“And she is going to retire.”
“I was beginning to think I’d have to drive up there some icy day and push her down the school steps. Not to kill her, you understand, just to break her hip. In hopes that an intimation of mortality might suggest to her it was time to hand in her red pencil.”
“You’ll apply for her job?” I asked, and all at once wondered what it would be like working here without him, without his easiness or his packets of Nabs and his entertaining chat in the teachers’ room. I thought quickly over the other English teachers who might be promoted to his job if someone new wasn’t brought in, and I couldn’t imagine anything but madness resulting from working for them.
“I already have,” he said. “Would you like a Pall Mall, to celebrate?” He lit them. “A friend of mine, the science teacher there, called me up last night to tell me the great news, so I called up the superintendent and asked if I could come for an interview, which is rather ridiculous since he’s been the superintendent since I was in kindergarten, and he said sure, I can bring my transcripts and fill out the application when I get there. So I’m going up Monday.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Would you like to come along for the scenery?”
I stared at him. Then the police car, no siren, arrived, so I was able to turn away and watch the two policemen stroll leisurely into the school while I tried to think.
“I’m sorry,” Cliff said. “I just wondered if you might like to see some of the north country again. We haven’t got much time left to see it before it’s a Levittown of A-frames.”
Now the fire engine, also no siren, arrived.
“Well,” I said, wildly trying to figure whether or not we’d have to go through Thornhill to get to North Riverton. I didn’t even know if David and Ann were still there; most likely they had moved on to another town. But Thornhill itself would be there. And Monday was our wedding anniversary.
I took a deep drag of the cigarette, for courage, and asked, exposing my feelings, “Do you have to go through Thornhill?”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
And so I thought about the trip. When had I last been on a long trip? There were my job-hunting trips. And there was the time, about a year before the divorce, when David, restless, said we needed a change, and although we couldn’t afford it we went to Boston; but that, from Plymouth on, had been a turnpike trip, with Howard Johnson stops and a night in a motel. I thought about seeing the Old Man of the Mountain again.
I said, “Could I bring along a picnic?”
Right here, with all the kids milling around the lawn, he touched my hair. “That’ll be great. I’ll buy some beer.” He hesitated, and I suddenly knew he was going to ask me out tonight, but then he said, “I’ll pick you up at eight Monday morning,” and walked away.
I saw Grace standing alone watching us. I went over to her, and Kaykay emerged from a throng of teachers and said, “Honest to God, this is getting to be a bore. Mrs. LaBrecque says it was a kid’s voice on the phone again, a girl’s, and the bomb is supposed to go off at two o’clock.”
We looked at our watches. It was two.
Kaykay said, “They ought to let us go home, the whole next hour will be nothing but a waste, vacation starting early. What were you and Curlytop having such a heart-to-heart about, adjective clauses?”
“He’s going to North Riverton for an interview Monday and he invited me along for the ride.”
“Are you going?”
“Yes.”
“And Bob and I are going to Witherell Monday. Here it is again, the time of year when teachers play musical chairs with schools, and, Emily and Grace, you really ought to get into the game.”
I said, “I’ve signed my contract.” It had been so much simpler to do than job hunt.
Kaykay said, “You didn’t sign it in blood, did you? You can resign; give them thirty days’ notice. You, too, Grace.”
“My folks—” Grace began, and Kaykay said, “As I tell you every year, they’ve got Wendy and Norma right in the same town, there’s no need for you to stay, they’ll be fine.”
“Maybe,” Grace said, and for the first time I heard the frightening bitterness in her voice. Kaykay and I glanced at each other; I realized Grace would be alone all day Monday at the apartment, while we were off on trips with men.
Kaykay said, “Let’s stop at Lum’s and have a beer after this damn day is finally over.”
