A Terrible Beauty: What Teachers Know but Seldom Tell outside the Staff Room

by Dave St. John

  Legal or not, when these immigrants crossed the border, they came with respect for work, for school, for teachers. All too soon they learned that in America only fools worked or studied. In Mexico, those who didn’t, starved. In El Norte, all was given.

  Solange had seen the change in the faces of the older students many times, from humble sincerity to sneering contempt in a few short weeks. Watching men at work in the fields from behind the fence, they taunted, sneering at such a shameless display of ignorance.

  “Ay, payasu!—what a clown! Studying was for school boys, and they were no school boys.

  They were vatos locos—crazy boys, gangsters, banderas. Two brothers, seniors, were arrested for carjacking only last year. Drive by shootings were becoming common, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it.

  Her second graders practiced in crayon the script she’d seen spray-painted on the wall of the market. They imitated older brothers’ gang signs with tiny fingers, and no matter how many times she stopped their small hands with hers, she could do nothing to change the way they thought.

  There were others, too—families that worked together in the fields, some with more than a dozen children. Fathers who came in after a long day in the vineyards to sit respectfully at teacher conferences.

  Straw hats stained with sweat and dust held in big hands, they listened carefully as their wives asked always the same question— ‘M’ijo, se deporte bien?’—is my son behaving himself? The answer was always the same. Their children sat respectfully quiet, eyes ready to learn, soaking it all up. Enrolled speaking no English, they were immersed in it. At first they listened. Within a year they were talking. In two or three, they spoke as well as most.

  When the time came, they graduated from high school with high grades, speaking perfectly.

  For these children, school worked.

  For them it always had.

  As a classroom teacher, she had seen her children’s needs with painful clarity. They came to class having eaten no breakfast, with dirty arms and faces, with filthy stinking clothes. They came on frosty mornings in thin tee shirts with empty bellies. They came yawning and nodding from too little sleep. They came with eyes that had seen too much, needing to be hugged, listened to, spoken to. They came needing all that parents should give but too of ten didn’t.

  One little boy, Rene, she had never been able to forget. His mother, an attractive divorcee, had left him for days at a time with a baby sitter while she went on with her life. She must have loved the boy, but she wasn’t prepared to give up her life for him. Well dressed, well-fed and washed, he wore the unbearable pain of her abandonment in his eyes, in his face.

  Solange met his sitter. She was nice enough, but had a family of her own. Having Rene live with them for weeks at a time was more than she’d bargained for. When she quit, the mother picked him up only to drop him off at a new sitter the very same day. Rene did nothing at school that day, she remembered, but sit and stare. How must it feel, she wondered, to know your mother didn’t want you? Could there be anything more painful than that? Solange went to see her that night, and by a stroke of luck found her at home. She had guests and was not at all happy to see her.

  A blond with a model’s body and deep blue eyes, at first she’d offered her business smile. When she recognized her son’s teacher, her face soured. She came outside, pulling the door closed behind her. “What do you want?” Solange hadn’t expected to be met with such hostility. The woman’s eyes brimmed with hate. For whom? Herself? “I wanted to talk with you about Rene.”

  “How I raise my son is my business,” she said, already bored.

  Solange knew there was no good way to tell a mother how to raise her child. So she just said what she’d come to say. “He needs you so much— Today I couldn’t get him to talk to me. I called his sitter, and she said you’d come to get him.”

  “If you’ll excuse me, I’m entertaining.” She went inside, leaving Solange standing alone on the sidewalk. A cold rage grew inside her as she went to her car. What else could she do? He was her son; she could raise him any way she chose. The pain she lavished on Rene, while more painful than any blow, left no scars, no bruises. Solange marveled that such obscene ugliness could exist behind such a lovely face. Nearly to the street, she turned on her heel, circling back.

  The woman opened the door with a wide smile meant for another guest. It became something ugly. “Still here?”

