River Angel

by A. Manette Ansay

  Anna Grey sighed, checked her lipstick in the compact mirror she kept inside her desk. It was probably just the weather. She hadn’t gotten used to Northern winters, the chill that never left her hands and feet. The children thundered in, and she smiled at them vaguely, but she did not come around from behind her desk. In September, it had been announced that teachers shouldn’t touch the children anymore, because of liability. Some of the teachers were outraged, but Anna Grey herself hadn’t touched a child in years. Strange, because she remembered hugging the children at her school in Indianapolis: the surprising cold of their cheeks after recess, the various shampoo smells of their hair. Gabriel’s hair was uncombed and oily. That awful sore glistened—would it ever heal? He sat down at his desk as if he had no idea where he was; his expression was the same one the hitchhiker had worn as he stood beside the highway, watching or not watching Anna Grey drive by, untouchable, untouched. It was the same one Bill wore at night as he sat at the supper table, the flat line of his mouth rippling as he worked his roast like a cud.

  The principal’s voice came over the intercom, and Gabriel rose with the other children, pressed his hand over his heart. I pledge allegiance—to the flag—of the United States of America—

  Anna Grey had neglected to rise, to put her hand over her own heart, and when they finished the pledge of allegiance, the children looked at her curiously. “You may be seated,” she said. “Open your math books to Chapter Fourteen.”

  When Gabriel opened his book, Anna Grey could tell he was in the wrong place. His reading and writing skills were far behind the other children’s. “Chapter Four-teen,” she said, but Gabriel wasn’t listening. His hand was in his desk cubby, and Anna Grey thought she heard the irritable crackle of his lunch bag. Bethany packed him plenty of food, but the child was always hungry. All morning, he’d sneak bits of crushed Ding-Dong, a corn chip, a peanut butter cracker—that slow hand moving from his cubby to his mouth. By lunchtime, most of it would be gone; still, he prayed before he ate, seemingly oblivious to the mimicking gestures of the kids all around him. Looking for attention, Anna Grey knew, like the second-grade boy who always fell down or the girl—thank heavens she’d moved away—who kept taking off her underwear. Poor child, the other teachers said, and inevitably they’d ask, Why isn’t he in Living and Learning? Living and Learning was Marty’s pet project, a special class for special kids that met three mornings a week. But Anna Grey couldn’t admit she was failing with Gabriel, especially not to Marty, especially not now. She wasn’t the same green teacher who’d encountered Sandy Shore. She planned to surprise everyone, discover a special talent in Gabriel—art or, perhaps, music—and encourage him until he grew to trust her, blossomed like a flower. She imagined how he’d start making friends, play kickball and softball at recess, look boldly out at the world—but the fact was that, nearly a month into the term, Gabriel still was staring at the ground.

  What made it worse was that Marty himself had approached Anna Grey about Gabriel just last week, surprising her as she sneaked a cigarette in the teachers’ lounge after the first bell had already rung. “I think he needs more than you can give him,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “My recommendation is to keep him mainstreamed,” Anna Grey said firmly. “You know how the Living and Learning kids get ostracized.”

  “Gabriel is already ostracized,” Marty said. “Tortured might be a better word. Let me help the kid, Anna.”

  “I’m late,” Anna Grey said, crushing out her half-smoked cigarette.

  “Can we schedule a meeting to discuss this?” Marty said. “It would be, I mean, strictly professional.”

  He blushed with the sincerity of those words, and Anna Grey blushed too, but angrily, because even as he spoke she was imagining the scrape of his beard against her cheeks, the edge of his teeth against her tongue. Strictly professional—of course, that December afternoon had been a mistake, a weak moment after his separation, her only infidelity, ever. Until that day, affairs had been something that happened only to other people, and even now, after the fact, it was unthinkable that she had fallen into such a thing herself. She almost wished she were a Catholic so that she could confess, receive her punishment, leave her sin in the care of someone bound by God’s law not to repeat it. Maya assured her that the Circle of Faith meetings worked the same way—members took a vow of silence so that whatever was said between Faith walls was sure to stay there. “I know something’s on your mind, Anna,” she’d said more than once. “You just don’t seem yourself lately.” But Anna Grey could not imagine admitting something like this to anyone, though the fact was that she longed to tell Bill, to make a clean breast of everything. Her fear wasn’t that he’d be angry, or hurt, or even that he’d leave her. Her fear was that he wouldn’t care one way or the other.

