With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  But perhaps he who had me targeted as the next abused teacher had changed his mind. Maybe, influenced by Dr. Havermeyer, he, too, now esteemed me.

  More likely, though, he was cutting assembly, lurking somewhere, readying a push or a jab or a poke that would make me a statistic.

  I was dismayed that my thoughts had so swiftly reverted to the lurker, the threatener. My pulse was elevated and my hackles up. Raffi had been an ego-boosting intermission in a dark play, that was all. Whatever ultimate act the letter-writer had in mind, he—or she—had already killed any easy pleasure I might enjoy during the workday.

  The assembly was the highlight of the academic day. From then on it was all downhill. My ninth graders continued play practice, but Lord Henry had the hiccups straight through rehearsal. We tried every known cure: breath-holding and sugar-eating and paper-bag-breathing and scaring him and whistling. But when the bell rang, Lord Henry was telling Dorian that, “The only way to get rid of a hic!—temptation—hic!—is to yield to it.”

  The tenth graders had a mini-lesson on punctuation. This, along with most of the teaching of grammar, is part of the HSE Curriculum, as in hope springs eternal. One more go-round, one more gimmick, one more clever presentation and they’ll get it, teachers whisper to themselves like a mantra. And then we whisper it again, the next time we have to teach the same lesson to the same people.

  “Punctuation matters,” I said.

  The tenth graders’ eyeballs rolled up into their skulls. The morning of the living dead.

  It’s not flattering to know your audience is counting the nanoseconds until they can escape. Bravely, stupidly, in need of a paycheck, I plowed on and tried to win them over by writing two sentences on the board.

  We’re hungry. Let’s eat children.

  I waited for a response. The journal article from which I’d cribbed it (“A Dozen Ways to Liven Up Mechanics”) had promised outrage, shock, delight. At least a pulse.

  “Yes?” I said. “Anybody?” My class looked suspicious, but mostly of me, of my expectant air. A waiting teacher is an anxiety-provoking thing. And, ultimately, an anxious thing. “Any ideas?” I asked with some desperation. “Do you see anything that needs changing?”

  It was as if they were all on the wrong side of one-way glass. I could see them, but they could only see a reflection of their own bored selves.

  “Clue,” I said. “The change has something to do with punctuation.”

  “Wow,” several of them muttered.

  Finally. A timid hand, half raised, pulled itself down, then fluttered uncertainly in front of a blue and white sweater. I smiled encouragingly. “I think it should have a question mark at the end?” That particular girl thought every sentence had a question mark at its end, but she was so timorous, I kept my response as gentle as possible.

  “Let’s see. Then it would read: ‘Let’s eat children?’ As if the speaker’s not sure that it’s a good idea. Is that what you mean?” She looked around the room, signaling that it was somebody else’s turn to dare to answer.

  I had a sudden flash. Perhaps I’d misread the note-writer’s intention. Maybe all we had was a failure to punctuate. Yes! I looked at my class idling, their brains in neutral, waiting for this nonsense to end. The only person with a smile on his face also had a plug in his ear. I could hear the shhh-shhh of the bass beat all the way across the room.

  I couldn’t wait any longer to check my theory, and the students weren’t exactly caught up in the spirit of the quest. “We aren’t cannibals, are we?” I asked.

  They looked at me, then at each other, then up to the heavens for help with their incomprehensible teacher.

  “Do we eat children, no matter how hungry we are?” I inserted a comma after eat. This was supposed to have been a lot more fun.

  They got it. Finally. They even giggled. That didn’t mean they would transfer the concept of the comma to any other sentence, ever, but all the same, I was content. I gave them a punctuation exercise, and while they moaned over it, I pulled out the manila envelope and checked the note.

  R.I.P. Teach. Makes you wonder who’s next, doesn’t it?

  Exquisitely punctuated, given the message. I couldn’t find a whole lot of interpretational scope in it. No matter where I moved the commas and question marks, the message was the same.

  I was being threatened by the one student who understood how to clearly express his or her thoughts.

