The English Teacher

by Lily King

  Vida’s first impulse was to sneak down to the cafeteria kitchen, where she knew Marjorie and Olivia would have a pot on, but the smell of baked sugar sucked her in with the rest. She’d just slip in, fill up her mug, grab a muffin, and get back to her office.

  “Vida Belou!” Brick Howells bellowed from the middle of the room, the great boom of his voice mostly unimpeded by the minibagel halfway down his throat. He placed his pile of food on the table, swallowed, and made for her, carrying his weight as if he were a larger, taller man. His arms reached out for her well before she was within reach. Over the years Brick had tried to fix her up with various men: his wife’s brother at a Christmas party, his college roommate at a faculty-trustee luncheon, and his freshly divorced physician at an athletic banquet. And then, a few years ago, having given up on his friends, he licked her on the neck while she was pouring rum into their Cokes in this very room during a Valentine’s dance they were chaperoning together. She’d twisted out of his grasp and said, “C’mon, Brick, you can do better than me.” He was drunk—they both were—but her words seemed to sober him and he withdrew in agreement.

  But here he was now, ready to gather her up in a public, avuncular hug. Thinking fast, she clasped his hands in hers, keeping him two arms’ lengths away but preserving the facade of a strong collegial bond. Her fellow teachers cheered. Vida flushed in anger—hadn’t the applause at assembly been enough?—which they took for embarrassed thanks, prompting them to clap even louder. Heads of curious students appeared in the door’s small window.

  “Stop,” Vida said, more harshly than she would scold a rambunctious class, but to no avail.

  After the clapping, she was unable to escape the warm wishes, the hugs, the dreamy smiles. A new teacher, one of the many young hires this year, tossed up Vida’s unclipped hair and said, “I like it. Get married and let it all hang out.”

  They had, every one of them, misunderstood her entire life. She had never yearned to marry as these people apparently thought she had. Brick Howells was hardly the only person to have attempted the fix-up. How many times had she accepted a dinner invitation from one of them, only to find in their living room some recently devastated fellow wiping his palms on his slacks? You have so much to offer, she was often told, as if she had a tray of cigarettes and candy perpetually strapped to her waist. But these setups had stopped a few years back. Vida realized now, from their relieved, astonished expressions, that they had all given up.

  Her life with Peter had been enough. It had. Why had she tinkered with it? She felt incapable of piecing the events of the last five months into any fluid, comprehensible sequence.

  “So, you married your fighter pilot,” Paul Gove said to her at the coffeemaker.

  Men chose the strangest ways to debase each other. Tom had trained in the air force, but by the time he got to the Pacific, the Korean War had ended and after a few weeks they sent him home to resume his work with his father at Belou Clothiers. Exactly how Paul had gleaned this information about Tom was a mystery to Vida.

  “I did,” she said, with far more conviction than she’d had in the past twenty-four hours. Paul always had this effect on her. His confidence with women made her defiant. In all the years they’d taught together, she’d felt like a horse he was trying to break. Her falling in love with him seemed to be his prerequisite for friendship. She had never complied, thus they had never been friends, but now he wanted to play jilted suitor, not because he had loved her, but simply because she had not loved him.

  “Short courtship.” He took a sulky bite of a chocolate croissant. “You pregnant?”

  It should have been funny—a woman her age having a shotgun wedding—but she couldn’t muster a small retort or even a smile, and she turned away from him with her coffee to the plate of banana muffins, her throat inexplicably twisted shut.

  She felt Paul’s hand on her arm. “I wish you and Tom the very best. I really do.”

  “Good God. All these best wishes. You all make me feel like I’m entering a battle armed with a feather.” She tossed a muffin onto a napkin and climbed back to her office on weakened legs, glad for this free period before another set of seniors.

  She sat at her desk in her office, unable to touch the coffee or muffin or her work. She was aware of the black phone to her left, which she only used when Peter was home sick or once when a student fainted and she couldn’t revive him. It was a direct outside line, with an unpublished number and no connection to the office, so no parent could reach her here. It never rang. She could pick up the phone now and call Tom. She had his work number in her book, though she’d never used it. And he didn’t even know she had a phone up here. Just the idea of calling him made her heart race. What would she say? What had she done?

  She thought of all those wary smiles at the wedding reception, some guests not even bothering to hide their astonishment. How did this Vida Avery, boyfriendless as far back as anyone could go, how did she receive this stroke of luck? A mere high school English teacher who wore old moccasins and drank too much at parties—who had suddenly aligned her stars? The same surge of victory collided with the same certainty she would fail.

  For lunch Vida had to descend the two flights, then cross the length of the mansion and the two added wings to reach the cafeteria. Because there was not the room or the staff to feed the entire school at once, lunch was spread out over the three middle periods, and fifth-period classes had already begun in many of the rooms she passed. Through the window of Sally Haynes’s history class, three juniors stood before a homemade map, tracing what looked like the Silk Road. Next door, Roger Graver sat in the middle of his psychology elective, mouth open, eyes closed, while his students walked around him in a circle. In ninth-grade English, Yeats himself read “Innesfree” from a tape recorder: “… shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, dropping from …” His voice was old and Irish and lovely.