When the assistant principal came to the front door and announced that no bomb had been found and we should return to our classrooms, I walked back thinking of what I should make for a picnic. I hadn’t fed a man since Warren. Kaykay and I had abandoned the no-protein phase after going crazy one evening and massacring a pound of Grace’s ground chuck, so my diet was no problem, I’d just have to eat as tiny as possible. What were our lunches when David and I went on picnics along country roads and brooks in Thornhill? Tunafish sandwiches, potato chips. No, I thought as I told the kids to settle down and opened my book again to “The Road Not Taken.” Something different from that. Potato salad, this time. Cold cuts. Cheese.
Cliff was a driver of back roads, in order, he said, to look his last on all things lovely before they were destroyed by turnpikes or housing developments. So we drove through towns with names like Center Barnstead and Gilmanton, past farms and woods, and then around Lake Winnipesaukee to Meredith, and on to the mountains.
His car was an old classic Volvo, a pale cream puff, and he obviously took tender care of it.
He hummed commercials and hymns, interchangeably, as we drove. All at once I felt very happy. I was going on a journey with someone I enjoyed, and we would have a picnic. And although we were leaving spring behind the farther north we drove, and although this feeling was rather foolish, perhaps, at my advanced age, I felt also like springtime. Rebirth? I looked down at my yellow jersey, short green culotte, display of nylon-encased legs, and little yellow shoes, and realized that at least I looked like springtime, and I looked quite nice.
I didn’t remember Grace, home alone, until we reached Plymouth.
“Grace went to school here,” I said. “Damn it all,” I added, thinking out loud, “there’s absolutely no reason for a girl to be plain these days, I don’t know why Kaykay and I don’t hog-tie her and do something about her hair and get her some way-out clothes, like in those movies you used to see, the plain-Jane secretary lets down her hair and takes off her glasses, and her boss says, ‘Good heavens, is it—it can’t be—can it be—is it you, Miss Bigelow?’ and instantaneously marries her.”
Cliff was laughing. “Why don’t you?”
“How can we? All we can do is hint. Kaykay got her to go see about contact lenses a couple of years ago, saying how everyone says they’re so convenient and comfortable and all that, but Grace found out she can’t wear them, her eyes aren’t teary enough or some damn thing.”
Then we were in the White Mountains. The road was so familiar. The motels, the smelly polluted river, the place that had the trained bears I grieved for every time we drove past. The Indian Head profile of rock far above us impassively ignored the motel resort, the campground, the trading post, and the animal farm below it.
And then there was nothing but mountains. The road rose higher and higher through Franconia Notch, and I leaned out the window to try to see the tops of the mountains, knowing that I couldn’t, and I couldn’t.
Cliff said, “I always forget how hypnotizing these mountains are, I always want to drive straight at them.”
“Please don’t.”
He laughed, but his knuckles were white on the steering wheel. David, too, had found it difficult to drive this road.
A small sign announced the Old Man of the Mountain. I crouched down in the seat so I could see higher out Cliff’s window, and when the moment came I saw the Old Man beautifully clearly, his rock profile solemn against the sky.
I heard myself saying, “School would get too much for David every once in a while, and we w
ould drive down here and look at the Old Man, and everything would be all right.” Then I said quickly, to cover up, “Are they really going to put a turnpike through here?”
“Well, they’ve been told not to, so we’re safe for a time. What about Thornhill? I can take back roads again.”
We passed the ski area, and involuntarily I said, “We used to go skiing there. We couldn’t’ve afforded it, except we knew the guy who took tickets and he let us in free.” I slipped Cliff’s pack of Pall Malls out of his pocket and lit one.
He hummed, “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing, He chastens and hastens His will to make known.”
“Not appropriate,” I said. I sang, “The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain.”
“I was brought up Methodist, Emily, and unfortunately I know a great many hymns.”
The Thornhill question still awaited an answer. The high gray road began its swoop into the valley, and the white safety posts whipped past. I said, “I think I would like to see Thornhill again.”
“You sure?”
“No. Yes.”
