“I think so,” said Sally.
“Then you know what I do,” said Joan, brightly. “I’m not a teacher; I’m not connected with the principal’s office. I’m just here to talk to the students.” She waited, but Sally said nothing, looking down at her shoes. “If you have a problem, you talk to me. It can be anything,” she said. “It doesn’t even have to be about school.” She paused. “How is school, by the way?”
“S’okay,” said Sally, evasive, biting viciously at the cuticle of her left index finger.
“How’s math?” asked Joan.
“S’okay,” around the cuticle.
“Well, Mr. Wells seemed to think you might want to talk to me. Do you have any idea why he might have suggested that?”
“Isn’t it in there somewhere?” asked Sally, gesturing with her free hand toward the file, not fooled by Joan’s casual manner.
“Well, probably,” said Joan. “But I’ll tell you something, if you promise not to tell anyone: I haven’t read this yet.” Sally chewed on, but a little less avidly. “I should apologize to you,” Joan went on. “I’m not really prepared this morning.” The girl looked up: a teacher apologizing to her? “I’m supposed to read all the new students’ files right away,” said Joan. “And I’m usually very good about it. But this morning I was just too worried about other things, and I didn’t get to it.” Sally was looking directly at her now, her hand stopped halfway to her mouth. “I’m sorry, Sally.”
“S’okay,” said Sally, earnestly. After a pause, she added, “I’m not always prepared either.”
“Thank you for being understanding,” said Joan. “Well,” she said. “How do you like your classes?”
“They’re okay,” said the girl, remote again.
“How about the other kids?”
“They talk funny,” said Sally. “They make fun of me.”
“When I came here, they made fun of me, too,” said Joan.
The girl looked skeptical.
“They called me a Yankee,” said Joan, improvising. “They told me I should go back where I came from.”
Sally said nothing, picking at her cuticles again.
“They made me feel pretty bad about myself,” Joan said quietly.
“They call me Fatty in gym,” Sally whispered.
“Gym’s the worst,” said Joan, leaning forward. Now they were off and running.
Ordinarily, she took her lunch to the cafeteria, where she could observe her charges; but today, she opened a cup of yogurt at her desk, shutting the office door, running the soles of her feet over the pebbly institutional carpet. She ate slowly, but still was finished in less than half an hour. She needed to run errands, but something within her shrank from going outside. He’s out there. The thought came unbidden. And with him, all the rest of it. All the rest of what? She shook her head with irritation, slipped her feet into her shoes, and unhooked her purse from the back of the door.
Coming out of the drugstore, she spotted Gil. He was across the street, in front of the old Paramount Theatre which had been turned into a restaurant. He was occupied with something, frowning down at his hands. Joan looked harder, and saw that he was stripping a packet of chewing gum.
She liked spying on him like this. What luxury, to see her husband as others saw him, casual, unaware of her attention. She appraised him coolly: he looked like any middle-aged man, in his plaid shirt and work boots. His pants didn’t go with the outfit: they were navy and shiny, and he’d worn them with a jacket and tie in the morning. He must have changed at the office before lunch, planning to spend the afternoon outdoors.
When she first met him, he was enormously awkward and shy. Thin as a reed, given to blushing. She’d had other suitors; what had made her choose him? He’d been frail and looked inexperienced, with the appealing candor of a reckless child. Not the most charming man she had ever met. But there had been something about him, a lostness, a confusion, that had made her want to rescue him. She remembered the urgency of that emotion accurately but without force, as one recalls the chill of January in July. It had been so; he’d depended on her then, and she’d taken charge.
He’d confided in her right away. On their first date, he’d explained his feeling of being miscast. She hadn’t understood then; and when he’d brought it up again early in their marriage, she’d challenged him.
“We all feel like that sometimes,” she’d said. “Out of place.” She’d looked out of the window at the Virginia landscape. “It’s normal.”
“Tell me Jack feels that way,” he’d retorted.
“Well, maybe not Jack,” she’d conceded. “But everyone else I know.”
From the way he described it, his confusion reminded her of the feeling she’d had at fifteen, wearing her first pair of heels. She’d felt like a different person, with the increased height and the accompanying unsteadiness. And when she’d worn cosmetics for the first time, and when she’d begun to menstruate. She’d been horribly embarrassed by each change, and certain that she was the only one who’d ever experienced any of those things. She’d been ashamed, adjusting the belt in the girls’ bathroom at school, thinking everyone could hear. That was it, she recalled it perfectly—it was as though she’d had a dark secret, but so ordinary that anyone could look at her and know it, know it right away. It was a feeling of exposure, of not feeling at home with herself.
“You’re not happy being a man?” she’d guessed and immediately saw that she’d hit a nerve. Later she learned that when someone most wanted you to understand them, they often least wanted to hear that you had.
“You’re not listening,” he’d said, flushed. “You don’t get it.” So she’d told him what she’d been thinking. “Close,” he admitted. “But it’s not the same.”
“It sounds—” she’d begun.
“Who showed you about your period?” he interrupted. “And taught you about lipstick, that stuff?”
“My mother,” she’d admitted. “Girlfriends.”