  She’d first met Bill on the IU campus during the terrible fall of Sandy Shore, when it seemed to Anna Grey that her life had changed, that nothing was satisfying anymore. She and another teacher were there to see a football game. Bill was sitting next to them, and they all got talking during the halftime show. As the cheerleaders kicked their pretty legs, Bill told Anna Grey how his father owned a funeral home in Ambient, Wisconsin (Where? Anna Grey had said), and how he’d offered Bill a junior partnership when he’d graduated from high school. But Bill was worried about the draft, and he had an idea about becoming a veterinarian, so Bill senior gave his blessing, even paid Bill’s tuition on the condition he spend his summers at the morgue. Now, three years into his undergraduate degree, Bill was failing all his science classes. The army had stopped drafting people, and Bill wished he had the guts to drop out and go home. If he’d taken his father’s offer, he said, he’d be out in the real world, making money, instead of studying abstract ideas that meant nothing. As he talked, Anna Grey kept looking at the curious gray streak in his hair. (Later, his mother would tell Anna Grey he’d been born with it. The devil’s kiss, she said.) She wrote her phone number on a corn dog wrapper, and the other teacher giggled about it all the way home. “Imagine all the dead people he’s touched,” she said. “Imagine him combing some dead person’s hair.” In spring, when he bought the ring with his fall tuition money, the other teachers teased Anna Grey that he’d taken it off a dead woman’s finger. They said that on her wedding night, he’d ask her to hold her breath, tell her not to move.

  Opposites attract: That was what people always said about Bill and Anna Grey. She was short, fair, talkative, while he was the quiet type, tall and dark. Back in those days, she was interested in politics. She supported environmental causes, hunger drives, and women’s rights. It was true that Bill seemed to have no opinions whatsoever on any of these subjects. But she’d grown bone weary of her life in Indianapolis, and she was still young enough to believe that change could only mean something good. Bill had a solid future; he loved her, he wanted a family. At the time, it had all seemed simple enough.

  Math period ended; science began. Anna Grey divided the students into task groups, ignoring the groans of the three girls who got stuck with Gabriel. Their assignment was to design an ecosystem. All parts of the food chain were to be represented. If they didn’t finish their ecosystems today, they could work on them again during science period tomorrow. She gave each group a poster board, tracing paper, and a stack of National Geographics; they already had glue and scissors and markers in their desks. “Plan the whole thing out in pencil first,” she warned, and then she went back to her desk, where she took three Tylenol caplets with the gritty dregs of her decaf. She thought about Bill undressing for bed, his spare tire spangled with varicose veins. How last night, again, she’d laid a warm hand on the small of his back and he’d twisted to look at her curiously. “What?” he’d said. “What?” She thought about Marty, how he’d fumbled with the front of her bra until she guided his hands to the back. How she looked away, shy, when he kicked off his trousers and how then—too quickly—he’d slid up inside her so that she never actually saw him, and this left her e
ven more unsatisfied than his odd, staccato rocking. He’d looked at her, afterward, spreading her with his fingers to blow cool air on the place that didn’t want cooling, and yet she had held his head between her hands until. he had blown the last of her desire out.