Foothills rushed up at us, carrying past us a house of tar paper and a cow, cellar holes and forgotten orchards, and then there were A-frames.
“Oh, no,” I said. “There’s more of them.”
He said, “I think they must multiply like amoebae,” and braked to a stop at the corner by the lumber mill. We turned and drove down Main Street.
I looked at the grocery store where I had bought our food with David’s money, the five-and-ten where I bought manila envelopes to mail away my stories, the laundromat where I washed our clothes, the drugstore where I bought my Pills.
Cliff suddenly made fast conversation. “If this is your first year teaching, what did you do all the time you lived here?”
“Wrote stuff that nobody bought. There’s the library, what a silly little one it is, it’s only open about two minutes a week. I read my way straight through it, murder mysteries, love stories, books on gardening, biographies of Napoleon, even the town history. The woman who was the librarian must be as old as your Miss Higgins, but by God she remembered everyone and we didn’t even need library cards,” I said, and when I’d finished I had stopped shaking and I could look up at the old brick school on the hill above the river.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Don’t worry,” I said, smiling at him, “I can’t cry, I’d ruin my eye makeup.”
But was David still here, was David still here? And was my ghost still here for him, haunting these stores, haunting this town, did he sometimes forget and think I would be waiting for him in that shabby house on that dead-end street, did he drive home to me and our beers and our suppers and our evenings of television and our bed?
There was the street. I didn’t say anything, and we drove past.
Cliff said, “It’s a nice town.”
“Yes. I liked it.” I took another cigarette from him. “Are they considering anyone else in the department for head?”
“I doubt it. The school is so small, like Thornhill, that there’re only two other English teachers, and Miss Higgins is such a holy terror there’s always a turnover, nobody wants to stay and work with her. The other two are always kids fresh out of Plymouth or Brompton, they teach a year with her and then flee.”
“So you’ve got it made, with your experience.”
“Knock on wood.”
We drove past the big old gray tavern with its six chimneys, once a stagecoach stop, now nothing, rotting silently. We drove along the river where in the summer you saw red-winged blackbirds. There were fields and pastures and farmhouses, and new little houses in hostile colors, turquoise and pink, and there were trailers.
WELCOME TO NORTH RIVERTON, the small sign said. ESTABLISHED 1763.
The school was an old brick one near the common. We parked in front of it just as the clock in the town hall struck eleven.
“You sure you don’t mind waiting?” he said. “You could get some coffee or something over there in the drugstore.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said, unbuckling my seat belt and taking my paperback Nero Wolfe out of my pocketbook. I looked at him, and suddenly he leaned down, and we kissed. I said, “Good luck.”
But instead of reading, I watched the kids, also on vacation this week, hanging around in front of the few stores. There was the Riverton Inn, white with a wide porch. A dog ran across the common, sniffed at the statue of a soldier (Civil War? World War I? I couldn’t tell from here), and ran on.
No shopping plazas, no Miracle Mile. But soon, I supposed, there would be, complete with self-service liquor store.
And just as I thought I’d succeeded in thinking of this and not of Thornhill, out of nowhere crashed the memory: awakening early in the mornings when David was still asleep, his head on my shoulder, his breathing warming my skin. I would lie there and love his breathing and wonder what I’d do if it ever stopped.
Cliff came out of the school an hour later.
“How’d it go?” I asked, closing my book as he got in the car.
He was grinning, and he kissed me again and said, “I signed the contract.”
My stomach plunged with fear. “Hey, great,” I said.
He took off his sport jacket and tossed it into the back seat and took off his tie. “The poor guy was kind of flabbergasted when he saw the beard, but then he must’ve remembered what an honest American boy I used to be, and he rallied.” He started the car. “Now, look, I ought to go see my folks, since I’m here, but if we show up at lunchtime my mother will start racing around the kitchen and insist on feeding us more food than you’ve ever seen in your life, so why don’t we go have our picnic now and we can truthfully say we’ve already eaten.”
