The English Teacher

by Lily King

  From the front hall window, Peter watched them walk out into the driveway. Her father was examining her and she was pretending not to notice. When he had decided she was sober, he put his arm around her shoulder and guided her to the green Mercedes whose license plate, 210514, Peter knew by heart. She rolled down the window and waved to people on the grass as her father turned the car around. She didn’t look toward the house. Perhaps she had already forgotten him.

  Carla came at midnight, and when they got on the highway, Jason leaned into the front seat. “Can you turn it up a bit?” This meant he wanted to talk. He sat back and waited for Peter to ask.

  “You and the sister?”

  “An hour and a half in the poolhouse.” Jason shut his eyes.

  “Sounds cold.”

  “I was amazing.”

  “You were amazing?”

  “I think she must have had fourteen orgasms.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. Wow.”

  If Peter asked anything more specific, Jason would get prickly, so he kept quiet. Up front they were giggling. The roommate kept wiping the fogged-up windshield with what looked like a brown bra.

  “So where were you?” Jason asked, expecting little.

  “With Kristina.”

  “Kristina Luhzin?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” Peter said. A small elated laugh slipped out.

  “Where?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “In a bedroom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “We talked.”

  “Talked? I saw her. She was bombed.”

  “I was trying to sober her up. Before her father came.”

  “You were alone in a bedroom with her all that time and nothing happened? You got nothing off her?”

  “A lot happened. I mean, I could have kissed her. She wanted me to, I think.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “She was drunk.”

  “Of course she was drunk. That’s the point of parties. Girls get drunk because they want us and can’t ask for it unless they’re drunk.”

  “Kristina doesn’t want me.”

  Even Jason couldn’t argue with that. “Well, she asked for it tonight and you didn’t have the cojones to do it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Fuck me? Try fucking her.”

  Peter had never hit anyone before, not like that. It didn’t even feel like a decision—he just watched his right fist cross his chest and smash into Jason’s face. Jason pummeled him four or five blows so fast he couldn’t get another swipe at him. Carla was swearing at them in the rearview mirror and just when Peter was about to land another solid punch, he was shoved hard against the door handle. The roommate was sprawled above them like a hawk, one flat palm pressed against Peter’s chest, the other against Jason’s.

  “Fucking cut it out.” They were the only words he ever heard her say.

  She flexed her arms, shoving him and Jason simultaneously slightly farther apart, then withdrew and settled in even closer to Carla.

  Why hadn’t he kissed Kristina? Why had just lying there talking to her been enough? Why hadn’t he jumped her with the same unconscious passion and urgency with which he had just punched Jason? That’s what it was like for other guys in love. In movies they leapt out of chairs, dashed across rooms, clutched and grabbed and pressed themselves against the women they loved. Why hadn’t he had any of those impulses? Why was he so self-conscious, so controlled? What was wrong with him? Was he gay?

  It was a long ride home. Peter told himself he wasn’t going to say anything to any of them when he got out of the car, but a small “thanks” slipped out anyway.

  The house had not been waiting for him, not the way his old house waited, the way it seemed glad when his feet touched the porch steps in the afternoon. When he lived there, he’d never really thought of it as home. Home was something in books and always had more than two people living in it. Home wasn’t a borrowed gardener’s cottage on a school campus, even if it had once belonged to his grandparents. But now he missed the smell of it, a blend of cheese popcorn and wet dog. They still bought the cheese popcorn, and Walt still smelled, but the Belou house had its own smell that he and his mother would never alter, no matter what they brought into it.

  He could see that someone, probably Stuart, was still up watching TV. Normally the prospect of hanging out on the couch with Stuart would have cheered him, but tonight he didn’t feel like talking to anyone. He shut the door quietly and headed to his room. But he felt bad, felt rude, not even saying hi, and he glanced over to give at least a wave. It was Fran on the couch, her head turned away from him, one knee drawn up to her cheek. And she was shaking.

  “Fran?”

  She shook her head. “Just go to bed, Peter.”

