by Torey Hayden
“You probably should have. She needs to mind her own business sometimes.”
“I wanted to sort it out on my own. I didn’t want her to tell you. God, that was the last thing I wanted, you two gossiping in the ladies’ room.”
“We weren’t gossiping, Lad.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
I scanned the playground, counting heads to make sure all the children were still there. Carolyn had gotten a new boy, and he kept wandering off. I spotted him at the far end. Standing against the wall was very hot, so I pushed myself off to let the air circulate. Lad looked over at me.
“I’m still going back,” I said. “To Enrico’s, I mean. I really do feel I need that break in my day.”
Ladbrooke looked down at her hands.
“You’re welcome to come. You know that. But I’m not going back to sandwiches in the classroom.”
“You’re still upset, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not. I just think the time’s come for me to have a change of scenery.”
Ladbrooke frowned and didn’t say anything further.
The next morning I arrived as usual at 7:30, got my cup of coffee, sat down at the table and started to organize myself for the day. Within a few moments, the classroom door opened and someone came in. This surprised me. I was one of the few people to come so early, which was why I did it. It usually guaranteed me an uninterrupted half hour to myself.
I sat, waiting for someone to appear but heard instead the familiar rumble-bump of Ladbrooke’s putting her things beside the filing cabinet. She opened the bottom drawer and took out her jogging shoes. I craned my neck to see around the divider but couldn’t quite.
“You’re early,” I said.
She came round the corner then, still in her sock feet, the shoes in her hand. She stopped across the table from me but remained standing.
“I got drunk last night,” she said.
I thought for a moment she was going to burst into tears.
“I’ve gone nearly three months. Through hell and high water. And then I took one shitty drink and blew it all.”
“Sit down, Lad.”
She remained standing. “What’s wrong with me, Torey? Why can’t I stop?”
“Nothing’s wrong with you. It’s just very hard to do.”
“I only wanted one drink. That’s all. Just one. Why couldn’t I stop at one?”
“Lad, sit down.”
Pulling out the chair across from me, she fell into it. Her shoes made a resounding thud as she dropped them to the floor beside her. Despondently, she braced her head with both fists. I regarded her, and there was silence around us.
“Do you know why it happened?”
“I just felt like a drink, that’s all.”
I studied her, as she sat across from me, her posture reflecting her despair. The obviousness of her disappointment kept me from asking her why she hadn’t managed to take any of the numerous preventive measures we’d come up with over the months to help her avoid that first drink. I could sense that this had caught her as much unawares as her announcement of it had caught me. After all the traumas she’d managed to ride out, I was perplexed that she had succumbed here and now in the middle of the working week.
“Was it Tom? Did you and Tom have an argument?”
She shook her head. “Tom wasn’t even home.”
“Did his kids come over?”
Again she shook her head.
“You just felt like a drink?”
“Yes.”
Folding my arms on the table, I leaned on them. “Is it me, Ladbrooke?”
She glanced over briefly and our eyes met. Then she looked away again. She shook her head. “No.”
Silence followed.
“You and I have been having an uncomfortable, confusing few weeks, haven’t we? It’s getting to me too. I’ve been feeling under a lot of pressure from you.”
“From me?” she asked, surprised.
I nodded. “I feel like I can’t do anything right around you. If I try to help, you don’t want me to. If I don’t help, you’re angry with me because I haven’t. I give an opinion on something, and you disagree. I make a decision, and you tell me it’s the wrong one. That’s been hard on me.”
Ladbrooke was watching me. Chin braced in one hand, she gazed at my face. Tears had filled her eyes but they remained enmeshed in her lower lashes and did not fall.
“I can’t imagine that you’re not aware that this has been going on,” I said. “I kept hoping it was just a stage and would pass, so I didn’t say anything; but now I think maybe it’s time for us to talk. My feeling is that the pressure’s getting a bit too much for you too.”
She looked down at the tabletop. “What’s behind it? Are you afraid of the end?”
“Not really.”
“Is it the pressure of working to a deadline, like we’re doing? Do you feel like I’m pushing you out too fast?”
She shrugged slightly and kept her head down. “I don’t feel like you’re pushing me out.”
I nodded.
Another slight shrug. “What I do feel like is that maybe you don’t care if I go.”
“Oh.”
She looked over. “I still can’t figure you out.”
“What do you mean?”
“You never protest. You never say you’re sorry that it’s all coming to an end. We’ve all sweated blood in here, but it’s just business as usual with you. Get Shemona placed. Get Shamie into junior high. Get Ladbrooke to make small talk at Enrico’s. Maybe you’re so used to all this by now that it doesn’t matter to you anymore.”
“Does it seem like that to you?”
“You’re so damned objective about everything. I can never tell when something really matters to you and when it doesn’t. You always seem to care terribly about everything, and yet, at the same time, I don’t see how it can be caring, because it doesn’t affect you.”
“It’s not quite like that.”
