SJ told Mickey about the adult literacy program the library offered. She pulled out a brochure from her top drawer. “The Wilson Reading System. It’s great. Really works. The adult branch offers it,” she said. “It’s free,” she added when he seemed to hesitate.
Mickey said that he would rather work one-on-one with a tutor, that he had never been much of a joiner of groups.
“Can I ask what made you decide now to learn? Are you thinking about going back to school, getting another job . . . ?”
“Nah,” Mickey said. “It’s hard to explain. I guess I just want to, you know, better myself?” He shifted his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
Maybe this was the reason, without knowing it, that SJ had opted to become a librarian—because she had an unwavering faith in the power of books. She believed that reading could save lives. She knew it had saved her own, growing up with parents who didn’t understand her, who didn’t want her, really. Cold and distant, they had treated her like a detail to be managed, like the other tasks they successfully accomplished in their busy world of law and finance. SJ’s parents had hired excellent au pairs and had sent SJ to the best summer camps. They made sure her schools were top-notch. Maybe this was the reason, too, that SJ had such disdain for Deirdre’s students at Brandywine—because she knew them all too well. She hadn’t liked them back when she was one of them, and she didn’t like them now.
“I’m trained,” SJ said after a moment. “I could teach you.”
Mickey brightened. “Yeah?”
“It’s a big commitment. Three times a week minimum.”
Mickey nodded. “After work. I can do it. If . . . if that’s all right. Can we start tomorrow?”
The next day, Mickey showed up fifteen minutes early. He arrived, clean-shaven, hair wet and combed back off his head. Jeans and an ironed white T-shirt hung on his skinny frame.
SJ glanced at the clock. “You’re early. I’ve got a few things to finish here first.” She held up the papers in her hands and peeked over at the children grouped around books at two round tables.
“No biggie,” Mickey said, folding and unfolding his arms. “I’ll just wait over here.” He pulled out one of the tiny chairs made for small children and sat. His body bent in half like a crane’s. “Whoa,” he said. One of the little boys looked up and laughed.
SJ pointed to the rack on the wall. “There are magazines,” she said. “Help yourself. And bigger chairs.” She pointed to the tables in the back. “We’ll meet back there.”
From over the top of her computer, SJ watched him. He was like a giant in the land of little people, loping past the pair of shiny heads—Isabella and Rosie—hunched together over Where’s Waldo? at one table, and the bodies of little boys who couldn’t sit still, their feet and hands in perpetual motion, one with the chair tipped back on its hind legs, the other on his knees, rocking forward in his chair, and the third half-sprawled across the table, all of them reading Captain Underpants, their favorite. These were the library regulars and no matter how many times SJ lectured the boys about sitting in the chairs the way they were meant to be sat in, Freddie rocked, Marco sprawled, and Paulo knelt and straddled. All of them were good kids and mostly SJ left them alone. She helped them find new books and gave them ideas for their school projects when they asked. The boys were fourth-graders; Isabella and Rosie were a year younger.
SJ watched Mickey scan the magazines on the wall, pick up a WWF publication, and hunker down in a chair, body bent in half, knees jutting out, back hunched. He flipped a few pages, put the magazine back, picked another. People. Mostly, he seemed to be looking at the pictures. SJ hadn’t told Mickey that he was her first student. She had recently received her certification, and while she was eager to begin working with a real person, she suddenly had her doubts. Somehow all the practice and the theory seemed like hocus pocus with someone like Mickey. Would he tolerate the tapping out of sounds and syllables? Would he have the patience? SJ watched him move his lips over a piece of text, frown, and stop. He went back again, used his finger to follow along, and mouthed each word. SJ thought she heard him trying to pronounce the words under his breath.
“You’ve got your work cut out for you,” Florence murmured, coming up behind SJ. “He’s trying to read People. People. What’s that—a third grade reading level?”
“Just look at him. It’s so sad.”
“Listen, don’t forget, we have that meeting at five thirty. We can’t be late.”
“Don’t worry. Class is an hour, no more.”
“One hour?”