  He moved to obey, then heard a huge gasping sob, as if she’d been carefully holding it in since he’d come through the door.

  “Are you okay?” He moved closer and sat at the far edge of the couch.

  “She hates me. She hates me so much.” She raised her head, and her mouth, readying for another sentence, opened then kept opening, far wider than necessary, and the lips quivered as she struggled and failed to get control of it. A long moan careened out instead, ending in sharp, short cries. After a deep breath she said, “I was just talking about this stupid book I got out of the library and suddenly she’s screaming at me, wanting to know my ‘position,’ telling me to clarify and then going on about ‘girls like me’ and how our brains are jellyfish or something. God, Peter, no wonder you’re so—”

  “What book?” He couldn’t bear to hear her adjective for him.

  “The Thorn Birds.”

  “Oh. She hates that kind of book.”

  “Aren’t English teachers supposed to like books? My teacher last year used to cry when he read us poetry. All I did was tell her what it was about and before I knew it she was screaming at me.” She broke down again and hid her head.

  “You can’t take it personally. It’s how she is about stuff like that.”

  “I was trying so hard.” She wiped her nose, which was red and wet, and then wiped her palm on her shirt. It made a long filmy streak. In someone else he might have found that a little disgusting but Fran was exempt in his mind from those kinds of judgments. She did everything with such self-confidence he didn’t dare question her, even to himself. It was this composure that made her tears, her complete lack of control of her mouth, so disturbing to him. She usually operated with such coolness and detachment, like nothing could ever really bother her.

  “Things began really well. After I put Caleb to bed, it was just the three of us and Dad seemed happy that I was there, hanging out.” He couldn’t help noticing that her shirt was tighter than most things she wore and he could see, against her thigh, the outline of her right breast. “Daddy told his story about breaking his collarbone on a date in high school and your mother was laughing. Then she told us about a straight-A student who always had to wear this white fur hat of his grandmother’s during tests. But then we started talking about books and she just snapped.” Fran’s face twisted up and her voice creaked but she was determined to get her next sentence out. “My mother never ever …” The rest of her words got lost in another long moan.

  Peter touched her back. She was crying so hard he wasn’t sure she could even feel his hand. He gave her a few pats, then began stroking her slightly. Her spine was like a row of marbles down her back, nothing like Kristina’s padded bones. The memory of touching Kristina made his stomach hollow. Why hadn’t he kissed her? What was wrong with him?

  “I don’t think my father has the strength to deal with all her problems. He’s been through so much already. It doesn’t seem fair.” She began to cry so hard now that she made no sound at all except a little click click deep in her mouth. Peter let his fingers drift up to the ends of her hair and, on the next stroke, to her head. It was hot and moist
at the roots. His heart was pounding so hard, harder than it had even with Kristina. With her head still down, Fran said, “I don’t understand her. She’s not like any other mother I’ve ever known. She’s lucky you’re such a … good kid. You could have turned out really badly. You could fly to the moon and back and she wouldn’t even know you’d gone. She doesn’t wash your clothes or tell you to pick up your room or even kiss you hello or good night or anything. She just reads her books, mixes her drinks, and smokes her cigarettes so she can get cancer one way or another and die, too.” Peter barely heard her through the racing of his blood, daring him, urging him. She was talking and he was touching and she hadn’t told him to stop. He watched his hand disappear into the hair in the back of her head. Then he felt it rising up and she looked at him for the first time that night. His hand was still tangled in her hair. “You’re bleeding,” she said. And he kissed her.

  It was wet and salty with tears and blood and when she opened her mouth Peter did the same and their tongues met and it felt slimy, like kissing Walt. It felt like being a tadpole more than being human, a tadpole with a tiny brain and a big mouth and everything wet and silty all around. A rattle of breath from her nose poured out onto his cheek and he was so focused on his mouth he didn’t know what he was doing with his hands though they were moving the whole time. It was noisy, this kind of kissing, and the noise made him like it even more. And then, in an instant, that whole briny, underwater world became memory. She hit him hard on the upper arm and stood up, wiping everything off her mouth. She was still crying as she told him he was gross and shouldn’t be kissing his stepsister. Then she disappeared down the hall to her room.

