Election

by Tom Perrotta

  “I want our school to reach its true potential a radiant city … uh, citadel of learning and serving I mean service to humanity that is why I am running for President.”

  The applause that followed expressed relief rather than approval, but I'm not sure Paul was up to making that sort of distinction as he stood frozen at the podium in a post-oratorical daze, a grin of pure panic inching across his face as he tried to remember what to do next. The outgoing President, Larry DiBono, had to direct him back to his seat.

  You had to feel for Tammy as she approached the microphone in a pretty flowered dress. The mob had grown surly after Paul's speech and was now eager for sport.

  “Tammy! Tammy! Tammy!” they chanted, their wolf whistles and catcalls only serving to emphasize her plainness and obscurity. She had to climb onto a footstool just to see the audience.

  LISA FLANAGAN

  TAMMY DIDN'T SPEAK right away. She scanned the rows of seats spread out below her, as if trying to make eye contact with every single voter. I felt funny when she picked me out of the crowd and smiled. Suddenly there were only two of us present in that enormous room. I hated her for that, the way she still had of making everyone else disappear.

  MR. M.

  SHE MUST HAVE STOOD there for two solid minutes, letting the idiots have their fun. It was an extraordinary display of patience, something you might have expected from a veteran public speaker. When she finally opened her mouth, she had the undivided attention of everyone in the auditorium.

  “Who cares about this stupid election?”

  There was another eruption from the crowd, only this time it was spontaneous, cleansed of sarcasm. She had put her finger on the pulse of the event, uttered the unspoken truth that was hovering in a giant cartoon balloon over the entire gathering.

  From his post by the emergency exit, the Vice-Principal, Walt Hendricks, shot me a startled glance. All I could do was shrug. She wasn't reading from the prepared text.

  “You think it really matters who gets elected President of Winwood? You think it will change anything around here, make one single person happier or smarter or nicer? You think the food will taste any better in the cafeteria?”

  The audience was quiet now, but it was a charged silence, the kind you'd get at a wedding if someone rose to tell the assembled guests exactly why this couple shouldn't be joined in holy matrimony. Walt flushed a bright dyspeptic pink and made frantic throat-slitting motions with his index finger, my signal to intervene. I rose from my aisle seat in the front row and began moving slowly toward the stage. I didn't want to pull the plug on the microphone, but didn't see much of an alternative.

  “My opponents have a lot more experience than me,” she continued. “But since it doesn't really matter, you might as well vote for me. Your lives won't be affected one way or the other.”

  I had my hand on the plug when she stepped down off her stool, crossed her ankles, and signed off, to a huge ovation, with a breathtakingly cynical little curtsy.

  Walt's initial impulse was to banish her from the election, but I convinced him not to do it. I said it would turn her into a martyr for free speech and shake our students’ faith in democracy. He was furious, though. Nothing bugs him more than insubordination from one of the “good” kids.

  “The little bitch made a fool of us, Jim. We can't let her get away with it.”

  He suspended her for three days.

  MR. M.

  THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN a happy time in my life. I had a good job, an apparently solid marriage, and an easy, unthinking faith in my own good judgment and moral integrity. Right now, that seems like more than enough to ask for.

  I was restless, though. I thought about going back to school, earning a master's and maybe even a doctorate in Education, retooling myself for the administrative track. With all the ferment going on in the field, all the talk about the decline of America's schools and the need for a bold new generation of leadership, I sensed a golden opportunity for the transformation of my life.

  After nearly a decade of classroom teaching, interacting with maybe a hundred kids a day, I was itching for a chance to apply my skills on a larger scale—writing curriculum, formulating policy, developing innovative programs that would help reshape secondary education. I had visions of myself as a Principal, a respected authority on school reform, perhaps even a politician one day.

  Measured against my dreams—which, admittedly, I'd done nothing to implement—my day-to-day life seemed a bit lacking. There were times when I nearly hypnotized myself with the drone of my own voice, the all-too-predictable trajectory of my classroom thoughts. I'd walk out at the end of the day feeling underutilized, like the best parts of me hadn't been engaged, and were turning rusty from disuse.

  It's probably not surprising that this vague discontent spilled over into my marriage. There was nothing particularly wrong with it. For the most part, Diane and I got along well enough and enjoyed each other's company. We just felt stagnant, like a TV series that had run a couple of seasons too long. Part of it was that we were stuck in a holding pattern, trying to conceive our first child, but the problem ran deeper than that.

  Diane has an enormous number of good qualities. She's attractive, well-read, politically aware, and good at her work (she does PR for St. Elizabeth's Hospital). People who know her consider her a loyal and caring friend, the kind of person you can count on in hard times and emergencies. After five years of marriage, her virtues were so familiar to me that I hardly even noticed them.

  What I noticed more and more in the months leading up to the election were her shortcomings. There weren't many, but I guess I kept my eye out. Her underwear bored me. She ate an awful lot of ice cream that went straight to her thighs. She couldn't have told a joke if her life depended on it. She interrupted my reading. Sometimes I'd look at her and find myself thinking about Jack Dexter, wondering if I was finally beginning to understand.

