I carry his books with me, reading them whenever I can, every spare few minutes and through every meal. I start to realize the point isn’t really whether I like the books; it’s more about him giving me different lenses to see myself through. The poems are clues to help me understand why he’s so interested, what it is exactly that he sees in me.
His attention makes me brave enough to show him drafts of my poems when he asks to read more of my work, and he returns them with critiques—not just praise but real suggestions for making the writing better. He circles words I’m already unsure about and writes, Best choice? Other words he crosses out altogether and writes, You could do better. On a poem I wrote in the middle of the night, after waking from a dream set in a place that seemed a mix of his classroom and my bedroom back home, he writes, Vanessa, this one scares me a little.
I start spending faculty service hour in his classroom, studying at the seminar table while he works at his desk and the windows drape October light over us both. Sometimes other students come in for help on assignments, but most of the time it’s only us. He asks me questions about myself, about growing up on Whalesback Lake, what I think of Browick, and what I want to do once I’m older. He says that for me the sky is the limit, that I possess a rare kind of intelligence, something that can’t be measured in grades or test scores.
“I worry sometimes about students like you,” he says. “Ones who come from tiny towns with run-down schools. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and lost at a place like this. But you’re doing ok, aren’t you?”
I nod yes but wonder what he’s imagining when he says “run-down.” My old middle school wasn’t that bad.
“Just remember,” he says, “you’re special. You have something these dime-a-dozen overachievers can only dream of.” When he says “dime-a-dozen overachievers,” he gestures at the empty seats around the seminar table and I think of Jenny—her obsession with grades, how I once walked into our room to find her sobbing in bed with her boots still on, rock salt on her sheets, her precalculus midterm crumpled on the floor. She’d gotten an 88. Jenny, that’s still a B, I’d said, but it did nothing to console her. She just rolled toward the wall, hiding her face with her hands as she cried.
Another afternoon while he’s typing up lesson plans, Mr. Strane says out of nowhere, “I wonder what they think about you spending so much time with me.” I don’t know who he means by “they”—other students or teachers, or maybe he means everyone, reducing the entire world down to a collective other.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I say.
“Why’s that?”
“Because no one ever notices anything I do.”
“That isn’t true,” he says. “I notice you all the time.”
I look up from my notebook. He’s stopped typing, his fingers resting on top of the keys as he gazes at me, his face so tender it turns my body cold.
After that I imagine him watching me when I’m bleary-eyed at breakfast, when I’m walking downtown, when I’m alone in my room, pulling the elastic from my ponytail and crawling into bed with the latest book he chose for me. In my mind he watches me turn the pages, transfixed by every little thing I do.
Parents’ weekend arrives, three days of Browick putting its best foot forward. Friday is a parents-only cocktail hour followed by a school-wide formal dinner in the dining hall with food that never otherwise appears on the menu: roast beef, fingerling potatoes, warm blueberry pie. Parent-teacher conferences are Saturday before lunch, then home games are in the afternoon, and parents who stay until Sunday go downtown in the morning, either to church or out to brunch. Last year mine came to everything, even to Mass on Sunday, but this year Mom tells me, “Vanessa, if we sit through all that stuff again, Dad and I are going to lose our will to live,” so they come only Saturday for the conferences. It’s fine; Browick is my world, not theirs. They’d probably vote Republican before they’d put one of those i’m a browick parent bumper stickers on their car.
After the conferences, they come see my room, Dad in his Red Sox hat and buffalo check flannel and Mom trying to counterbalance him with her sweater set. He wanders around the room, inspecting the bookshelves, while she reclines next to me on the bed and tries to hold my hand.
“Don’t,” I say as I wrench my hand away.
“Then let me smell your neck,” she says. “I’ve missed your scent.”
I lift my shoulder to my ear to ward her off. “That’s so weird, Mom,” I say. “That’s not normal.” Last winter break, she asked if she could have my favorite scarf so she could store it in a box and take it out to smell when she missed me. It’s the sort of thought I have to push out of my head immediately because otherwise I feel so guilty I can’t breathe.