  The lunch bell rang. Half the day down. At noon recess, a group of boys led by Bethany Carpenter’s own Robert John—a troublemaker if Anna Grey had ever seen one—pinned Gabriel down and made him eat chunks of dirty slush that shot through the fence from the highway. The teacher on recess duty was Maya Paluski; she called Bethany at home, but Bethany had to clean house for someone in Killsnake and couldn’t come in before her crossing guard shift started at three. “Call my husband at Jeep’s,” she said, but Fred was unloading stock and couldn’t leave. “Handle it however you see fit,” he said. “I’ll talk to Robert John again when I get home.” So Maya brought Gabriel back to Anna Grey’s classroom, interrupting her half-hour planning period, the only break she would get all day. Gabriel’s face was raw and wet, streaked black around the mouth. He didn’t look at Anna Grey, but he didn’t not look at her, either. Gabriel just looked. That was what always got to Anna Grey. “Maybe you should keep him here,” Maya said. “I mean, instead of sending him outside with the others. They’re worse than wolves.”

  Anna Grey imagined spending the rest of the term’s planning periods under Gabriel’s absent stare. “He has to learn to stick up for himself,” she said, perhaps a little more crossly than she meant to. “He won’t always have teachers to look out for him.”

  “Well, OK,” Maya said. “But if I can help, Anna, let me know.”

  After Maya was gone, Anna Grey wiped Gabriel’s mouth with a Kleenex from her desk drawer, careful not to let her fingers touch his sore. “You’re bigger than those boys,” she said. “It’s silly to let them do this to you.” She poked the Kleenex into his hand. “Here. You can wipe your own mouth, don’t you think?” Suddenly he leaned over and spat into the wastebasket, a dark stream that made Anna Grey’s stomach turn.

  “Gabriel!” she said.

  “It tasted bad,” he whined. “It still tastes bad.”

  “Then don’t let them bully you next time.”

  He stared at the floor, unresponsive. It was as if she were talking to the air.

  “Do you hear me?” she said. “Do you?” Then abruptly, cruelly, she knocked on his head with her knuckles. “Hello? Anybody home?”

  He lifted his head to look at her, eyes brimming, an innocent child. Appalled by what she’d just done, Anna Grey turned and walked away, down the hall and out the school’s back entrance, where she inhaled deep, burning gulps of cold air. On the asphalt, a group of boys chased a red rubber kickball, slipping and sliding over the ice. Younger girls jumped rope, while the older ones floated in groups. Maya was right. She wasn’t herself lately. The truth was that she wanted to go home—not home to Ambient, but to Skylark, where her sister still lived. She wanted to hear people speak her full name—Anna Grey—instead of shortening it to just plain Anna, the way Northerners automatically did. She wanted true heat that lasted more than a week or two in August, and she wanted humidity that left a person not knowing where her own skin ended and the air began. She wanted country music on the radio instead of rock ’n’ roll, and she wanted to order a glass of tea in a restaurant without having to say iced tea. She wanted to open her mouth without somebody telling her, “You’re not from here, are you?” And she wanted to walk down a street where people looked you in the face; but the thing was, Anna Grey’s sister said that Skylark had changed. People who worked in Atlanta lived there now; it was more like a suburb than a town. It had been seven years since Anna Grey had gone back, though her sister had come twice to Ambient. “You don’t want to see it, really,” her sister said. “It’s one big parking lot.”

  But the same sort of thing was happening to Ambient. Once, Solomon Public had stood alone on Country O, the only building north of the D road. To the south was the school bus parking lot and repair shed; farther down the road, well out of sight, was an International Harvester dealership. Now the IH stood empty, but new homes were sprouting up haphazardly as mushrooms, and the D road, which continued out past the Badger State Mall toward the interstate, had been transformed into what was now called the Solomon strip: outdoor malls and fast-food restaurants, gas stations and minimarts, video stores, electronic shops, outlets. The couples building homes in the developments around it weren’t rich weekenders like the millpond people: They had to commute to Milwaukee, or even Chicago, five days a week, morning and night. If you asked if the drive didn’t bother them, if the smell of the fertilizer plant didn’t get into their hair and clothes on days the wind was wrong, they said it was worth it to own their own house, to live where the money went further, to have their kids grow up in the country, away from guns and drugs.

  The bell rang. Anna Grey blew her nose into the tissue she kept tucked inside her sleeve. The truth of the matter was that what she really wanted, more than anything, was a cigarette. She could see that pack of Salem Lights tucked between her car registration and an emergency box of Kotex. But there simply wasn’t time to walk to her car. Besides, somebody might catch her smoking.

