by Noley Reid
I have grading to finish. The last two midterms from feminist philosophy. I stand up to shut my door right as Sue Hammond, the new Aristotle specialist, leans in to say hello with a big wave. I wave back to her and sit right down again. If life were different, I would have liked to invite her to a dinner party at the house. I could see Francie liking her, even being friends, maybe. Years ago.
I slog through the second-to-last midterm, give it a generous C- / 70%. I uncover Holly’s. Just like Enid with a roll she has buttered and set back on the plate for after she’s eaten the lima beans or spinach or whatever else Francie used to serve, I always save Holly’s work to grade last. I take hers off the stack and slip it to the bottom, the best for last and all that. Or sometimes I flip the pile and start from the back. And until the midterm, she had always been the slowest to finish, which made it easy.
I pick up her booklet and place it in front of me. I think of the door and decide to shut it. Lock it, even. I don’t know why. I sit down and settle in.
Now I peel back the blank cover and what I see is an ivy wall of curlicues: scrollwork s’s like ironwork fence gates, like stylized half hearts. The next page, again, is absent of answers to the exam. More blue ballpoint doodling. I turn the next page and the next, reach the midway staples and fan through the pages until, on the very last page, she has written:
Dearest Dr. Sobel,
You know what I miss the most? Falling asleep with you in the middle of the day, all sticky and hot and gross. Then waking up just before suppertime, the sheets always felt so much cooler and we weren’t sweaty anymore. Just smooth and soft and, well, together. That was my favorite. And you touching my hair. You should know that, I guess. In case your wife doesn’t tell you or thank you, I think
It’s been two months since we broke up and, to be honest, I knew we had no future but I wish missing you didn’t hurt so much.
Everyone around me right now is so scared of you and this test, that I can fill this entire blue book with drawings and no one will even notice. What’s that like? To have an entire (almost) roomful afraid of you?
And by the way, if you wish to challenge my mastery of the material, please summon me to your office where I’ll gladly provide all the answers to you in oral form.
Once,
Holly
Vivvy
After school today, I step up onto her bus and start down the aisle. I smile to the driver. “Dawn Prescott is having me over today,” I say. “We’re trick-or-treating together.” He always lets me on because I ride home with Dawn like every day.
She looks up, Dawn does, from way in the back. All I can see is her tortoise headband and that her eyes are smaller because she likes whatever is being said near her.
I wave.
She stands up in the second-to-last seat on the right—back where she always sits. She motions to me so I move quicker. “You can’t come today, Vivvy,” she calls.
I stop where I am.
Danielle and Justine stand with her but so do two more girls swarming from the seat across the aisle from her. Where have they all come from? They look me up and down in their green satin headbands and double-layered, flipped-up-collar shirts and dresses, which all have alligators—not a single tiger, horse, or swan among them.
But Dawn is only goofing.
“Oh my god,” say the girls, and “Make her stop,” and “What’s her problem?” They cluster tighter together, enclosing Dawn.
I squeeze the seat backs where I stand and move farther down the aisle.
“Please, Vivvy,” says Dawn, looking right inside me.
I stop and where I stop there is a guy here I know from science, when the G&T kids leave their own classes and meet up for word problems in an empty kindergarten room, where the furniture is brightly colored but too little. That’s what Dawn says, except she always adds, “But not for you, Vivvy. It would be perfect for you, if you were gifted and talented.”
Around this bus, the other buses have started up their motors. Puffs of gray smoke roll onto the windshield of each bus behind another’s tailpipe.
I sit down next to the guy—I think his name is Charles—and swing my legs into the aisle to show her it’s okay, I’m still here, I’m not mad or anything.
Dawn does not look. She will not look.
The boy standing behind her in the back row starts flicking her hair. Dawn kneels backward on her seat now, trying to slap at the bus boy’s hands. I watch her do it. The bus’s motor rumbles through the floor, walls, and seats. Everything I feel, I know she feels it too, right this very second. She turns around, just looking over her shoulder like she knows I’m thinking of her. I sit up straighter and smile for her.
