The English Teacher

by Lily King

  Vida thanked him, set the roast in the child’s seat of the cart, and headed for produce.

  “You’ll want to put that in at three-fifty for an hour and a half,” the butcher called out to her before turning on his machine once again.

  In the vegetable aisle, she pulled the string off the meat and tied up her hair.

  Peter was waiting for her at the magazines. He looked at the roast, the eight potatoes, the bag of string beans, and the bottle of bourbon. “That’s it?”

  “I need to get the roast in.” Maybe tomorrow night she’d have more stamina for all the choices and the scrutiny.

  Larch Street made Vida uneasy. All these houses pressed together seemed to demand something of her as she drove past—a normalcy she couldn’t deliver. She hated the curtains in the windows, the decorations at the door. She still had to look carefully at the house numbers to find the right one. She pulled in behind Tom’s wagon and cut the engine. The car shook a little, then was still. Above the squat little house, long clouds floated pink in the dark sky, as if it might snow. Here, too, lights were on in every window; everyone was home. Her throat had seized up; she couldn’t even swallow her own saliva.

  “Aren’t you getting out?” Peter’s voice was shrill. He had some fear in him, too, and she wished she found it reassuring. All those years they had been alone together and yet she couldn’t turn to him now and ask, What have we done?

  They walked up the steps together without speaking.

  Walt made happy circles around her as she moved from the front door to the kitchen with the grocery bag. Fran and Caleb were at the table spreading peanut butter and fluff onto eight slices of bread.

  “Those for lunch tomorrow?”

  “Dinner. Tonight,” Fran said, glancing at the clock.

  “I’ve got dinner. I’m about to whip it up right now.”

  “That’s okay, we can just have these,” Caleb said, bouncing, all sugared up just from looking at that crap.

  “We’re going to have a roast.”

  “But—”

  “It will be ready at seven-thirty.”

  Fran sunk her knife deep into the peanut butter and left the room. Caleb tried to do the same with the fluff but both jar and knife tumbled to the floor.

  “Sorry,” he said, squatting to pick it up and then, thinking better of such a reconciliatory gesture, scrambling off with a small whimper, as if she might chase him.

  Vida piled up the heavy slices of bread and dumped them in the trash. Walt was making as much noise with his arthritic limbs as he could, demanding to be fed.

  “You’re home.” It was Tom. She’d nearly forgotten about him.

  “I am. In all my glory.”

  How had it all led to this, his leaning in the doorway looking as if she had broken in through a kitchen window? She brushed the crumbs off her skirt but didn’t know what to do with her hands after that.

  “I’m glad.” He came toward her with a face she recognized from the beginning of their dates, when she’d answer the door and there he’d be, grinning as if every moment since he’d last seen her had been spent in anticipation of seeing her again. But now that he’d gotten her, brought her to his house to live, how long could that grin—a grin that expected so much—really last? He kissed her, his tongue reaching for hers. He seemed to have no plans to stop kissing her. Hadn’t he seen Fran storm off or heard Caleb squeal? And the roast had to get in the oven or supper wouldn’t be ready till midnight.

  “Later, cowboy.” Where did she come up with these phrases?

  “Promise?”

  He seemed not to remember last night or the night before. He swung a chair around to face her as she unwrapped the roast and set it in a pan. He wanted to talk about her day. He had a thousand questions. She fought them off with short answers as she cut up potatoes, trimmed beans, and boiled water for the gravy mix she’d found in a cupboard. She glared at the clock; at this time in her old life she’d have eaten in the dining hall already. She’d be home in her slippers under a blanket, reading.

  By the time she managed to get dinner on the table, no one seemed particularly hungry. Even Tom, who always polished off his meals at restaurants, picked at his plate. Vida couldn’t understand it. The roast had turned out well; the slices looked just like Olivia’s at school.

  “So, Stu, what went on today?” Tom tried to be light, but he was worried, deeply worried, about his oldest son.