  After lunch my prize-winning journalism team squeezed their newly inflated self-esteem into my classroom. Watching them slap hands and congratulate each other, I had a small epiphany followed by enormous relief. Of course. The clippings I’d received were research for an article, an attempt to upgrade the paper’s general level of content. Why hadn’t I realized the obvious sooner?

  “By the way,” I said after we’d had another round of self-congratulations and were getting down to work. “Which one of you is preparing the story on teacher violence?”

  “I’m doing the fire,” Raffi said. “At the Cavanaugh. I figure it’s the first time I’m writing, like, actual news. Like a story, you know? A real one.”

  “Great,” I said, and he rewarded me with that beatific, weird smile of his. He had too many elbows and knees and Adam’s apples, but you could tell he was evolving into something seriously cute. I did not, however, acknowledge even his potential adorableness in any way. Better to appear chilly than be even an unintentional letch. “But what about the article on teacher violence?”

  They glanced at me to verify that I’d asked the question, then swiveled their heads, looking for the answer along with me.

  “Nobody’d let us print that,” Hal said.

  “Violent teachers?” Kelly Cleary asked. “Wow.” She was a waiflike creature whose fashionably oversized clothing had gulped her down. All that was left were two wide gray eyes and a lot of surplus material.

  “Violence against teachers,” Hal corrected her. “But would the school really let us print that kind of a story?”

  “Who assigned it, anyway?” the editor-in-chief demanded. “I didn’t.” It was amazing what a title did to a person, even at seventeen. Since being named editor-in-chief, Winkie Mueller had discovered the thrill of power. He had, in fact, dropped his Winkie and was now the more dignified Walter Mueller, Jr. “People can’t simply decide to do any story they choose,” the former Winkie said. “That produces chaos. This paper has a philosophy. An editorial outlook.”

  There was much hooting, although less than there’d have been had we not won a prize.

  “The point is, nobody’d let us print it, anyway,” Hal insisted.

  This led to an encouragingly heated debate about censorship. Normally, such intellectual enthusiasm would cheer me, but not when I’d been hoping for a plain and simple explanation for the threatening note.

  Actually, I’d gotten what I’d hoped for. The fact was, nobody was writing an article about violence. My message was from a player, not somebody reporting on the game.

  * * *

  Carpooling supersedes even murder and death threats. Three days ago, before I’d trundled off to Lyle’s fatal birthday party, I’d promised to be part of my mother’s help-your-sister-Beth program. The surprises and shocks of the intervening days did not cancel out my pledge.

  Karen’s class had visited Betsy Ross’s house today. I find it a singularly dull destination for anyone, but particularly an innocent child. You know you’re in trouble, attractions-wise, when one of the advertised specials is a peek at Betsy’s third husband’s family Bible.

  The truth is, nobody is really sure if that was the woman’s actual house. Furthermore, nobody is certain that she truly made the original American flag. So what you visit is the house of somebody unknown passing as the house of somebody who probably didn’t do what she’s famous for. The only justification for trucking in class after class of students who are too young to appreciate the nuances of a Colonial woman’s life is that the stairwell is so low, only wee ones ca
n get through it without risking concussions.

  My mother had subbed for Beth as one of the parents who worked on mob control. But my mother hadn’t returned to the Main Line on the school bus. Instead, she and Karen had stayed in town and I had been designated as their homebound chauffeur. I was to meet them at One Liberty Place.

  It’s shallow of me, but I find this new building a much more satisfying bit of architecture than old Betsy’s theoretical digs. It lacks two hundred years of history, but it makes up for it in the sleek brightness of marble and color and brass, almost to the point of overkill. I felt underdressed and out of style in my pudgy down coat over the unglamorous brown slacks and rust sweater I’d worn all day.

  I sat on a bench in the balconied rotunda admiring the colorful march of people moving in and out of two stories’ worth of glass-fronted shops. Across from me a black grand piano sat under a brass-railed staircase. It was unoccupied and unopened—although classical music was being piped in from somewhere—but the piano stood majestically as the new litmus test for upscale retail. People shopping on the cheap had Muzak to ignore. High-enders were given genuine concert pianists as musical wallpaper.

  I abruptly realized I was no longer alone on my bench.

  Although I like to think of myself as having a wide tolerance for adolescent and postadolescent diversity, the fellow next to me set off all my mental alarms. I was surprised he hadn’t activated sensors on his way in here.