Dawn purses her lips; her eyes and eyebrows pinch together. I look straight ahead now. The buses begin to pull out and it is stupid, but I feel like I’m spinning in outer space. Totally bogus but my stomach flips every time I think her name.
Tate
Finally ready to hand back their midterms, I lurch and lumber into the fray, the narrowest aisles made narrower by student cargo: backpacks, purses, those enormous basket bags the women carry like they’re Guatemalans toting baled sugarcane to market. I suck in my gut and breathe through my mouth but the humiliation can’t really be minimized.
This is her class, feminist philosophy.
I try not to think of it this way, but no matter what, every class I have taught since Holly has been defined by either her presence on the roster or her absence from it.
She is wearing a long, full skirt today. I don’t have to look at her to see that. She never leaves my periphery. Today it is blue in soft geometric smears over a creamy background. I know the skirt. There is a cord that ties at the waist. Tiny tassels at each of its ends.
I pass Holly’s desk, see down in her straw bag an obscure, unmarked collection of French poems from my bookshelf. I’d forgotten she took it. A wave of heat blasts through me, accompanying the thought that perhaps she intends to return the book after class, today.
Nothing good can come of it.
I reach the front of the classroom, aware that I am midsentence but without any shred left of the train of thought. “And so . . .” I say, hoping time will jog my memory. I stand in place. I tug up my waistband in back, run two fingers just inside the cut of my belt to smooth the tucked portion of my shirttail.
Still nothing.
I shake my head and start anew.
Enid
On the bus, nearly everyone has store-boughts except me. And they look different than they did this morning: the folding lines have worked their way out of the stiff smocks that tie three times down everyone’s backs. A couple of them are torn or crusty with sloppy joe sauce from lunch. Still, they are beautiful. The girls are Leia and Wonder Woman, with shiny plastic buns or the gold crowns and smooth black curls printed on the tops and sides of their masks. All of them make that special rustle sound coming down the aisle in the plastic capes and elastic-stringed masks their mothers bought them. The littlest kids who sit up front are Cabbage Patch dolls, Tweety Bird, and Raggedy Ann. One boy is C-3PO. Another wears E.T.
Foot-long Slim Jim at the checkout. Mr. Goodbar in snapped-off squares. Milk Duds smashed between my molars till they’re stuck and I have to work to pry my jaw open. Hot Fries, Starburst squares and smoothing a stack of their waxy papers deep down in my pocket.
Tina sits with Rachel. Michelle sits with Caroline.
Corn Nuts. Pringles.
It’s best when Vivvy rides home with Dawn. Without her here, I can be no one. Just slouch way down and drift away.
Star Crunch, Nutty Bars. Star Crunch, Nutty Bars.
Bubble Yum grape—two blocks at once.
Cheetos, Boston Baked Bean candies, cinnamon bears and chocolate-covered cinnamon bears, Bottle Caps, Laffy Taffy, Beer Nuts, Super Skrunch bars, Whatchamacallits, Hershey’s Miniatures, Reese’s PB Cups, Kit Kat, Twix, candy cigarettes, half-and-half powdered sugar and chocolate-covered little tiny doughnuts all
lined up.
Mrs. Healey pulls the bus up to the stop and my belly flips over. I move down the aisle like flying. I picture myself invisible, which is picturing air with just a faint silvery outline. Corn Nuts, Corn Nuts, Corn Nuts. Red cherry licorice strings. Bugles and Whoppers and Big League Chew. I go down the last step and I’m free. I run my hand along the hedge I walk beside. The bus turns off.
“Hey, Jabba the Butt! Wait up.”
It’s Clint.
I keep walking.
“What’s wrong?” He is beside me now. Dressed as an astronaut in an orange smock but no mask. “Don’t you like your new name?”
I walk.
“Come on, it’s just a joke,” he says. His face is so close to mine I can smell his teeth.
I take a deep breath of air away from him and I hold it, start counting one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
“Hey, want to come over?” he says. “I have a new magic trick to show you.”
I keep my breath inside but my eyes kind of peek at him.
“See?” he says. “You know you love me.”
“I do not!” My breath floods out and he laughs.