“It seems like it to me. Like yesterday, I knew what was going on in your head. It was just get me back to Enrico’s, get me talking, make a socially acceptable person out of me so I can go off and live a good life and you can notch up one more success on your tally. You didn’t really care that I was so unhappy, that it’d scared the shit out of me and all I wanted was some support.”
“Hey, Ladbrooke, hold on. Yesterday you were telling me you didn’t want me to help, that you were angry with me for interfering. Now you’re saying you’re angry with me because I didn’t help you enough. Which do you want? It’s sort of difficult for me to do both.”
Tears sprang up again and again did not fall, but her entire jaw tensed to keep them in check. A long, very pointed silence followed.
“I don’t know what I want anymore,” she said at last, her voice shaky. “Everything seems to be in a state of flux. My opinions, my feelings, my thoughts, nothing’s the same. Sometimes I just want to do things by myself. I don’t want everybody to keep paying such close attention to me.”
“I think you’re having fairly normal feelings, Lad. I think we’ve come to the point where you’re going to feel a bit ambiguous about my intervening. That’s a positive sign, not a negative one. That’s growth. It’s your life, not mine, and ultimately, you’re going to want to take sole charge of it again.”
With one finger, she flicked the tears from the corners of her eyes. “We’ve managed to get this conversation off you again, haven’t we? You’re like trapping a shadow. You really are.”
I smiled slightly.
“I need to know about you, Torey. Can’t you understand that? I can handle the end coming. Maybe I don’t like it, but it’s a fact of life. I can come to terms with it. However …” She paused. Gazing down at the tabletop, she ran her fingers along the edge. “What I can’t seem to shake is the feeling that this is all just a job for you, that it’s nothing more than some sort of high-class assembly line, processing people through, getting them to turn out mo
re acceptable than when you got them.”
Ladbrooke lifted her eyes to meet mine. “I’ve got to understand what you really feel, because, otherwise, nothing is going to make sense. I’ve survived all this hell these last few months because I felt it finally mattered to someone that I did. I felt I had some value, that you cared. But if it’s all been just a job for you, then it’s been kind of a hollow victory, hasn’t it?”
I was silent. I looked away and then down. I studied the fake wood grain of the Formica tabletop and did not speak for several minutes. Ladbrooke, chin in hand, watched me intently.
“This is a job, Ladbrooke. There’s no denying the obvious. I would never have been here in the first place, never have even met you, if it hadn’t been for someone’s hiring me with the specific intention that I come in here and do the kinds of things you’ve watched me do over these last nine months. It is my job; it’s what I’ve been trained to do. But I don’t like to think of it as processing people. What I’m working with, what I’m ‘processing,’ are problems. I’m contracted to get rid of problems interfering with people’s lives that they themselves can’t get rid of on their own. I go in; I do what I can in the time I’m given to accomplish that. And when my time’s up, I leave, because that’s what the contract says. I don’t get very emotional about the problems; if I did, I wouldn’t be very effective. But I don’t like to think I seem the same way about the people. For you and Shamie and Shemona and all the others, I do care, Ladbrooke. I love you. Otherwise, you’d be right. There wouldn’t be any point in it.”
She looked down at her hands.
“Don’t confuse yourself with your problems, Lad. You’re not your problems. Don’t go back to drinking to discover that.”
She shrugged slightly. “I don’t know why I did that.”
“Well, I think it was one of those things like we all do sometimes and wish afterward we hadn’t. Probably, it’s best just to acknowledge it’s happened and leave it at that. You’ve been doing a super job, Lad. Pick up where you left off and go on.”
“You know what I keep wondering?” she asked, her eyes still down.
“What’s that?”
“I keep wondering what it’s going to be like without those problems. What’s my life going to be like?”
She paused.
“I watch you getting ready to finish with the kids … I know you’re probably never going to even see any of them again, and still, you go on like normal, even after all this intense togetherness.” And she paused. She continued to study her hands in her lap. “I mean, I wouldn’t want it to go on like this forever, with everything so intense. I’m tired of it. I’ve felt at times like there’s been both of us in here under my skin with me, and there just isn’t room. I want to be my own self again. But still, over and over, I find myself wondering what it’s going to be like without this, when you’ve packed up and gone, I wonder, are you even going to miss me?”
I did smile then. I smiled and covered my eye with one hand and kept smiling.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m not laughing, Lad. This is amazement—at how two people can spend all this time together and still not figure one another out. Yes, of course, I’m going to miss you. How could I not miss you?”
She smiled self-consciously at the tabletop.
“The thing is, it’s not going to be the end, is it?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, that’s what all this hassle’s been about over these last few weeks, hasn’t it? The time’s come for the changeover. You’re not going to be just another kid anymore. You’re going to be my friend.”
Chapter 32
My birthday came during the fourth week of May. It fell rather inconveniently midweek, but I decided, what the heck, we’d have a party anyway, middle of the week or not. The only two special occasions all year had been the Nativity play and Shemona’s birthday, so this provided one more needed break in routine.
Celebrating my birthday, rather than one of the children’s, was better because, while the focus of the party was pleasantly familiar, no one was going to get a nose out of joint over preferential treatment. So we opted for all the trimmings: balloons, streamers, silly hats and games.
