Minor Dramas & Other Catastrophes

by Kathleen West

  Lyle made a note. How could he remain so unruffled? “And who will be teaching Isobel’s classes?”

  Mary piped up. “Judith Youngstead has agreed to step in for the week.”

  Judith Youngstead, of course, had stepped in last year when Peter Harrington hadn’t made it to Thanksgiving. She was like the grim reaper of the Liston Heights English department. “Will I need to provide her with lesson plans?” Isobel asked weakly.

  Mary shook her head. It didn’t really make sense for Isobel to provide lesson plans, she guessed, as she’d been ousted for them. “The other members of the department and I will take care of that,” she said. Isobel imagined Eleanor wandering into her classroom and cheerfully asking Judith if she needed help. Eleanor, she knew, would probably revel in her suspension. She blanched at the word “suspension” when it appeared in her consciousness, bending slightly at the waist.

  “We’ll be in touch tomorrow,” Lyle said to the room. He reached a hand to the back of Isobel’s chair. “Ready?” he prompted.

  Isobel wasn’t sure if she’d be able to stand. If she left this meeting, she felt she would essentially be leaving her job. She’d prized teaching above everything else, rejected a study-abroad program in college to finish her student teaching within the course of a regular four years. She’d toiled at East High for six years, spending her own money on supplies and food for the kids’ weekends and holiday breaks. She applied for the Liston Heights job because these kids reminded her of herself and her father. And she thought if she could trigger their social awakenings at a young age, they’d be better citizens—they’d make change—going forward.

  And now she’d failed.

  Lyle looked so confident, though, and nodded at her so expectantly that she managed to push her chair back and apply weight to her feet. He reached for her elbow. She let him steer her out of the office, and he closed the door behind them.

  They said nothing until they reached the top of the stairs, where they’d part, Lyle heading to the parking lot and Isobel to her classroom. “Take this,” he said when they stopped. It was her copy of the official complaint. She took it and let her arm drop by her side. Lyle continued. “You need to go home and write rebuttals for each point.” Isobel blinked at him. “Okay?” he said. “Stop by your room and grab any paper files if you don’t have digital copies of everything.”

  “I do have digital copies,” Isobel said.

  “Good.” Lyle clapped her on the shoulder. “Then go home, sit down, and refute every damn bullet.” Lyle meant to pump her up, she knew, but misery welled up from a pain near her navel, tears threatening. “It’s going to be okay,” Lyle said. “Text me while you work.” He smiled at her as he turned toward the door. “I’ve done these before.”

  “Here?” Isobel asked, calling after him. She couldn’t remember a single teacher who had been put on administrative leave while being investigated. Even Peter had just been summarily fired without much rigmarole.

  “It’s more common than you think.”

  “But I know you think they’re right,” she blurted, hopeless.

  “I don’t think that,” he said seriously. “I think you have strong convictions, and you’re a risk taker. And I think the kids are lucky to have you.” Isobel sniffled as he grasped her shoulder again. “I’m heading out,” Lyle said. “I’m expecting a text from you before seven.”

  Isobel lifted her right hand to wave, forgetting she still clutched the complaint. It flopped over, grazing her wrist, and she dropped her arm. She turned from the main entrance and shuffled to the second-floor faculty restroom, the only single-stall bathroom in the building. Once inside, she faced the door, locked it, and turned back into the room. She slid to the tiled floor and let her laptop bag slip from her shoulder and the complaint fall from her hand. She folded both knees to her chest, the cool of the tile seeping in through her skirt and tights.

  It occurred to her to call her husband. Would she need Mark to come and pick her up? But her arm felt too heavy to move, even to grab the phone from her bag. Actually, her entire body felt heavy. It seemed a lot to ask to hold her head up, so she lowered it to her knees and closed her eyes against her cable-knit tights. “Oh my God,” she whispered. Isobel expected to cry, but nothing happened. Her breath felt hot against her thighs. Her friend Meera popped into her head then, standing in front of the sold sign, glaring at Isobel as her mother drove their U-Haul out of their once-comfortable neighborhood. Isobel hadn’t thought she’d deserved comfort ever again after that, which was the reason she was always pushing back here at Liston Heights. Otherwise, the three-car garages and the Ivy League acceptances—they just became the default, the things that everyone deserved. That was the trap that her father had fallen into, the entitlement that had ruined all of their lives.