“Where’s Vivvy today?” he says. He yanks me back by the loop of my backpack.
“Quit it,” I say but he does it again. “Quit it!”
Once more I go stumbling back and this time I fall right on my behind. It hurts but I squeeze my eyes not to cry. We’re nearly to his house so I cut through his neighbor’s yard, instead of his, which also runs against the side end of our yard. Clint follows me. I start to run and he’s running after me.
“I saw London, I saw France!” he calls out. “I poked Enid with no underpants!” He sings it loud, louder.
I’m in our yard but so is he.
“What’s the matter, fat girl? Don’t you like me anymore?”
Francie
I’m here with my boy. Daddy hollers from the upstairs window but does not come out. I hear him cough in the house. I don’t want to leave this place to the girls or to Tate. This is a place of endings, of tree roots run too shallow and boxes of little boys.
I lie down above him, let my fingers fan through his grass. I shut my eyes, take the sand dollar from my pocket and hold it up to block the sun. But when I open my eyes, light shines through the notch Sheldon made, trying to eat something else I loved.
Enid
“Stop it!” I scream. I’m nearly home.
Basey lies panting near the forsythia. He licks at his front paws. He looks at me with horse eyes and growls. I scuff the dirt, kick pine needles at him. He growls again but it isn’t him making the noise. It’s in the bush, the forsythia. It’s our dogs. The bush vibrates with their sound. I peel back the vines and scraggly whips to see all the way, and Basey’s up now. Floey and the new dog are in the very middle, where everything happens. Floey’s sitting. The little one makes a grr sound at me and licks Floey’s coat. He stands next to her and his claws make a pinging sound on something metal in the dirt beneath them both.
I drop my backpack in the footsteps worn around the bush. I go in it. Basey follows me. Floey and the new dog bark. Basey snaps. He paws at the ground, scratching at what is there. It’s one of Ma’s big pans and his claws scrape it and catch on the edge. He gets this hump of fur on his shoulders and neck, like a buffalo or a warthog. So does the new dog, just exactly the same.
Everyone is teeth. Skin and lips scrunch up so high on their snouts, they look like ruffled petticoats if the teeth were ladies’ legs.
They bark. Gnash jaws and teeth up in the air next to one another’s faces. Something drips out of the new dog’s butt. Basey sniffs at it. He goes nuts. He digs his front feet into the earth superfast. He jumps in the air, straight up from all four legs. The new dog hides behind Floey. She bares her teeth and points her snout up to the sky but right in Basey’s face, so he does it back and now both of them are pushing their jaws and skulls hard against each other’s.
I want to run inside but it’s my Floey and I can’t let Basey pick on her!
I reach in for her collar, feel my fingers grasping at it in the kinked white fur around her neck. Basey flops over. He jumps back up and growls again. I don’t have a grip.
“Don’t do that,” I yell at him.
Basey moves closer, head low, growling.
I go at him, I stomp my sandal. A shovelful of dirt and dust slides in under my toes so I take off my shoe and shake it. “Rawr!” I scream. I shake my shoe in the air.
He’s up when I move. His claws drag across my shin. Beneath my jeans, the skin stings.
I scream and try to kick him but miss. I reach for Floey again and grab hold of the bush to keep from falling. He gets behind me. Between me and Floey. They tussle in the branches and down into the dirt. Basey pushes Floey on her back and her eyes get big. The new dog stands behind Basey now.
“Do something,” I tell the new dog but he just watches and whimpers from where he is.
Her back feet pedal and kick at Basey to get him off of her. Her tongue is long out the side of her mouth. Stiff like she’s trying to reach something important but can’t quite make it.
Basey tumbles back hard, yelping when he lands. Floey rolls over but stays down. She is panting now. I turn and see Basey jump at her. I scream and I don’t even know what words I’m making. Her name and “no,” and “stop!” She’s just a mama-dog.
I slip my hand in between Floey’s face and the others’.
There are necks in jaws. There is fire and blood in my hand. I have no idea who’s done it but I am bit. I hold my breath until my cheeks buzz. I make myself look at my hand and there is so much blood.
“Crybaby, crybaby,” Clint calls.
