by Jonathan Dee
“Well—”
“Like that English teacher! What an asshole!”
“Well, okay,” Candace said, worrying she’d let things go too far. Though she bet she knew which English teacher was being referred to. “I’m glad to give you a respite from all of that.”
“I mean I don’t mean to put it all on you teachers. I’m sure you get some batshit parents coming through here.”
Candace knew she shouldn’t answer. But it had been a rough night, for reasons she could never tell anybody, so she needed to talk about something else, just to redirect the thoughts in her own head.
“I had a mother in here once,” she said. “Wanted to know if I was teaching her daughter about the theory of evolution. I wanted to say well, it’s not so much a theory anymore, you may have heard. But I just said not yet, we haven’t gotten to evolution yet, they won’t start the human-bio unit until next fall, thinking that would pacify her, you know? Then she says, can you prove it? Meaning evolution. I said we only get four minutes, but if you’d like I could recommend some excellent scientific sources. She says, I thought so.”
“Nice,” Henry’s mother said.
“So she says, if one explanation of what we’re doing here on earth is a theory, and the other explanation is the word of God, then it makes sense to her that we’d only be teaching one of those, but you picked the wrong one. I said ma’am, I certainly respect your beliefs, and she said like hell you do, and they’re not beliefs, they’re God’s word.”
It had been pretty upsetting at the time, but they were both laughing now.
“You gotta be careful with those people, though,” the mother said cryptically. “I work for a bunch of doctors. Ob-gyns, some of them.”
Candace let her face compose. “How do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Some people really come to life when they have an enemy,” she said.
“Excuse me?” said a voice from the doorway, and Candace started, though the mother did not. “I don’t want to rush you. But they make this schedule so tight.”
“Not a problem,” Henry’s mother said, and she stood up quickly, offered a brief smile that put Candace in mind of someone flicking their brights on and off, and left the classroom without another word. Past her came the woman from the doorway, trailed by her husband, who, like a lot of the husbands, wore a blandly cooperative expression that made it clear he had checked out some time ago.
It was rare to see fathers at these conferences at all—rarer than it should have been, at least, in this day and age. Which was why Candace had been so disarmed to see her former lover Patrick walk into her classroom, behind his wife, earlier that evening. He wasn’t as surprised as Candace was; she could tell from the look of grim phoniness on his face that he’d known she was going to be sitting there. How could he not know? She was his daughter’s science teacher. He couldn’t be as remote from his own family’s life as all that, despite his many past dishonest vows to the contrary.
“Ms. Firth,” Patrick’s wife had said. Candace damn well knew her name but was not going to use it, even in her head. She’d seen the wife plenty of times before, but they’d never actually met. Now she stood and the two women gingerly shook hands. The fact that Candace had been rehearsing that moment in her head all day—to be honest, on and off all semester, ever since she’d seen that Bayley Kimball was enrolled in her animal-bio class—did nothing to slow her heart or dull her panic, which she only hoped she was managing to keep off her face. On Patrick’s face was a stricken, apologetic look Candace guessed was meant to convey that he knew how awful this was yet felt powerless to stop it. On the wife’s face, a plastic formal decorousness. Candace did not worry that that look was concealing anything: she knew enough about that marriage to be certain the wife knew nothing, suspected nothing, had been told nothing by her husband. The mask of politeness was just a mask she wore all the time.
“Bayley enjoys your class so much,” the wife said. “She talks to us about it constantly.” From that ground-softening lie she went on to question a recent B-plus Bayley had received on a lab assignment. The truth was that the girl had deserved a B, but Candace was so guiltily conscious of disliking Bayley, both on her own sorry merits and because of her status as living reminder of what a fool Candace had been and still was, that she graded her more generously than any other student in the class. And then resented her for unknowingly receiving special treatment. God, Candace thought, while the wife yammered on, I am an awful person. Although at least when I was in seventh grade I didn’t make other girls cry.
Patrick’s childish fidgeting mirrored what Candace was trying to do invisibly with the entire force of her will: make four minutes go by. Anything, even this, could be endured for four measly minutes. He was very handsome. And stupid. The stupidity, the utter resourcelessness, was what made him so hard to turn away from. You just knew what you could reduce him to.
And then it was over; and at the end of it, she stood and he stood and they shook hands, while the wife watched. She got through the rest of her conferences somehow. Already she barely recalled most of them. She thought she might have said something a little inappropriate to Henry Batchelder’s mother, but it was only a residual guilt, not a memory.
She drove home exhausted, taking Route 7 most of the way, which was slower and longer but the road was better lit. She pulled into the tiny lot across the street from the liquor store, which kept most of its interior lights blazing even when it was closed. She turned on all her living room and kitchen lights, and her TV, with the sound off. A triptych of heads, one yelling, the other two scowling, while scary reminders of the state of the world scrolled like stock prices beneath them. All in silence. She poured herself a glass of sauvignon blanc and watched the heads for a while. They were only moderately less alarming when you couldn’t hear what they were saying. She poured another one. Like all her neighbors, she kept her shades down, not because there was nothing to look at outside, but because after a certain hour your windows just operated like mirrors anyway, and who wanted that?