  In three minutes or ten—she couldn’t be sure—she unfolded herself and leaned back against the bathroom door. “Okay,” she said aloud. “Okay.” She put her right hand down next to the folder and pushed herself to standing. She walked to the sink and washed her hands, cool water running over her fingers. She took a long look in the mirror. Her usual winter paleness had given way to a sickly pallor, but her green eyes were still clear. She held her own gaze for a moment. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said in a whisper. In fact, she was probably working closer to her mission than ever if she’d triggered this kind of response, right? Still, she wondered what had prompted the six calls just in the last day.

  But before she lost time ruminating about how she’d wound up suspended, she’d have to fight the complaint. Her students needed her, especially now, when she’d somehow touched a nerve.

  JULIA ABBOTT

  Julia reclined in the driver’s seat, her knee lightly brushing the steering wheel. She stared straight ahead at the snow-covered tennis courts opposite the Liston Heights parking lot, forlorn metal poles jutting up from the ground, awaiting the nets that would hang there in just six weeks or so. Tracy said she’d be done in the Nordic ski waxing room at four fifteen. According to the clock in her dashboard, Julia had eight more minutes to wait. She hadn’t quite been able to make eye contact with her daughter that morning after she’d helped her with the Facebook problem the day before. Julia was the one who should be solving problems, after all, not her fourteen-year-old.

  “Did that Lisa Lions write back?” Tracy had asked after Julia handed her a muffin. Julia could only shake her head. “Unfriend her, Mom. That woman, whoever she is, is only making everything worse.” There was no arguing that the child sounded like the parent, which made Julia feel like even more of a failure.

  She knew she’d have given Tracy the same advice if their roles were rightfully reversed, but if Julia unfriended Lisa Lions, she’d no longer be able to see the Inside Liston page at all. She wouldn’t be able to track her own crisis or any of the others.

  She closed her eyes and leaned back against the smooth leather headrest. She wished she could talk the dilemma over with a friend, but in the week since the cast list was posted, she hadn’t heard one word from Robin Bergstrom. She also hadn’t heard from the other handful of moms with whom she normally texted or chatted. She’d received not a single text from Vivian Song, not that she expected to after how the conversation with Annabelle Young had gone. She’d also heard nothing from Andrew himself, who moved around the house without acknowledging her. The previous night Andrew had tried to take a dinner plate up to his bedroom rather than sitting at the table with the family. When Henry said, “No,” in response to Julia’s arched eyebrow, Andrew had shoveled his green beans and pan-roasted salmon into his mouth at lightning speed. Julia could see the pink bits of fish he was still chewing as he perfunctorily answered Henry’s questions about rehearsal.

  That interaction and all the others—the call to Annabelle, Tracy intervening on Facebook, Henry managing the meeting with Wayne—exhausted her. Julia yearned for normalcy.

  She tu
rned up the teen pop radio station that both of her kids had pretty much outgrown. The music, an upbeat ballad by the Jonas Brothers, sounded like the stuff she’d listened to between her junior and senior years at the University of Minnesota.

  That summer she’d scored an internship at YM magazine, a dream job, and slept on a cot in the living room of her mother’s cousin’s one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. The accommodations didn’t matter. She was thrilled—New York, fashion, journalism, shepherding the finalists in YM’s annual modeling contest around the city. “I’m going to move here,” she’d tell herself as she left work at the end of each day, her scalp damp from the moment she exited the office’s air-conditioning.

  The first time she’d handed in two hundred fifty words of copy, a bio on one of the modeling finalists, she felt as if her chest would burst. Professional writing! It didn’t matter that the features assistant didn’t even look as she took the paper, each word selected painstakingly. Julia would have written a hundred bios of teenagers from small towns in Arkansas if it meant a shot in publishing. When the eight-week internship ended, Julia wrote thank-you notes to all of her superiors and started reworking her résumé. She’d apply widely at magazines that year, hoping for something permanent in this city she’d come to love.

