The real story, which Mrs. Bradstreet told us standing up on the first day of class and reading an essay she had written called “Living Inside American History,” is that she had gone to Wellesley, in 1965, “like every nice Bronxville girl educated at Emma Willard,” but then dropped out to join the Freedom Rides—“which we’ll be examining later in the year, and I’ll bring in photographic documentation.”
Her essay ended there, and she assigned us to write what she called a think piece on the same topic, “Living Inside American History,” due Friday. She doesn’t tell us how she ended up, rather incongruously, at West Mendhem High, but enough people in school have talked about her for me to know the basic story: somewhere along the line, after her Freedom Riding hippie years were over and she had come to teach at West Mendhem High School, she met Nathan Bradstreet, who’s a selectman in town. His family was one of six to settle West Mendhem about three hundred and fifty years ago, and today he owns roughly half of it, with a street, an elementary school, and three Revolutionary War monuments around town, all bearing his family name. Nathan Bradstreet is nearly twice her age, filthy rich but destitute-seeming in his L.L. Bean rags from the 1950s, with no occupation other than his selectman’s post, which he’s held for twenty-five years.
The conventional wisdom is that Mrs. Bradstreet married Nathan Bradstreet for his money. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but Mrs. Bradstreet does spend every summer in places like Nepal or Bora Bora, without Nathan Bradstreet, who doesn’t look like he’s ever set foot outside West Mendhem for longer than a day. (He’d need a change of clothes.) This past Wednesday, the day she read the essay, Mrs. Bradstreet was deeply tanned and wearing a huge necklace of carved wood gazelles, which Erin O’Rourke (a dumb, cutesy girl in my class) told her was “wicked cool.”
“Why, thank you, Erin,” Mrs. Bradstreet said in her weirdly measured voice, taking off the necklace and solemnly handing it to Erin for inspection. (To me, Mrs. Bradstreet seems to have the grim, regal bearing of a court royal being carried off to the guillotine.) “It was given to me as a gift by the natives of a village I stayed in this summer in Burundi, helping to build a clinic. It’s a symbol of the strength and beauty of mothers.”
To which Erin O’Rourke said, baffled, “Oh. Cool,” and handed the necklace back like it was infected. “Where’s Burundi?” I heard her asking people later.
“Mr. Fitzpatrick,” Mrs. Bradstreet called to me from her desk as people were filing out at the end of the first class. When I looked her way, she said something so low and quiet, I couldn’t hear her.
“I’m sorry?” I said, stepping up closer to her desk.
“I said, I hear from Mrs. Bissett that you’re quite the young bard.”
“Oh, God. Whatever. Mrs. Bissett was a great teacher,” I said, lying. Mrs. Bissett was my English teacher last year and wasn’t good for teaching us how to diagram a sentence.
“You have ambitious postsecondary plans, I presume?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m looking at Yale.”
She gave me a broad, conspiratorial smile, as if the very word Yale was a delicious little secret the two of us shared. “Ah, God and man at Yale,” she said. “But you’ve got to watch out there.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because they’re puckish at Yale. Everyone,” she said, almost like she was reading me a sonnet or something. “At least the ones I used to know.”
I laughed. “I don’t think of George Bush as very puckish,” I said, glad for a chance to let her know that I understood the meaning of “puckish.”
“Mr. Fitzpatrick,” she said, pointing her pen at me. “I think you are grossly overcalculating my age.”
“Oh,” I said, flustered. “I didn’t mean that. He just came to mind when you said Yale. I wasn’t insinuating you were contemporaries.”
“No,” she said, then, after a pause, “nor soulmates. You’re not a Reagan Democrat like the rest of this community, are you?”
I laughed again, slightly bewildered. “I’m politically apathetic, like the rest of my generation,” I said—jokingly, but more or less honest.
“We’ll have to change that this year.”
“I wish you luck.”
“Good day, Mr. Fitzpatrick.”
“Good day,” I said awkwardly, mimicking her formal tones. She smiled—indulgent bordering on condescending, I thought—and I slipped between two dividers and out of the space.
Outside in the corridor, Phoebe and Charlie were having some whispered, giggly-looking conversation against Phoebe’s locker, which she had already plastered with photographs of Jerry Garcia, Charles Bukowski, and Airplane-era Grace Slick.
“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” I said when I approached them.
“You’re so paranoid, Eric,” Charlie said, looking away. “We’re not the fucking KGB. You gotta chill.”
