“I don’t wear makeup. Or perfume.”
Jukka insisted and Ursula circled the glowing counters, calculating how much Jukka’s guilt could cost him. At the back of the store there was a tiny basket filled with clearance tubes of lipstick, lichen reds and bruise purples. She picked the brightest and dropped it into Jukka’s palm. It cost eight markka.
“You don’t really want this,” he said.
“Sure I do.”
“I really am glad you came. I wanted you to come. I want you to have a good time. It wasn’t just the duty-free stuff.”
“Please, just buy it and we can go back to the cabin.”
Jukka paid and explained that the restaurants on board were expensive, that they should load up on duty-free snack foods. In the cabin they sat on the floor and ate handfuls of potato chips and cheese curls, bars of chocolate clotted with nuts and dried fruit. Jukka took the clear plastic cups out of the bathroom and filled one with vodka and orange juice, the other with straight vodka. He raised his cup and toasted cheers. They ate and drank until they felt ill and then Jukka kissed her. He tasted like the rubbery buttons of salmiakki—black licorice crusted with salt. Ursula decided she didn’t mind.
They were both drunk when Jukka decided he wanted to check out the dance clubs. They left the cabin and Ursula ran her fingers along the wall as they walked. She imagined she could feel the enormous ship rocking, the cradled heaving of the Bay of Tallinn. The clubs, one floor down from the shopping mezzanine, were all playing the same EuroPop. Jukka kept drinking from a flask in his pocket, and Ursula kept closing her eyes to steady herself. When the strobe lights flickered she held her stomach. Jukka grabbed her wrist and listed, let his weight drag them onto the dance floor. He rested his arms on her shoulders and pressed his forehead down onto hers. Ursula told herself to make it to the end of the song, then, when Jukka pulled her closer, to make it to the end of one more. The songs all sounded the same, bright and thumping, and she lost track of how long they’d been there before she told Jukka she needed some air.
“I’m sorry,” she said, when Jukka frowned. “I’m not feeling very well.” She towed him out of the club, tripping through the plush carpet of the hallway. The glass doors to the deck strained against the wind, and Jukka had to help her shoulder them open. There were couples leaning against the railing, huddling together against the cold. Ursula walked past them toward the bow of the boat, the empty viewing area full of white observation chairs and sea spray. It was a new moon, pale and thin as an eyelash. The harbor lights glared in the dark. Farther out in the bay were freighters and another cruise ship, painted red and white and strung with lights. On land there were stacks of shipping containers like a child’s game, towers of red and brown blocks. She could see the wind catch the thin layer of snow on the pavement and blow it into ripples, like sand.
When Tallinn had been part of the Soviet Union and Ursula had been a child, she had watched news reports of the city, filled with exotic exiles from Soviet territories. She would go there someday, she had dreamed, and meet a Mongolian in a long, red, felt coat lined with yak fur. They would fall in love and they would both be so clever they could learn each other’s languages, and they would be finally so in love that they would not need languages at all. He would have his cousins in Ulaan Bator send her a matching coat and soft cashmere sweaters. They would move to the Black Sea and live in a dacha on the shore year round, and their children would only know what winter was like if she found the words to explain it. She thought about telling Jukka all this, and then pushed the story back down her throat, held it in her lungs with the air so cold it burned.
The wind had picked up and caught the white plastic chairs, flinging them backward against the wall at the rear of the deck. Ursula and Jukka had to dodge them, the chairs turning end over end or sliding along upright, four legs to the ground, as if invisible people were still sitting in them. Jukka caught a chair mid-flight and sat down heavily, anchoring it in the middle of the deck. He pulled Ursula onto his lap and put his arms around her. “Let’s go inside,” he said, and Ursula, out of breath, the wind freezing her chest, nodded yes.
They made it back to the room with Jukka’s arm tightly around her, their feet colliding, hips joined as in a three-legged race. Jukka released the latches that held the bunk against the wall. It crashed down on top of the green sofa-bench, and Ursula heard the bag of cheese curls crunch. The bunk was already made up, tidy with sheets and a pillow. Jukka pushed her backward onto the bed, and she felt silly when she bounced on the mattress like a child’s ball. “I like you,” he said. “Really.”
