Getting Warmer

by Carol Snow

  “No, but it’s better than the pool,” Lars said, teeth chattering dramatically.

  “Lars is a pussy,” Jill said. “You pussy!” She splashed him. He laughed and splashed back.

  I went over to the pool equipment and hit a switch. “It’ll warm up in a minute.” I padded over to the spa. The Arizona flagstones were warm under my feet, still clinging to the heat of the day.

  “Join us!” Lars said before submerging briefly. When he reemerged, his hair was slicked off his face. He had a very high forehead. He rubbed the water out of his eyes. “It feels good once you get used to it.”

  “Bullshit!” Jill said. “It’s fucking freezing!” It was odd to hear Jill swearing—like she was the Chess Club president trying to sound cool.

  “I’ll wait till it warms up.” I sat on the edge of the spa and stuck my feet into the frothy water, right at the spot where the warm water gushed out. The bubbles obscured the bodies underneath. “You are wearing underwear, aren’t you, Lars?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” He popped up. “Calvin Klein’s finest.” They were black and form fitting and revealed the smallest beginnings of an erection. I looked away.

  “They’re boxer briefs,” Jill said. “Or brief boxers. I told Lars they demonstrated a fear of commitment. You know the old question—boxers or briefs? Well, for Lars, it’s neither!”

  “Or both!” he piped in, lowering himself back into the froth. “It’s getting warmer.”

  “I feel like we’re on Elimidate,” I said. They both cackled furiously. I am very funny when other people are drunk.

  I heard a faint whirring from inside the house. “The phone,” I announced, pulling my legs out of the water.

  The answering machine had picked up by the time I reached the kitchen.

  “We’re in Flagstaff,” my mother’s voice informed me, in case I’d forgotten. In the background, a woman’s voice chirped, “Hello from me!”

  “Mrs. Gillespie says to tell you hi,” my mother continued. “Anyway, we’re just checking to make sure everything is okay and that you haven’t seen any more scorpions.” More murmuring in the background. “And Mrs. Gillespie says to tell you that her daughter Celia is engaged. You remember Celia.” More murmuring. “And she says to remind you to shake out your shoes before you put them on in the morning.”

  I just stood there looking at the machine until my mother said her good-byes. (“Anyway, hope you’re out doing something fun. Maybe on a date.”) What was I supposed to say? That I’d chosen the first possible moment after my parents’ departure to fill their hot tub with half-naked educators?

  My cell phone lay on the counter next to the kitchen phone. I checked my messages; Jonathan had called. I looked out the window. Lars lounged in the spa, his arms stretched around the edges like a bird’s wings. Jill sat half in, half out of the water, exposing her black bra (which, I was happy to see, appeared to be holding up).

  I dialed Jonathan.

  He answered on the second ring. “Hey.” There were voices in the background. Laughter.

  “Hey, yourself. Did you go out to dinner without me?” Oops: too possessive?

  “Nope. I’m at my father’s. They’re having a dinner party.” His voice was low. The background noises faded as he spoke, then disappeared entirely. I heard a click. “Okay. I’m inside. I would have invited you, but, well, I like you.”

  I laughed. “I liked your father. Krista, too.”

  “Yeah, I know. Everybody does. I’m just not sure you’ll like me when I’m around them. What are you up to?”

  I looked out the window. Jill was back up to her neck in bubbles, while Lars’s hairless chest shone in the moonlight. Did he wax his chest, or was it naturally that smooth? “Just hanging out at the house with a couple of friends from work.”

  There was a brief pause. “Guards?”

  “No, um, I don’t really, we don’t really mix. There’s my friend you met, the, uh, warden. Plus another teacher.”

  “And your mother, she’s not upset?”

  My mother. Oh, crap. “She’s not here, actually. My dad took her up to Flagstaff for a little while. The heat was bothering her.”

  “Can he handle her on his own?” Oh, right. That’s why I lived with my parents: to help with my mother.

