The English Teacher

by Lily King

  “My mother wanted to marry your father from the moment they met.” His mother wouldn’t like him saying that. He knew it wasn’t true.

  “I could tell,” Fran said, scrutinizing them, his mother and her father, who stood holding hands and not letting go as the music started up again. It was “Beast of Burden” and they played it much slower than usual, Mr. Crowse practically whispering into his mike with his eyes shut and sweat streaming over his lids. Peter and Fran watched their parents step closer, her father tucking his mother’s fingers tight in the dip between his shoulder and collarbone.

  Fran turned back abruptly to him. “Shall we dance?” she said in a foreign accent.

  At school dances, he headed straight for the bathroom whenever he heard the first languid notes of a song like this. Even a slow dance with Fran did not overpower the urge to bolt. But she’d already looped her arms loosely around his neck, so he placed a hand on either side of her waist. She was a year older but no taller. The fabric of her dress was so thin he could feel the narrow band of her underwear and the heat of her skin where there was no underwear at all. Peter tried to keep all the facts straight in his head: this was his first slow dance and his first contact with the underclothes of a girl; yet this was his mother’s wedding and this was his stepsister. He felt there was some secret to this kind of dancing that he hadn’t been let in on. Quickly his hands made damp nervous spots on Fran’s dress.

  Halfway through the song Fran’s head, which had been cocked and swiveling in every direction away from him, plummeted to his shoulder. Her eyelashes flickered on his long neck.

  “Does your mother dye her hair?” she whispered.

  Peter opened his eyes to see his mother floating by. Her hair was longer than most mothers’. Usually she wore it pinned at the back with the same tortoiseshell clip but today it was down, her dark red curls draped over Tom’s arm like a flag.

  “No,” he said, though he sensed another lie would have pleased her more. “She doesn’t.”

  At the end of the song, Peter peeled his palms from Fran’s dress. Before he could decide what to say, her father tapped her on the shoulder and gave a little bow as she turned to him. She put her arms out like a professional, the way she had when she’d said to Peter, Shall we dance? But this time her face looked like it had been plugged in. No girl had ever looked at him like that.

  Instead of completing the swap, his mother whispered that she had to go to the john, and left him on the dance floor alone. He watched, for a short while, her tall figure try to push through to the stairs on the other side of the room. Every few feet she was stopped by people wanting to congratulate her. They mashed their faces against hers, pawed at her dress, spoke loudly into her ear, and all the while his mother kept imperceptibly moving on. If he held his breath, she would look back at him. But she didn’t. She reached the stairs, kept her eyes forward, and disappeared beneath the floor.

  He took a seat at a table with some children he didn’t recognize and their babysitter. The children were tying her wrists together with the strings of balloons and none of them noticed when he sat down. He swung his chair toward the dancers and sipped on a flat Coke someone had left behind. He felt suddenly grown-up, beside but apart from the screeches of the little boys, his right ankle on his left knee which made a box of his legs, the way most of his male teachers sat during assemblies. The babysitter was pretty and probably thought he’d come over to try and talk to her so he was careful to ignore her. All three of his stepsiblings were out dancing now: Fran, with her father, still shining like a star; Stuart, the oldest, old enough to be in college but for some reason wasn’t, glumly twitching with a fat cousin of theirs; and little Caleb up on the shoulders of Dr. Gibb, who had been Mrs. Belou’s oncologist. She had only been dead a couple of years and now his mother was Mrs. Belou.

  Peter started to wish he’d invited Jason. His mother had told him to invite as many friends as he wanted, but he thought they’d get in the way of the beginning of his life with his new family. He’d envisioned the whole wedding differently, with him and Stuart and Fran moving through the day together, comparing parents, trading information like spies before a mission. He pictured them all sitting around one table, pointing out relatives and telling their stories. Well, Peter only had one relative there, his aunt Gena, but she had a good story. Years ago, she’d gone into the Peace Corps and fallen in love with a guy in her village in Africa. One of the guy’s wives had tried to strangle her with reeds from the river. She still had the scars on her neck.

  As if beckoned by his thoughts, Gena took the seat beside him. “You look a little gloomy.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Really?”

  She put a finger under his chin and guided his face to hers. Even though Gena was four years older, she was like looking at his mother through magic glass, the creases gone, the cheeks soft shiny bulbs above her big smile. His mother once said she wanted to skate on Gena’s skin it was so smooth.

  “I’m just taking a break from dancing.”

  “You glad she did this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You like the steps?”

  “I don’t know them really.”

  They were all dancing together now. Stuart had tied a napkin around his head and was jutting his arms out like he was putting a hex on people.

  “They must be pretty tough.” She meant because of their mother.

  “I guess.” He didn’t like it when people dwelled on Mrs. Belou’s death.

  Gena looked away. He was afraid she was preparing a move. He hadn’t been a great conversationalist, though usually he liked talking to her. He’d only met her twice before, but he felt comfortable with her. She said what she thought.

  “What do you think about Tom?”