I back out of the bush the wrong way. The branches scrape but I don’t feel them.
I hold my hand out to his face.
I hold it out to him, all the shine of blood and spit going crazy in between our eyes.
“Oh shit.” He grabs Basey by the collar. “Let’s go,” he says.
I shake my hand, try to shake out the fire, and shriek out every bit of air I have. “Get away from me! Get away—I hate you!”
He yanks on Basey to drag him home but the stupid dog won’t go. Clint slaps his hip but Basey splays his claws in the wispy grass. His toe knuckles dig in.
“He bit me!” I cry. “Ha-ha.” I wipe my nose and up my arm is dirt, mud, and gooey red snot.
Clint keeps pulling at Basey’s collar but the dog weasels and twists and they’re only to the wood chips under our trees.
“He’ll go to the pound!” I call. “They’ll shoot him.” I wipe at my tears and runny nose. “Forever!”
Clint’s eyes look to mine for just a second. “Come on!” he yells. His voice goes high and small like his big sister Lisa’s. He wraps his arms around Basey’s ribs and keeps dragging, but the dog flops backwards so then he has him around the belly and the back legs are all that’s keeping Clint’s grip. He pulls him that way, though, backwards, into his yard, and keeps going. And now even Clint’s crying, “Basey, come on!”
“And my ma’s here. Her car’s right there!” I call after him but he’s gone now and there is just my voice and the wet licking of Floey and the new dog cleaning each other.
Ma knows. Ma saw everything.
I run to the porch. The Datsun isn’t here, though, it’s gone.
All the hurt is a volcano inside my hand. Throbbing like a car door slammed shut, burning like boiled water. Shredded skin like it will all fall off and all that’s going to be left of my hand is bone so I’ll have a skeleton hand.
I run through the house. I run.
“Ma!” I call out.
Tate
In the classroom’s doorway stands the department secretary, Mrs. Leahy. She motions to me with a square of scratch paper she cuts down on the paper slicer from old memos and committee meeting minutes.
“Excuse me, please,” I say to the room. I move briskly to her but when I’m nearly there, her expres
sion changes: she smiles softly, nostrils flared, chin tucked slightly under, and lips pressing hard against each other.
This is how they all looked after Shell.
I take a step back.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt you, Dr. Sobel,” says Mrs. Leahy. “Under normal circumstances, of course . . .”
I shake my head, meaning it’s okay, meaning get on with it, and please don’t make this last any longer than it must.
“Your little girl,” she starts. “Enid—”
I start to walk. I pick up my satchel. It is heavy. I run toward my office, arrive covered in spittle and full-on lather of sweat. Winded, I fumble with the key in my office door.
I make it in but don’t know how to order my tasks. Or what my tasks are. I pick up a scratch pad from the desk but am stumped as to what comes next.
I dump out my satchel over the desk chair, dump everything out to see what we’re dealing with. There are books, folders, papers, a manila envelope gone soft around the form of chapter edits. Cough drops, sticks of gum. Thick yellow markers, red and black pens, they roll over the cracked edge of the chair cushion and are gone. Sweat in rivulets ferries down my neck, sticks me to my shirt collar. I wipe at it and lose track. Why have I dropped to my knees? Why am I staring at it all on the chair, trying to understand what any of it is, what it means. What I will say to them.
I look up and from nowhere, Holly is magically here.
Real or imagined, I don’t care, I just want her to tell me what to do.
“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to go back on what you said, but—are you okay?”
I shake my head. Lips tight together.
Her eyes grow round. She drops her bag, comes closer but not near enough to catch my thoughts. “Tate,” she whispers. “You’re . . .”
I shut my eyes.
“I need to go home,” I say. “Enid is hurt . . .”
“Oh my god, yes.” Holly lets go of her braid. “I’m sorry. Of course you need to go.”
As we walk, I’m not thinking about Enid—I think about Shell and what happened directly after. I phoned the doctor. I held the girls beside me on the couch, waiting with him bundled up across my lap. I worried then that maybe they shouldn’t see him like that. All these years later, maybe they should never have seen what Francie could do.