  “Her doctor put her on some new medication. Something experimental. We’re not sure what it is, but so far, it’s working wonders.” I suddenly wished I hadn’t called Jonathan. Every time we spoke, I dug farther into the mess I had created. Mercifully, he changed the subject.

  “So, are we still on for Saturday night?”

  “Definitely,” I said. And I’d come clean to him, I suddenly vowed. It was time to make things right.

  ten

  Saturday morning I graded papers, making a point to write at least one line on each to prove I had read it. “Excellent insights!” “Watch comma usage!” “Use exclamation points more sparingly!”

  When I’d exhausted my pile, I moved on to my jam-packed e-mail in-box. Every teacher at Agave had an e-mail address; mine, regrettably, was natquack@agavesecondary.edu. The school e-mail system was intended to make teachers more accessible and more efficient. It certainly made us more accessible. A sampling:

  To: natquack@agavesecondary.edu

  From: Lynette Pimpernel

  Re: Re: Grading on a Curve

  Dear Mrs. Quackenbush:

  Thank you for your reply to my recent e-mail regarding grading on a curve as it relates to recent events in my daughter, Claudia’s, class, freshman honors English. Your points regarding punctuation mastery are well-taken, and I can appreciate why you believe it was fair to award Claudia, who has always been a straight-A student, a B on the recent apostrophe test, corresponding, as you said, to her 86% mark. I hope you understand, however, why we would have expected her to receive an A given that over four-fifths of her honors classmates scored lower than 80% on the same exercise. It is my sincerest hope that in the future you will resist punishing Claudia and her classmates by assigning low grades for material that, evidently, they were not given an adequate opportunity to master. Sincerely,

  Lynette Pimpernel (Claudia’s mom)

  To: Lynette Pimpernel

  From: natquack@agavesecondary.edu

  Re: Re: Re: Grading on a Curve

  Dear Mrs. Pimpernel:

  It is always encouraging to have a parent take an interest in her child’s education. Claudia is an excellent student, and I have no doubt that she will go far in life. She cannot run before she can walk, however, and she cannot write a groundbreaking dissertation, novel or Supreme Court decision until she has mastered the difference between “its” and “it’s.” I will be retesting the students on Tuesday. Perhaps Claudia can use the weekend to review chapter 5 in her vocabulary book.

  Regards,

  Natalie Quackenbush

  To: natquack@agavesecondary.edu

  From: codycoyote@freenet.com

  Re: Have a nice weekend

  Dear Miss Quackenbush,

  I just wanted to say thanks for working so hard to teach us The Odyssey. (See? I even remembered to underline the title, just like you taught us!) I hope you have a really excellent weekend. I am going to use my free time to read some books I just got out from the library and to listen to some new music. Well, that is all for now. Have a nice day.

  Your friend,

  Cody Gold

  To: codycoyote@freenet.com

  From: natquack@agavesecondary.edu

  Re: Re: Have a nice weekend

  Dear Cody,

  It is good to hear that you are spending your free time reading! If you liked The Odyssey, you may want to try The Iliad, which, regrettably, I will not have time to teach this year.

  See you on Monday.

  Ms. Quackenbush

  Jonathan took me to dinner at a restaurant perched on top of a craggy mountain, suspended above a million city lights. We sat out on the deck for cocktails, scoring a table next to a stainless steel propan
e heater. Jonathan ordered a bottle of pinot noir. As we clinked glasses, I vowed to come clean to him before the bottle was finished.

  “Fodor’s named this place the most romantic in Phoenix,” I told him.

  He smiled. “You’re going to start thinking I like you or something.”

  “Have you ever been here before?” I asked, turning around to look at the restaurant and imagining Jonathan sharing a dinner with Jack and Krista.

  He didn’t answer right away. “Not recently,” he said finally.

  “Oh,” I chirped, forcing a smile. “You take your dates to nice places.” I drank my wine and waited for him to disagree, to say he hardly ever dated. He didn’t say anything. “Do you come here often?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Ah.” And then, before I had a chance to think about it, I asked, “Who was on your answering machine?”