Mom starts describing the conferences, and all I want to know is what Mr. Strane said, but I wait until she works her way through the list of teachers because I don’t want to raise suspicion by showing too much interest.
Finally, she says, “Now, your English teacher seems like an interesting man.”
“Was that the big bearded guy?” Dad asks.
“Yes, the one who went to Harvard,” she says, drawing out the word. Hah-vahd. I wonder how it came up, if Mr. Strane somehow dropped into the conversation the fact that he’d gone there or if my parents noticed the diploma hanging on the wall behind his desk.
Mom says again, “A very interesting man.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “What did he say?”
“He said you wrote a good essay last week.”
“That’s all?”
“Should he have said more?”
I bite down on the inside of my cheek, mortified at the thought of him talking about me as though I were just another student. She wrote a good essay last week. Maybe that’s all I am to him.
Mom says, “You know who I was not impressed by? That politics teacher, Mr. Sheldon.” Shooting me a pointed look, she adds, “He seemed like a real asshole.”
“Jan, come on,” Dad says. He hates it when she swears in front of me.
I push myself off the bed and throw open my closet door, fuss around with my clothes so I won’t have to look at them while they debate whether they should stay on campus for dinner or head back home before dark.
“Would you mind awful if we don’t stay for dinner?” they ask. I stare at my hanging clothes and mumble that it doesn’t matter. When I give them my usual brusque goodbye, I try not to get annoyed when Mom’s eyes tear up.
On the Friday before our big Whitman paper is due, Mr. Strane goes around the seminar table and calls on us at random to share our thesis statements. He gives us immediate feedback, deeming our theses either “good but needs work” or “scrap it and start over,” and in the process anxiety dissolves us all. Tom Hudson gets “scrap it and start over,” and for a second I think he might cry, but when Jenny gets “good but needs work,” she really does blink back tears and part of me wants to run around the table, throw my arms around her, and tell Mr. Strane to leave her alone. When we get to my thesis, he says it’s perfect.
There’s still fifteen minutes left of class after everyone is evaluated, so Mr. Strane tells us to use the rest of the period to fix our theses. I sit, unsure what to do since he called mine perfect as is, and from behind his desk he calls my name. He holds up the poem I gave him at the beginning of class and gestures for me to come to his desk. “Let’s have a conference on this,” he says. I stand and my chair scrapes against the floor just as Jenny drops her pencil to shake a cramp out of her hand. For a moment our eyes lock, and I feel her watch me walk to his desk.
I sit in the chair next to Mr. Strane and see my poem doesn’t have any marks in the margins. “Come a little closer so we can talk quietly,” he says, and before I can move, he hooks his fingers around the backrest of my chair and wheels me right beside him so we’re less than a foot apart.
If anyone wonders what he and I are doing, they don’t show it. Around the seminar table, everyone’s head is ducked in co
ncentration. It’s as though they’re in one world, and Mr. Strane and I are in another. With the heel of his hand, he presses the crease out of my poem from where I folded it and begins to read. He’s so close I can smell him—coffee and chalk dust—and as he reads I watch his hands, his flat bitten-down nails, dark hair on his wrists. I wonder why he offered to have a conference if he hadn’t yet read the poem. I wonder what he thought of my parents, if he thought they were hicks, Dad in his flannel and Mom clutching her purse to her chest. Oh, you went to Harvard, they must have said, their accents opening up in awe.
Pointing his pen at the page, Mr. Strane whispers, “Nessa, I have to ask, did you mean to sound sexy here?”
My eyes dart to the lines he’s pointing at:
Violet-bellied & mild, she stirs in her sleep,
kicking back blankets with chipped polish toes,
yawning wide to let him peer inside her.