“That’s just it,” he’d said, bitterly.
He hadn’t spoken much about it after that, but she could tell that he was still suffering. She even suspected him of enjoying a kind of martyrdom, taking himself to that old-boy bar every afternoon, signing up for the softball team at work. He played his discomfort out for years, stretching it until it was thin as paper, perhaps hoping for it to break under the tension. He was so thin then, as though he were being stretched along with his burden, trying to break himself.
And he was still thin, although the impression of coltishness had disappeared these twenty years ago. Time had settled some flesh on him, and permitted some fine hairs to spring up on the backs of his hands. How the situation had reversed: her lost lamb had become her savior, and that attitude he’d had of incompetence and discomfort, of waging battle on alien ground, had given way long since to a clear appearance of belonging. Now he seemed part and parcel of his surroundings. No different from the man who hailed him, coming out of the Real Thing diner, accepting a stick of chewing gum.
Joan watched them talk together. The other man was black and muscular, younger than Gil, someone she didn’t know. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, laughing at something Gil had said. Laughing, he brought his arm up and then across, to slap Gil lightly on the shoulder. The universal symbol of acceptance between men. You hug, Jack had told her once, when she’d commented on it. We hit.
How odd it had looked, the first time she’d seen it bestowed on Gil; and how odd he had looked, accepting it. Now it was completely natural; she watched Gil chewing his gum, holding his mouth slightly open. She felt the old push-pull, looking at him. He’d changed, and she’d let him, even helped him along. Sometimes she wondered if she ought just to go away, to leave the scene of her undoing, but always the thought of Gil stopped her. He was no longer the weak, searching boy he’d been, but he needed her. And no matter what chased her, what threatened from murky memory to overwhelm her, she could not leave him. Would not. Naturally objecti
ve, she wondered sometimes if she was merely offering up a blind repentance, but really what she felt was love.
She watched as the younger man, still laughing, strode away from Gil, who turned into the sun and saw her. He put his hand up to his eyes to shade them, and smiled. Then he was jogging across the wide pavement toward her.
“Hello there,” he said.
“Hello,” she replied, suddenly shy.
“On your lunch hour?” he asked. She nodded. “Walk you back,” he said.
They walked back toward the school. Joan was very conscious of the way her arm swung out from her shoulder, and she kept a little distance from her husband, so that his arm, swinging too, should not brush hers. He reached across the gap and took her hand. Immediately, she felt light, as though she might float right up and away.
“Getting hot,” said Gil.
“Yes,” she said. “Early in the year, too.”
“Gonna be one hell of a summer.”
What they said to one another didn’t matter; it was the feeling that sustained her, his hand holding hers, and having seen him before he saw her. He’d seemed a stranger then, a dozen or so feet away, laughing with another stranger. Running across the street, he’d turned into her husband. Joan didn’t understand why the transformation made her so giddy.
“You looked just like anybody, from across the street,” she confided.
“Well,” he said. “I am just like anybody.”
“I guess that’s true,” she said.
After lunch, she had a parent conference.
“Hello, Mr. Gorman, Mrs. Gorman,” she said. The father was a burly man, with an alcoholic ruddiness; the woman with him was a hard, wispy thing.
“Parker,” said the woman.
“We’re Danny and Edith Parker,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” said Joan. She looked down at the file on her desk. “I must be confused. This is the file for Charlene Gorman.”
“Charlene’s ours,” said Edith. “Her daddy died. Danny’s her stepfather.”
“I see,” said Joan.
“What’s she done?” grunted Danny.
“It’s not really that she’s done anything,” said Joan. “I mean, she’s not skipping school or anything like that.”
“We had a son, Charlene’s older brother, did those things,” said Edith. “I guess we’re worried she’s turning out like him.”
“I think I remember him,” said Joan. “Michael?”
“That’s right. He was real smart at school, till he started getting wild like that.”
“He ran away, didn’t he?” asked Joan.
The woman’s face pinched up, and she nodded, once.
“Sometimes kids do that,” said Joan. “No matter how hard you try.”
“I hear from him sometimes,” said the woman, warming a little.
“What’s Charlene done?” repeated Danny.
“She hasn’t done anything,” said Joan, a little shortly, and then softened her voice. “But we’re worried about her. She seems unhappy.”
“Girls,” said Edith. “I was unhappy at her age.”
“So was I,” said Joan, and the two women shared a glance. “But Charlene’s unhappiness seems to me to be more than natural teenage confusion. She’s a smart girl, but she’s not listening in class, and she’s falling behind in her schoolwork.”
“I’ve told that girl,” said Danny.
“I try to make her study,” said Edith. “But I can’t stand over her, not like I could when she was small.”
“When she was small, she had small problems,” said Joan. “And she shared them with you.”
Edith nodded. “She told me everything.”
“Now it’s a fight to get a civil word outta her,” Danny said.
“It happens,” Joan told Edith. “Even in the happiest of families.” Not that this family is happy, she thought, darting a glance at Danny. “I think something is bothering Charlene, something deeper. I thought you might have some ideas on what it might be.”
“Whyncha ask her?” said Danny.