  TRACY FLICK

  PEOPLE KEPT USING the term “sexual harassment” to describe what happened, but I don't think it applies. Jack never said anything disgusting and he never threatened me with bad grades. Most of our time together was really sweet and nice. I even cried a few times, it felt so good to have him hold me.

  MR. M.

  JACK WAS JUST like me. We started the same year at Winwood, and were friends within a matter of weeks.

  We ushered at each other's weddings, played Friday night poker with a couple of his buddies, and made it a habit to get absolutely plastered once a year, on the last day of school. Both of us had electric guitars and vibrant fantasy lives, which we indulged every now and then in his basement, turning the amps up to ten and scratching out every three-chord anthem we could remember, plus a few that the world hadn't heard before.

  The poker games ended in 1990, when Sherry Dexter got pregnant. I guess I wasn't too broken up about it. The games had gone from weekly to monthly by that point and had begun to emit the stale odor of rituals that have outlived their usefulness. But Jack acted as though something important and sustaining had been subtracted from his life. He started talking about poker all the time, wistfully, as if we'd been big-time professional gamblers instead of young married guys puffing on pretzel rods, biting our nails over a pile of nickels. If you asked about Sherry, he always said the same thing, with the same disheartened expression.

  “She's enormous, Jim. Big as a frigging house.”

  Sherry was six months along when Jack started up with Tracy Flick. I know because he told me about it at lunch the next day, half bragging, half confessing his sins.

  They were working late on the Valentine's Day edition of The Watchdog, just the two of them, when the conversation somehow turned to the subject of dating.

  “The boys in this school are so immature,” she complained. “They don't even know how to conduct a conversation.”

  “Oh?” said Jack. “So you'd prefer an older man?”

  “As a matter of fact, I probably would.”

  “How
old?” he asked, not quite teasing.

  She pondered him and the question together.

  “How old are you?”

  “Me? Thirty-two.”

  “Thirty-two?” Her tongue made a thoughtful circuit of her chapped lips. “That sounds about right.”

  TRACY FLICK

  IT SEEMED EXCITING tome, a new frontier. Jack had been flirting with me all year anyway, commenting on my clothes, telling me I reminded him of this girl he'd been in love with in college. He watched me all the time.

  Yes, I knew his wife was pregnant. Everybody knew. Somehow that made it even more exciting.

  It was the stupidest thing I ever did, but I wouldn't trade that first kiss for anything. And for all the trouble I caused him, I'd like to imagine Jack feels the same way, though I wouldn't blame him if he didn't.

  MR. M.

  I WAS APPALLED and jealous at the same time. I didn't want to lecture him, didn't want to offer even implicit approval, and couldn't quite conceal my curiosity.

  I also had to accept a certain amount of responsibility. I'd been egging him on for years about the girls at Win wood, asking if he'd seen this one in her tight little skirt or that one in her black velvet top. Tracy had been a staple of our gossip for well over a year at that point. It was easier than you might imagine to forget she was fifteen. Spend enough time in a high school, and you forget what fifteen means.

  TRACY FLICK

  WE TOOK RISKS. Jack had lots of keys and more free time than I'd realized. He wrote me passes out of gym and study hall and we unbuttoned each other in musty storage rooms, surrounded by musical instruments, audiovisual equipment, shelves of mysterious chemicals. We did crazy things right in his classroom, in a corner you couldn't see from the door. I gave him a hickey one day under the stairwell, then painted it over with some cover stick. We fooled around in the darkroom, the handicapped elevator (this was after school, when the wheelchair kids had gone home), and backstage, behind the curtain. We kissed and licked and rubbed, driving each other crazy with our tongues and fingers. Twenty minutes of that and I'd walk around the rest of the day in a zombie daze, smiling at everyone I passed. It was the same for Jack. He forgot how to teach. He'd be standing there at the board and his face would just go blank. He'd tap the chalk against his forehead, leaving a cluster of faint white dots.

  “I'm sorry,” he'd say. “Where the heck was I?”

  I was a sophomore. He was my first real boyfriend.

  MR. M.

  JACK WAS SIMPLY not functioning on a rational level. You saw him in the hallway with Tracy all the time, and he looked as love-drunk as any sixteen-year-old in the whole school. I expected to turn the corner one day and find them making out in front of her locker.

  “Jack,” I said. “This has got to stop. It's getting out of hand.”

  “I can't,” he told me.

  “You've got a wife,” I reminded him. “A baby on the way.”

  “I know. But there's nothing I can do.”

  One Friday night in the middle of it all, Diane and I had Jack and Sherry over for dinner. Sherry was big all right, but she seemed radiant and self-contained, stroking the hard dome of her belly as she spoke in a bright, authoritative tone about the pros and cons of midwives, birthing chairs, Pitocin, and epidurals. Jack sat beside her, jittery as a kid in church, his expression alternating between mild interest and profound boredom.

  “Poor Jack.” Sherry laughed and patted him on the knee. “He's heard all this a hundred times.”