  “If I were God,” she looked the elegant woman in the eye, “I would reserve a special place in hell for you.” She shut the door on Solange for the second time.

  Solange could hear laughing and talking in the apartment. She knocked again, harder.

  Rene’s mother opened the door, face set. “I’m calling your principal tomorrow! I’m sure he would like to know about this harassment.” Solange ignored her. “In a few years you’ll be too old to interest men,” she said, voice low.

  The woman stepped back, preparing to shut the door, and Solange pressed her shoulder to the jamb.

  “I’m not finished. If I have to, I’ll raise my voice.” The elegant blond cast a quick look over her shoulder. “Then will you please finish?” The woman’s politeness was somehow worse than rudeness.

  “You’ll want your son, but it’ll be too late. By then he’ll hate you, and you’ll be alone. Then you’ll understand what an evil thing it is you’ve done.” The woman watched, eyes hard as the diamonds at her ears.

  “That the sermon?” She went doggedly on, not willing to give up. “Don’t you understand what you’re throwing away? That little boy loves you with all his heart.”

  “You finished?” Solange moved out of the doorway. “I’m finished.” Without a word, she returned to her guests.

  Rene was absent the next day, and the day after that. A week later she found out his mother had pulled him out of school. Nothing Solange had said had helped. All she had done was make Rene’s life harder.

  Solange shut off the water, stood dripping amid rising steam.

  Where was he now? He’d be twelve, still young, but Rene would be a very old twelve.

  It was for kids like Rene that she did what she did, for them that she had given up a life of her own.

  And she was close. She was so very close.

  It was too late to stop.

  Too late to go back.

  Too late even to think about it.

  She dried herself, put on a pot of tea, burned her fingers taking the plastic off her microwave dinner. As she took her first bite of chicken, the phone rang. It was Hugh.

  “Goodness, but you’ve been a busy girl! You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she lied, “I’m fine.”

  “Mrs. Noble called, said you were there. Next I get a call from Parnell. He tells me O’Connel blew his top over this kid, Wagner, I guess his name is, bumping into you in the hall. Demanded he miss this week’s game. Said if he were allowed to play, you’d press charges.

  Of course I knew he couldn’t be right about that.”

  “Of course not,” she said, wincing as she reached to massage the small of her back.

  She smiled to her reflection in the dark window. So, he’d told off Parnell. It embarrassed her, but pleased her as well. Just thinking it she felt traitorous.

  “Parnell says this kid is one of his starters, and they’ve got a tough game coming up this week. of course he’ll apologize. Parnell says it was just an accident.” She said she was sure it had been.

  The boy’s sneer had been a vile thing, his eyes anything but sorry. Solange’s stomach burned, and she pushed the tray away, no longer hungry.

  “The main reason I’m calling is to touch bases with you on how it’s going. Are you making any headway?” She frowned. How ridiculous. Why the ring around the rosy? Why didn’t he just say it? What dirt had she gotten on him? “I’m rewriting my notes, now.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ve documented several instances of misconduct.”

  “Ah, that’
s exactly what I hoped you’d say. Why do I get the feeling there’s going to be a but coming up here somewhere?”

  “I don’t know, Hugh,” she said, dredging up enthusiasm she didn’t feel. “I’ve got them here.”

  “Okay, you get some rest, now, and fax them over tomorrow, will you?” She said she would. As she set the phone down she tried a smile at her reflection in the darkened window. It was no good. No good at all.

  She set her dinner on the floor for the cat. Felix sniffed at the low-fat chicken entree, and stalked off, tail swishing. Chucking the meal in the garbage, she dug a pint of Dutch chocolate burnt almond ice cream out of the freezer. This she polished off at her desk as she composed her notes into something she could read at a hearing.

  A death sentence for a dedicated man’s career. Maybe they weren’t so far off after all; maybe she was the angel of death.

  It was past midnight when she finished. She went to bed and lay awake, mind refusing to be silent. The comforter gathered under her chin, she watched as the streetlight sent strange shapes flitting across her ceiling. A car’s horn from somewhere down Fourth blared three short blasts.

