The English Teacher

by Lily King

  The tears had stopped and he was sitting in the grass, whose tips rested at his shoulders. His head had begun to pound and his shirt was wet in front and around the neck. His whole face felt swollen. The sun had fallen toward the ocean, darkening it, and the waves still smashed into huge white fans against the rocks below.

  Gena would worry if he didn’t get back. He followed the path out to the road, crossed it, and began the long walk to her house. In the weaker light, the unfamiliar vegetation seemed sinister. He hadn’t known that a life could run amok so quickly. He wondered why he kept walking toward Gena’s. In the movie of his life he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t ever go back. He’d make a left right here on something called Caballo Way and head toward the pink and blue lights of a strip of shops he could see at its end. He still had fifty-six dollars in his pocket. He wished he could be that kind of boy they always read about in school, the kind who trusted his luck. If there was one thing Peter didn’t trust anymore, it was his own luck.

  Gena’s house seemed smaller than he remembered. She’d put a light on outside, above the door. The Dodge sprawled in the small driveway at the same angle he’d pulled up in. His mother would be in bed; Gena would be making dinner. She’d feign relief at his return, as if she didn’t know he was incapable of anything else.

  TWELVE

  WHEN I MAKES TEA I MAKES TEA AND WHEN I MAKES WATER I MAKES WATER. Buck Mulligan imitating that old lady—Old Mother Gowan? Grisby?—and she couldn’t get it out of her head. It was a habit from childhood, letting a senseless cluster of words get lodged like that. She tried to concentrate on the hummingbird whirring its wings against the screen across the room as it tried to push itself into the long tube of a white flower. Water I makes water. She wondered what a cup of tea would taste like. She’d always been a coffee drinker, never understood the teachers with their delicate cups of tea, the little paper tassel hanging off the side. Davis Clay had switched to tea. Not right after that summer his wife sent him off but a year or so later. Coffee’s an addiction like any other, he’d told her. His wife had probably flown people in for that, too. Tea drinkers were like that. Sheep. Look at the Irish and all they put up with for centuries. Then again the English themselves were obsessive about their tea. In novels they packed it in their suitcases with their toothbrushes when they went abroad. Anger spiked down her arms. Why was she getting so worked up about tea? Could there be anything more innocent than a poor cup of tea? And when I makes water I makes. She heard, beyond the closed door, voices, soft, companionable. She should have given him to Gena and he could have been raised among guinea pigs. And then that feeling again that these choices were still ahead, not behind. It had always been a comforting sensation, a protective nook where she took cover. She remembered her mother throwing a dish towel at her father’s face and her father taking her mother’s head in his hands and knocking it five times fast and hard against the wall then walking out of the room and Vida laughed even though her mother was in the bathroom crying because she knew when this exact moment happened again, her father wouldn’t do that and her mother wouldn’t cry. How did you go about convincing yourself that this instant right now was real and solid when it felt so flimsy in your hands, bleeding into the next, porous, full of holes and puckers, and the mind was so bad at recording anything correctly? How did you make this moment right here with the hummingbird moving now onto the flat yellow flower and the voices dwindling toward the kitchen and her own quick breaths pushing up against her hand—how did you cut that into a granite block and slide it perfectly into place beside all the others?

  Did Gena know how to do that? Isn’t that what she’d always been so envious of, the way her sister had always known how to live? Their whole childhood she was the one the phone rang for, the car outside honked for. She was the one with the plans and the dreams. She had gone to Africa. Vida hadn’t been aware that she had formulated a picture of Gena’s life here until she walked into it however many days ago and nothing was as it should be. Where was the furniture, the bright fabrics, the plush cushions, the strange art? Where was the bulletin board crammed with photos and phone numbers? Why didn’t the phone ring more often? She could hear their mother’s voice full of vicarious titillation, “Gena, it’s for yooooouuuu!”