“Fine with me.”
He drove along the street and parked again. “I’ll just run into Downing’s and get the beer. Budweiser okay?”
“Fine.”
I watched him go into the grocery store and sat numbly staring at the signs in its window—PREMIUM BACON 79¢ LB., CUKES 4 FOR 39¢, HOMEMADE GRINDERS 49¢—until he came out carrying a six-pack.
We drove north out of town and then down back roads through woods, past farms. The roads became dirt, became narrower, and at last he stopped the car.
“We have to walk from here,” he said, picking up the picnic basket I’d bought Saturday. “Is it too chilly, do you want your coat?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Let me carry something.”
He gave me the blanket and we started walking down the path.
“Oh, my God,” he said.
There was an A-frame regarding us through the trees with its big triangular eye.
“Damn it all, damn it all,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“I should’ve expected it, that bastard McLaughlin would sell anything to anybody. But his land ends here; we’re safe from any more.”
We walked along the path. The trees hadn’t yet begun to bud, and the sun through the naked branches made dancing crisscross shadows everywhere. I took a deep breath of the clear warm breeze.
Then we left the path, and I followed him through the trees down a hill to a brook.
“Your stockings,” he said. “I didn’t think.”
“They’re quite intact,” I said, spreading the blanket. “Wonders of modern science.”
We sat down and watched the brook swirl around rocks.
I said, “You used to fish here.”
“I damn near lived here,” he said, and popped open a couple of beers, handed one to me, and put the tabs neatly into the picnic basket. “Hey,” he said, investigating its contents, “this looks good.”
I started to reach in to take things out, and he said, “As does this,” and his hand was on my thigh and we were kissing. My stomach growled. We laughed.
So we ate, and watched the brook, and after our second beers we both went off on private journeys into the woods. We smoked his cigarettes, careful of a
shes and butts. He talked about his fishing here and camping out overnight, and he always seemed on the verge of saying something else, yet he didn’t.
It was, I realized, a good way to spend what would have been our eleventh anniversary; in fact, David and I had picnicked on anniversaries during our earlier years when we couldn’t afford to go out to dinner. One time we’d made love in the crushed grass of a deer’s bed.
On Ma and Pop’s anniversaries, Ma’s diary had told me:
Wed., April 3, 1907. Our first anniversary. Dr. thinks baby not getting enough to eat, so began feeding her partly on bottle with Holt’s Formula No. One. Chester gave me Ferruzzi’s Madonna and I gave him a modern Madonna.
Fri., April 3, 1908. Had Jacksons and Burnhams to dinner. Chester gave me an Indian Tree platter and I gave him a card table.
Sat., April 3, 1909. Cold and snowy. Had bad cold and didn’t go out. Lucy stole two gumdrops and threw up in P.M.
I remembered their fiftieth anniversary and the big party Lucy had engineered in her efficient way, a surprise party at Ma and Pop’s house. Lucy had sent invitations to their hundreds of friends, and she and Susan and I had made acres of hors d’oeuvres, packed them, somehow got them all into the car, and drove down to Lexington. The friends arriving, Ma weeping, the rooms growing more and more crowded with old people laughing and drinking, while Susan and I, embarrassed teenagers, stood about awkwardly and watched.
Cliff slid his hand along my leg. “I’ve been interested in doing this ever since I saw you at that first teachers’ meeting.”
“If you had, it’d’ve sent our colleagues into a tizzy.”
“You look like a flower.”
“It’s springtime.”
He said, “Let’s pick up my camping gear at my folks’ house and spend the night here. I’ll catch you trout for supper. I’ll catch you trout for breakfast. I cook trout very well.”
“The season isn’t open yet.”
“That’s never stopped me.”
I pressed his hand between my thighs, but although camping here seemed a wonderful idea, I said, “No. No, we’d better go back,” and began putting our paper plates and napkins into the basket. Cock teaser, I accused myself.
One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 10