  “Not much. Got up, went to work, came home. Same as you.”

  “Where’s that?” Peter asked.

  “At E. J.’s.”

  “Are those people free yet?” Caleb asked his father.

  “It’s a used record store downtown.”

  “In Iran? No, sweetheart, I’m afraid they’re not.”

  “You have to be really cool to know about it. There’s no sign or anything outside,” Fran said, trying to provoke her brother and insult Peter all at the same time.

  “They’ll be out of there soon, I promise,” Tom said. He was too soft with Caleb, as if he were a girl.

  “You don’t know that.” Stuart glared down at his plate.

  “Only druggies go into E. J.’s. Everyone knows that,” Fran said.

  “Who said that?” It was exhausting to watch Stuart fighting on two fronts.

  “Mom did. One time we were walking past it and I asked her what was in there and that’s what she said. Drugs.”

  “She did not.”

  “Yes she did.”

  “You’re full of it.”

  “Stuart,” Tom said.

  Vida got up to make herself another drink. Usually she only had one on weeknights, but there was the problem of that promise. She mixed the soda with the bourbon slowly.

  “Why can’t we just give them a bunch of money?” Caleb asked.

  “They don’t want our money. They want the Shah and their money,” Stuart told him.

  “The what?”

  “The American pawn who used to rule their country until the revolution.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In New York.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s at some hospital.”

  “Cornell. In the city,” Tom said. “He’s got cancer.”

  “What kind?” all three of his children asked at once.

  He didn’t know.

  “Is he having an operation there?” Caleb asked.

  “I think so.”

  Caleb looked at his father until he explained. “Hers was inoperable. They couldn’t operate.”

  “According to one American doctor.”

  “Stuart, please.”

  You could see around Tom’s mouth the effects of the pain of the last three years. She had found that pain reassuring at first; it had filled her with a sense of security to know that he had been through loss and survived, that he was the type of person who would survive. And wasn’t there a sort of lucky protective coating around people after such a calamity? She had believed that by attaching herself to him she would be protected as well. But now, in his house, perched on a hard chair in his kitchen, she felt like she was back in her parents’ house with all its claustrophobia, all the old inexplicable resentments pressing down on them. She took a long sip of her drink. It kept her from screaming at the top of her lungs.

  Stuart scraped back his chair and stood.

  “Dinner isn’t over,” Tom said.

  “I’m just going to the bathroom,” Stuart said, halfway there.

  Peter doodled with his fork in the gravy. He’d said nothing since they’d sat down. She had done this to his life, bound him to this seat at this table with these strangers. She glanced at Tom again for a memory of why, of how, but he was intent on cutting through a piece of meat.

  Stuart returned, not from the bathroom, Vida guessed, but from a little toke beside an open window. His eyes weren’t red but his lashes glistened, from Visine no doubt, and he slipped into his chair with the catlike movements she recognized from the students she b
usted at school dances.

  Finally it was over. Fran helped her clear without having to be asked.

  “What’s for dessert?” Caleb asked.

  Thank God she hadn’t gotten any. Another course at this table would do her in. “It’s probably not a great idea to have sugar so close to bedtime,” she said. The clock on the stove confirmed that it was nearly nine.

  “We’ve always had dessert,” Caleb said to his father, tears already slipping beneath the round glasses he wore.

  Fran, scraping dishes into the trash, said, “I can’t believe you just chucked all those sandwiches. What a waste.”

  “I have a candy bar in my bag,” Peter said to Caleb. “You want that?”

  Vida opened her mouth to protest, but Tom covered her hand with a squeeze.

  Caleb nodded, and wiped his face. Peter got up and came back with a mangled package of Reese’s Cups.

  “May I please be excused?” Stuart asked Vida, perfectly politely, the contempt well hidden. It was the first time he’d looked directly at her. His eyes were a pale brown set below soft swollen lids. They were the only part of his body he was unable to make hard and angry. She’d had several students like him over the years, seething, humorless, unattractive boys who made few friends and suffered, again and again, the humiliating passion of unrequited love.