She was glad she had no one to come home to. She didn’t know why people were so sentimental about that. Oh, boohoo, poor Candace never married and has no one to come home to. But why was that something you wanted? To come home feeling like shit and then have to put on some act? She’d been putting on an act all night. Just let her quietly put herself to sleep with wine, thank you, without feeling all judged and self-conscious about it.
The heads gave way to a commercial. She could tell it was for some sort of drug by how long it went on, how protracted was the shot of the couple and their dog walking on a path through the woods. She was shaking, she remembered, after Patrick and the wife left her classroom. She held her hand out level in front of her: nope, no shaking now. She tried to think instead about all the other parents, but they blurred together, earnest, anxious, bored, ugly, ugly. Finally, when she was drunk enough not to question her own impulses, she stood abruptly, walked into her bedroom, and sat down at the little vanity table that just barely held her computer. She logged in to the old Hotmail account she’d used to communicate with Patrick, back in the day. She told herself that if there was nothing there, she would just close it again. But there was something there.
Hi Candy, I just wanted to say sorry about tonight, surprising you like that. Bayley’s class schedule, which has been up on the fridge since August, still has Ms. Whalen’s name on it for science. It wasnt until I got to school and they handed me the conference schedule that I saw your name. But at that point there was nothing I could do. I know you’ll probably say I should know my own daughter’s teachers names, but she’s at the age where she doesn’t hardly talk to us at all about school, or about anything. Anyway, I’m really sorry.
Candace let her eyes run over this communication a few times. There was nothing I could do, she thought: that’s like your middle name. That’ll be on your tombstone. Of course there was something he could have done, if he cared enough. Or if he really
didn’t want to see her. He just didn’t have—well, she was going to say the balls, but he had balls, what he lacked was any imagination. Then, while she was still staring at the screen, his name came up again at the top of her inbox. Which meant he was staring at the screen himself, at this very moment. Probably because the wife had gone to bed. They were staring at each other, basically, through the medium of the screen, like two people on opposite sides of a darkened window.
I shouldn’t have apologized so much—it makes it sound like I wasnt happy to see you. I was, just not about the circumstances. You look great. The situation wasnt ideal, obviously, but it was really good to see you.
Jesus, she thought. He was like a child. A big, dumb boy. He spent a lot of time apologizing for this or that, always had, but really he was ruled by nothing more than the balance of expediency and desire. You put him in front of something he wanted and he started wanting it, that’s all. For instance, her. It was arousing, in the same way now as it had always been, to feel how incapable he was of being smart, of being prudent around her, even after all that had happened. Desire was desire: it did not learn.
You looked good too, she typed. I mean, in a dead-man-walking sort of way.
Lol, he answered immediately. Yeah, I never did have much of a poker face. So here we are, back in touch again. Well, writing is okay, right? We can’t get in too much trouble writing.
She logged out of Hotmail and went back to the living room for another glass of sauvignon blanc, but she didn’t get a third of the way through it before she fell asleep. She awoke in her chair, dawn glowing around the window shades; in front of her the news of the world silently flashed. She showered and dressed and went back to school. She taught the seventh graders about amino acids and proteins, the same dimly familiar lessons she’d heard at their age, the carboxyl group and the conjugate base. The only way to get through the lesson was to avoid looking at Bayley, or even at the side of the room on which Bayley always regally sat. Candace genuinely did not like that kid. Very phony and superior. A lot of her mother in her.
On Saturday she drove up to Pittsfield to pay her parents’ bills. She didn’t know for sure they had any bills to pay right at the moment, but she did know that they sometimes fell into a sort of mood or rut where they simply stopped opening their mail, letting weeks’ worth of it pile up, going out faithfully to collect it from the box at the end of the driveway every afternoon but then just letting it sit in a neat stack on the dining room table, a development that baffled her utterly.
“I suppose I can take care of my own household,” her father would say when she questioned him. “Been doing it since before you were around to save the day.”
It made sense he’d react like that, lash out at her, scold her for her supposed pride because his own pride was injured. But other routines of the life they’d settled into were more alarming and harder to account for. Often when she opened the refrigerator door she was hit with the smell of rot—stuff had been left in the crispers and forgotten about. And he wouldn’t touch it because, he said, “that’s her job.” A tangle of blankets on the living room couch suggested that he’d been sleeping there—how recently or how regularly, she didn’t know. As for Candace’s mother, she spent more and more time in the garden, and yet the garden looked like hell. He was so angry at her—for fading, basically, for growing older, which he seemed to see as disingenuous and a personal affront—and the angrier he got, the less she seemed to notice he was even there.
And the television. It was never, ever not on. She could remember being forcibly pushed outdoors, as a child, if she and her siblings got caught spending non-rainy daylight hours in front of the TV. Now it played so relentlessly it effaced whatever was outdoors, all sense of an outdoors. It used to be considered the opposite of the world, but now, in this house anyway, there was no outside world except that of the television, a world of outrage, calumny, tears and canned laughter, provocation, paranoia, sinister forces bent on taking away all you had worked for and earned, just because they wanted it, just because they said so. Why would you want to prepare to exit this life—for that was what Candace’s parents seemed to be doing—to this harassing soundtrack of gloom? Maybe her father wanted to believe that it really had all been for nothing? Maybe that would make leaving it all behind seem less bitter somehow? He seemed pretty damn bitter nonetheless. She didn’t get it.