  Students past and present hollered out hellos in the hallway as they passed, some sticking to her old name, some trying out the new.

  At last she reached the theater, her favorite place to spy. She wedged the door open a crack to hear the two actors on stage beside a kitchen table. To her surprise, the girl was Helen from her sophomore class. It was impossible to reconcile the private, contained Helen with the Helen now hollering at her stage husband, slamming cabinets, hurling a pot against a wall. Within seconds, however, the incongruity was gone, for the Helen on stage obliterated any memory of any other Helen, obliterated the stage itself, forcing you to believe that this was the only reality, right here beneath these lights, these acts, this pain.

  “Ticket, please.” The voice just behind her ear made her leap. Jerry Poulk held up a plate of french fries floating in ketchup. “They don’t seem to need to eat, but I was starving.” He bit off half a fry, then nodded toward the stage. “What do you think?”

  Vida had assumed he was down there in front, but they had been performing alone, for themselves. They still were, sitting at the table now, Helen crying softly.

  “It’s a one-act for this Friday’s assembly. They ready?” he asked. He was standing too close to her, chewing, the odor of ketchup coming out of his nose.

  “She is. Adam, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that she outshines him.”

  “Girls always do at this age.”

  “Do they?” She shot him a sly eye. He was careful to ignore her.

  Jerry had come to Fayer six years ago. He became the new novelty with all his energy and charm and the ridiculous little ponytail that hung over his tweed jackets. From the start, Vida understood his game. He made his students need him emotionally. In his classes he churned them up, then broke them down. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he was never again seen eating lunch, walking a hallway, or leaving the building without some student pressing beside him, the two in a deep, closed conversation. He built an extraordinary drama department. The spring musical, formerly a one-night embarrassment, now ran two weeks, attracted audiences
from out of state, and earned the school nearly twenty thousand dollars each year. And each year, Jerry Poulk was screwing around with a member of the cast. At first, it was hard to tell which one. But Vida caught on to his method after a few years: it was always the girl in the fall that he was hardest on, the one who didn’t seem to be enjoying the class all that much, the one who wasn’t ever seen in fierce private talk with him. But by February she’d have a good part in the musical, if not the lead, and she’d often be found alone on his stage or belting out a song at his piano. By graduation the entanglement would be over, Jerry refueled, spouting off about some European vacation he was planning with his wife and children, the girl underweight and withdrawn. Whether Brick was aware of this pattern, whether any other teacher had caught on, Vida didn’t know. She’d decided long ago it was none of her business.

  Without answering her, Jerry headed down the center aisle with his plate of fries. Helen and Adam moved downstage, where they stood close to each other in quiet conversation. Helen managed to convey, all the way to Vida at the back of the theater, that weary acquiescence in the wake of an argument, the listening and not-listening, the acceptance of the failure of real communication. Then her husband made a joke and she kissed him so impulsively it seemed impossible that even Helen knew it would happen.

  “No!” Jerry barked from a seat in the third row, and Vida closed the door before he could destroy what she had seen. She was alone in the hallway with the smell of boiling oils and overcooked meats. Her lunch period was already half over. How she wished she could go back in and hop up on that stage in possession of new words and new impulses, a truly new identity and not just a different name. Instead she’d have to squeeze in at a corner of the faculty table, forced to listen to the petty November complaints about the soggy fields or disgruntled parents, or to her own mind full of yearning for youth and talents she did not have—and the unpleasant discovery that Helen Cavanough would be Jerry’s spring victim.

  On Mondays, Vida finished teaching at 1:40. She monitored an eighth-grade study hall in the library from 2:25 to 3:05, where she intercepted notes, separated disruptive elements, and corrected a set of Macbeth quizzes. On her way back up to the third floor, where she would work until Peter’s soccer practice ended at five, she stopped in the lounge for more coffee. It was empty now. Nearly all of her colleagues had afternoon obligations: coaching, tutoring, supervising volunteer work or independent projects for the growing nonathletic population. It boggled her mind, the extra hours her coworkers would put in for a few extra bucks in their paychecks each month. On weekdays, she liked to have all her work done before she went home.

  There were a few tablespoons of slow-cooked sludge at the bottom of the pot. She rinsed it thoroughly and began again. It was a pleasant place to be, the teachers’ lounge in the afternoon when the light, too weak to pass through the windows, clung quietly to the panes, and no voices were there to drown out the hiss and plock of the fresh coffee being made. Vida sat on the brown corduroy sofa and let her head fall back upon the soft lip. She was tired.

  “Congratulations, Mrs. Belou.” It was the one voice she dreaded hearing. “You probably need a little shut-eye after this weekend.” Carol, Brick’s secretary, slowed but didn’t stop her trajectory to the closet, where the extra office supplies were stored.

  Vida sat up straight. Had she slept? The coffee was still and silent in its pot. Carol’s knees cracked as she squatted to reach the mimeograph paper in the bottom cabinet. It was never too late to offer condolence. She needed to say something. If only she’d been able to finish that damn letter. She thought of the opening line, Shelley’s “Grief awhile is blind …” What good were her own small words if she uttered them now? The letter had so much more strength to it, centuries of wisdom. She’d worked on it for days at a time last summer; she had pages of notes filled with gorgeous quotes from everyone from Shakespeare to Bishop, but no coherent letter. If only she could just hand Carol those sheets of paper and be done with it.