  “You may.”

  The rest fled behind him. The TV went on and she imagined Stuart hulking over it even before she heard Fran tell him to get out of the way.

  Tom still had his hand on hers. He lifted his face, and for a moment, before he could master it, she saw the question, her own pounding question. She wished she could offer him the answer but she couldn’t, and in her fear she turned away, and when she looked back it was gone. Still holding her hand, he asked her to follow him.

  He led her past their children to the bedroom. All her boxes had vanished. Her clothes were in drawers, her dresses on hangers in the closet. In the far corner, on either side of her desk, were two tall bookcases. All her books stood neatly on the shelves.

  “I knew you needed them, since you had all those built-in ones in your old place. I just put everything in alphabetically, but you probably have a much more sophisticated way of arranging your books.”

  “Yes, much.” She tried to smile at him. She hadn’t realized how much she’d counted on her boxes remaining packed, things remaining temporary, reversible. “How did you do all this?”

  “I got back from Springfield at three. And I’d already stained the wood last weekend.”

  “You made these?” She ran her fingers along the edge of a shelf. She couldn’t identify the wood but it was a lovely burnished color and sanded to silk. Each side of the top shelf had been carved into long narrow birds. “Herons,” she whispered.

  Behind her he shut the door and flopped onto the bed.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said, still standing.

  “You’re beautiful.” He sat up and pulled the butcher’s twine from her hair. He spread the mass of it (how she had always hated this bulk of frizz, so inexpressive of her and her love of order) from shoulder to shoulder and stroked it with his wide warm hand from the top of her head to the middle of her back. He eased her down on the bed and continued to touch her head and face. This time, he didn’t speak at all. His kisses were gentle on her cheek, her neck, her shoulder. Even his mustache was soft. She could feel the bourbon in her system protecting her, obscuring the path back. He rolled her nipple between his thumb and fingers carefully, as if it might break, and desire, that elusive bird, fluttered faintly. Then he got up, snapped the lock in place, and everything died inside her once again.

  “I love you, Vida,” he said when he finally gave up. “We’ll figure all this out.” He pulled her naked chest to his and closed his eyes.

  Maybe she slept, she wasn’t sure. The light was still on. Tom was still beside her, though his grip has loosened. His eyes were open, staring straight ahead at a framed drawing on the far wall she’d never noticed before, a pencil sketch of an infant wrapped loosely in a blanket and held low in its mother’s arms, its head resting heavily on her bent wrist, her breast depleted at his cheek. The mother had no head; her figure began at the small knobs of her shoulders and disappeared at the waist, behind the blanket’s folds. Her hands were her most expressive feature, the fingers longer than possible, spread carefully above and beneath the sleeping child. Vida understood that Tom had drawn it, that the wife and infant had once been his.

  Draw him! Draw his face, Peter had cried all those years ago, and when she refused, tears soaked his collar and bright blotches appeared on his neck but he wouldn’t give up. Please! She’d grabbed the pencil and made three thick lines of hair then, her fingers shaking by now, smashed the lead to the paper four more times—first the mouth, then a low bent nose, and finally the eyes, two short vertical lines that nearly punctured the page, eyes that conveyed not cruelty or pain or whatever had made that man do what he’d done to her but surprise, as if he himself were startled to have suddenly been drawn by her. She had wanted the drawing to be uglier, more frightening; even if Peter was only five she wanted him to stop asking and understand that this was a man you must forget, not remember. The picture was cartoonish, the head too round, but when she moved to correct it he snatched it from her. She’d never seen it since.

  She remained still. If Tom saw that she was awake he might want to try again. He would keep trying. That was the sort of man he was. So she waited for his eyes to shut, his breathing to thicken, before she pulled on her shirt and slipped quickly out of the room.