“One hour, yes. Okay? Quit looking at me like that.”
“You know what you’re doing, right? What you’re taking on?” Florence put down the stack of books she had been holding and wiggled her scrimshaw back and forth.
“Florence,” SJ said, folding her arms, “I can do this. I didn’t take a lunch break today, so I’m allowed.”
“Allowed, of course you are allowed. That’s not what I meant. Don’t you think this guy needs more than an hour one-on-one with you? Don’t you think he needs a class? Structure?”
“I told you, he doesn’t like groups . . .”
“I know, I know. He isn’t a joiner.” Florence picked up her pile of books. “Five thirty,” she said over her shoulder. “In the conference room.”
SJ didn’t want to insult Mickey. She half-wished she had insisted he sign up for the adult literacy course, but in the back of her mind she was also thinking that after working with him one-on-one for a few weeks, she might convince him that a class was what he needed. She would just get him started and up to the next level. SJ pushed the student reader and workbook over to Mickey. “I know this seems like a little kid book.” She took a deep breath, tried to summon confidence. “But we have to start here. First, I need to assess your reading level. The program is intended for adults too,” she had added, rushing her words together.
“All righty,” Mickey had grinned sheepishly, sitting upright in his chair.
* * *
Now, SJ waited, uneasy, for Mickey to arrive for his lesson. What had Mickey said about wanting to learn to read? He hadn’t really explained, had he? He had given SJ some vague excuse, some plausible reason, but nothing for why now exactly he had finally decided to learn to read. She shrugged off her worry and focused instead on the way his face lit up when he read his first two-syllable word and later, a whole sentence. No, she decided. They were wrong about Mickey. But she never thought to ask herself why the police might be interested in Mickey in the first place.
Chapter Three
If you grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, if you were Portuguese or Italian, your father fished. Deirdre and Paul’s father commuted to Salem to make shoes and, before him, his father had come to Gloucester to work the granite, but when Deirdre and Paul were growing up, most of their neighbors fished. Or built boat parts. Or worked at Cape Pond Ice. Growing up in Gloucester, especially in the West End, you knew everyone’s mother best. You knew women who, by and large, raised their children alone, their husbands away for days and sometimes months. Having a fisherman for a father was akin to having a father in the military—you didn’t ever know if he was coming home. At Our Lady of Good Voyage, you were always praying for the fishermen along with local politicians and the president, but the fishermen were fathers whose kids you knew, kids in your class at St. Peter’s. The kids at St. Peter’s were usually of two types—the wild ones who came from families so big their parents never knew what the kids were up to, or the dutiful ones who helped out at home and didn’t make their mothers worry.
It was weird, Deirdre had complained to Paul, wasn’t it, that they had nothing to do with fish?
“Well, not nothing—we eat it,” Paul had pointed out. They had been walking along the rocky edge of the beach on one of those early summer mornings when you could feel the heat pulsing behind the thin layer of clouds, the humidity threatening to vacuum-seal the city. From the harbor, the cawing of s
eagulls, the clanging of halyards, a boat’s motor. Deirdre and Paul were taking one of their long walks, a precursor to their runs together, both of them opting for cross-country at Gloucester High. For Deirdre, running became a way to channel all her energy so she wouldn’t explode. Even in seasons other than summer, she felt the sky threaten to give way, the town ready to swallow her whole. Boston was only thirty-some miles away, but you wouldn’t know it from the way her classmates talked, some of them never venturing into the city at all. Her parents hardly ever made the trip.
At least fishing brought adventure. Who didn’t want adventure?
Paul, ever the practical one even though he was younger, reminded Deirdre, “I’d rather have both my parents, wouldn’t you?”
* * *
Gail Murphy, their mother, was grateful her husband worked in a factory and they never had to go through the drama the others faced. Take the Da Silvas who lived next door. A cod fisherman, Mr. Da Silva was gone more often than he was home, which meant that Maria, the oldest—Deirdre’s age—enjoyed new clothes more than other kids, and her mother drove a car that worked.