  “What?” He looked genuinely confused.

  “The night I was at your house. With . . . my friend. Your answering machine was blinking.”

  “Ah.”

  I took a deep breath and tried to sound convincing: “I mean, if you’re dating other people, that’s okay. I mean, not entirely okay, but certainly allowed. It’s not like we’re, you know. Intimate.” I gulped. What a ridiculous word. “I mean, I’m not dating anyone else. But if you are, it doesn’t need to be some big secret.” I drank my wine to keep myself from saying anything more.

  Jonathan put down his glass, leaned over the table and took my free hand. He looked me in the eye. “I’m not seeing anyone else. I don’t want to see anyone else.”

  “Okay.” I exhaled.

  “The message on my machine—it was from someone I used to go out with. It’s been over a long time, almost a year, but she still . . . for a long time she kept holding out hope. And calling. Pretty much every day. And stopping by unannounced.”

  “Was this The Slasher?”

  “No, The Slasher was a couple of years ago. This was The Stalker.”

  I felt an odd sense of relief. Compared to these women, I was downright normal.

  Funny thing about alcohol: it makes you lose your resolve. When we finished the bottle of wine—we were inside and enjoying our salad course at this point—I still hadn’t told Jonathan that I was a high school English teacher. In my defense, though, I hadn’t told him any new lies, which was a warped kind of progress.

  “So what about your mother?” I asked him. “Did she ever remarry?”

  “Nope. After my father left her for another woman—”

  “Younger?”

  “Naturally. After that, my mother became a certified man-hater. I can’t count how many times she’s said to me, ‘All men are assholes. Except you, of course.’ She did all right financially, though. When my father left, he didn’t have a lot of liquid assets, so she had to settle for land. In the nineties, she sold it all and bought herself a nice spread in Santa Fe.”

  “And what about your father’s third wife?”

  “Evil.” He grimaced. “Thought my father had a lot more money than he did because he lived in a huge house that he’d bought for next to nothing. She was always whining about wanting to take a cruise, then after they’d get back from the cruise, she’d whine that they should have taken a better cruise line. She hated me, of course. The way she saw it, money spent on my food and housing could have been put to better use at Saks.”

  “Did he go right from her to Krista?”

  He shook his head. “No, there was a big gap. Let’s see . . . Janelle and my dad divorced the year I turned nineteen. He left her right before he was set to make a small fortune selling a big parcel in Chandler. After that, he was single for more than ten years. Single-ish, anyway. He had a lot of girlfriends. A couple even moved in with him for a while. But no one got a ring until Krista.”

  “And you’re not that crazy about Krista.”

  He shrugged. “She’s okay. Could have been worse.”

  The waitress came and picked up our empty wine bottle. “Can I get you another?”

  We said no and asked for more water. When I finished my water, I’d tell Jonathan the truth.

  I never even touched the glass.

  eleven

  Audition notices went up on Tuesday. They were supposed to go up on Monday. My first duty as assistant director was to design and post them, a task that sounded simpler than it was. Creating the flyer was easy: I sat down at the English department computer and typed up the time and place of the auditions. I named the play and listed the available roles.

  But when it came time to print, the computer froze up. I had to reboot (which, to me, means “turn it off and turn it back on again”), and by then the document had vanished. I typed it again, saving it on the hard disk this time. I congratulated myself on my foresight when the machine crashed again. I didn’t have to reenter the document. I did, however, have to hunt down a blank CD, finally begging one off Neil Weinrich, the pompous math department head, after assuring him that I would bring in a new, blank disk the next morning. By this time, I had to teach a class.

  At lunch, I took the disk to the Media Center, where I successfully managed to send the document to the printer—only to discover that the printer was out of paper. Actually, the whole Media Center was out of the “right kind” of paper, and the Media Center Specialist (what we called “a librarian” in the old days) refused to allow the “wrong kind” of paper into the printer, even though I assured her it wouldn’t do any damage. Lunch was almost over by then, anyway.

