Class Dismissed

by Kevin McIntosh

  “And I have.” His fourteen-year-old voice again. I did take out the garbage, Mom.

  “Yes, you’ve changed the litter. Twice.”

  “And I’ve gotten cat food.”

  “But the wrong kind. Twice.”

  He leaned against the sink, folding his arms across his chest. “The right kind’s eight bucks a bag.”

  “So what? I pay for it.” Wrong answer.

  He pointed his chin at Chauncey. “And he ruined a pound of scallops.”

  “Is this really about money, Pat? Or Chauncey? I’m sorry about dinner, and that he scratched you, but this all feels really passive-aggressive.”

  “Jesus,” he said, rolling his eyes. She knew he couldn’t endure the therapy-speak. Still, she was only wrong about the passive part.

  “It’s like you don’t value what I value.”

  “How can you say––”

  “I’m not saying you don’t have good values. You do, obviously. I’m saying you don’t value the things that are important to me. Like my work at the shelter.”

  “I support that. Don’t I always have dinner when you––”

  “Yes, and you’re always pissy about it.” She stroked her cat. “And you neglect Chauncey.”

  “Because I got the wrong cat food?”

  “You can’t go out for Tylenol for a feverish child and come back with cough syrup and say, ‘Well, at least I got some medicine.’”

  “Susan, this is a cat we’re talking about, not a child.”

  “It’s all part of the same cloth. It’s a…continuum.”

  “A continuum?”

  “A continuum of nurture.” Chapter two, Aspects of Modern Social Work.

  “Are you saying I’m not nurturing?”

  “No, of course you’re nurturing. You’re a teacher.” Patrick studied his wounded hand. Susan tugged at her neckline. She had to finish her point. “But it’s neglectful.”

  That hot, spinning sensation, like everyone at Nick’s was staring, clutched him. “Susan, it was an accident.”

  It took a moment. “Oh God, Pat. You think I don’t know that? Really?”

  He’d succeeded: now she was just angry.

  “And does everything have to be about Josh? Does everything about us have to be displaced onto him?”

  It was this last bit of therapy-speak that did it. “Well,” he unfolded his arms, windmilled his bandaged hand, “we all can’t afford special cat food. And pâté. And…and…” he thrust his good hand at her, “…Gucci glasses.”

  Susan pushed up her glasses, her eyes misted. He knew she hated to cry, especially when she was angry. It’s what girls did. She looked down at Chauncey. “I thought you loved these glasses.”

  “I do, I do.” He wasn’t too far gone to know he’d gone too far. The designer glasses were her one public extravagance. She didn’t own a car, or expensive clothes or jewelry. It was cruel, going after her softest spot this way. Much crueler than finding fault with, say, her small breasts––which he also loved––the glasses were her choice, her signature. “I do,” he whispered. He wanted to sit next to her, hold her.

  She took Chauncey in her lap. She was crying now.

  “Susan, I’m sorry.”

  “God, Patrick, what is your fucking problem? What do you want from me?” Susan wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “What do you need?”

  She said it without irony, looking him square in the face. Seeming to forget that it was his classic classroom question, a running joke between them. That they’d asked each other that question and giggled a thousand times.

  Stop messing around. Get back to work. Leave her alone. Keep writing, reading, studying. Stop! These commands were easily deflected with shrugs, shakes, snorts, sneers, Who me’s? and the ever-popular, unanswerable double negative, I didn’ do nothin’. He’d stumbled upon his magical mantra with James, he of the scars and self-inflicted gang tattoos, back in Experiment in Cooperative Learning. James was once again leaving off pretending to read or write or think and returning to what came naturally, intimidating the world, when Patrick choked back Stop, knock it off, get to work, and out of his mouth fell, James, what do you need?

  The question stunned James. And Patrick shivered at the possibility––the probability––that James had never heard this question before. The boy’s face hung dumbly, his pumped-up body slack, like a kitten hanging from its mother’s mouth. Did he understand the question? Were the answers so manifold––Where does the universe end?––that to begin would suck him into a black hole of neediness?

  Nothin’, James mumbled, resuming his personal failed experiment in cooperative learning.