  Inside, Gabriel was sitting at his desk. His hands were folded; his eyes were closed. The child was praying, and this time, the image twisted like a hook in Anna Grey’s heart. Hating herself all over again, she got her purse from her desk, dug through it until she found a half-eaten roll of cherry Life Savers.

  “Here,” she said. She meant to let her fingers touch his hand—an apology—but instead she dropped the roll on his desk. It landed with a hard, metallic sound. “That’ll get the taste out of your mouth.” Kids were coming in from recess now, bringing with them the mildewed odor of wet wool. Anna Grey swallowed three more Tylenol before calling them to order; still, by the end of the afternoon, her headache clutched her skull like a heavy knit cap. And perhaps the headache could have been blamed for the peculiar thought that bobbed to the surface of her consciousness as she drove home from work: Why not just keep on driving? Why not just?

  Milly, a responsible voice replied, but Anna Grey ignored it and lit a cigarette. She had her checkbook, credit cards, a map if she chose to look at it. Maybe she’d just drive until she got good and hungry; then she’d stop at an all-night diner, where she’d buy more cigarettes from a machine and order steak and eggs. If she wanted pie, she’d damn well have that too; the hell with her spreading thighs. In her mind’s kind eye, a man—the hitchhiker with the buttermint smile—took the stool beside hers. “Coffee,” he told the waitress. “Just coffee.” And then, seeing the concern in Anna Grey’s face, he revealed to her that he had nothing in the world but what he carried with him on his back. “I’ll help you,” she told him. “I’ll take you wherever you need to go,” and his windburned face flushed darker as he realized his good fortune. Together they discussed the possibilities—Atlanta, Florida, Mexico, Baton Rouge—but even as they tried to choose, Anna Grey was startled by the sight of Bill’s car parked in its usual spot in the driveway, the Graf Funeral Parlor logo stamped on the driver’s-side door. Habit had brought her home.

  Inside, Bill was watching TV. He did not turn around as Anna Grey hung her coat in the hallway closet. President Bush was being interviewed by reporters about the effects of environmental terrorism; he looked ten years older than he had when he’d given his speech in Cradle Park. Anna Grey stared helplessly as images of the Persian Gulf flashed on the screen, the terrible black smoke of the oil wells rising, unchecked, into the sky. Experts said it would affect the level of air pollution worldwide, and some even predicted increased incidents of cancer, birth defects, and infertility. There was nothing anybody could do about all the civilians who were dying in the aftermath of the bombings with no drinking water, no medical care. But if Anna Grey said anything, Bill would say, “OK, OK, can’t a fella watch the news?” He liked things quiet when he came home. He was tired. He wanted some peace.

>   “Look at ’em burn” was all he said now. The fine hairs tangling above his balding head were haloed with light.

  Anna Grey went into the kitchen, where Milly already had the table set and was now chopping tomatoes for a salad. She was tall and plain, painfully shy, the sort of girl the Cherish Maders of the world never gave a second thought. It broke Anna Grey’s heart to think about it. Suddenly she lifted her daughter’s ponytail and kissed the soft, sweet skin beneath it.

  “Ma.”

  “You’re a good kid, you know that?” Anna Grey said. She started browning the ground beef while Milly emptied the dishwasher. “Anything new?” she asked, expecting Milly’s usual shrug. But when Milly spun around and beamed, Anna Grey realized she’d been waiting for the question.

  “I tried out for the summer play.”

  “You did?” Anna Grey was shocked. Every summer, the Ambient Community Center put on a musical, but Anna Grey could no more imagine Milly climbing onto a stage than she could imagine her skydiving. Still, Anna Grey had surprised Milly singing around the house, and what a beautiful voice she had! Anna Grey quickly learned not to mention it, though. If she did, Milly got embarrassed and was careful not to sing for a while.

  Milly nodded. “Actually, I tried out last week.”