“Don’t say that.”
“What? I like you.”
“I don’t think you do,” Ursula said, but part of her thought that if she’d believed him this long, if she’d even pretended to, she should see the thing through. He wanted her enough to lie to her. Perhaps that was something.
While she puzzled at what she should do she did nothing, and then Jukka was between her legs, her skirt pushed up and her underwear gone, Jukka’s pants down but not all the way off. She could feel the heavy denim bunched somewhere around his calves, crowding her ankles. She opened her legs wider, feeling for a moment that his jeans were the part of him she could not bear to touch.
“Goddammit,” he said, pressing against her. Ursula turned her head to the side. Jukka was still soft, even as he pushed at her, even as he grabbed at himself, his face red and his eyes unfocused. Ursula did not move to help him. “Drank too much. Drank too goddamn much,” he said, shoving against her helplessly. Finally he dropped his head against her chest and apologized. Ursula reached her hand up and touched his cheek. “It’s okay,” she said, and was relieved.
Jukka fell asleep and Ursula found her underwear, smoothed down her skirt. She got down on her knees to clean the food off the carpet, scraping broken cheese curls and splinters of chocolate into her palm. She found the tube of lipstick under a potato chip. Uncapping the tube, she stepped toward the mirrored back of the room until she was nose to nose with her reflection, chapped lips and pale skin and her funny dark eyebrows. She began writing with the lipstick on the upper-left corner, above her ear.
Jukka,
Have taken your kidney and gone to Estonia. Seek medical attention ASAP!
Ursula
On the bed Jukka was asleep on his stomach, his breath a liquid snore. She pushed his shirt up and he didn’t stir. She pressed one hand to the small of his back, wondering where his kidneys were, what they looked like. She drew an oval to the right of his spine and rubbed the blunted end of the lipstick with her index finger, drew the finger across her lips. She kissed Jukka’s back in the center of the kidney. “I’m going to find the sleeping area. I’ll get home just fine tomorrow. Don’t worry about me,” she whispered, her mouth moving against his skin. She was embarrassed after saying it that she had imagined Jukka worrying about her, that his sleep might be troubled by her absence. “Goodnight,” she said, pulling a blanket from the other bunk to cover him.
Ursula found the sleeping room on an upper deck, a humid and windowless space lit by two red EXIT signs. Passengers cocooned in coats and jackets sprawled on benches and pressed into corners. Ursula waited for her eyes to adjust to the dimness, threaded her way through the sleeping bodies. She found a narrow patch of floor between two anonymous shapes, men or women, their faces turned away; she stretched herself out on her side with her backpack wedged under her cheek. The stranger behind her jerked and flung a hand out, its fingers brushing the nape of her neck. Ursula lay still. She thought of her pretend Mongolian husband and of their little house on the Black Sea, where the summers were long and warm and lit and their breath would be invisible. She slowed her breathing to the quiet pace of the bodies around her, the warm animals curled in the darkness. She imagined the feel of her own vertebrae under the stranger’s fingers, and found herself hoping that the hand wouldn’t move until morning.
Zero Conditional
Principal St
eckelberg was late. Eril brushed snow off the wooden steps of the administrative portable and sat to wait for him. Morningcroft Montessori Academy was made up only of portables, standing in a circle on concrete blocks. In her phone interview, the principal had told her that the portables were the same colors as the pie wedges in Trivial Pursuit. This, he had said, symbolized the value Morningcroft put on knowledge. When he arrived he unlocked Cerulean, where Eril would be teaching the third grade.
“Fourth grade is in Vermilion, second Lemon, first Tangerine, fifth Salmon. We have an excellent teaching staff. They’ll be a real resource for you.” Steckelberg opened the door and stood aside, gesturing toward the darkened classroom as if presenting a prize she had won. Eril supposed she had. It was a job, after all. The heat had been off for two weeks and she could see her breath. A long table below the windows on the opposite wall was covered with cages of hamsters, a rat, a fish tank, a tiny garter snake under a heat lamp.