“Daddy, I think there’s stuff in here for a sandwich,” she said. “Can I make you a ham sandwich?”
“I’d eat a sandwich,” he said.
“Have you eaten yet today?”
He shrugged. She wasn’t sure how to read it; he liked the drama of martyrdom.
“You have to eat,” she said testily, her frustration getting the best of her. “What am I going to tell people, ‘He died of malnutrition brought on by stubbornness’?”
“It’s a wonder I can survive a whole day without you around,” he said.
Her mother stomped the dirt off her shoes and came in through the kitchen’s back door. She smiled happily. She took off her gloves, and hung up her coat, and then she stood in the center of the kitchen for a bit, still smiling.
“Pills,” Candace’s father said, between bites of his sandwich. The look on her mother’s face was not that of having been reminded of something—of having heard, that is, another voice—but of having remembered it herself. She passed by them at the table and headed upstairs.
They all knew something was going on with her, but one of the things that made it easy to pretend otherwise was that her fogginess of mind was different only in degree, not in kind, from the way they’d always known her. She was never the type of mother who ran the proverbial tight ship. Their whole childhood was about reminding her of things: permission slips, clothes to be mended, games or parties to and from which they needed transportation. They took it for granted back then, they were protective of her—in large part because the flip side of her spaciness was that, provided Dad’s attention was otherwise engaged, they could get away with murder. As teens they would fight over whose turn it was to sneak out of the house after bedtime, so little did they worry about getting caught. Now that impulse to protect her seemed gone in Candace’s brothers—“That’s just Mom,” they’d say to her—and in truth it was not always easy to find it in herself.
“Work is getting me down a little lately,” she said to her father, just to force a conversation with him that wasn’t about him, and to cover the sounds of his chewing. “I had a whole curriculum for the spring, and then we’re handed these new state tests and told the school’s funding depends on how our students score. So anything you wanted to teach them that’s not on that test goes right out the window.”
“Thought you weren’t teaching anymore.”
“No, Daddy, I’ve been back to teaching this whole year. Ever since that Whalen girl had her stroke, remember that?”
He frowned. “Well, you know,” he said. “That’s government work.”
“What?”
He pursed his lips as though he had said something self-evident.
“It’s a job,” she said. “They don’t grow on trees, especially around here. We can’t all be like Renee and just find some rich guy to marry.”
“No, we cannot,” her father said. Then, perhaps sensing from her silence that he had gone a step too far, he said, “But you’re right. You can’t take anything for granted. Look at your brother.”
“Right,” she said. “Wait, what?”
“Your brother Gerry got fired,” he said matter-of-factly. He started in again on the sandwich, seeming hungrier now.
“Why? When?”
“A little while ago. I don’t know. Not sure the why of it changes anything. So apparently he didn’t tell you.”
“But apparently he told you.”
Her father shrugged. “He’s been over here more. Helping out. You’re not the only one who comes over.”
When she’d washed her father’s dishes she got back in the car a
nd dialed Gerry’s number while heading home. “Are you in your car?” he said. “I thought you didn’t make phone calls in the car.”
“Gerry, you lost your job? Why?”
“How’d you hear?”
“From Dad, I was just there. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry.”
“You’re on unemployment, I hope?”
He took a while to answer.
“Please tell me you’re collecting unemployment,” Candace said. “You’re entitled to it!”
“What entitles me to it?” he said. “But no, I mean yes, I’m getting it. Not much choice. I don’t feel very proud of myself. I just try to think of it as getting back some of what I’ve put in.”
“But what happened? Dad said you got fired but of course he would put it that way.”
“I just didn’t fit in there,” Gerry said. “I don’t fit in that culture in general, that PC culture. I wouldn’t play the game. You try to stand up for something and that is basically the worst thing you can do.”
He went on in that vein for a while, but she couldn’t get anything more specific out of him, so when she got home she called Mark. “Hey, Candace,” Karen said. “What’s up?”
“Not much,” she said reflexively. “Is everything okay? I thought I was calling Mark’s cell.”
“You are. He’s out—he forgot his phone here. I heard it ringing and found it in the bathroom.” She paused. “So I’ll just give him a message you called, then?”
She was so touchy, Candace thought, so easily slighted. Candace had never really figured out a path to intimacy with her only sister-in-law, maybe because Karen had seemed to take that intimacy for granted from the beginning. She’d talk about how they had to stick together as the only women in the family (leaving Renee out, though that seemed fair enough); and for the past year or two she’d go on about how they both “worked in education,” which bordered on insulting, Candace thought, because education was something for which she’d trained and to which she’d devoted her whole adult life, while Karen worked part-time in a private-school admissions office. Bottom line, she seemed desperate for a sister, which was weird only because she already had a sister, though there was some kind of dark backstory there, which Candace had never really asked her about, which probably counted as a slight too.