“Well, Mr. Parker, I’ve tried that,” said Joan. “But sometimes kids can’t explain things very well. Sometimes they don’t even know exactly what it is that’s bothering them. I was hoping you or your wife might have noticed something.”
“She seems all right to me,” said Danny. “Sulky, that’s all.”
Joan looked at Edith, who looked like she might have something to say. But the woman put her lips tightly together and said nothing.
Thirty minutes later, the Parkers got up to leave. Joan shook hands again, with a feeling of defeat.
“I could sign those papers now,” said Edith. “While Danny gets the car.”
“Papers?” said Joan.
“Those permission papers,” said Edith.
“What kinda permission?” asked Danny.
“For gym,” said Joan, and Edith nodded. “I nearly forgot. Thank you for reminding me.”
“You go ahead, Dan, get the car,” said Edith.
When he had gone, Joan turned to her expectantly.
“I didn’t like to say nothing while he was here,” she said.
“What is it?” asked Joan.
“You asked if we noticed anything different about Charlene,” she said. “Well, there is something.” She lowered her voice. “She asks a lot of questions about her daddy, now. She never used to.” She paused. “He died when she was real little. Her and Mike got real close; I never seen anything like it, the way they stood up for each other. When he run off—” Edith’s eyes, which had been fixed on the door, came sharply back to Joan. “Dan was kinda hard on him,” she said, shortly. Her eyes moved away again. “Danny’s a good man, Miz Corbin. He treats Charlene all right, but,” she said, and her brow wrinkled, “he’s not real patient. I try, but I can’t be everything to her.” She brought her eyes to Joan’s again, and then looked down at her own hands, which were holding her purse. “I’m not what you’d call,” she said, “affectionate. Not like Jimmy. Jimmy was a loving man,” she finished, simply.
“I see,” said Joan. “Thank you very much for telling me this.”
“I know you’re trying to help Charlene,” said Edith.
She left, her sad story staying behind her, fashioned of things she had told and things she hadn’t, and of things she didn’t even know. Edith’s words, her darting, intelligent eyes, mingled with Sally’s morning confessions. Joan felt them weaving together, into a winding-sheet, a thick fabric of sorrow. Why had she chosen this job, this life filled with other people’s misery, with the self-pity of teenagers, the blunt agony of parents? She knew that it calmed something inside her to run her fingers daily through the pain of others. Seeing them, hearing their dread confessions without judgment, she felt herself more at peace. She had to love them: love Edith, love fat Sally. “I love so I will be loved,” said Joan, aloud. “I love, to salvage myself.”
Something that she’d been told years ago during her training floated back to her now. Sometimes, you’ll get frustrated. You’ll think you can’t change anything. And that nothing you do matters. You’ll want to give up. Well, it’s true, you can’t change much. It’s love and hate with us, like any addiction. And it is just that, an addiction; you get used to the role; you can’t just give it up.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Controversies
BY THE WEEKEND, everyone had heard about Buddy Whyte and his camera. There was mild speculation about him, but no more than mild: newcomers to Naples are largely ignored until they prove interesting. Since the early part of the century, with its dramatic boom then decline, Naples has continued to teeter on the edge of prosperity. People are drawn here from other places, but not in too great a number. They come here for the women’s college or to work in one of the state institutions which have tended to collect here or for the sheer prettiness of it. There is a half-metropolitan air to the town: we are close enough to the center of things to permit us to feel a connection with the lar
ger world, yet at the same time not quite near enough to the state university for any kind of bohemian element to integrate itself into the community. There is, in short, no thorough mixing, and the result is a divided, hybrid place, a nucleus of long-time residents surrounded by immigrants. Literally surrounded: the strangers tend to inhabit the fringes of town in hastily built developments which ring the core of old houses standing in the hilly heart of Naples, in the area known as the Village. Between the two there lies a kind of no-man’s-land of businesses, some old, some new. From the time I was a young man, that was the character of Naples—a wheel within a wheel, almost no fraternization, the old preserved, the new tolerated. The people who migrated here either found their niches and settled in or more often left again, as quietly as they had come, no one having paid them much attention. There is a kind of appeal in anonymity, I suppose, and one could find that here: rarely was a stranger absorbed into Naples. A person could live here, as Joan did before I met her, in a rental apartment in one of the slap-up dwellings near the bypass, working in the business district, grocery shopping with the rest of the strangers at one of the fancy new markets at the side of the highway. One could shuttle between those points quietly for years, never approaching the nugget of Naples, not even brushing up against the rim of the inner wheel.
Attracting notice to oneself, if that was what one wanted, was a trick; for that, one had to do something rash, like running for mayor or marrying into one of the resident families. Townspeople were hardly anonymous—most were nicknamed early on—but transients went labelless, escaping categorization, it being too much bother to fix your attention on someone who might well be gone in ten years. And so there might be five doctors in town, but to most of us there was only Dr. Greene, on Cedar Street. A new barber might set up shop, but we ignored him. Harley Sweet was the only cutter we trusted; he had given most of us our very first haircuts, and held a kind of tenure in the town. Strangers tended to mix with strangers, and so new businesses always had plenty of custom, but it was never of a steady kind.
Near Canaan Page 12