“Your predecessor was quite the biologist. We’re sorry to lose her. She had a last-minute job offer after Christmas. Some kind of fieldwork out in New Mexico, dietary habits of predatory birds. She was coming in to feed the animals up until yesterday.”
On the table, Eril’s predecessor had left long lists of instructions on the care and feeding of the animals. She had also left bowls of soft gray balls of owl vomit filled with the fur and bones of whatever the owl had eaten. The contents of twenty pellets had been glued, spread-eagled, on squares of cardboard, the bones arranged into the skeletons of voles and shrews. It was an ambitious project for third graders. The skeletons were caked in Elmer’s glue, slivers of rib bones shellacked onto skulls, paw bones the size of rice grains wedged into eye sockets. Larger bones were scattered across the table, sticks and bark and the jagged brown dust of dried leaves, sea shells that smelled like the residue of the animals they’d harbored, damp and rotting and salty. It was a great wreckage of life.
Steckelberg left and Eril walked across the room to the table. The portable felt suspended over some uncertain, hollow space. Once she heard the principal’s car pull away, wheels spinning in the unplowed lot, she jumped up and down. The floor quivered. Eril was not used to feeling so large. She looked at the walls, the alphabet in cursive, the American flag, a series of Your State Symbol posters: the official fish of the state of Michigan was apparently the Brook Trout, the official mineral the Petoskey stone. The official state game animal was the White-Tailed Deer, for which, she read, the hunting season was divided into periods for Archery, Regular and Late Firearm, and Muzzle-loading. She wondered if her eight-year-olds would know these things. She wondered what she was supposed to teach them. For a moment she wanted to cry.
Monday morning she stood and watched the children arrive, stripping off their coats and boots in a pile near the door. The children stared at her suspiciously and read her name, Ms. Larcom, on the blackboard along with the date and a Word of the Day: fortitude. A boy lifted the rat out of its cage and cradled it in his hands, letting the long, hairless tail dangle in the air like a tentacle. “Binx’s tumors have gotten bigger,” he announced, and set the rat on a blond girl’s head. The girl screamed and the week went downhill from there.
Thursday was a field trip, already arranged by the departed biologist. There was no money to charter a bus, so Eril had been left instructions to walk the children to the corner and catch the 16B Ypsilanti/Ann Arbor to the Natural History Museum. The docent delivered the museum rules while standing next to a transparent plastic woman with light-up organs. Bored, the children pressed the buttons to light her pancreas, large intestine, esophagus. Then the boys figured out what the mammary glands were, and the woman lit up like a strobe light, like a showgirl, until the bulb in her left breast went out with a loud snap. A hot, burning smell lingered.
“They’re very immature,” a voice commented, down by Eril’s waist. She looked down at Donald’s brown hair, so light it looked dusty, like he was either prematurely old or extremely dirty. He’d worn a sweatshirt with dinosaurs on it to mark the occasion. He’d said it like that, “to mark the occasion.”
“Maybe you should tell them to stop.”
“They’ll get bored in a minute.”
“You’re the teacher. You should tell them to stop.”
“You should mind your own business.”
“You’re not a very good teacher, are you?”
“Maybe you’re not a very good student.”
“That’s not true,” Donald said. “I’m an excellent student.”
Of Eril’s twenty students, she’d decided she liked Donald the least. He’d held her hand on the bus, refusing to notice the way the other kids mocked him, and lectured her on how Archaeopteryx was the first prehistoric bird with both scales and feathers, and how during the Ice Age Mastodons had once walked here, right here, along the 16B bus route. It seemed to Eril that there was something very wrong with him.
The docent walked them past the plastic woman to the Hall of Dinosaurs and paused by a duck-billed Parasaurolophus skull. “Are you signed up for the planetarium show?” she asked Eril.
“Sure,” Eril said. “The planetarium sounds good.”
“They might be a little young.”
“For the planetarium? They’ll be okay.”