  He was very tall and deliberately fierce. He had four earrings in the ear I could see, a heavily studded black leather jacket, black leather boots that should have been declared weapons, and jeans that were terminally ripped at the knees and crotch. Red long johns showed through the tattered denim.

  He was out of place in this glitter dome, and even more so next to me.

  I wondered if his arrival and placement were pure accident. He felt too much for happenstance, particularly today. He was too extreme and too close.

  I wondered how well he punctuated. Assigning the note and the tombstone drawing to him didn’t seem a stretch of the imagination.

  This was the sort of situation my self-defense instructor had said was best handled by avoidance. In fact, “Git!” is what she had said. I looked around. The other benches were occupied. Surely, he wouldn’t harm me here, in the rotunda, with all those witnesses. Nonetheless, I clutched my bag and stood up, but as I scooped up my books, he bent over and reached into a filthy satchel. A gun? A knife? A burning cross? I stepped back, out of range.

  He pulled a book out of the bag, sighed with audible contentment, and settled back to read, a hot pink highlighter in one hand.

  I sidled closer and checked the cover. Cognitive Theories of Personality Differences and Treatments.

  I was really losing it. Seeing devils instead of students. I didn’t want him to witness my mortified blush, so I turned away—and saw real peril barreling across the rotunda.

  “Wouldn’t this be a beautiful place to have a wedding?” she said from halfway across the expanse.

  Back to reality. The scary guy seemed preferable. “Mom, it’s a mall,” I said, teeth gritted.

  She pivoted, a shopping bag in each hand, checking how many tables would fit in this rotunda. Actually, it wouldn’t be a bad place for the prom if, say, Richard Quinn couldn’t open The Scene because he couldn’t get that final backing or, say, because he turned out to be a murderer. And of course, here, if dancing became too boring, the kids would be able to buy a little chocolate, or jewelry, or new party clothes between sets, to liven things up.

  “How was Betsy Ross’s house?” I asked Karen, who was occupied with a pretzel with mustard I hoped she’d want to share.

  “Elizabeth Ross’s house.” The child had a little mustard mustache. “That’s her real name, like Miss Penelope says.”

  I had no idea who Miss Penelope was or why my niece suddenly hunched her small shoulders and tried to click the fingers of her left hand. But then she started chanting, a tiny white bepretzeled Main Line girl-child, rapping Mother Goose. Don’t try to tell me the U.S. isn’t a melting pot.

  “Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Bess,

  They all went together to seek a bird’s nest.

  They found a bird’s nest with five eggs in,

  They all took one, and left four in.”

  “Grandma explained,” she said. “They’re all the same girl. It’s just nicknames, so she’s Elizabeth Ross, isn’t she?”

  “Absolutely right.” My mother flashed a beam at her granddaughter, then aimed a when-are-you-going-to-create-a-genius-like-this? look in my direction. We had progressed, without speaking a single word, from having my wedding in a shopping center to proudly enjoying the fruit of the union.

  “We went upstairs for a snack first,” my mother said.

  “Time to go, then.” I offered to hoist the shopping bags. They were pretty solidly packed. My mother looked embarrassed. “We found a wonderful sale. Besides, Beth doesn’t have time to shop for Karen right now.”

  My mother is extremely frugal, but money spent on grandchildren doesn’t count, the same way calories ingested while standing up don’t count. Some things are off-the-record, free points.

  Karen chanted Mother Goose as molested by Miss Penelope all the way home.

  “Great A, little a,

  Bouncing B!

  The cat’s in the cupboard,

  And can’t see me!”

  A Mustang is too intimate a car for such torture. I toyed with the idea of hailing Karen a cab, but that seemed cruel, as did putting her on the Paoli Local and hoping for the best. Instead, we drove on, making conversation and trying to ignore the backseat.

  “Your father and I have decided to stay up here until after Lyle’s funeral,” my mother said. “Whenever that is. It’s the right thing to do. I feel so sorry for Hattie. Besides, it’ll give Daddy a few more days to heal. I just hope we’re not too much of a burden for Beth.”