  When she and Peter arrived, Gena had had to go out to a shed for two more chairs for her kitchen table.

  Outside her window she heard Peter and Gena, their voices approaching and receding as they walked around the house.

  “Someday I’d like to plant things out here.” Gena was saying.

  “I can help you,” Peter said.

  A few days later she heard Peter say, “I really thought I was in love with her.”

  Another time, as they lay in the grass after lunch, he said, “Just looking at a palm tree makes me happy. Isn’t that weird?”

  She heard Gena tell him about a dream she’d had about her boyfriend in Senegal. “And he pulled up into the driveway, just like you did, and I went running out to him and I was crying and laughing at the same time and I said, Look, look at my beautiful scars.”

  If they were outside, Vida walked about the cool house, made a bowl of cereal, spied on them through the small windows, but when they came in she retreated to her room. She found a sketchbook and a charcoal pencil in a drawer, and remembered how well Gena had drawn as a child. But all the pages were empty. Vida sketched the tree outside her window, a tall palm with spears for leaves. When they checked in on her, she hid the book and pretended to be asleep. Sometimes she did doze during the day, but at night she stopped sleeping altogether. Her old fear had new power now and she lay in the dark, blindsided by panic. Her heart vibrated, its beats barely separate. She couldn’t get enough air; her skin felt like it would peel off. She turned on the light and focused on the pillow, the faded blue flowers and their sprigs of leaf. She tried to put Joyce back in her head, When I makes tea, I makes tea, but it wouldn’t stick. She could not get her pulse to come down. She was going to have a heart attack, a heart explosion.

  She dreamed about the mansion. The appendages were gone—no hockey rink or tennis bubble or science wing. She drove up to the front door, Walt in her lap, a puppy again. Her grandfather came out, carrying the bust of himself. He didn’t see her. He followed a path along the side of the house to a garbage can, and he dropped the head in. Then he went back into the house and shut the door. Down in the fields girls in white dresses were holding hands and dancing, some raising their arms high and others dipping their heads through, making intricate tangles then pulling back out to a large, perfect circle. The May Dance, she thought, looking for Tess but seeing, at the crest of the rise beyond, Angel Clare. He was walking away. No, she cried out. Not again. Not again. The sound of her own voice woke her up, but still she could not stop screaming.

  On their eighth day in California, Gena drove her to a shrink. In the corner water bubbled over black rocks. Toward the end of the hour, Vida managed to say it out loud.

  “I’ve always been scared that I’d kill him in my sleep.” She waited for the woman to call the police or the nuthouse. They locked up people who said things like that.

  Instead the woman said calmly, “What feels truer than that?”

  Vida felt a small loosening in her body. This was what she was always asking of her students, to see beyond the words on the page.

  “I’m so scared,” she said, and even just saying those words shrank the feeling slightly, “of losing him.”

  The next day she agreed to go to lunch with Gena and Peter. “It’s just a few blocks away,” Gena reassured her.

  She trailed behind Peter and Gena on the sidewalk. It was hot and sweat soaked into her turtleneck and the waistband of her skirt. She’d left her tights behind, and the canvas shoes Gena had lent her scraped the skin off her swelling ankles.

  Gena pointed out a house and said the owners were extremely peculiar, as if she herself didn’t live alone in a dark empty house with guinea pigs.

  �
�Why did you come to California?” Peter asked.

  Gena looked around. “I suppose it reminded me of Africa.”

  “Africa? Really?”

  “Something about the flatness of the light. At dusk the sun just sets, like a light being put out. No afterglow, no in the gloaming.” She glanced back at Vida, who decided to play her part.

  “‘In the gloaming, Oh my darling!

  When the lights are dim and low,

  And the quiet shadows falling

  softly come and softly go …’”

  They both smiled at her encouragingly. She had a stab of paranoia. Were they scheming something? Was Tom going to be at the restaurant?

  But the restaurant was nearly empty, every booth along the wall free. Through the doorway in back was a bar.