During the show a cartoon astronaut, white and puffy like the Michelin Man, floated across the starry ceiling. “The surface of the sun is very hot,” the narrator intoned. “Much too hot for humans to survive. They would burn up instantly.” The astronaut disappeared into the yellow circle of the sun as a man’s screams faded into silence on the soundtrack. One of the students whimpered. On the way back to Morningcroft, Eril threatened not to let the troublemakers, the mammary gland boys, the whimpering girl, the incessantly chatty Donald, back on the bus. “I’m going to leave you here,” she said. “Let’s see how you like that.” It was a clumsy threat, Eril knew as she made it. The kids knew she didn’t mean it, and this just confirmed what they’d suspected for a week: Ms. Larcom was not a very good teacher.
At the staff meeting that afternoon Eril asked about curriculum, about lesson plans, about discipline, about what was and was not appropriate for third graders, about all the things she was only just realizing she knew absolutely nothing about. Besides the principal and secretary there were four other teachers, refugees who had come to Morningcroft Montessori in search of a place to exercise their frustrated talents, their curricula reflecting the different directions they wished their lives had taken. One decorated bulletin boards with her own hand-painted borders, spent two weeks every January on watercolor reproductions of famous paintings, the originals taped to the students’ desks so they could be confronted with their own inadequacy. Another recycled the vocabulary of modern dance into stress-relieving activities, physical fitness initiatives. The fifth-grade teacher had filled her classroom with all the musical instruments she could afford, meaning mostly bongos and plastic xylophones. She had written a version of the Code of Hammurabi set to bongo accompaniment for a unit on Justice Through the Ages. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” she sang, drumming her hands on the table. “The kids love it.”
They asked Eril what drove her, what she loved, what she could twist into thematic units that met MEA standards for the third-grade year. But Eril was a woman without great talents, forced to pride herself on small, unexpected skills, like the way she could untangle knots, hold her breath for two and a half minutes, or the way she’d taught herself in the sixth grade to balance things on her head the way women did in third-world countries or finishing schools. She still practiced sometimes, unloading groceries from the car and balancing a twelve-pack of diet soda on the top of her head, plastic bags in each hand.
That Friday, the end of her first week, Eril commenced teaching grammar. It was something she knew. The four types of conditionals, starting with the Zero. The conditional tense for certitude, a state of inevitability: If you heat water to 100 degrees Celsius, it boils, Eril wrote, the
n crossed it out. If students misbehave, they are punished, she wrote in larger letters. The chalk squeaked as she made the final d and the children complained. Eril rapped her knuckles on the board. “Five examples in your notebooks. Go.”
She walked around the room and looked over their shoulders. If you go to the sun, you die. If astronauts go to a star, they scream and burn up. Donald had two sentences so far: If climate change happens, species go extinct, and If people are mean to someone, they will be sorry.
“That’s the first conditional,” Eril said. “We haven’t learned that yet.”
“They are sorry,” Donald corrected.
“It’s grammatically correct. But it’s not really true. They aren’t usually sorry at all, are they?”
Donald erased his sentence.
Morningcroft was not a real Montessori school. Morningcroft was not, as far as Eril could tell, a real anything apart from some last-ditch effort to avoid Ypsilanti public schools. For parents who couldn’t afford other private schools or charters and didn’t bother looking too closely, there was always Morningcroft. The student body, Steckelberg had told her, was a stimulating combination of disadvantaged youth and wealthy hippie offspring. Eril had just earned an Associate’s Degree in Behavioral Science at Washtenaw Community College. She’d switched from a Hospitality major in her last semester; a surprising number of the requirements had been the same.
When Eril saw her friends all they wanted to talk about was the job, how funny it was, Eril as a schoolteacher, Eril who’d never cared for school, who couldn’t do math, who had no affection for English beyond the mechanics of it, who, at twenty-one, hadn’t even scraped through a real college, who had filled out applications to be a desk clerk at the Marriott, an assistant manager at a sandwich shop, a receptionist at a furniture distributor, and a schoolteacher, and gotten hired by the school. “It’s just for the semester,” she told them. “Teaching’s not for me.”
This Is Not Your City Page 5