  She and O’Connel hadn’t spoken much in five years at Elk River.

  They’d run into each other at the copy machine, passed in the lounge, seen each other at meetings... But he’d been married at the time, and she’d been with someone.

  There was something there, though. It wasn’t going anywhere, but it was there, just the same. Two years hadn’t changed a thing—at least not for her.

  She was pushing thirty, and as any good Brazilian girl knew, and her mother had of ten reminded her, a man was caught in your twenties, or forever lost.

  She smiled at the memory of her mother in the kitchen of their tenth story apartment near the Capemi building in Sao Paulo. On swollen feet at the stove, she waved a long-handled wooden spoon in the air as she recited her cautionary tales. She was so round, so wonderfully plump, her voice so comforting, even when chiding.

  “Que isso? What is this? Always your nose in a book! A girl should be learning to cook so she can be a good wife, not always hiding in a book! Come here, now, little one. Corta uma cebola para sue Mae, querida. ‘Cut Mama an onion, sweetheart.

  Every minute she wasn’t in school Solange spent at the battered table in Mama’s kitchen. In a frightening world, it was a place of warmth, of safety. She read, steam from a simmering pot of black beans billowing about her. Neighbors yelled, fought, laughed, sang, made love—all on the other side of cracker thin walls. When the bedstead began its rhythmic thumping, her mother, cheeks hot with anger, would beat on the wall with her spoon, dressing the energetic lovers down in words Solange heard in the markets, but never at home, and certainly not from her mother’s mouth. Her laugh of delight silenced by her mother’s hard look, she went back to her book.

  At meals, four brothers, all older, crowded into the small room, moving in chairs from the hall. Towering over her, they gave her a pet or a pinch—she was the baby and they tolerated her. To Solange they were strangers, busy with lives of which she understood nothing.

  Much better were the quiet afternoons in Mae’s steamy kitchen.

  Now, like black beans scattered across the table from hastily ladled feijoada, they were cast wide across the world. One here, one there, each busy with families of their own, children of their own, some of which Solange had seen only in pictures sent in Christmas cards.

  Mae, they left to Solange. After all, who better than the youngest daughter? Who better than she? Who better than one with no family of her own to take care of Mama? Solange smiled bitterly into the dark.

  Let them go, all of them. She would never ask them for a cent.

  She would show them what the baby could do. Now, like in the old days, it was just Solange and Mae. The flesh of her mother’s meaty arms wasted away to sagging wrinkles, back humped, now, her eyes were as sharp as ever, perhaps sharper.

  A vague thought tickled at the back of her mind—what was it? What was she forgetting? Though she strained to remember, nothing came. She would have to drive home and see her this week. Take her bags of pigs feet, linguica, tea and the cheap orange jelly candies she loved so.

  Though Solange paid the bills, her mother refused to take any money, so whenever she visited the little trailer on its weedy acre, she would sneak a few tens into the pickle jar on the shelf by the sink as she rinsed the dishes. When Solange suggested she get her an apartment in town, her mother set her lip stubbornly, dark moustache bristling.

  Unconsciously, Solange’s fingers felt at her upper lip in the dark.

  Reassured by the silkiness she felt there, her hand slipped back under the covers. Mae wanted only her chickens, her garden with its peppers and tomatoes, and the skinny mongrel, Pepino.

  Ah, Mae— if only life t were as simple now as it was in your kitchen.

  Exhausted, aching for sleep, she willed her mind be still.

  It refused.

  • • •

  Patti O’Connel brought her Volvo wagon down the on ramp onto 1-5 just as the sixty-foot tractor trailer swept by in the fast lane, rocking the car in its wash. Accelerating into the flow of cars on the rainy highway, she watched as the speedometer passed seventy, then eighty. She was late—doubly so, having called to postpone her presentation once already. She would play hell making even the later one, now. She glanced at the sleeping two year old strapped in the car seat beside her and reached over to brush a strand of hair from her perfect face. Smiling to herself— she glanced over her left shoulder and, giving the signal time to blink only twice, moved into the fast lane.