  Peter waited a long time before he got up. In the bathroom, Mrs. Belou was stern.

  I thought it might come to this.

  I’m sorry.

  She’s my little girl.

  I know.

  You don’t know. What do you or your mother know about anything?

  Peter turned away from the picture to the mirror. No wonder you’re so—What had she been going to say? Wimpy? Boring? Dense? “Unfocused” and “distant” were words that appeared regularly on his report cards. Was his mother somehow responsible for that? He’d never thought of his mother in this way. She was like a building to him, tall, brick, permanently adjacent and absolutely necessary, whose shape he had never questioned, whose shadow he had never noticed until he stepped back and stood with the Belous at a safe distance. Now he could see the dilapidated frame, the broken windows, the rotting roof.

  He sat on the toilet cover looking at the thin hand towels with the embroidered bluebells and the jar of dried petals on top of the wicker cabinet—decorations his mother would never have chosen. She would have left all those places bare and ugly.

  He thought of how, not all that long ago and for as long into the past as he could remember, he used to fear her absence, and how the sound of the Dodge pulling up beneath his window could make him whimper with relief. He doubted he could ever feel that way about her again and for a moment, as the great building was razed swiftly to the ground, he felt guilty and ashamed. Then he turned back to the picture and saw a deepening smile.

  Stuart was not in their room, and he was relieved. In his bed in the dark his body reexperienced, in random order, moments of the long night. The bra on the windshield, the smell of stain, the salty metallic slippery kiss, the blue black of Kristina’s hair in his fingers, Jenny Mead’s head tipping back. His mind could find nothing to rest on, nothing that made him feel safe.

  SEVEN

  VIDA CIRCLED THE CLASSROOM SLOWLY, STOPPING AT EACH WINDOW, feigning interest in the bleakness below. Wendell was out by the pond, raking up the last of the slimy half-frozen willow leaves at its edges. Her freshmen were writing an in-class essay comparing “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” with “A&P.” If she looked toward them and not out the windows, their hands would shoot up with a hundred useless questions—Can I use purple ink? Where should I write my name?—questions designed simply to bring her over to their side where just the presence of her body was comforting to them. But they were in ninth grade now, and they needed to be broken of those middle school habits.

  Stepmothering, she realized, was not all that different from teaching. It was essential to keep their intellectual development in mind at all times. You couldn’t get all wrapped up in their needs and whims. Stuart and his mysticism. Fran reading The Thorn Birds. They were too old now for that kind of material. A young man needed a hearty Byronic outlook, not this boneless Taoism. And if Fran began to believe in the characters in novels like that, real people were going to be a sore and sorry disappointment. She would have to, once again, urge Fran to read Tess of the d’Urbervilles; that would teach her exactly how far she could trust a man, even a seemingly well-intentioned man like Angel Clare.

  Or Tom Belou, who had withdrawn since her blowout with Fran last week. He was angry in a way she didn’t understand—placid, wordless anger. He had behaved yesterday as if he couldn’t see her in the room. She figured that all marriages, if they lasted, ended up here in the land of quiet regret. She and Tom had simply arrived a little early. She had predicted it, but even her own conviction that she would fail did not protect her from the discomfort of having done so. In bed last night she had tried, her heart thumping stupidly, to make a small advance: one brave hand reaching up over the curve of his hip bone and down into still unfamiliar and terrifying ground—but it was soundly rejected and she lay awake for several hours cradling her humiliated fingers.

  She moved to the windows at the back of the room. A dog she didn’t recognize trotted briskly up the driveway. A few years ago Walt would have charged out to meet it, smell it, inform it of whose territory it had trespassed. This morning she’d had to lift him up and hold him before his bowls as all four legs quivered and shifted desperately for a painless balance. He took a tongueful of water, then looked at her, confused by his lack of appetite.