  She watched her old friend retrieve the reams of paper, balancing on the balls of her feet, her camel-colored skirt stretched tight. Her son had died. Her son had killed himself. And yet little about her had changed. Vida avoided the front office now, but she could still hear Carol’s laugh occasionally, spilling down the hallway. Within moments she would rise and pass in front of Vida once more. What could she possibly say to her now, now that she’d missed the funeral, neglected to call or write, had been unable, that first week of school, to catch her alone, though she had tried, she really had. Carol couldn’t know about the pages of notes, the hours of research, the pleasure she had taken in finding just the right line. Because of this terrible misunderstanding they had barely spoken all fall (she’d sent her a wedding invitation and Carol had checked the regret box, offered no words at all), and they used to be such friends. Carol used to arrange her lunchtime around Vida’s schedule. She wished she could follow her back to the office, pull up that green chair in the corner, and gossip as they had before at this hour of day. Carol might even ask about the wedding night and maybe Vida could have implied something, maybe Carol could have given her some sort of advice. She’d been married nearly thirty years. But Carol was rising now, her heels sinking back into her shoes, paper in arms, and Vida had yet to say a single word to her. Something would come, she knew, when their eyes met. Carol backed out from the closet and, a few feet from the couch, looked directly at her with a tight smile. The windows were behind her, two pale panes like wings on Carol’s back. Vida smiled far wider, opened her mouth, and heard the word “Angel” come out. Carol nodded and vanished around the corner.

  Angel? Had she really said the word angel for Christ’s sake?

  Vida poured herself the largest mug of coffee on the shelf and slunk back up to the uncomplicated solitude of her third-floor suite.

  At five, she drove down to the gym parking lot and waited in her car with the other parents for the JV soccer players to trickle out the locker room door. Peter emerged with his friend Jason. Both boys were bent over from the weight of their knapsacks and talking in that way that made boys so distinct from girls of the same age: brief remarks, no eye contact. It was hard to tell, when they separated near the hood of the Dodge, if they had even said good-bye.

  The passenger door creaked, the enormous bag thunked onto the floor, and Peter slumped in.

  “Hey there, big guy.”

  “Hey,” he said at the end of a breath. He shot her a quick glance, then stared straight ahead as if the car were already moving.

  “How’d it go?”

  “What—practice?”

  “Practice, history quiz, the day in general.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  She put the car in gear and headed down the school driveway, relieved to be moving away from Carol, from Tess, from the classroom in which suddenly Peter was a student.

  Peter didn’t answer. She was afraid he was going to bring up the class, the way she had let things unravel. That horrible new boy, Kevin, and his cousin in the mental hospital. It was physical, the mortification this memory produced.

  “How’d French go?” French was always a safe subject; they could make fun of Cheryl Perry. His mediocre marks in that class never bothered her as much as they did in other subjects.

  “It was stupid. She showed us this movie about this sort of lonely kid. One day he’s walking through a kind of junkyard and he sees this painting of a girl. He looks at her a long time, and then this real girl just appears out of nowhere. She’s supposed to be the one from the painting, but she doesn’t look anything like her. Why do they do that, act as if you can’t tell the difference?”

  “Suspension of disbelief. They want you to use your imagination.”

  “In a book maybe. But it’s so stupid in a movie.”

  The car weaved through the unlit narrow roads, then the lighted stretch of the town center and on toward the mainland. The black surface of the water held the
soft yellow light from shore, the bluish neons on the bridge, and the slow red and white streaks from the crossing cars.

  “Where are you going?’ Peter said, slicing through their silence when the car didn’t take the right toward Larch Street.

  “We need groceries.” The word was strange in her mouth.

  “Oh.” A trace of delight in his voice.

  She had come into this store only once before, with Tom last summer before a picnic. They had bought egg salad sandwiches and lemonade. Every person in the place had greeted Tom: the teenager shelving soup, the woman buying toilet paper, the old man laying out the fish on crushed ice. The cashier and the bagger barely let him out of the store with all they wanted to talk about. Out in the parking lot Vida had glanced back to see a line of them at the plate glass, gawking, all their mouths moving at once.

  “Be right with you,” a man shouted above the gnarl of the meat grinder, then, upon recognizing her, quickly cut the machine, wiped his hands on a rag, and hurried up to the counter. “What can I do you for?”

  She looked down into the case of purple meats. In fourteen years she’d made nothing more elaborate than a cheese omelet. “Any suggestions?”

  He chose a small roast. In one long complicated gesture, he wrapped it in a fresh sheet of white paper, tied it tight with twine, and marked the side with a black hieroglyph only his daughter at the register could read. “I was really happy to hear about you and Mr. Belou,” he said, sliding the package at her. “Mrs. Belou—the former—she was a customer of ours from the very beginning. Special lady.” His pale eyes swam unsteadily. “He’s a lucky man. Twice blessed.” He looked unconvinced.