  I didn’t know whether to tell her to get out of town while the getting was good, or what.

  “If I’d as much money as I could spend,

  I never would cry old chairs to men—”

  “Why give men chairs?” I asked my niece. Maybe the kid knew something new about the opposite sex. There was all that talk about wisdom from the mouths of babes, wasn’t there?

  “Aunt Mandy!” Karen sounded amused and incredulous. “Not men. Mend.

  “Old chairs to mend, old chairs to mend,

  I never would cry old chairs to mend.”

  Damn. For a moment Mother Goose had seemed code for a new furniture-oriented courtship ploy. Instead it turns out I had a hearing problem.

  * * *

  Beth’s living room would have looked like a What’s Wrong With This Picture? game except that I knew what was wrong with it. Mackenzie.

  Last night he’d said he’d see me today, but I certainly didn’t think he meant here, now, or for this reason.

  Worried as I was about his presence, I still felt a momentary reflexive flutter. He’s a looker, after all. Also, I had the threatening note in my briefcase. I couldn’t wait to turn it over to him, to have him take care of it and make it all right.

  A trick of the light, or of my mind. I was confusing him with a knight, even if one in slightly tarnished armor. But he was a cop, not Sir Galahad. Maybe he’d find out who was threatening me, but only on the side. Mostly, he’d still be a cop on a case. And in this case, one involving my parents.

  I shouldn’t have told him about my father and Cindy. If I was sure he was going to find out about it anyway, why hadn’t I let him do so on his own? Charm and ease and sweet southern mush-mouthing notwithstanding, he’d just been grilling my old, wounded dad. He’d cast Dad as villain, Mom as dupe, both as killers. A more ridiculous duo had never been suspected. The third degree ceased at our arrival.

  “I saw Elizabeth Ross’s house and got new shoes and a coat!” Karen skidded across the living room floor, raced across the carpet, and hur
led herself at my father.

  “Careful!” my mother called out. Then she quickly added: “Everything was on sale.” It wasn’t her husband who was upset about her buying spree; it was her daughter, Beth.

  “You mean Betsy Ross’s house,” my father said before we could warn him. Karen, delighted at the continued ignorance of adults, smugly, loudly began an encore of her routine.

  “Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Bess,

  They all went together to seek a bird’s nest.

  They found a bird’s nest with five eggs in,

  They all took one, and left four in.”

  “Get it?” she demanded. “They’re all the same person. Just nicknames! Like I’m Kari and Pumpkin-face!”

  My father did the grandparent admiration bit, then recovered enough to speak again. “There’s even more nicknames for Elizabeth,” he said. “There could have been ten names at that bird’s nest and only one egg would be gone, I’ll bet. There’s Betty and Libby and Elsie and Elissa.”

  “And Lissa and Lisa and Lizzie and Lisbeth,” my mother added.

  Karen had long since lost interest, but my parents were really into it. As for me, I suddenly heard them from a distance. My ears clogged, as if the atmosphere had abruptly changed, as if I were making a too-rapid descent. A crash landing.

  “Not just Lisbeth, but Beth herself as well,” Mackenzie said from far away, and through a haze I saw him bow, gallantly, at my sister.

  My heart palpitated. I didn’t want to pursue the path opening in my mind, but words nonetheless had been dropped like a little crumb path to follow. Name words. Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy and Bess… Betsy. Cindy’s toddler, Cindy’s murderer.

  Around me real conversation had gone on hold and all was chitchat and pleasantries set to the drumming, finger-snapping—or at least finger-rubbing—enormously annoying sounds of my niece, the rapper.

  “The Queen of Hearts,

  She made some tarts,

  All on a summer’s day…”

  Nobody asked her to stop. My family is pathologically tolerant.

  I thought back to Sunday. It seemed ancient times, years, not days, ago; but I nonetheless tried to replay a mental tape in slow motion and listen carefully to every word that had been said in this room. I knew that my mother and father had squabbled trying to date the length of time since they’d seen Lyle, a span that began with Cindy’s death. I tried to remember. Nearly two decades ago, isn’t that what my father had said, rather testily? Twenty years, give or take one. And Betsy had been three, so she’d be twenty-three or twenty-two now.