  In the end, I took some of the “wrong” paper into my classroom and wrote the information out multiple times while my college prep students wrote an in-class essay, the main difference between in-class essays and out-of-class essays being that in-class essays actually got written.

  The class, with the exception of Katerina, scurried out the minute the bell rang. She lingered by my desk, talking about Romeo and Jules.

  “I read it over the weekend,” she said. “It was totally amazing.”

  “It’s powerful,” I concurred. (I still hadn’t read it.)

  “Hey, what’s that?” Robert asked, appearing breathlessly at my desk a full two minutes before the bell. Ever since Katerina had shown up, Robert had been remarkably punctual. For her part, Katerina always hung around my desk until the last possible moment. I wondered whether her chronic lingering should be attributed to her fondness for me or her attraction to Robert. I suspected the latter and felt oddly jealous.

  “Audition notices,” I said. “You ever think about acting, Robert?”

  He looked at Katerina. “I’ve thought about it,” he said. “It looks fun.”

  “Maybe you should audition,” I said.

  “Maybe I will,” he said, smiling at Katerina.

  “I think I’ve got a Romeo for you,” I told Lars at lunch.

  “No way,” Lars said when I named Robert. “I had that kid last year. Totally unreliable.”

  “He’s changed,” I said, unconvincingly. He had yet to turn in a single homework assignment, but at least he’d become punctual.

  “He’s a good-looking kid, I’ll give him that.” Lars shrugged. “Let’s see how his reading goes.”

  On Wednesday, I invited Jonathan to dinner at my house, a move I immediately regretted: my parents’ home did not look like an invalid’s house. Besides, I can’t actually cook.

  “No problem,” Jill said when I told her. “I have some cold Asian pork salad in my fridge. It’s got ginger, sesame seeds—really tasty. You can have it. Buy some good bread, a bag of salad, and you’re in business.”

  “What about salad dressing?”

  “I’ll whip some up for you.” Jill had finally stopped making fun of Jonathan’s cowboy boots and pickup truck. “You deserve to be happy,” she’d said.

  When he first arrived at the house, he asked for a tour. I couldn’t say no (though I considered it), but I found myself wishing I had hit a medical supplies store on the way home from work. A sa
fety seat in the bathtub would have been a nice touch.

  “I call it ‘Boston meets Bonanza,’” I said of the décor. In an effort to be Southwestern, my mother had filled her Spanish-style house with Mexican dishes, terra-cotta planters and dried-chili wreaths. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to part with the furniture she had either inherited from her parents or discovered on antique hunts in Maine: the mahogany dining room set, the camelback sofa, the grandfather clock, the Hummels. The overall effect wasn’t eclectic so much as ambivalent.

  As we walked up the stairs, Jonathan took my hand. My heart began to beat faster. I’ve seen enough Lifetime Channel movies to know what it means when a man takes a woman’s hand as they head for the bedroom—except on Lifetime, the scene usually cuts to a Tampax commercial the moment they reach the bedroom door.

  It was our fourth date, and everyone knows what that means. Okay, in case you aren’t “anyone,” I’ll tell you: after four dates, if you really, really like someone, you can sleep with him without being what my more streetwise students would affectionately term “a ho.”

  However, while Jonathan made my skin tingle and my stomach grow warm, I didn’t think we should sleep together until he knew who I was—assuming he’d still want to, of course.

  So, when we reached my bedroom, I halted at the door. “This is where I sleep. Not too exciting.”

  He peered beyond the door. “No foreign doll collection? No teddy bears?”

  “I had a shelf of ceramic animals. My mother gave them to Goodwill before they moved. I’m still not ready to talk about it.”

  Still holding his hand, I guided him down the hall to my parents’ bedroom. “The master suite,” I announced. The walls were burnt orange, a tone my mother chose after Mrs. Gillespie encouraged her to “make a bold statement.” It was bold, all right, but my mother said she felt like she was waking up in a pumpkin every morning.