  The rest of the house was dark. Walt’s tail pounded the carpet as she crossed the living room, but he didn’t get up. He refused to come into the bedroom now that she shared it with someone else. She needed to see Peter, needed to know he was all right. The door was open, the way Peter liked it. The boys hadn’t pulled the shade and a street lamp cast a fan of light across the room. Peter was asleep on a narrow bed that came out of the wall like an ironing board. She glanced over to Stuart’s by the window, hoping he slept as deeply as Peter. It was empty. The clock on the bureau read 12:52. She moved quickly back down the hall. No one on the sofa; no one in the kitchen. Where was he?

  If he was gone, he’d have taken her car; she’d blocked in Tom’s. She headed for the window by the front door that was closest to the driveway, already angry. She needed that car to get to work in the morning, to get more groceries, to drive away from here if need be. She pushed aside the curtain. The Dodge was there, behind Tom’s, just as she’d left it. The anger clung. Her eyes scanned the rest of the driveway and the small yard. The grass and bushes seemed frozen in place. It was a winter’s night. Fall was over. Another season gone. She could feel the cold on her face through the glass.

  Then she saw them. Stuart and a girl. Had they just appeared, apparition-like, or were they there all along? Stuart was leaning back on his elbows against the trunk of her car while the girl performed a trick that made her arms momentarily whirl together like a pinwheel. Vida couldn’t hear them but she knew Stuart was saying That’s so easy as he brought his weight back down on his feet, freeing up his weedy arms to show her. But they just flopped in front of him unmagically. The girl was laughing and said something that made him laugh too. He reached out to grasp her wrists but she was too quick and spun a few feet away from him.

  She was a lovely girl, the kind Vida remembered from a decade ago: long, untampered-with hair, silver bracelets, and a skirt of printed cotton. She had a small, foxlike face which helped magnify her round eyes. Stuart hopped up on the car and patted the spot beside him. The girl took a few moments to decide, then scrambled up beside him. He pointed up at the heavy pink clouds and watched her as she watched them move. Just like his father, Vida thought with shock, never having seen a similarity before.

  She meant to turn away from the window, but the scene was as compelling as the performance she’d glimpsed on stage at lunchtime. Like Helen, Stuart had tran
sformed himself, and Vida could no longer find the sullen child from dinner in this spry fellow wooing a girl on her car.

  They played like kittens; she nudged him off the trunk and he feigned injury until she came to his side, then he leapt up and ran off and she chased him, catching him by the shirttail and zigzagging with him across the yard as he tried to free himself from her small clutch. Then he twisted and stopped and she slammed into his chest. Vida thought they would kiss then, but they just stood there, close and coatless on the frost-stiff grass.

  When the girl left, she moved in a slant across the lawn as if pushed by the wind. Just before she turned from the driveway she called out something. To Vida it was a thin underwater sound, but it made Stuart laugh deeply as he walked toward the porch. Though he was only a few yards away from where she stood at the window, he was oblivious to an audience, even as he raised his face to the house. On it was Tom’s grin but wider, his eyes nearly forced shut by the bulge of his cheeks. She saw them each simultaneously, Stuart and Tom, as they once were: exuberant, unbridled boys, untouched by grief.

  And then the faces fell away, instantly, as Stuart’s foot landed on the first step. Vida was relieved. They had frightened her, those faces, two ghosts of what had been. The knob on the front door clicked and Vida, having nowhere else to go, fled down the hallway toward the slit of light escaping beneath the bedroom door of the man she’d just married, toward the hope that he’d remain asleep.

  FOUR

  THEY ALWAYS CAME TO HIM, STUART’S GIRLS. LATE AT NIGHT, ON FOOT, THEY appeared like magic in the window.

  “Hey,” Stuart said, a long pulled-out syllable that dipped deep down to a voice he didn’t possess with his family.

  The girl’s words were quieter: “Whatcha doin’?” or “Come out and play, sleepyhead.” Sometimes all Peter could hear were the soft taps of her tongue in her mouth as she whispered.