  “Everything’s yummy,” Gena said, “But the soups are their specialty. Perhaps I’ve mentioned the spicy artichoke—”

  “Yeah, I think you did,” Peter said. “About a hundred times.” They were smiling at each other. They already had their little jokes.

  The waitress came and went, a tiny creature in turquoise ballet shoes. Stuart’s kind, more sprite than girl. She couldn’t stop the great chasm of failure, of shame, that opened up beside the thought of Tom’s children. She pulled herself quickly from it.

  Peter peppered Gena with questions: did she know how to surf, did she like the Giants, did it ever snow? He got her to describe her work at the nursing home and what an earthquake felt like. And yet their voices were too animated for the context; they were saying other things beneath their words. They shared a secret, an anticipation. Vida forced herself to look each time someone came through the door. He was coming; they had asked him to come. She was sure of it.

  Gena was right. The soup was good, but Vida only brought a few spoonfuls to her mouth before she lost the energy and interest. Peter and Gena polished their bowls clean with the thick slices of sour bread from a basket the poor little waitress had to keep running back to refill. Vida slid her soup over to them and it was gone within minutes. Then they ordered ice cream sundaes, enormous goblets with chocolate, caramel, and pineapple sauces cascading down the sides. Peter giggled and raised the long spoon to the top. Gena said, “We’ve concocted an idea,” and Peter put the spoon down again.

  “I could tell,” Vida said. Was Tom at the house now? What was happening?

  “How about Peter stays with me for a while?” Gena said. Her round cheeks were red as apples.

  It wasn’t Tom. It was all about them, all the excitement in the air.

  “Gena says there’s a good school just a few blocks from her house.”

  Everything was a just a few blocks from her house, it seemed. In Peter’s eyes, in his voice, was the same enthusiasm he’d had just before she’d married Tom. She’d misinterpreted it then. Now she understood. Getting away from her had always been the goal.

  “That’s fine with me.”

  They had been ready for a battle; their list of reasons twitched on their fingers. She needed to be away from them, in the bar through the beaded doorway.

  Stools turned when she came in. She looked each one in the eye, the blond in flowered shorts, the old guy with the pink cap, the two college kids hoping she’d be someone else. They might not have seen many gaunt English teachers from New England, or turtlenecks, but she knew them, each one of them. She knew the feeling that brought a person to a strong drink at noon on a Thursday.

  The bartender raised his eyebrows and slid a coaster her way.

  “I’m just—” She glanced up at the TV in the corner. A bearded, blindfolded hostage was speaking into an old-fashioned microphone. It was Day 43. “I’m just looking for the bathroom.”

  “Right through there.”

  It was a dark little hallway. She looked back at the glasses pyramided on the bar, then rushed to the door with the W and bolted it shut behind her.

  The soup came up yellow and bitter. She spat it into the sink and wiped her face slowly in the mirror. She didn’t know how to fight for him. She’d never fought for anything in her life.

  On the way back Gena and Peter veered into a store. Vida stayed outside, looking at the books in the window. There were a few classics in paperback. Daniel Deronda, which she’d never read. But she wasn’t tempted. Gena and Peter came out with Parcheesi. They opened it as soon as they got home, hunkering down on the floor on their stomachs like little kids. The phone rang when they were into their second game. Gena went into the kitchen to get it. She spoke in a low murmur, her back to them. Peter was left alone on the floor, Vida on the brown chair. It was the first time they’d been alone since the car. He was sitting up now, sideways along the board, one knee bent, one arm straight as a pole to the ground. With the other arm he rolled the dice over and over, unsatisfied with the numbers. His sprawled body seemed enormous, the dice and the board tiny beside him. He was done with her. Every thud of the dice told her that.

  Gena held out the receiver. “It’s for you.”

  Vida shook her head but Gena shook her head right back at her. “I can’t put him off any longer, Vida.” She wouldn’t back down. Vida could see that in her face.