  With students less deprived, or with greater access to their wants, the answers flashed across their faces: What do I need, Mr. Lynch? What do I need? I need breakfast, a father, my cavities filled, to fill someone’s cavities, to be loved, feared, respected, paid attention to, or, even, educated. But no teenager could say these words (except for the boys who asked Mr. Lynch if he was going to finish that bagel on his desk). They, like James, would be frozen long enough for Mr. L to say, casually, Okay then, let’s get back to learning. And that magical question inoculated him––for the class period, at least––from further harm. Not even a student as disordered as James would make trouble for a man who had just inquired about his needs.

  But now, with his would-be fiancée staring at him red-eyed through those funky frames, the full weight of that question pressed on him. It left him as speechless as it had James and every child he’d ever asked.

  Susan nudged Chauncey off her lap. She removed her glasses, then leaned down and dried her face with the hem of her dress. When she looked up at him, she was swollen-eyed but contained. “I think you should leave,” she said.

  Only then did he realize how long he’d been fearing this request, expecting it. Would he cry now?

  “Go for a walk,” she clarified.

  He nodded, exhaled.

  “I’ll feed myself,” she said. “And Chauncey.”

  He grabbed his wallet and keys. “Come back when you’re sane,” he heard as he closed the door.

  It was dusk and getting brisk, the city cooling off as it never would after a hot summer day. Patrick walked downtown on Amsterdam, the street filling with Columbia and Barnard students looking for food, drink, love. He thought to gather himself at the Hungarian Pastry Shop on 110th, a favorite haunt, but was held by the gravitational pull of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine across the street. Susan, a default Episcopalian, had dragged him there last Easter and he’d been surprised by the hippie charm within the immense Gothic walls.

  He paused to ponder once again the Peace Fountain in the garden beside the cathedral: the Archangel Michael wielding his sword astride a smiling sun, a smiling moon; huge crab claws stretching out beneath, one claw pinching Satan’s dangling head. Around the whole mess a herd of giraffe gamboled. He’d found it bizarre and vaguely disturbing when Susan showed it to him. What Episcopal bishop signed off on this Xanadu on the Upper West Side? What was he on? And where, Patrick mused, could he get some?

  A peace fountain that’s violent and waterless, he’d asked Susan, what gives? She pointed to the plaque below:

  Peace Fountain celebrates the triumph of Good over Evil, and sets before us the world’s opposing forces—violence and harmony, light and darkness, life and death—which God reconciles in his peace.

  It’s all from the Book of Revelation, she said. Don’t you Catholics read your Bible? And she’d poked his ribs, knowing that “lapsed” didn’t begin to cover the kind of Catholic he was.

  The images were now oddly soothing, more tumultuous than the tumult in his head. Now it made sense, perhaps the way stimulants helped hyperactive kids, speeding the world up to their normal pace. He stood before the sculpture until the light faded and the floodl
ights came on, throwing a sinister cast over the grinning moon. A soft clucking came out of the garden and a pair of peacocks strutted from behind the fountain, thrusting their heads forward with each step. Patrick half-expected a unicorn to emerge from the shadows. The peacock keeper herded the pair back to a shed behind the fountain, leaving him alone with the angel and Satan and the giraffes. Patrick took this as his sign to leave.

  He hung out at the pastry shop until he finished the Times, relieved to find himself not in it. Then he zigged over to Broadway and headed further downtown until it occurred how close he was to Garvey on 103rd and to running into his––former?––students. The summer after his disastrous first year at Experiment in Cooperative Learning, Patrick had avoided coming within a three-block radius of his school building. He’d be strolling Broadway with Helene and hit 106th and be squeezing her hand, feeling tightness in his chest, pain in his stomach. That sensation hit him now, the terror that he might run into Abdul or Julio or, heaven forbid, Josh, kids for whom the phrase “school night” had little meaning.

  Patrick feared running into his colleagues, too. Didn’t Naomi live on 105th? Her first year at Science & Tech she’d thrown a Halloween party, memorable for the justice she did to a French maid outfit. The rest of them dressed to type as well: George a dandyish Oscar Wilde, Patrick as Tom Sawyer, complete with whitewash bucket and brush. Always-upbeat Denise and feisty Dorie came as Glinda and the Wicked Witch of the West. But such easy camaraderie was a thing of the past; since the day of the Incident, he’d only spoken to Dorie, and then only briefly. The Rubber Room was a disease no teacher wanted to catch.