  Behind her Patrick Watkins cleared his throat. He’d let his raised arm fall unbent into the crook of his other hand just to let her know how long he’d been trying to get her attention.

  When she was beside him he asked, “Is it okay if I call Seymour Glass Morie? I mean, just sometimes? My father’s best friend from college is named Seymour but we call him Morie so I’ve kind of gotten used to calling Seymour Glass Morie in my head.”

  “That’s not okay, Patrick.”

  “Really?”

  As she weaved through the desks back to the perimeter of the room, she saw that Mandy Hughs was dotting all of her i’s with daisies. She’d only written half a page for all the time it took to make the petals. “No flowers,” Vida said as she passed. “Just letters.” How did those middle school English teachers sleep at night?

  Finally the bell shook the floor. Her students dashed off their last thoughts and tossed their pages onto the pile on her desk. Everyone was suddenly free.

  Peace returned to her classroom. She realigned her chairs, picked up flecks of torn notebook paper from the floor. She gathered up the essays, each page puckered on both sides from the ballpoint ink pressed on hard and nervously. If she were focused, she could get through half of these, then glance at the pages her sophomores read over the weekend before the next bell. But focus had eluded her lately. She was behind on her grading, and had been less than inspired in the classroom. Her students rattled her in a way they didn’t used to. And the material, once so easily intellectualized, seemed to writhe under her inspection of it. Even Hardy, whose theories on Darwinism, religion, and social codes were as cold and straightforward as mathematics, was becoming a sensualist, with all those disgusting passages she’d never noticed before about the oozing fatness and rushing juices of summer, the dripping cheeses in the dairy where Tess takes refuge after her baby dies and meets Angel Clare.

  “Vida.”

  A wild yelp came out of her as she spun toward the voice. It was Tom. Fuck him for sneaking up on her like that.

 
; “I was just hoping …” he said, looking around, making sure they were alone. “I called to find out when you had a free period, and I thought we could talk.”

  She couldn’t speak for the sudden thrumming of her heart. She’d heard nothing, no scuffle on the stairs, no crack of an old board in the hall. Fear, unable to hear reason, flooded her body.

  “Is there someplace we could go? Someplace”—he looked around the dim, cavernous room—“smaller?”

  The scare had heightened her perception yet dulled her reaction. She could smell the vinyl of his station wagon on him, but it took her a delayed moment to turn and lead him to her office.

  He sat on the ratty green sofa and she moved to take her seat behind her desk. He patted the cushion beside him. It was the first attempt he’d made to be physically close to her in eight days, and she gave in. She regretted it instantly; the springs were shot, the cushions nearly featherless. She felt trapped in a rabbit hole.

  How often, in September and October, she had conjured him up in this room as she worked at her desk. How often she had stared at the empty couch and wondered who he really was, and what he wanted with her, her blood churning at the memory of the slightest gesture from the night before. And now he had come and it seemed perverse to think back to that other time when his lips shook against hers, when he said things no woman should ever let herself believe.

  “I came here to try and talk.” The sound of his voice in this tiny room that had been for fourteen years reserved for the dispassionate talk of books, made-up people’s blunders and heartaches, not her own, disturbed the very molecules in the air.

  “Okay. Shoot,” she said, feeling the gulf between this smooth, teacherlike response and the mayhem inside her.

  Disappointment flickered in his face. He began again. “I think we need to air out a few things. I came here because I thought it might be easier for you to talk in your own element.” His eyes traveled briefly around the room, which after all these years bore little evidence of her presence. The books on the shoulder-level shelf across from them could be found on the shelf of any high school English teacher in any state across the country: Norton anthologies, the Riverside Shakespeare, Melville, Dreiser, Brontë, Hawthorne, Cather, Faulkner. Nothing contemporary, nothing edgy, nothing out of print, nothing in translation. Not even a slight leaning toward a theme, a preference of gender or time period. The passionless shelf embarrassed her.