Precious

by Sandra Novack

  Watson High remains as it has throughout its many years of existence: an uninspired four-story building, its boxy formality consistent right down to the hedges that run along the base of the building. Even now, with school ended, there are summer classes under way, and signs of life. She spots Jeremy Reed, the boy Eva let into her mouth, the boy who later, during study hall, ignored her while Eva sat rigidly next to him, penning eyeballs into her notebook. He leans up against his Firebird and gives her a lazy grin. When she gets out of her car, she strides by, ignoring him.

  Down at the field, the coach runs drills, and Eva sees Greg, her boyfriend from the days of sweet kisses, her now good friend and purveyor of pills, weed, and beer. He stands by the sidelines, waiting for the players to finish. Even at a distance, he has an unmistakable slouch, an easy gait, his thumb frequently hooked into his belt loop. She waves, but he doesn’t see her, so she turns her attention to the bus that remains parked near the building, ready to deliver students home from the shame of summer school. A group of girls congregates at the front entrance: Brenda Armstrong and the Armstrong sisters, or as Eva refers to them, the Mafia sisters, the Brenda wannabes. They wear platform shoes and summer shades, tops tied in knots just above their belly buttons.

  Eva does not want to feel this way—a pull, a small panic when she sees the girls. She wishes so desperately to be prettier—taller, more graceful, smarter than she pretends. She does not want to think of these girls as competition. But she can’t help but remember them all seated in Peter’s class in the spring, their moist lips slightly parted, their legs crossed. She’s seen the way they smile at him, the way they sometimes look at him as they answer questions about Shakespearean sonnets, as if they actually cared about Shakespeare at all.

  Her strides grow more brazen. When the girls see her coming, they trade such knowing glances that Eva raises her shoulders and holds her head higher. A stiffness settles in her, one that she has had too often of late, when anyone stares at her for too long. She calls upon reserves of vanity, the knowledge that she has been told over and over again that she is beautiful, but which she never successfully embraces. She hurries more than she wishes to, feels adrenaline pour through her legs.

  Brenda Armstrong, who is homely despite being a shoo-in for prom queen, smiles as Eva nears, exposing a row of perfect teeth that were only recently released from the stranglehold of wires. Eva supposes it is Brenda’s smile and oddball humor that make her popular. It surely isn’t her nose.

  “You’ve been around,” Brenda says casually. She flicks the underside of her painted fingernail.

  “A lot,” a Mafia sister says, the one with the short hair and full cheeks.

  The girls all snicker. Eva’s look grows steely. It is a look she learned from her mother when she’d turn militant, irritable with the girls, with Frank. Eva is certain there’s a crease etched between her eyes and that her left eye is squinting in a mock curse. She pushes the door open. “Cheerleading is really kid stuff, don’t you think? Rah, rah.” She leaves them standing there, Brenda’s jaw slightly dropped.

  Eva hears the buzzing fan in the principal’s office, set strategically to catch cross breezes of air. The hallway stretches on either side of her and gives way to classrooms and labs. In front of her is the gymnasium with its double wooden doors and stale smells. A water fountain is positioned neatly outside, a testimony to the fifties with its pea-green base and creamy knob. The tiles beneath her remain mottled and dirty-looking, though Mr. Wood, the janitor, mops them several times a week, his head down, oblivious to the students.

  Eva sneaks by the office and ascends the steps to room 312. The lights are on, the door closed. She peers through the opaque glass, but it is as useless as peering through an icy window. She abandons the door and opens the nearby lockers instead, to pass the time. Most are empty but on her fourth try, she finds a key chain that says BORN TO BE WILD, and a pack of pens. She places both in her purse as she rehearses a conversation designed to make her seem older than she is, so that she doesn’t get tongue-tied as she often does when she is nervous. She will tell Peter about the local college she wishes to attend. She will say she has no desire to push papers at a doctor’s office, as her mother did when she finally was able to seek part-time employment, wearing skirts that were too short not to be strategic. Eva has plans. She will travel first— Italy, France, London—before attending school. She will appear talented, poised. Ready to take on the world. Things are changing, she might say. Does he have any idea who taught her to embrace such freedom?

  Eva is a reinvented woman.

  If the mind has its own atmosphere, today the weather in Peter’s head is cloudy and foul. He glances out the window and wishes for rain instead of sun, for pounding thunder and cracks of lightning. He blames his mood on too much starch. Because Amy is trying to perfect her role as housewife, because she seems bent on reminding him that, in light of the baby, she has turned over a new leaf, as it were, given up smoking and cursing and even so much as an ounce of alcohol, she has seen fit to have Peter included in the general betterment of the house and so has had his shirts professionally dry-cleaned. He feels like his neck must stretch to accommodate the confines of polyester and cotton. Such shirts remind him of his banker father, that depressed, fidgety man who spends his days sitting behind a mahogany desk, mulling over lending applications.

