Somebody Else's Daughter

by Elizabeth Brundage

  Mrs. Heath was always getting after Teddy. She was a bitch, and everybody had started to hate her. She was always after the girls for rolling over the waistbands of their skirts so that the hem rested at midthigh instead of at the knee, where it was supposed to be. She’d chase you down in the courtyard and make you lower it while she watched, but with Teddy it was different. Mean-spirited. She came up to him at lunch that day, her face jaundiced and wrinkled like a dried apricot, and explained in a voice dripping with honey that his paper for her class was unacceptable, on something like a fourth-grade level, and how dare he attempt to turn something like that in to her. “Your work insults me,” is what she’d said, shoving the paper into his hand. Willa took him into the girl’s room to smoke before Chemistry and they stood there together in the way horses will stand quietly, hardly moving. Teddy leaned at the window with his tortured squint, wearing his usual gray wool sweater. It was his dead grand-father’s sweater and the sleeves were frayed on the bottom. Teddy was a big husky dog with his pretty blue eyes and pink tongue and if he had a tail it would be wagging, no matter what his trouble. He was a happy dog and she knew he didn’t care what Mrs. Heath thought—not really he didn’t. Then Ada Heath came in and complained, “He’s not supposed to be in here, there are rules for Christ’s sake, why can’t he follow them.” Teddy muttered something under his breath and walked out and Willa absorbed Ada’s drama like some kind of toxic smoke. Ada rubbed her eyes with her yellow fingertips and bragged about her bulimia. Yesterday she’d done it twice. “Your face is yellow,” Willa told her. “Be careful.”

  Sex was everywhere she looked. The possibility of sex lingered between people like the shadows of trees. She could feel it with Teddy, a kind of heat. She was still a virgin, but she thought about it a lot, trying to imagine what it would be like, how it would feel to have a boy inside her. She didn’t think it was such a big deal like everyone said. Her parents had taught her that sex was a natural thing that occurred between people who loved each other, it was natural and it was beautiful. Just the word beautiful was seductive—but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing—in the eye of the beholder—but that wasn’t really true anymore, it hadn’t been true for a long time. The media defined what beauty was. You would look at a magazine and you’d say that is beautiful. Or you’d watch two people making love in a movie and you’d think that is beautiful. Or she is beautiful. She had a beautiful body. But someone had decided it was beautiful and made it so. There was real beauty like you saw in nature or in babies, and then there was fake beauty like you saw in movie stars or women who looked too young for their years or in artificial flowers. Some things looked natural and some things looked beautiful, but really weren’t. It was confusing. It was deceiving. Just the word natural—it prickled with artifice. It looks so natural, her mother had cooed over Monica’s mother’s eye job. So natural. But it wasn’t natural, was it? Her mother’s boobs weren’t natural either. Natural would be sagging, pendulous, weary. But nobody wanted that brand of natural. Deception taunted people, Willa thought. It was routine, it was pervasive, and such casual trickery made her furious, but she could never discuss these ideas with anyone, except maybe Teddy, who hated the world almost as much as she did. Feed them a steady diet of deception and everyone will be happy.

  When she got home from school that afternoon, her parents were fighting in the kitchen. The minute she walked in they shut up, as if she couldn’t tell; her mother had begun to cry. They were quiet tears; they were not for sale.

  Willa blamed everything on sex. She didn’t think that her parents ever had sex. They never touched each other—not even in a casual way. Her dad never put his arms around her mom like you saw married people do in movies. He didn’t come in at the end of the day and kiss her hello and vice versa. He never said, “You look beautiful, Candace,” like the men in movies said to their wives. Her parents took each other for granted or something. They were just taking up space in the same house. She loved her father and she loved her mother, but it didn’t matter to her if they were together or not. Not really it didn’t. She had thought about it and decided. Everybody got divorced, eventually. Some people just had more endurance than others. Willa just wanted them to be happy. A wall had come up between her parents. They couldn’t talk anymore. In the big quiet house that had swallowed them whole.

  12

  “Everyone has a broken heart,” Nate told his students. “That is the first thing you have to know if you are going to write.” He said this mostly to provoke them, to rouse them from their teenaged stupor, but, dramatic as it was, he believed it to be true. The class was comprised of fifteen juniors. They sat around a wooden table on ladder-back chairs. They were all staring at him, forlorn as neglected house pets. He suspected that they were feeling sorry for him.

  “You have to become very quiet,” Nate told them. “You have to listen.”

  Marco Liddy, whose father made the widgets for airplanes, shifted in his chair and said in his typically patronizing tone, “And what are we listening for?”

  Some of the others stifled laughter. “Voices,” said Nate.

  “Voices,” Marco repeated, and looked around at his mates as though he’d made his point.

  “When you write, you might hear some. But you’ve got to get very quiet.”

  Willa Golding frowned. The period was about to end. She had things to say, he could see it in her eyes. Questions. She ran her hand through her long hair, her bracelets jingling. He saw in her eyes a longing for something she could not yet define, and he sensed that, before long, she’d search for whatever it was in all the wrong places, just like Cat had.