I gave over the whole of Tuesday to the party. We now had only four children in class in the morning anyway, so I let them do the decorating, which led to considerable noisy chaos. Leslie and Dirkie enjoyed the atmosphere tremendously but didn’t contribute much in the way of concrete help, so this left everything to Mariana and Geraldine. They reveled in their new-found authority, commanding the rest of us like two despots.
We blew up balloons, cut streamers and made Chinese lanterns. Mariana and Geraldine hopped from table to chair to radiator to bookcase and back again, taping things up. Then we made a small assortment of no-bake cookies and bars, and chocolate-dipped bananas to be frozen in the ice compartment of the refrigerator in the teachers’ lounge. Toward the end of the morning, the four children sat down to make party hats.
“This has really been fun,” Mariana said. “We ought to have parties more.”
“If we had parties more, they wouldn’t be as good,” I said. “We couldn’t afford to spend time like this very often.”
“How come?” Mariana asked.
“Because we wouldn’t learn anything,” Dirkie said. “If we spent all our time having parties, we wouldn’t learn, and you come to school to learn.”
“We’re learning. I learned how to make a Chinese lantern this morning,” Mariana said. “Besides, I didn’t mean have a party every day. I just meant more often than we’re doing now.”
“There isn’t time now,” I said. “The school year’s almost over.”
Silence enveloped us as everyone grew involved with the activities.
“I’m lucky,” Geraldine suddenly said.
Mariana looked up. “How come?”
“I get to stay in this class. Me and Dirkie and Leslie. We’re going to be in this class next year. But you won’t.”
“Well, I’m going to third grade,” Mariana replied, her voice injured sounding.
“So?”
“So I’m going to be in a real class. With a real teacher.”
“She’s real,” Geraldine said, jerking her head in my direction.
“No, she isn’t,” Mariana replied. “And this isn’t a real class.”
“So?”
Mariana couldn’t think of an answer to that.
Geraldine raised her head to look over at me. She smiled. “I’m lucky. I’m going to be in here.”
When Ladbrooke came back from lunch, she found me on my hands and knees in the depths of the library.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Hiding peanuts for the treasure hunt.”
“You’re really getting elaborate, aren’t you?”
I stood and dusted off my knees. “They’re good kids. I want them to have a good time.” And I smiled. “Besides, it’s my birthday.”
“Well, come on out here then and look at your birthday cake.”
Ladbrooke set the box on the table. “Now, don’t look for just the minute, okay? Turn around. This is going to stun you, believe me.”
When I was given permission to turn back, she was holding a piece of paper in front of the cake. “Ta-da!” she said, and pulled it away.
“Gosh, it’s great,” I said and it was. A tall cake with rather passionately pink icing, it had my name written across it in bold white letters.
“I’ve been practicing. Besides, it’s angel food. They’re really easy to make. You don’t end up with two pieces you’ve got to stick together, like with other cakes.”
“You’re getting pretty good at this.”
“Well, I could only get better, believe me. But I think I did all right this time.” She smiled at the cake. “You’re another one like Shemona. It just wouldn’t have done to have bought you a cake at the bakery.”
And then it was party ti
me. Everyone put on silly hats. Music went on the phonograph. And the party started.
We played endless games. I blindfolded the children and gave them each a plate of food, which they had to taste and try to identify, then remember and write down afterward. We had chocolate chopping, a game I’d come across in Wales, where the children, divided into teams, had to run, put on a series of cloths, then get to a plate containing a large bar of chocolate, cut a bit off with knife and fork, eat it and get back to the next team member. Lad and I joined in, our dubious talents divided between the two teams, but it was Leslie and Dirkie who gave real hilarity to the thing. While alight with the spirit, neither had a clue as to what was actually happening, which necessitated having other team members accompany them to try to get them through the motions. At one point, Leslie, Shamie and Shemona were all laughing so hard that none of them could stand.
Coming back from recess, we all sat down at the table for cake and ice cream.
“Miss,” Shamie asked, “can I put my record on now?”
I nodded.
Shamie got up and went to his cubby. When he’d arrived at lunchtime, he was carrying an LP he’d brought especially for the party. It was a recording of Irish folk music, and he’d thought I might like to hear some.
Carefully, Shamie removed the record from its sleeve, dusted it with his shirt cuff, then set it gently on the turn-table. After lowering the stylus, he returned to the table and sat down with us, while the air around us filled with thin, foreign sounds.
“This is céili music,” Shamie said. “When we have a party, this is the kind of music we play.”
“Yes,” said Geraldine enthusiastically, “and everybody dances.”
“The party itself is called a céili,” Shamie said. “We had them down at the church hall on Friday nights. Curran Maris and Sean Michael O’Flannery would play their fiddles. Sometimes my daddy would too. And everyone dances. It was nice.”
We listened to the music as we ate.
“Oh, there’s ‘The Top of Cork Road,’” Geraldine said, as a new piece of music began. “I can dance a jig to that. You can too, can’t you, Shemona?”