  TRACY FLICK

  IT HAD TO HAPPEN. The sex, I mean. It was our destination. We talked about it all the time as we touched each other under and through our clothes.

  “I need to make love to you,” he whispered. “I'll go crazy if we don't.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “What you want.”

  “I want to make love.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “Now?”

  “Soon.”

  We came within an inch of it in the darkroom one Wednesday afternoon, but I made him stop. I didn't want it to happen like that, on a cold floor in a room that reeked of developer. We decided to play hooky the next day, to do what had to be done in a safe, private place.

  MR. M.

  SOMETHING HAPPENED, he never told me what. I guess Tracy came to her senses and decided to break it off.

  Jack couldn't handle it. He put his hand through the windshield of his own car and ended up in the emergency room. He told Sherry he wanted a divorce. She was eight months pregnant at the time.

  Despite Diane's vehement objections, he spent that night on our living room couch. I heard noises around three in the morning and went downstairs to check them out.

  “Please,” he said, in a voice not really his own. “I'm a friend of hers. I have an important message.”

  I turned on the light. He was sitting on the kitchen floor in his underwear, a bottle of scotch cradled between his knees. His right arm was in a sling, the phone in his left hand.

  “Jack,” he said in that same harsh, desperate voice. “Just please tell her it's Jack.”

  TRACY FLICK

  I HAD TO CROUCH on the floor of his Corolla until we pulled into the garage, a position that gave me ample opportunity to disapprove of his black sock white sneaker combo. I'd never seen him out of school clothes before and had expected a sharper fashion sense than that.

  It was interesting to wander through his house, to see how he lived when he wasn't at Winwood. A small, bright kitchen with a checkerboard floor and lots of new appliances. Pictures of three different babies stuck to the fridge by magnets in the shape of tropical fruit. I wanted to ask whose kids they were but he sort of steered me out of the kitchen, into a cozy den with Oriental rugs and a tiled fireplace. Magazines were scattered across a glass coffee table, just like in a doctor's office.

  “This is where you spend most of your time, isn't it?”

  “Huh?”

  “You and your wife. You spend a lot of time in this room, don't you?”

  He jammed his hands into his pockets and nodded. He looked tense and unhappy.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let's go upstairs.”

  At the foot of the staircase, I noticed this great little TV room with plush carpeting and a fat, comfortable-looking couch. I imagined us snuggling together in there, laughing at the nuts on Phil Donahue. There's something so luxurious about watching TV during school. You really feel like you're getting away with something. He reached around from behind and grabbed my breasts, squeezing so hard I winced.

  “Come on,” he said. “What are we waiting for?”

  Two minutes later we're in the bedroom with our clothes off. The bed's unmade and the sheets smell like other people. There's a stack of baby books on the end table to my left—Dr. Spock, What to Expect When You're Expecting. This isn't what I had in mind, no more than the cold greasy floor of the darkroom. And suddenly I realize it: every time I've imagined sex for the first time, it's been in my own room, surrounded by familiar things—my stuffed animals, my Tom Cruise poster, the desk where I do my homework.

  It's a bad dream: my English teacher is standing naked at the foot of this slightly lumpy bed, clutching a pair of not-quite-white underpants in his hand, studying me with this creepy look on his face, the one he gets when he's reading aloud in class and wants us to think he's moved by the passage.

  “Tracy,” he says. “Look at you.”

  How do I tell him I'd rather he didn't? That I've never been naked in front of a man and feel totally disgusted by my body? One breast is bigger than the other and there's a line of brown peach fuzz connecting my belly button to my pubic hair. It's kind of freakish.

  To be honest, his body disappoints me, too. I know he's strong, but you can't really see the muscles. He's got love handles and no chest hair except these wispy little tu
fts growing straight out of his nipples. When he turns around to slip a cassette of middle-aged guy music into the boom box, there's a pretty big pimple on his butt.

  He turns back to me and smiles. The clock behind him says 9:13. I belong in Psych, watching Mr. Farmer jam a knuckle up his nose while he drones on about laboratory rats. Next to the clock there's a wedding picture. Jack's wife looks pretty in her wedding gown, prettier than I'll ever be. Jack needs a haircut.

  “Baby,” he whispers, “I could die right now.”

  His penis grows before my eyes. I'm just lying there, wishing it was already over.

  MR. M.

  I ONLY SAW HIM once after he left in disgrace. He called out of the blue and asked if we could get together for a beer. I didn't have the heart to say no.

  He stood by the coatrack at T.J. Peabody's, squinting in the direction of the bar. His face lit up when he spotted me, and I wished I'd never agreed to the meeting.

  “Jimbo,” he said, hoisting himself onto the stool beside me, greeting the bartender with a two-fingered salute.

  “Jackie D.,” I glumly replied.

  The old nicknames were sorry reminders of better days: marathon jam sessions in the basement, end-of-the-year tequila blowouts, the night we forced a team of New York Jets into double overtime at a charity basketball game, amazing hundreds of Winwood students, as well as the Jets and ourselves.