  Journal writing was considered a fundamental practice for new writers and it was included in nearly every high school’s creative writing curriculum across the country. This is what he told the students, dispensing a box of composition notebooks around the table, but in truth he saw little benefit in it. He was not in the habit of writing in a journal, nor did he necessarily believe that writing in a journal produced good writing in the classroom. He supposed it allowed students to translate their feelings and ideas onto the page, without the pressure of producing something artful, but in his case, cheap shot that it was, it would bring him closer to Willa, and that was his primary concern. It would take him into her mind. “Your journals will be strictly confidential,” he told them.

  “What are we supposed to write about?” Teddy Squire asked.

  “Anything you want. Anything at all.”

  “Are we getting graded on these?” Ada Heath asked in a burdened voice.

  “No,” he said. “No grades on journals. Writing is your freedom. Just go with it. See where it takes you.”

  On his way out, Teddy stopped to see him. He waited until everybody had cleared out before he spoke. “It’s true what you said, the broken heart thing.”

  Nate nodded. “But, it’s a very forgiving muscle.”

  Teddy looked at him, skeptically. “Whatever.” He shrugged, and went out.

  On the surface, The Pioneer School was an ideal place. As a visiting writer, Gallagher was treated cordially, with guarded respect. Most of the teachers had been there for years. They were a somewhat eccentric group, the sort of folks he’d grown up with, who lived in dusty little houses crammed with books. Over lunch in the teachers’ lounge, they’d discuss a variety of teaching-related subjects. They often discussed ethical issues, in the vein of Theodore Sizer, whom several of them admired. They assured Nate that the school had changed since the early days when many of them had first started. “Since Heath’s been the Head,” Mr. Jernigan whispered conspiratorially, “it’s a very different place. More competitive. The uniforms and whatnot. Many of us here don’t support what he’s doing. Unfortunately, the parents do.”

  “Heath has one goal and one goal only,” Mrs. W
heaton asserted, then hissed the word, as if it were profanity: “Money.”

  The kids were different now too, they argued. The world had made them so. They blamed the television, the Internet, the iPods. Even the drugs were different. You couldn’t trust the drugs anymore. “Not like in our day,” Jernigan said. “Now, who knows what they’re getting?”

  The parents too were different. “In your face,” Jernigan complained. “I get phone calls at all hours.”

  “It’s the money again,” Mrs. Wheaton said. “They pay more, so they expect more. Yet, it guarantees them nothing.”

  “Yes,” Jernigan agreed. “That’s the betrayal.”

  “There’s nothing worse than that,” Mrs. Wheaton confirmed.

  “Suddenly, little schools like ours are out of favor with the Ivy League. They want the public school kids. They’re under the impression that they work harder.”

  “Myths!” Mrs. Wheaton said.

  “It’s all nonsense of course,” Jernigan said. “I feel for the kids, I really do.”

  On the few occasions that Maggie Heath took lunch, Nate would sit with her out of a sense of brotherly obligation. She ate in a kind of disconsolate haze. One had the sense that if she moved too fast, or too abruptly, all of the thoughts in her head would spill out onto the floor, only to be swept up later by the janitor and thrown in the trash. She was a woman, he thought, with little confidence in herself. There was an ambiguity about her that made him anxious. Occasionally, he’d see marks on her body in curious places. Raw-looking rings around her wrists and ankles; he found them disconcerting. She scarcely ate. She’d take a brown bag out of her briefcase and proceed to empty its contents on the table: a can of vegetable juice, a Baggie full of carrots, a small triangle of cheese, three crackers. And she seldom finished it. She’d put everything back into the bag, relieved, it seemed, that the lunch period was over, and dump it in the trash.

  Sometimes, after work, they’d go running together. They’d go down by the lake. There was a trail around the lake that attracted many runners. The lake was seven miles around, but their route was only three. Maggie was easily winded, but refused to slow down. She’d get a look in her eye of feverish determination. In truth, he would have preferred to run alone. There was something draining about being with her, and he found himself worrying about her more than he should. Somehow, their history at Choate, vague as it was, had encouraged a siblinglike bond, and neither had refuted it. When he’d ask her, casually, “Is everything all right?” she always gave him a winning smile and said, “Why shouldn’t it be?”

  As the weeks passed, Nate detected in Maggie a growing animosity for Teddy Squire. She seemed highly critical of the boy, more than most, accusing him of being lazy and insolent, two qualities that Nate frankly saw in her own daughter, Ada. Perhaps not lazy, but Ada had something of an attitude. He sensed that the faculty members walked on eggshells around her, and graded her accordingly, allowing her more than the benefit of the doubt—but, then again, perhaps he was being ungenerous. Everybody knew it was the social kiss of death to be related to the Head of School—and somehow Ada seemed to hold her own. He knew she was friendly with Willa, but he also knew that, now that Teddy Squire was in the picture, Willa was less than devoted to her.