  And then, three months later at Christmas, after his parents’ traditional Yule log had been sliced and enjoyed, Henry had held her coat and asked her to take a walk with him. The snowflakes drifted from the sky, coating the trees with a silvery sheen.

  “How beautiful,” she’d said, looking at the old-growth oaks in Henry’s Minneapolis neighborhood, not fifteen minutes from where they lived now in Liston Heights.

  “You’re beautiful,” he’d said, tugging her hand to stop her walking. She turned to him, and suddenly she knew exactly what was happening. She’d dreamed of it, of course—rings, bridesmaids, cake—but they’d talked about getting engaged in a year or two, after graduation and first jobs. Julia kept saying, “New York,” and Henry teased her. Called her a go-getter.

  “We’ll settle here, though,” he’d said each time she mentioned midtown Manhattan. “This is the best place to raise a family.”

  They had never really held that debate, as it turned out, or had come to a shared decision about where they’d live. And now here was Henry, pinching a diamond solitaire between his thumb and pointer finger before she’d even begun her last semester of courses or mailed her job applications.

  Now, twenty years later, Julia looked down at her diamond in the traditional setting. It was true she’d never imagined spending so much of her time waiting for her children in a parked car. To be honest, in those early days, she hadn’t thought of children at all. It had been a welcome surprise when she became pregnant with Andrew. It hadn’t made sense, Henry said, to continue her work at Twin Cities Monthly magazine when the need for day care came up. It would have cost more than her salary, after all. And didn’t Julia want to raise her children herself?

  She caught a flash of movement in her rearview mirror as someone walked, head down, across the parking lot. She recognized the canvas tote first, and then placed the mousy brown hair stuffed beneath a black pom-pom hat. It was Isobel Johnson.

  As she watched Isobel shuffle toward her car, she wondered again what Tracy saw in her. How had Isobel achieved such high status with her daughter? Tracy herself appeared in the rearview mirror then, too. One strap of a heavy backpack weighed down her left shoulder, and she had an LHHS athletic duffel slung across her chest, messenger style.

  Tracy’s face tilted up in happy surprise when she saw Isobel in front of her. Julia flinched.

  The two of them talked. Certainly, Tracy wouldn’t tell her about the Inside Liston Facebook page? Their exchange didn’t look like a serious conversation. Isobel’s pale cheeks shone in the fading light. She looks young, Julia thought. How old was she, anyway? She watched as Tracy pointed at the car. The teacher nodded, still smiling. She reached out a mittened hand and gave Tracy a friendly pat on the upper arm, and then they parted.

  Julia clicked open the trunk and waited for Tracy to come around to the front seat. Meanwhile, Ms. Johnson looked back toward the Mercedes and waved, perhaps at Julia. The minivan she walked toward had a “Kindness Matters” decal on the back window above several other bumper stickers.

  Figures, Julia thought. Although Julia had opinions, too, she didn’t feel the need to broadcast them via her vehicle. She turned and smiled at Tracy. “Hi, honey,” she said, pushing her irrational jealousy away. “Get those skis all waxed?”

  “Yeah,” Tracy said. They pulled out of their spot and drove toward the minivan. “Oh, wait,” Tracy said as they pulled even with Isobel. She rolled down her window, cold air rushing in. “Ms. Johnson!” she called.

  Julia tensed. “What is it?” she asked her daughter as Isobel turned toward them.

  “I forgot to ask you whether you’d heard about the new PBS adaptation of Inherit the Wind.”

  Isobel leaned down toward the window. She looked blank. “No,” she said. “I’ll check it out. Thanks!” And then, looking at Julia: “Hello, Mrs. Abbott.” Julia recalled the last time she’d spoken with the teacher, also in the parking lot, just after Julia had been excised from the Theater Booster Board. Her jaw twitched as she thought of it. It had been so embarrassing to fall like that, and right in front of the woman Tracy so admired. She forced herself to make eye contact and noticed that Isobel’s eyes looked red.