  Gena watched Tom, who was dancing in that shoulder-bouncing way that people who did not grow up with rock music did, then turned back to him, as if he were the real subject of study. Finally she said, “He’ll call a spade a spade.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said with sudden defensiveness, as though they were in the middle of a fight.

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what he’s going to find in there.” She looked at Peter and seemed surprised by his disturbed face. “Oh honey, for you this is fantastic. It’s a nice family. And you’ve got brothers and sisters now.”

  “One sister.” He felt sulky. What did she mean by find in there?

  “One sister.” She looked at Fran, twirling beneath the bridge of her father’s arms. “Who will hog the bathroom and torture you with all the gorgeous friends she brings home.” Her head fell back, laughing at her vision, and he could see the three ragged white stripes just below her chin.

  The bass player, Mr. Carbone, struck the last chords of a song with a long flourish and an embarrassing scissor split, then announced the band would be taking a breather. Peter hoped his stepfamily would join him. There was plenty of room—the children were playing at the dessert table now, smashing pieces of cake faster than the babysitter could push the plates away. But the Belous drifted over to their side of the room where Tom’s friends and family all congregated. Peter scanned the top of the crowd for his mother’s hair, but she still wasn’t up from the bathroom. He had a flash of her climbing out a small window but he knew that was ridiculous. Where would she go? Their house on campus had been emptied out that morning; Mr. Hoyle, with his wife and new baby, would be moving in tomorrow.

  Dr. Gibb took a seat on the other side of Gena. He leaned across her to shake Peter’s hand for the third time that day, then said something that made Gena smile. He was neither young nor old, but in that long dull part of life Peter dreaded. He had a squat face and an oxbow of hair just above his forehead, cut off from the rest of his scalp by the bald patches on either side.

  He and Gena plunged into a serious discussion. Their voices dropped to exclude him. Peter feigned disinterest and slowly turned his back on them so that gradua
lly their voices rose again.

  “I don’t know about that,” Dr. Gibb said. “Youth is very resilient. But it’s true that there are easy declines and difficult declines and this was a very very difficult one.”

  “Slow?”

  “No, relatively speaking, it was swift. But she fought it with her bare hands. This was a woman who did not want to die, who did not believe she could die.”

  “My father always told us no matter what, die with dignity.”

  Dr. Gibb took a deep breath as if to stop himself from saying something more acerbic. “There is not a lot of room for dignity with cancer of the brain.” He said “cancer of the brain” like it was a French delicacy. Peter felt a sudden hatred for this man who had brought death to his mother’s wedding.

  Why did people have such a fascination with death? Once they’d found out Tom was a widower, everyone at school wanted all the details about how his wife had died. Wasn’t it wonderful, they all agreed, that Tom had found Vida. Like a rose in winter, his English teacher had said.

  Peter had stopped himself from thinking about dying long ago. When he was much younger, for no good reason that he could remember, the reality and certainty of death struck him all at once. He went through a long scary stage of believing he would die in his sleep like in the stupid rhyme Jason’s mother always said before bed. Sleep itself began to feel like death, and he would jerk himself awake whenever it came over him. He felt, late at night, the pull of his father, the mystery of him that was as large as the mystery of death itself and all tangled up with it. He began to wonder if his father was dead, dead and wanting Peter to join him in death. It was the winter of fourth grade, with its short bleak days and long nights and everything snapping and cracking outside his window. Finally spring came, with its softening and loosening, and his mind loosened too, relinquished its grip, and he began sleeping again.

  He tuned out Gena and the doctor after that, and looked around the dreary room for distraction. This restaurant they’d rented out was one of the summer shacks in Fayer right on the water. It would be a great place to go on a hot August night when you wanted to feel a breeze against your skin. It was not a great place to go in November when all the windows were covered with thick plastic which billowed out and collapsed back in loudly with the wind. He was filled suddenly with a familiar loneliness, and he stood up quickly, desperate to shake it, anxious to find his mother among all these strangers.

  There she was, weaving her way slowly back across the room. She looked like another person today, all that hair everywhere and a faintly pink dress swirling down to her ankles. She lifted a flute of champagne gently from a passing tray.

  Peter’s French teacher, Miss Perry, asked Dr. Gibb to dance and Peter was surprised to see how eagerly he accepted her, leaving Gena’s side without another word. His aunt turned back to him without a trace of injury.

  “When are you going to come visit me?” she asked. When he didn’t answer she said, “I’m not worried. You’ll come. Someday, when you’re a little older, you’re going to get in the car and not even know where you’re going, and five days later I’ll see you pull up into my driveway.”

  “I’d call first.”

  “No you won’t. You’ll just show up. And I’ll be real glad to see you.” She gave him a rough hug, clubbing him on the ear with one of her thick upper arms.