The question makes me split off from myself, like my body stays beside his while my brain retreats to the seminar table. No one has ever called me sexy before, and only my parents call me Nessa. I wonder if they called me that during the conference. Maybe Mr. Strane noted the nickname and tucked it away for himself.
Did I mean to sound sexy? “I don’t know.”
He backs away from me, a tiny movement but one I feel, and he says, “I don’t mean to embarrass you.”
This, I realize, is a test. He wants to see my reaction to being called sexy, and embarrassment means I failed. So I shake my head. “I’m not embarrassed.”
He reads on, writes an exclamation point next to another line and whispers, more to himself than to me, “Oh, that is lovely.”
Somewhere down the hallway, a door slams. At the seminar table, Gregg Akers cracks his knuckles one at a time and Jenny drags her eraser back and forth over the thesis statement she just can’t get right. My eyes drift to the windows and spot something red. Squinting, I see a balloon, its string caught on a bare branch of the maple tree. It floats in the breeze, knocking against leaves and bark. Where would a balloon even come from? I stare at it for what feels like a long time, so focused I don’t even blink.
Then Mr. Strane’s knee touches my bare thigh, right below the hemline of my skirt. With his eyes still on the poem and the tip of his pen following the lines, his knee nestles against me. I freeze, possum-dead. At the seminar table, nine heads bow in concentration. Out the window, a red balloon hangs limp from a tree limb.
At first I assume he doesn’t realize, that he thinks my leg is the desk or the side of the chair. I wait for him to recognize what he’s done, to see where his knee drifted and whisper a quick “sorry” and shift away, but his knee stays pressed into me. When I try to be polite and inch away, he moves with me.
“I think we’re very similar, Nessa,” he whispers. “I can tell from the way you write that you’re a dark romantic like me. You like dark things.”
Shielded by the desk, he reaches down and pats my knee gently, gingerly, the way you might pet a dog before you’re sure it won’t turn mean and bite you. I don’t bite him. I don’t move. I don’t even breathe. He keeps writing notes on the poem while his other hand strokes my knee and my mind slips out of me. It brushes up against the ceiling so I can see myself from above—hunched shoulders, thousand-yard stare, bright red hair.
Then class is over. He moves away from me, the spot on my knee cold where his hand has left it, and the room is all motion and sound, zippers zipping and textbooks slamming shut and laughter and words and no one knowing what took place right in front of them.
“Looking forward to the next one,” Mr. Strane says. He hands me the marked-up poem as though everything’s normal, like what he did never happened.
The nine other students pack up their things and leave the classroom to carry on with their lives, to practices and rehearsals and club meetings. I leave the room, too, but I’m not part of them. They’re the same, but I’m changed. I’m unhuman now. Untethered. While they walk across campus, earthbound and ordinary, I soar, trailing a maple-red comet tail. I’m no longer myself; I am no one. I’m a red balloon caught in the boughs of a tree. I’m nothing at all.
2017
I’m at work, staring out across the hotel lobby, when I receive a text from Ira. My body goes rigid as I watch the push alerts pile up on my phone screen, his contact still labeled DON’T DO IT from our last breakup.
How are you doing?
I’ve been thinking about you.
Would you be up for a drink?
I don’t touch the phone; I don’t want him to know I’ve seen the texts, but as I give restaurant recommendations and call in reservations, telling every guest it’s my pleasure to serve them, my absolute pleasure, a little fire kindles in my belly. Three months have passed since Ira said we needed to end it once and for all, and I’ve been good this time. No walking by his apartment building hoping to catch him outside, no calls, no texts—not even drunken ones. This, I think, is my reward for all that self-control.
After two hours, I respond, I’m ok. A drink might be nice. He replies right away: Are you working? I’m with friends eating dinner now. Could stay out and meet you after your shift. My hands tremble while I send a single thumbs-up emoji, as though I can’t be bothered to type out “sounds good.”