  “Is everything all right?” Julia asked, squinting at her.

  Isobel blinked. “Of course,” she said, rubbing her nose with a green woolen mitten. “Everything’s fine.” It wasn’t a very convincing “fine,” but before Julia could follow up, the teacher straightened and walked away.

  JOHN DITTMER

  At four forty-five, John Dittmer dropped his head into his palm and rubbed his right temple and cheekbone. He checked his watch. Fifteen minutes left in today’s rehearsal. “Okay,” the director sighed, leaning against the piano. “Let’s take it from the top of the scene. From the intro, Alice?” he said.

  Assistant Director Alice Thompson, her face hidden from the students by the upright piano, raised her eyebrows. John took a step away from the piano and breathed in the faint smell of sawdust, the beginnings of the set build. “Andrew,” he said, on a long exhale, “let’s make it a little less blustery in the arm movements”—the director pantomimed jerky pointing—“and go more subtle. You’re friendly in this scene. Try leaning down toward your paper, study it, and then turn your whole body toward Anna.” He demonstrated from the pit.

  Maeve Hollister, as Anna, nodded supportively. “I think that would work well.” She had pulled a tulle crinoline over her jeans to simulate the dress she’d be wearing in performance and tucked in an LHHS Drama Club T-shirt. John gave her a thumbs-up. If Maeve would continually coach Andrew, they might actually be able to make this work.

  Melissa Young, the director noted, seemed especially unwilling to do any coaching. She stood, hands on her hips, next to Maeve. “This is an important entrance for my character,” she said, scowling at Andrew. “It seems like the body movements should be almost nil, except for Fiona’s.” She raised a script at Mr. Dittmer. “I mean, am I right?”

  Something clattered backstage where the prop crew was working. “Sorry!” a voice called.

  John ignored it. “Yes,” he said to Melissa. “We’ll go subtle for the inspector and Anna, and Fiona, you go bigger. Tryg,” he continued, indicating the lanky ninth grader who held a weathered hard-backed suitcase loosely in his hand, “you echo Fiona, following about ten steps behind her, moving backward and forward when she does.” The director tapped his fingers on the upright. “We’ll get this,” he muttered.

  “Well, some of us will,” Melissa snorted.

  John glanced at Andrew, who stood at the inspector’s podium center stage, studying the script and whispering so
mething to himself. Fortunately, he hadn’t seemed to have heard.

  John knocked on the top of the piano, the raps ringing in the empty auditorium. “Let’s keep it positive,” he said, and then he called for action.

  JAMIE PRESTON

  Jamie expected an empty apartment when she clattered through the door that night, but her roommate was home, standing in the kitchen.

  Leslie looked at the clock. “You’re early,” she said. It was five forty-five, more than two hours since the final bell had rung, and still this counted as early. Jamie once again lamented her teacher’s salary, which was not nearly enough considering she’d basically take a dinner break and then speed-grade papers until she fell asleep.

  “I guess.” She dropped her backpack and her Prius fob next to the boots she kicked off.

  “How much grading do you have to do tonight?” Leslie asked.

  “Some.” Jamie’s mouth started to water, and she stood on her tiptoes to see over Leslie’s shoulder as she stirred pasta on the stove. Would there be enough for two?

  “I think I’m going to have more than enough of this,” Leslie said, reading her mind, “if you’re hungry.”

  “Yes,” Jamie said, with more fervor than she’d meant to. “I just realized I’m starving.” She walked toward the kitchen counter, where she saw a neat stack of mail. “Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked. Her student loan statement sat on top of the pile. She’d had to pay for a quarter of her tuition, her dad’s plan for teaching her the value of her education. She pushed the statement aside and flipped through the rest of the envelopes. A square one appeared to be a save-the-date for her college roommate’s wedding. Jamie sighed. No one was supposed to get married before thirty these days. Rebecca was six years too young.

  “No,” Leslie said. “I’m just going to add cheese and then dump that into a bowl.” She gestured toward a prewashed Caesar salad mix on the counter.