  “They’ve got this sweet young thing just out of Bank Street covering your class,” Dorie had said. “Very deer-in-the-headlights. I’m sure Abdul’s having her for lunch.”

  “And Maria for dessert.”

  Neither of them laughed.

  “I check on your room to see it’s not trashed,” Dorie said. No small favor. At EICL he’d missed one Friday and his students threw the used paperbacks he’d bought for their classroom library out the window and onto the blacktop three stories below, where they remained all weekend in the rain.

  “Thanks.”

  No mention of Josh, his missing middle digit. He’d heard Dorie’s raspy breathing from her springtime hay fever. “Patrick,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I know.”

  “Where are they putting you?”

  “I was at Court Street. They’re moving me to Chelsea, off Seventh and Twenty-Sixth.”

  “Good Chinese on that block. And a little Mexican place––Juanita’s––around the corner.” Dorie was all about lunch.

  “So this is a good move.”

  “Lunch-wise? Absolutely.” She blew her nose. “Pardon my allergies.” She blew again. “Patrick, we’ll talk.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Everybody misses you. Staff and kids.”

  “Give them my regards.”

  “This is bullshit, Patrick.”

  “I know.”

  “And not about you. Remember that. Could happen to any of us.”

  “I know.”

  “And any kid.”

  “Luck of the Irish.”

  Dorie laughed despite herself and promised they’d have coffee soon. And though he knew they wouldn’t have coffee or anything else soon, somehow it was Dorie’s number he tapped after inserting the quarter in the payphone at 106th and Broadway. Dorie was the only person who could at once bolster his confidence and slap the self-pity out of him. She, as much as anyone, had made him a teacher. Maybe she could keep him one.

  But as soon as he finished punching her number he hit the change button and heard the quarter fall through. It was almost eleven o’clock, he realized, and, indeed, a school night for her, if not for all her students.

  Patrick was beyond weary, the wine out of his system, ready for sleep. He walked back home sober, if not sane. He opened their door as quietly as possible, removed his shoes and padded back to their bedroom.

  Though the spring night had grown cool, Susan had kicked off her beloved comforter. With only the sheet covering her, Patrick was involuntarily warmed by a rare glimpse of her almost uncovered form, surprised by that delicious dip from rump to waist. He longed to touch her. Before he thought better of it, nearly laying a hand on that lovely hip, Chauncey jumped on the bed, circled twice, and nestled in the soft curve Susan made. She sighed and tossed an arm over her cat, pulled him to her. One eye on Patrick, Chauncey rested his muzzle on Susan’s breast.

  Patrick curbed his darker impulses and let the sleeping cat lie. He plucked his pillow from beside Susan’s dreaming head, grabbed the red blanket from the front closet, and set up quarters on the couch. He’d finished his evening ablutions and once again bent his six-foot frame into Susan’s five-foot-six-inch couch when he noticed a pink Post-it stuck to their answering machine. His girlfriend’s usually impeccable private school cursive was barely legible, confirming just how crazy he’d been to think of waking her. Chauncey, he had to admit, had saved him from himself. When he finally deciphered the message, its contents were still cryptic, and distressing. Patrick, she’d scrawled, who is Gunther?

  You Can Go Home

  Yes, it was the flatness he missed. How can you miss flatness? Susan once teased. She’d spent her entire life amidst the gentle undulations of New England and the towering, manmade topography of Manhattan. Flatness equaled boring, a lack of imagination, of soul. He’d failed to explain it to her then, but he felt it now, something inside him spreading out as his plane broke the clouds and descended over the lakes, farms, villages of his native state, divided into neat, level squares. The sensation deepened as he rolled down the window of his rented Corolla and drove past the suburbs of Minneapolis, which extended alarmingly far and north into farmland. Shin-high corn stalks, endless furrows of soy and sorghum spooled out to the horizon. Fertilizer and animal smells filled the car, odors that disgusted Patrick as a boy but now smelled like home.