  What he had wanted to say was that every fall his mother promised they’d visit Gena during spring vacation, but when the vacation drew near his mother always had some excuse for not having bought the tickets—that senioritis was going to be bad this year, that not one junior was going to get into college at the rate they were going, or that it had been years since she’d taught King Lear and really had to do some thinking. That was her most frequent excuse for everything they didn’t do—she had to do some thinking. Peter understood that they didn’t have a lot of money compared with most of the kids at Fayer, since they lived off one teacher’s salary, but they’d never taken anything but the same three-day vacation every year. On the first weekend after school ended each June, they drove north to York Beach to stay at the Sea Spray Inn, an aquablue, three-story motel across Route 1 from a gray beach and gray water. During the day he would swim, going back and forth between the pool and the beach, while his mother sat upright reading on a towel near the rocks. They shared a room and if he woke up in the night there was often a bright orange circle of ash floating above her bed. He felt comforted by her wakefulness, the smell of her smoke, and the rattling wheeze of the ice machine down the hall. He always wished the trip was longer.

  But Gena probably didn’t want to hear about almost-visits, and Peter was glad when his mother joined them. He leaned closer to her, ashamed of his need of her, that secret ache he kept expecting to grow out of.

  “How much longer are we going to stay?” he asked her.

  She turned to him but didn’t answer.

  “Mom?”

  She was looking right at him, with that smile that had been fixed on her face all day, but she still didn’t reply.

  “Mom!” He waved a hand at her. “I said, how long are we going to stay?”

  “You can stay as long as you like.”

  “But how long are you going to stay?”

  “I don’t know, Peter.”

  “Are we going to have dinner all together when we get home?”

  “We just ate.” She spread out her arm at all the round tables still covered with dessert plates and coffee cups.

  “Wasn’t that lunch?”

  “It’s past six.” She was irritated with him and looked off toward Tom, who was making his way to her. He passed a table of Fayer teachers, all women, and Peter saw them admiring him.

  When Tom reached them he said, “I feel like Lindbergh in Paris the way people are carrying on.”

  “You smell a little better,” his mother said. “He was soaked in urine.”

  Peter noticed how Tom’s fingers, like organisms separate from the rest of him, folded into his mother’s as they spoke. It was weird, much weirder than he expected, to see his mother standing there holding hands with a man, a husband. And she had an unnatural expression on her face, like she knew the whole thing was weird, too. He wondered, for the first time, if his mother was in love with Tom, really in love, the way he was with Kristina. She couldn’t be—she’d only known him since June and he’d known Kristina since sixth grade when she was new at Fayer. They sat together at study hall. They became partners in earth science. Neither was popular; they didn’t get asked to meet at the beach on weekends where their classmates smoked cigarettes and made out behind the rocks. In the spring, Peter tried to kiss her when they were alone in the woods, collecting salamanders for their terrarium. He’d caught one, fluorescent orange like a bike reflector, and she bent over to watch it scramble in his palm. Her hair was loosely woven in a braid, strands curling free in the damp air. Even now he could remember how he wanted to press his lips to the pale skin beneath the braid as she stood there so still. But he thought you were only supposed to kiss a girl on the lips so he buried that desire and tucked his head around to find her mouth. She screamed in fright. She said she’d thought he was a bird, a crow come to snatch up the little glowing salamander. She seemed really sorry for the confusion and Peter knew that if he tried again she would have kissed back, but he’d used up all his courage in the first attempt, and they walked back with their salamanders to the science wing in silence. He never got another chance that year, and by the next fall she’d cut off her braid and grown breasts and became the most popular girl in their grade. She still was, and he still loved her.

  Peter remained beside his mother and Tom, though they were as far away as stars. Even if they had both been shorter and spoken audibly, he wouldn’t have understood half of what they said to each other. It was like that with couples. Kristina was like that with Brian Rossi now. Gena had gotten pulled into a conversation with three tiny old ladies Peter didn’t recognize. Beside him, thei
r backs to him, Miss Rezo and Mrs. Shapiro, two of the other English teachers at Fayer, were talking quietly.

  “No, I never did. No one did. When she interviewed she said her husband would be joining her, but then he never came. I don’t think anyone dared mention him after a certain point.”

  “It’s like Lena Grove showing up in Jefferson looking for Lucas Burch. Where’d she come from exactly?”

  “Texas, I think. I can’t recall for sure. But there was never a mention of him, not even to my cousin Lucy who sat for them for years.”

  “Really? The one with the wired jaw?”

  And then they launched into a long discussion of jaw-related dentistry. It seemed to him teachers often did that, picked the least interesting angle of a story and pursued it like bloodhounds, leaving behind all the more promising trails. It’s why he hated school, history in particular. The past had to be more intriguing than what they were given to learn.

  “He’s no longer in the picture” was what he remembered his mother saying the first time he asked about his father. Another time she said, “He was a man,” and he waited for her to go on because she liked talking about people and what she noticed about them. But she said nothing else and he knew by her changed expression not to ask more. The two times Gena had visited, he asked, when he got her alone, if she knew anything about his father. She said his mother had never confided in her about things of that nature.

  Tom turned to him. “You ready to go home, Peter?”

  It sounded so normal, as if Tom had been asking him that for years. “Definitely,” he said.