  Nate couldn’t relate to Maggie’s criticism of the boy. In his estimation, Squire was bright, observant, acutely aware of his surroundings. Yes, his handwriting was chaotic and he had trouble forming a decent sentence, but his ideas were unique, different from the other kids’, more exacting, more deliberate. On the rare occasion when he spoke up in class, it always turned the conversation in a surprising direction. The kids would sit up taller in their chairs.

  Nate wasn’t worried about Teddy Squire. He was going to be just fine.

  The trees were turning colors, blazing with red and gold. The lake had taken on a somber hue, a foreboding of what winter might bring. After their run, Nate and Maggie would say their good-byes and he’d walk through town on the way home and buy something to cook for dinner in the small grocery on the corner, a steak or a piece of fish, a good bottle of wine. While his dinner was cooking, he’d have a drink in the empty living room, in the salmon light of the setting sun, and think about the book he was trying to write and how badly he wanted to write it. He ate in the tiny kitchen, listening to the blaring sound of Larkin’s television, scandalous news shows dishing out the perilous travails of ordinary people like gruel in a soup kitchen. He’d read over the journals of his students, coming to know their specific likes and dislikes, their tastes in music and fashion, their ideas about politics even, their fears and dreams, and in the process he came to know Willa, which only reaffirmed in his mind that Catherine had been right, after all, to give her up. Nothing had been spared in raising her, it seemed; she had a privileged life with the Goldings. And in her face, her bright, dazzling eyes, he saw that she was happy.

  Coming up here had restored him on some fundamental level. He could remember the month or two just after giving her up. He’d lost Catherine; he’d lost them both. He remembered that sharp little pain in his gut. He’d have nightmares and wake with the baby’s screaming ringing in his ears. There was nothing worse than not knowing how she was—not being able to call and check. His child was out in the world—with strangers! Not knowing if she’d been fed or changed or hugged sufficiently. Wondering if she’d experienced any confusion—if she’d known, in her tiny little mind, that her mother was gone—her real mother—and that this new mother was there to stay. Had she missed him at all? The way he used to carry her up on his chest like a little kitten? His big hand on the soft crown of her head. When they’d walk on the pier with all the sounds and colors and he’d hold her up so people could see—the fishmonger with his glass eye, the man selling umbrellas, who’d touch her cheek with his crooked, tobacco-stained finger, cooing at her like a pigeon, or the fat lady bartender with her frilly neckline who’d always ask: “How’s my little sunshine today?”

  You couldn’t go back that far; your brain didn’t let you. Which he knew was for the best. Because there were other things she’d remember too. The apartment, her mother comatose on the bed, her teeth black as licorice. Her sour milk smell. The look in her eyes, of terror.

  Cat was dead; she’d been dead for sixteen years, and his life was finally, at long last, just beginning.

  13

  They were drinking in the Union Cemetery: Willa and Teddy Squire and Ada Heath and Monica Travers and Marco Liddy and Bette Lawton and her sister, Darcy, who had a turnip brain and had to be coaxed into the cold field with a bag of Hershey’s Kisses like a dimwitted nag. Monica dared them to find the Weeping Angel, a statue on one of the graves whose hands had been severed at the wrists. It was said she wept tears of blood whenever there was a full moon, and there was a full moon tonight. Legend had it if you touched the statue you got cursed, and there were stories to prove it. One man had crashed into a telephone pole just outside the cemetery gates and died instantly—his car horn had woken the caretaker. Willa was superstitious and believed in things like legends and curses, and it was why she’d kept her distance from the statue all her life, but tonight they were all stoned and drunk and happy and nothing bad was going to happen, that’s what Teddy was telling her as he cored an apple and stuffed it with pot and lit it up like a pipe and passed it around. It reminded Willa of the film they’d seen in Cultural Studies about Aborigines. They’d had a substitute and when she left the room they’d had a spitball contest to see who could hit the nipples on the naked women of the tribe. It had been an intensely juvenile thing to do, even the boys admitted it, but Teddy Squire had a way of transforming even the most insipid behavior into a life-altering experience. Teddy laughed suddenly, like water splattering, and handed Willa the pipe and she took a hit, letting the sweet smoke quiver inside her. She didn’t really like to smoke, but they wouldn’t trust her if she didn’t. They’d turn her into someone else.

  They linked arms and marched across the
field like some crazy infantry, chanting: Left, left, left my wife with forty-eight kids, right, right, right in the middle of the kitchen floor, and it was so cold you could see your words like smoke on the black air, and there was the jangle of stolen whiskey bottles and the yellow moon screaming above them, taunting the spinning earth as if any moment they would all fall off and be sucked into oblivion. Oblivion was one of her SAT words: The quality or condition of being completely forgotten. It was how she felt sometimes. Not just forgotten, but completely forgotten. It was a feeling she had from time to time and she thought it had something to do with being adopted. The mystery she carried around was her birthmark. She didn’t know much about her biological parents, except that they’d been very young, and that her biological mother had died. She’d had a weak heart, but she’d been very beautiful. “You look just like her,” her mother had told her, smoothing back her hair behind her ear the way she always did. They’d been students or something, out in San Francisco. They’d been the ones to name her; it was part of the agreement, that she kept her name.