When I leave the hotel at eleven thirty, he’s outside leaning against the valet podium, shoulders hunched as he stares down at his phone. Immediately, I notice the changes in him, his shorter hair and trendy clothes, skinny black pants and a denim jacket with holes in the elbows. He jumps when he sees me, slips his phone into his back pocket.
“Sorry it took so long to leave,” I say. “Busy night.” I stand holding my bag in both hands, not knowing how to greet him, what’s allowed.
“It’s fine, only been here a few minutes. You look good.”
“I look the same,” I say.
“Well, you’ve always looked good.” He holds out an arm, offering a hug, but I shake my head. He’s being too nice. If he wanted to get back together, he’d be guarded and skittish like me.
“You look very . . .” I search for the right word. “Hip.” I mean it as a jab, but Ira just laughs and thanks me, his voice sincere.
We go to a new bar with distressed wood tables and metal chairs, a five-page beer menu organized by style, then country of origin, then alcohol volume. As we step inside, I scan the room, checking each head of long blond hair for Taylor Birch, though I’m not sure I’d recognize her even if she appeared right in front of me. The past couple weeks, I’ll see women on the street I’m certain are her, but every time it’s only a stranger with a face that isn’t even close.
“Vanessa?” Ira touches my shoulder, startles me as though I’ve forgotten he’s there. “You ok?”
I nod and give a thin smile, grab an empty chair.
When the server comes around and starts to rattle off recommendations, I interrupt. “This is too overwhelming. Just bring me whatever and I’ll like it.” I mean it as a joke, but it comes out harsh; Ira gives the server a look, like I’m sorry for her.
“We could have gone somewhere else,” he says to me.
“This is fine.”
“It seems like you hate it here.”
“I hate everywhere.”
The server brings the beers—some dark, wine-smelling thing in a goblet for Ira and, for me, a can of Miller Lite.
“Do you want a glass,” the server asks, “or can you manage?”
“Oh, I can manage.” I smile and point to the can, my best attempt at charming. The server just turns to the next table.
Ira gives me a long look. “Are you doing ok? Tell me the truth.”
I shrug, take a drink. “Sure.”
“I saw the Facebook post.”
With my fingernail, I flick the pull tab on the beer. Click-click-click. “What Facebook post?”
He frowns. “The one about Strane. Have you really not seen it? Last I checked, it’s been shared something like two th
ousand times.”
“Oh, right. That.” It’s actually up to almost three thousand shares, though the activity has died down. I take another swallow, flip through the beer menu.
Softly, Ira says, “I’ve been worrying about you.”
“You shouldn’t. I’m fine.”
“Have you talked to him since it came out?”
I smack the menu shut. “Nope.”
Ira studies me. “Really?”
“Really.”
He asks if I think Strane will be fired and I lift my shoulders between swallows. How should I know? He asks if I’ve thought about reaching out to Taylor and I don’t answer, just flick the pull tab, the click-click-click now a boing-boing-boing echo through the half-empty can.
“I know how hard this must be for you,” he says, “but it could be an opportunity, right? To make peace with it and move on.”
I force myself to breathe through the thought. “Make peace and move on” sounds like jumping off a cliff, sounds like dying.
“Can we talk about something else?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says. “Of course.”
He asks me about work, if I’m still looking for a new job. He tells me he found an apartment up on Munjoy Hill and my heart jumps, a delusional moment of thinking he’s going to ask me to move in with him. It’s a great place, he says, really big. The kitchen can fit a table; the bedroom has an ocean view. I wait, expecting him to invite me over at least, but he only lifts his glass.
“Must be expensive if it’s that nice,” I say. “How are you managing that?”
Ira presses his lips together as he swallows. “I lucked out.”
I assume we’ll keep drinking—that’s what he and I usually do, drink and drink until one of us gets brave enough to ask, “Are you coming home with me or what?”—but before I can order another beer, Ira gives the server his credit card, signaling the end of the night. It feels like a slap.
My Dark Vanessa Page 5