  Topping eighty-five, she came up close behind the eighteen wheeler, mirror-polished stainless double doors reflecting a fun-house view of her car, lights on bright, white lines flashing by.

  The truck’s black lift gate, a 480 pound, eight by six foot sheet of three-eighths diamond plate, hung on one hinge pin, buffeted by the wind, a single quarter-inch retaining chain the only thing keeping it upright. The day before a fire safe had tipped off its pallet onto the ramp, shearing off one of the inch-thick pins and putting a stress crack most of the way through the other.

  Patti looked down at the dashboard clock and pressed the accelerator. Why wouldn’t he move? Dear God, don’t let her be late, not after all she’d done to get them to listen. If she could just get past this guy, she could drop Nikki at her sitter and just about make it. She checked the slow lane and found it blocked by a land yacht, car in tow.

  Damn, damn, damn! At that moment the truck passed into a stretch of highway becalmed, and the quarter ton gate, freed from the constant pressure of wind, slammed back against its safety chain. A gust from the west sent it back again, harder this time, and a hairline crack appeared in the tack weld binding chain to frame.

  Patti looked down and saw a single pinhead size bloodstain on her bone silk blouse.

  Dh, just great. She dabbed a tissue to her tongue and worked at it. It was no use. She would never get the blood out of her blouse, now.

  A second gust and the chain tore free, sending the gate in a slow arc downward. When it reached horizontal it severed the remaining pin. Caught up on the eighty-five mile an hour draft, the rearward edge, worn smooth and sharp, knifed downward through the air.

  Patty, seeing it come at her on the slipstream, knowing in that instant she was to die, opened her mouth wide as she reached out to shield Nikki with her right hand.

  There was time for nothing more.

  • • •

  O’Connel, grunting in terror, flung back the covers on the four poster and came erect.

  The dream again.

  A peacock shrieked from its perch high in a fir along the bank of the river, and shivering with cold sweat, he staggered, trembling, to the toilet. Just the dream again.

  Returning to sit on the side of the bed, he squinted through sand-filled eyes to see the time, 5—58. Groaning at his dashed hope for further sleep, he switched on the lamp and, wipi
ng his face, hoisted himself to his feet.

  Stiff of mornings. Forty, and mornings he felt every day of it.

  Drawstring O.R. scrubs barely hung on his hips as he padded bare foot down the squeaking stairs. He’d worn them in the delivery room the night Nikki was born, and worn them every night since.

  He hit the power button on the stereo as he went by on his way to the laundry room, and the house echoed the trill off lute and orchestra as he rummaged in the dryer for a clean pair of socks.

  “Jean Pierre Rampal with the Academy of St.Martins in the Fields, Sir Neville Mariner, conducting,” he said.

  Roused by his voice, an old liver Dalmatian bitch teetered through the kitchen, hindquarters wobbling.

  With a grunt of disgust, he settled for a navy and a black. “I’m telling you I’m right this time, Sonny.” A mellifluous voice named the performers. “There, you see? What’d I say.” Happy for the attention, the dog’s eyes brimmed.

  • • •

  About the house hung tenebrous phantoms of wife and child—a family dissolved into mist. When least on his guard they came, leaving him shaken and trembling.

  Up on the mountain, in the midst of thinning, over the growling of the chain saw, he’d hear Patty’s call to dinner echoing up the mountain. So real, he would kill the saw, raising his hardhat to listen, voice still sounding in his mind. There was never more than the wind in the firs—just that.

  More than once he’d started from sound sleep, ‘Daddy!’ whispered an inch from his ear. A two-year-old��s laugh in the silent kitchen, the sound of bare feet on the stairs.

  Once while shaving, he felt Patty’s cool hand on a bare shoulder.