ought to have been paranoid about his wearing a condom, but it only happened about half the time. We never took any care.
I crouched down with one hand on the cold metal. ‘I’m not doing this,’ I said.
‘It’s done, ma’am.’ He smiled like a man in the electric chair. The crepe streamers flapped damply behind his shoulders. He kissed me so differently from Lux. I never knew if I liked it or had just gotten used to it, habituated, acclimatised, whatever, his fast boy mouth. It was a funny position to be kissing in, crouched over the ground clinging to each other. I lost my balance. We laughed. Mud under my fingernails. I was a long time in the faculty restrooms, scrubbing it away. Once I’d asked him what he meant to do after high school. He said, Work on my daddy’s farm. Maybe move to the desert, get a job in a casino. I think he saw me looking at him sadly, because he also said, It ain’t so bad, ma’am. He was half-right. It only wasn’t so good as to force him to make something of himself.
IV
It was December when Lux started talking about moving again. She brought it up when we were out at dinner. The paper wrapper around my disposable chopsticks had the symbol for double happiness on it. For a moment I thought, She knows. She knows and she wants to make me say it. It turned out she was just edgy for reasons she couldn’t say. Maybe it was the cold, I said. It never got this cold in LA. Diurnal mood something or other, seasonal affective disorder. She went quiet, but started up again as soon as we got home.
‘I’ve been thinking about it for a while, Jo.’
I knew she hadn’t. ‘I feel like we have a life here,’ I said.
‘You have a life. I’m sitting behind a desk reading Thomas Hardy novels with that goddamn door that tinkles every time someone walks through it. Handing out extra towels and maps.’
‘I thought that’s what you wanted. I thought you wanted time to write. Slow life.’
‘I made a mistake. I got it wrong.’ She fumbled in her handbag for her cigarettes. The pack was empty. She hurled it at the wall. ‘I can’t stand this place.’
We said we’d talk about it when we got back from New York. We went up there for the holidays, to stay with her parents. We saw Patti Smith perform at Webster Hall the night before New Year’s Eve. Lou Reed had died not long before. She opened with a cover of ‘Heroin’. Lux wept next to me. The intensity of it made me feel almost sick; the pulse like that stuff rolling and stopping in your veins, or how I imagined it. The steady, unbroken bass, the rising grief, the rapturous silent audience: a great, terrible build-up of pressure. At the final chorus Patti picked up the music stand she’d been using for the lyrics and moved it aside and started to dance. The crowd began to cheer and stamp and move in a new, joyful way. I sneaked a look at Lux. Her cheeks were a mess of tears and snot. Her body was moving with the throbbing horror of the music. She was weeping openly.
Her parents lived upstate so we’d booked a hotel room for the night. It was a Comfort Inn all the way out in Red Hook but we both agreed we’d been lucky to get anything so close to New Year’s. We lay facing each other, each propped up on an elbow.
‘How about that Lou Reed cover,’ she said. ‘I just stood there bawling.’
‘I saw. I didn’t want to touch you—you know, interrupt you. You looked like you were vibin’ it by yourself.’
‘Vibin’ it,’ she repeated. She looked down at the bedspread, touched it with her fingers as if reading braille.
‘What were you thinking?’ I asked.
‘It was the only time I felt good in my skin,’ she said. ‘I had to give that up.’
I couldn’t participate in those memories. She was making me sad.
Once she’d overdosed and died. She said she’d had a vision: millions of women shaking out their bedsheets to hang in the cold wind. She’d never made sense of it but she liked to joke. At the end there’s no white light, just women folding laundry. She liked to laugh at herself when it was on her terms. It was the game she played with her junk days: it was everything but it was nothing. Whichever way I tried to understand her was wrong.
The day we left there was a snowstorm and our flight was diverted. I waited on the carpeted airport floor with our bags while she went to get us coffee. I watched her standing in the queue until her figure was swallowed up. She was wearing a placid expression, resigned to waiting.
I thought of my mother saying to us kids, I’ve already given up so much of myself, and how I might never say that to Lux because it would ruin her. Leaving her parents’ house, we’d all stood at the bottom of the stairs to hug and say a long farewell. Her dad asked me, Is she looking after herself? I said, Yes. Yes, everything is wonderful. I knew he hadn’t meant smack, but he added, She doesn’t like herself. Who does, I thought. It had never been easy for any of us, in orbit around her.
I imagined telling her about Perry. I imagined the conversation we’d have. She’d stand with her arms crossed, tongue moving over her teeth. Or she’d say, What happened? And I’d say, I became invisible, and that would make her cry.
But back home things were fine. We drove too fast down the highway from Sacramento and she sang along to ‘Deanna’, only she changed it to Oh, Joanna. Years ago, when we were first together, we drove to Idaho for a wedding. I remembered her asleep in the back seat on top of her suitcase. I drove all night. I told myself stories to keep awake. Maybe for a thing to be a good a long time, it has to be miraculous.
I didn’t see Perry until the second week of January, when classes started again. I was feeling clear-headed. I gave my juniors a pop quiz, knowing Shannon Kendrick would be the only one to have made the chapter summaries I’d set before the holidays. I asked Perry to stay behind after class. I didn’t want to have to do it, I said, but I was going to need to speak to a parent if he kept flunking out on everything.
‘Ma’am, that was a pop quiz
. That was a bitch act.’
‘Don’t speak to me like that,’ I said.
He hung his head and smiled. His figure loomed over my desk. I picked up the paper with its red marks and handed it to him.
‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘I got nothing else to say about it. You can go.’
‘Will I come around tonight?’ he asked.
My eyes darted to the classroom door before I could help it.
He grinned again. I could have killed him.
‘After five,’ I said. ‘You’re gonna be late, you don’t leave this instant.’
But Lux wasn’t going to work. She was sick with a head cold. I filled the tub for her. I felt like I had a fever, too. It was already dark out. I broke the rule I’d never made. I called Perry. I said, ‘You can’t come tonight.’
‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘You just caught me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m sure it isn’t your fault.’
We hung there, speechless. I could hear Lux singing to herself in a clear, tuneless voice.
‘You want to meet someplace?’ Perry asked.
‘I can’t.’
‘Okay.’
‘Ten minutes,’ I said. ‘Meet me at the parking lot near the Round House. You know the one?’
‘I know the one.’
I went to the bathroom. ‘I’m just going to pick up some groceries. You want anything?’
‘I thought you were going to stay here with me,’ Lux said. ‘I thought it would be nice to do something together.’
‘You hate taking baths together.’
I sat on the edge of the tub. Her shoulders were freckled and pink with heat. Strands of hair stuck to her damp neck. I loosened her topknot, combed the hair between my fingers. I made a loose plait of it. The sunshine colour was growing out; the hair at her crown was the same colour as her brows.
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