  Peter scratches at his collar. A line of sweat gathers at the base of his neck. Under the fluorescent humming lights, his class takes on a bleary existence. He regards them all, this motley crew of eleventh graders who have failed English literature. Someone told him to take it easy on himself and use multiple choice instead of essay, but Peter is not a drill-and-kill type of teacher. Instead he tries to inspire these young minds. When they cover plays, he discusses Hamlet’s troubled and erratic moods, as if Hamlet might encourage them to move beyond their own angsty depression and indecision, to embrace what Peter calls the “alternate path of action,” one that is decisive and swift. He has encouraged conversation that too often falls short. He has implemented Elbow’s theory of teaching without teachers, but he does not know finally whether it’s really gotten him anywhere, or done any good.

  “Is there any point,” he asks them now, “to rhyme and repetition, beyond mere churlishness, of course? What lies buried under the surface of a Donne poem, what voice lives in the negative space?”

  No one answers, of course. No one cares about Donne. These kids care about their wasted summer, their waiting friends and parties. Peter isn’t even sure he cares that much about Donne, either, at the moment.

  “Is it the heat that’s getting to you?” he asks. His eye wanders as it always does, across the faces, not holding on to any for too long. They his students, this group of latchkey kids and future consumers of pay-by-plastic, ask nothing of him. Irritated, itchy, quite possibly depressed and suffering from what he fears is a premature midlife crisis, Peter lingers in the silence. Things happen, he wants to say. Poetry fails. Art is forgotten. Governments go corrupt and cities are bombed. People eat, drink, and screw only to die uncomfortably in bed, alone, waiting for those they love, remembering times that are all but gone. “What is the speaker’s voice in this Donne poem? How might you characterize it?” He picks it up, reads again.

  Sue Kidmark pops her gum and then peels it off her face. Peter regards her as one might an experiment—he is distant, clinical, with a now detached curiosity. His gaze moves again. Some in his class will go on and negotiate their way through the maze of school, only to be confronted by more complicated mazes. Others will simply give up. They like he, will stop scrambling and say, Fuck it. I refuse my part. And those who exercise the smallest defiance of the system, those who go on to be thieves or bums or even people—Peter suddenly thinks—who just have good old-fashioned affairs, will be forsaken and left to their own quiet regrets. Gone are the days of free love for all of them. In the eighties they will turn to punk rock. In the nineties they will be bankers, their fathers
’ children. A grayness will settle on everything just as this gray-walled room settles on them now, confining, restricting.

  He wishes he had another shirt.

  He calls on Ethan Fritz, a boy who is sure to never run the rat race. Ethan glances up from his book, looks around to his peers, and then regains his hip coolness. He taps his pen on the desk as if the action itself is more significant than words. He makes a sudden, airy noise through his nose and gazes out the window. “I think the speaker in the Donne poem is gay, man. I bet he likes disco.”

  “We should probably stick to the text,” Peter says. “There’s no disco in the text, at least not in this version. There’s sex, though. I’d think you’d all be interested in sex.”

  A few students laugh uncomfortably. He glances up to the clock over the door. Five minutes left and still this excruciating irritation. He notices the way the second hand speeds around, the odd way the long hand jumps ahead by minutes with a click and then jumps backward— still running, it seems, always too slowly.

  He pulls at his collar. He could strip now, just as he did one summer night when he and Amy lived out on the West Coast and frequently took late-night walks at the park by their apartment. Amy pulled away from him, and then waded into a granite pool of water, lifting her skirt as she did. He remembers how the park lanterns flickered on one by one, along the line of idle trees, and how Amy swayed under a marble statue of Pan—the lifted skirt revealing her pale calves; her long hair flowing around her shoulders. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Come in,” she said, splashing the water. He stripped off his pants and went in after her, and she laughed as she pulled off his shirt and tossed it over the statue, just out of his reach. Thinking of this—of the warm-scented air and Amy’s unexpected actions, her youthful fancy—Peter shifts his weight and puts the book down.

  “All right, a free-write,” he says. “I want you to compose a poem, or offer some meditation on why John Donne is gay. Either is fine. You’ve got five minutes, so make the most of it.”

  He sits at his desk and glances around to the stacks of books, the reports and take-home assignments. How did he get here, to this place of bland conformity? What happened to those cherished nights, to the always-new conversations, to the laughter hiding in everything?

  At least the morning didn’t start this way. He woke from a dream in which he was soaring over a canyon, the sky a pale blue and violet, the burnt-orange crevice below streaked with white and gold. He felt such bliss that everything about the morning seemed pure and perfect. He thought to share the dream with Amy, who had always seemed to him, in their six years of marriage, to be fascinated by dreams and their hold over people. She had studied Jung in college, where they’d met, and she’d majored in psychology. There was a time when she wanted to be a therapist. This was before Peter was offered a job after graduation, teaching on the East Coast, and Amy, succumbing to new pressures of money and house expenses, decided against graduate school and got a job working at a clothing store instead. She was good with people. She told him she liked the work.