But it also meant that Mrs. Da Silva drank.
Gail Murphy tried to help out. She brought over tuna noodle casserole, had Maria spend the night. She even watched the littlest ones on a few occasions—Manny, the baby, who lived with one continuous glob of snot hanging from his left nostril, and Gerald, just a year older, smart-mouthed even at three. There were two others in between Gerald and Maria, a boy and a girl, Frankie and Delores, both of whom ended up getting killed by a drunk driver when they were in high school. Not that their getting killed had anything to do with their father’s fishing, but still somehow you wondered if having a father around more often might have prevented some things. Gail thanked the Lord that Ed did factory work.
Everyone in town knew someone who didn’t make it back. Sometimes, entire crews disappeared and there were all the funerals and memorials, the flag at the town hall perpetually at half-mast. By the time you were in elementary school, you were used to going to funerals, and on some level you understood that nothing lasts forever. You even knew that sometimes, young ones go first.
Families dealt with the stress in different ways. Mrs. Da Silva drank, and she was not alone. There were several divorces, even among families in St. Peter’s and Our Lady of Good Voyage, where this wasn’t supposed to be an option. Sometimes the mothers just couldn’t take it anymore and hauled the kids away before their fathers even returned. There were affairs. In school, there were fights that the nuns did not condone but understood as the way the kids had to let off steam. The fights did not involve weapons, just fists and faces, black eyes and bloody lips.
It was a life that Deirdre and Paul were witness to but not exactly a part of, mostly because, as Deirdre pointed out, they had nothing to do with fish. Still, they lived in the midst of it, in a neighborhood of small clapboard houses, well-kept mostly, some with peeling paint or a Madonna on the half-shell, some with broken, rusty cars on cinder blocks in the front yard and a smattering of plastic toys strewn about. It was a life Deirdre vowed never to be a part of. She had counted the minutes until she could get away.
Chapter Four
Autumn meant field hockey. Cheering on the sidelines, yelling out the girls’ names. You could be passionate about them here, wearing your Brandywine sweatshirt, school spirit on visible display. You could love the girls openly, a kind of parental love and pride that was acceptable.
When you were learning to be a teacher, taking graduate classes in methods, sitting in lectures about differentiation or the plight of the gifted child, no one talked about the most difficult thing—how you were going to love the kids you taught, how you might even love them inappropriately or want them for your own, how you had to learn not to resent the parents. No one facilitated a discussion about the possible disasters waiting to happen if you mistakenly forgot that you were the teacher and the kids were your students—not your children and not, God forbid, your friends. But it was sometimes difficult to remember this.
Deirdre couldn’t talk about how she felt to anyone, not even SJ. Especially not SJ, who was already judgmental about the amount of time Deirdre spent at Brandywine, the hours she spent agonizing over the girls’ private lives, which, SJ liked to remind her, were private.
“Do you have to go to every home game?” SJ often complained. “You do get to take time for yourself, you know.”
But if Deirdre missed a game, then she might miss Anna’s biggest goal and then she would feel terrible, like she had let the girl down and missed an important moment in her young life. She wanted the girls to take her seriously in the classroom, she tried to explain to SJ, and if she showed them that their lives mattered to her, they were more likely to listen in class and learn.
The truth was, Deirdre loved attending the field hockey games, the long autumn afternoons a kind of symphonic lull in the middle of the city. The field, located a few miles from Brandywine, did double duty. Used both for youth soccer league as well as the Brandywine field hockey games, it was surrounded by oaks and maples, and made you feel as though you were not in Bradley with its factories and triple-deckers but out in another part of the state, in one of those picturesque New England towns with its own private school, the kind with glossy catalogs and a campus, the kind of place with big town greens where festivals were held and rich people retired, the kind of place in which the West Enders pretended they all lived, forgetting about the East End that was, in spite of their amnesia, part of Bradley. Here at the games, Deirdre stood near the cluster of parents, mothers mostly, dressed in smart-looking outfits, all in inappropriate footwear, heeled boots or cute slip-ons that did not navigate dampened grass fields effectively. Their hair, Deirdre noticed, always looked newly cut and styled, smooth and shiny, not the mess that hers inevitably turned into after a full day of teaching. Next to the mothers, she felt unlovely, but she tried to reassure herself that no matter what, the girls wanted her here and, in some cases, wanted her here even more than they wanted their own mothers.