  Maybe it was Brick, she told the blood rising to her face. It was just before five back there. He’d have come home, made himself a cocktail, put himself in the mood to deal with teacher truancy.

  But it wasn’t Brick. “Are you really all right?”

  She remembered the sound of his voice from their first phone calls. Her heart would be slamming just like this and she’d wrap the ringlets of cord around her finger and half of her would wish he’d cancel the date they were making and the other half wanted to talk to him all night long. His voice was deep and always a little hoarse, like an old reed instrument hitting the low notes. “I think I’m okay.”

  “Vida, I—”

  “I imagine you’ve spoken to Brick.”

  “I told him you’d call when you were ready.”

  It felt like a rug burn, the tight heat in her chest. A calendar hung by the phone and Gena had made a diagonal line through all the days that had passed, just as their mother used to do. It had always depressed her, that habit, as if each day were a task to be crossed off a long list.

  “I want you to do exactly what you need to,” Tom was saying, and she thought of that night in June when, after having dinner with the family of Tom’s goddaughter, they’d split off from the rest, taken a walk to the Norsett town landing, then back to Tom’s car. Nothing had happened between them on that walk; she couldn’t remember what they’d spoken of, and Vida had decided that if he asked her out again she’d say no. But on the way home, for no good reason, her whole body began to shake. It was a warm night in June but she was shaking and couldn’t stop. He didn’t ask why. He just turned the heat on for her. When she didn’t stop trembling, he turned it up higher, even though he’d begun to sweat in his suit and tie.

  “I’m here,” he was saying. “I’m not going anywhere. I’ll come to you and Peter the minute you say the word.”

  She thanked him and then, unable to form more words, hung up.

  “How did that go?” Gena asked from the doorway.

  She pushed down all that was rising and found her usual flatness. “About as well as one might expect.”

  A guinea pig scuttled out from beneath a chair, paused, and kept on toward Gena, who scooped it up and cooed into its ear.

  “Aren’t they supposed to live in cages?” Vida said.

  “Oh no. They grow much bigger and stronger if they’re given room to roam.”

  “But they’re not house-trained.” She pointed to the small yellow puddle it had left behind.

  “No more than a squirt of liquid here, a pellet or two there.” Tucking the creature under her armpit, Gena folded a paper towel into a square and pressed it with two fingers into the urine. The whole thing saturated quickly. She tossed it into the trash and returned to her game with Peter.

  She’d always believed Gena was the
stronger of the two of them, the sister who was meant to flourish and thrive.

  Vida went back to her room. She drew more palm trees. At night she slept. She awoke early, well before dawn. December 17. The date had been traveling through her dreams. It was a familiar date, a date printed somewhere. On flyers. At school. She had it now. The spring musical tryouts. Helen.

  She picked up the pad and charcoal pencil by her bed. It didn’t take her long to remember which of Jerry’s girls corresponded to which year, as if her mind had been keeping a careful inventory without her knowing it.

  1973 Janet Blake

  1974 Audrey Beale

  1975 Beth Zaccardi

  1976 Nancy Goff

  1977 Amelia Crane

  1978 Bonnie Steadman

  It felt good to match the names with dates, as if she were tidying up a small part of her brain. She wrote the letter out three times, one for Brick, one for Lydia Rezo, one for the board of trustees.

  On her way out, she passed Peter sleeping on a narrow mattress in the living room. He’d kicked off his blankets and curled one leg up to his chest while the other stretched out straight behind him, as if he were taking a great leap into the sky. He’d slept in this position all his life.

  She found envelopes and stamps in a drawer in the kitchen. Then she put on Gena’s canvas shoes and left to find a mailbox.

  THIRTEEN

  HE AWOKE TO THE SOUND OF THE TRUNK OF THE DODGE SLAMMING SHUT. Was she leaving? He waited for another sound. Nothing.