  Still dressed in boxers, Peter walked into the kitchen. He wanted to ask Amy if she still remembered Jung’s theories, and if she still thought she might eventually go back to school and do those things she had often talked about. He held out his arms like a bird in flight. Amy watched but said nothing. Peter took no offense to this; he figured she had probably been awake for hours. Sophie’s teeth were cutting through, and, before going to bed, Peter had suggested a little brandy rubbed over the tender flesh. Amy would hear none of it. “That’s not something you do to a kid,” she said, but it was clear she had debated for a moment. It seemed to Peter that she wore her motherly duties with too much uneasiness. He hated to think in that way, but she had become so different after Sophie’s birth. She’d suddenly embraced family values, reconverted to Catholicism, and gone off birth control. Whereas she had once loved the spontaneous and impractical and flawed joy of each day, she now seemed to regard with annoyance anything that might disrupt an orderly life. In Peter’s approximation, the only aspects of her former life she clung to were her abhorrence of beef products and an almost sacred veneration for brussels sprouts, which she still called, to Peter’s surprise and sadness, her petits choux.

  However wonderful his dream might have been, it was only ill-fated in daylight. “I had an amazing dream,” he said.

  “Oh, really?” Amy picked up a spoon and returned to feeding Sophie.

  “Good morning, Peanut,” he said, kissing Sophie’s head. She sat perched in her high chair, slapping her dimpled fists against the tray.

  “What about the dream?” Amy asked casually, and by then it seemed to him she cared little to hear of it. He wondered if at night she fell into a nothingness—no images or color or motion.

  “Nothing.” He sat down next to her. “It’s nothing at all.” He regarded her, thinking that at twenty-nine and even in a ruined nightshirt, she was still pretty. Her face held the memory of the girl he met in his senior year. In college she was an earthy sort, pleasantly wide around the hips. She was self-assured, aware, vivacious. In those days, she shared almost anything that was on her mind. He still loved her, but sometimes when she became sullen and impatient, he felt as though she’d become a stranger.

  They sat in silence for the better part of breakfast. Peter drank his coffee and read the paper. Finally, Amy put down her cup of tea. She took a spoon and stirred it idly the metal hitting the ceramic cup. “I’d like to talk, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said, looking up, surprised by the vulnerability in her voice. “Talk. What is it? What do you want to talk about?”

  “Lear,” she said.

  Peter glanced down to where their cat sat under the high chair, licking his booted paw. A black tiger, Lear’s eyes were so large and golden that Peter often became transfixed by them, particularly on nights when he snuck a little weed. “Okay,” he said, smoothing the paper. “What about Lear?”

  “I know he’s your cat. I know you’ve had him a long time.”

  “We’ve had him since college.” Peter remembered how Lear had sat on the dashboard of his van and slept most of the way as they’d driven, three days, across the country.

  “I’m worried about Lear and Sophie.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I wish,” she said. “I was reading this story in a tabloid, where a house cat sat on a kid as he slept. The kid turned blue. Blue, Peter.”

  “If it worries you, then at night shut the door of Sophie’s nursery.”

  “Then I can’t hear her,” Amy said. “I don’t even think Lear really likes Sophie; it’s like he feels replaced, like it’s a competition.”

  “Lear is fine.” He leaned in for a moment, toward Amy, and was about to say something more—something to the effect that he believed she was being ridiculous—but he stopped himself. He wished he could wean her off this new-mother syndrome, the fretting about every little thing when in fact nothing bad had happened to Sophie at all. Finally he said plainly: “The odds of a cat suffocating a baby must be one in ten million.”

  “Still,” she said, “that’s one possibility I don’t want. It’s not just that, either. It’s the work involved with cleaning up after the cat, the time I don’t have and don’t want to take. You’re out teaching, and I’m left here, with everything else.”

  “I’m out,” Peter corrected, “making extra money. I’d like to be home more. It’s not that I don’t want that.”

  “Sophie tried to pet Lear yesterday, and he hissed at her.”

  “What did she do to him?”

  “What do you mean, what did the baby do? She didn’t do anything.”

  “You’re overreacting.”

  Her shoulders stiffened and she sat quietly for a few moments. She smoothed her hair out of long habit, even though now it was short and permed. “Please,” she said finally. “Don’t tell me I worry too much. Just don’t.”

  Were it not for
her tone, which, at that point, seemed genuinely hurt, Peter might have laughed at how overly sensitive Amy was to the issue; they might have shared an amused chuckle. But he realized there was nothing he could say to rid her of her fear and of her anger at him for not understanding. The concern was real enough, and that was all that mattered. He knew she felt the way he did—that unexpected rush of pure love, a desire to protect the child at all costs—but he didn’t see the practicality in being obsessively paranoid about Sophie’s well-being. Life was there, all around them, and whether either wanted it, eventually something would happen. Sophie might sprain a finger, break an arm, fall on the pavement, chip a tooth. It bothered him, yes, but he saw it as inevitable. Part of being human meant eventually getting hurt. “Of course you’re right,” Peter said, finally.

  “You don’t mean that. You only ever mean that you’re right.”

  Peter ignored this comment and read about Ted Bundy’s recent escape, his half dozen murders in the Rocky Mountain area, and his subsequent arraignment in Florida. “Did you know,” Peter said, trying to change the subject, “that Bundy campaigned for the Republican Party. He planned a career in politics—that figures, doesn’t it? A serial-killer Republican? Did you know he volunteered on a suicide hotline and authored a book on rape prevention? How fucked-up and hypocritical is that?”