Secretly, Deirdre was thrilled when any of the girls confided in her something they couldn’t discuss with their mothers, though she always encouraged them to bring it up at home. “Your mother,” she would insist to the girl sitting in front of her, wiping away tears, “she needs to know how you feel. You need to tell her.” And when the girl would resist, would say something about how her mother just wouldn’t understand, about how it was amazing that Ms. Murphy did understand, how it was awesome they had a teacher like her, who got them, then Deirdre felt the power she wielded and reveled in it, just the tiniest bit.
But here, at the first home field hockey game, Deirdre didn’t feel special; she felt disheveled, inconsequential. She felt the way she had back in high school, always on the outside, wanting to be in.
“Deirdre?”
She turned.
“Or should I say Ms. Murphy? So nice of you to come cheer on the girls!” Evelyn Moore’s smile seemed warm, genuine.
“I love coming to the games,” Deirdre said. “Where’s Lydia?”
“Rehearsal. They have an early fall concert this year.” Evelyn adjusted her sunglasses.
“That’s right. September 20? It’s on my calendar.”
Evelyn nodded. “She hopes they’ll be ready.” She rolled her eyes. “According to Lydia, the cellos are weak this year after losing those two seniors who were fantastic.”
Deirdre agreed. It was rare to have such a strong cello section, in her limited experience with high school orchestras. Rare, too, in such a small school to have the orchestra they did have, a tribute to their teacher and director, Mrs. DeBesse, one of the original teachers. Joan, Mrs. DeBesse insisted the other teachers call her, but the younger ones, Deirdre included, couldn’t bring themselves to drop Mrs. DeBesse.
“See you at the fall supper, I hope?” Evelyn smiled again and turned to walk toward the group of mothers. Deirdre recognized a few of them, mother
s of juniors and seniors she had already taught. They were friendly enough. They waved hello or tried to encourage Deirdre to join the PTSA. The Fall Supper was the big fall fundraiser, but Deirdre had mixed feelings about going. SJ made it clear that she had no interest in Brandywine activities. She didn’t feel comfortable, didn’t like the way everyone would stare at them, surely the only same-sex couple in attendance.
“But how do you know that’s true?” Deirdre tried every time to get SJ to admit that they wouldn’t know what it was like unless they attended, at least once.
“Jesus, Deirdre, I went to a school like Brandywine, remember? I lived that life. No thank you. I do not want to go back there now.” And she refused.
Deirdre wanted to say, Won’t you do it for me? But she was afraid of the answer. She thought about asking Forest, about maybe the two of them going together. She’d check with him tomorrow.
Now, on the field, both teams warmed up, each with their series of stretches and drills, Brandywine in red plaid kilts with white polos, the other team in blue. There was Anna, already one of the best players, even as a sophomore. She was so in control of her body. Her movements looked effortless. Even when she lined up to take a free shot, she hit the ball with a hard whack of precision, graceful. Deirdre couldn’t stop watching, following Anna as she ran, those legs, taut and strong. She glanced over to the mothers, wondered if they watched each other’s daughters, what they saw, what they imagined.
“Yeah!” Deirdre shouted when Anna flicked the ball past the goalie. She pumped her fist in the air. “Nice one, Anna!”
The girls ran to high-five Anna, plaid kilts flapping. They grinned through plastic mouth guards, and Anna glanced to the sideline. Mrs. Worthington wasn’t among the cluster of mothers. The women clapped. “Good one, Anna!” yelled Evelyn Moore. “That’s the way!”
Late-afternoon sun filtered through clouds and shone in slanted rays on the field. Some of the girls put up a hand to see. Deirdre squinted, reminded herself to bring sunglasses next time.
The Year of Needy Girls Page 3