  He was grateful for the ride and the time. His mother had offered to pick him up, just as she’d offered to pay his airfare. She was practical in all things, and generous, but even she understood that, in this instance, time and space were more important to him than money.

  Mist began to fall and fog rose off the fields. Something to do with the relative heat of the air and temperature of the soil, he could hear Gunther explaining. And the nitrogen released by the crops. And he’d nod at the lecture by the boy who failed chemistry because he slept through final exams. Patrick rolled up the window, turned on the wipers, adjusted Susan’s dad’s tweed jacket under the shoulder strap. He cursed himself for leaving the trench coat. Susan couldn’t help being solicitous, given the occasion, but he’d left her in no mood to help him pack.

  The fields scrolled by as he cruised up I-94, letting a country station blare on the radio’s preset. Tammy Wynette wasn’t high on his playlist, but when would you hear her in the city? He was enjoying the unfamiliar familiar; he’d come home a number of times since he’d lived in New York, but never home home, not since his mother had moved to a condo in St. Paul, becoming office manager of the physics department at the U of M the year after he graduated from high school. God, how big Winnipee Falls had gotten! It had been the “city” to go to because it had a Walgreens; now Patrick marveled at the Burger King, Kmart, and RadioShack advertised at exit 56A.

  The Falls’ gain had been Peterson’s Prairie’s loss. The farm foreclosures in the ’80s had done it, his mother said. Unlike its larger sister village, Patrick’s birthplace lacked the critical mass to hold on to its downtown. His mother had wanted to drive with him because she knew how upset he’d be at the changes. As a child, he’d never liked change. And she’d been right: he swallowed hard as he drove past Morgan & Co.’s grain elevator and turned slow onto Main Street to find the Full Moon Café empty, boarded up. A
nderson’s Hardware, where his grandfather had worked after earlier hard times had forced him off the family homestead, was likewise vacated. Knutson’s Shop-Rite, of course, was still in business. Some things were eternal. Most disconcerting, Hendrickson’s Best had gone belly-up; one antique, round-headed pump still looked operational, like a one-armed sentry at a checkpoint for a war long over. The E in Best had fallen on its back, the middle prong blown off in a Minnesota snowstorm, the lone pump standing guard over HENDRICKSON’S BUST.

  At the end of Main Street, still at the edge of town, Patrick pulled up to the converted farmhouse he was raised in—cornflower blue when he’d lived in it, now a faded gray, and peeling on the southern exposure. The lawn was patchy, his mother’s flower beds weedy. He was glad to be alone. Shabby, she would have sniffed. Takes time to keep up an old house and a big yard, his father would’ve said, always withholding judgment. But, he would have added, anything worth doing is worth doing well. A bit of adolescent defensiveness snuck up on Patrick. Surely he’d taken better care of the property after his father had died, hadn’t he? He’d never let the grass get that brown, the gutters droop, full of wet leaves, or let tools lie out the way he saw them, scattered and damp, back by the shed Grandfather Lynch built.

  Before the current residents could come out and ask what in the Sam Hill he was staring at, Patrick pulled in and out of his old blacktop driveway––deeply fissured, he noted––and drove back toward downtown. Against his will he took a right on Evergreen and the Corolla headed in the direction of Willard County High School. How many perpetrators, he wondered, revisit the scene of their crime? Of all the aspects of Peterson’s Prairie he would’ve changed, his alma mater would’ve topped the list. But it, of all places, was the same, exactly the same, as the day he’d graduated and never looked back.

  It was 2:00 on a Friday. When did school get out in Peterson’s Prairie? He couldn’t remember; it seemed everything happened earlier in the Midwest. The Corolla crackled along the gravel bus path. He could go to the teacher’s parking lot (wasn’t he a teacher?) and get out, but he didn’t want to risk the attention. But why not? All who remembered him would welcome a returning hero. They’d remember the second half of his high school career, not the first. How many WCHS grads went to elite eastern colleges? Became teachers in New York City? How many had the elementary school named for their father? His mother once let slip that his were the highest English SATs ever scored at Willard County High. He drummed the steering wheel. The highest because Gunther never took the SATs. Because tests were bullshit. College was bullshit.