“We were just talking about what a kook Mrs. Bradstreet is,” Phoebe said. “Why is she writing essays for us? That wasn’t about American history. It was her neurotic D.A.R. history, that’s what it was.”
“She just told me Yale was very puckish, then she asked me if I was a Reagan Democrat,” I said.
“Why did she ask you that?” Charlie said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I feel like she’s set on watching me this year or something.”
“That is scary shit!” Phoebe said.
“She’s hot for you, Eric,” Charlie said.
“Delightful. Are you two ready for English with the sparkling Goody Farnham?” We’ve nicknamed Mrs. Farnham, our new English teacher, Goody Farnham because we’re reading colonial American writing and her pinched face, severe hairbun, and apparent total lack of joy in the world of literature remind us of a butter-churning Puritan wife.
“Go on without me,” Charlie said. “I’ve got to hit the john first.”
“What were you two whispering about?” I asked Phoebe again as we headed off to English class in Learning Pod 4A.
“Nothing,” she said, irritated, walking faster than usual.
“It didn’t seem like nothing.”
Finally, she stopped and looked at me. “Well, if you must know, it was a very small something.”
“What?” I said.
Phoebe squirmed a little in embarrassment. “Well, what do you think?” she said, looking away from me.
“Oh my God!” I said, low. “Are you two— I can’t believe it.”
“What?” she said, embarrassed but also enjoying the revelation. “We’re nothing—really. Or maybe we are. How the fuck should I know?”
“Did you get together?”
“Sort of.”
“When?”
“Last night. I taped a Dead show that he wanted for him and I brought it over.”
“And?” I couldn’t believe that my two best friends—who only knew each other, barely, on account of me—had gone ahead and hooked up behind my back.
“And what? He asked me if I wanted some pot in his room and we had some. And then we fooled around a little. What’s wrong with that? Charlie’s great. He’s cooler than all the other sausages in this school. He’s got excellent taste in music and he’s got hair like Jackson Browne.”
“Charlie is excellent, Phoebe, but he’s not sharp.”
“He is, too, sharp,” she said, indignant. “He just hides it under all this stoner stuff. He doesn’t bend over backwards proving he’s sharp all the time, like some people.”
“Oh, I wonder who you could mean by that?” I said, suddenly feeling very crummy.
Phoebe gave me a funny look. “I’m sorry, Eric. I didn’t mean that. You know who I like better between the two of you. You know who makes me laugh, and challenges me, and truly appreciates my singular sense of humor. But I gave Charlie a vibe and he gave me one back. You never give me a vibe back.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was supposed to be your personal pleasure orb.”
“Fuck you!” She kicked me clu
msily in the shin and stalked into class.
All through English with Goody Farnham, Phoebe, Charlie, and I kept exchanging glances: Charlie looking apologetic at me, me looking baffled and suspicious at Charlie; Phoebe looking sourly at me; Charlie and Phoebe looking sheepishly at each other, when they could manage to do it at all. My crummy feeling seemed to seep out of a little cavity in my stomach. The two of them together didn’t feel right to me at all; I felt like they had gone behind my back and deliberately betrayed me, especially because I thought that Phoebe and I had always had a sort of understanding. Of course, we weren’t together like that—that would spoil it, we always said—but otherwise we considered ourselves virtually married. We called ourselves F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, James and Nora Joyce, Virginia and Leonard Woolf. We were partners in crime, we said. We called each other darling. We shared everything.
My crummy feeling only worsened when Goody Farnham announced that as a mandatory class assignment we had to enter a youth essay contest sponsored by the Boston Globe called, repulsively, “What I Cherish in America.” The idea was that despite poverty, crime, the threat of nuclear annihilation, rising taxes, and terrible diseases like AIDS, there was still a lot to love about the United States, and who better to remind everyone but the rising young people of the nineteen-eighties? The top three winners would get to read their essays at some V.I.P. dinner in Boston and First Place would also win a personal computer to take to college. Goody Farnham told us she didn’t care what we wrote about, as long as it was typed, double-spaced, and submitted to her in two weeks.
“If we can pull a winner out of this class, even just third place, that looks great for West Mendhem High when the accreditation team comes around next year,” she said, stifling a yawn and latching back a tendril that had escaped from her skin-tight bun. “And it also looks great on a college application. So just crank something out and I’ll put them in the mail next week.”
With that, she steered us back to Cotton Mather, about whom she actually seemed to have a notch more than her usual cursory commentary.
I was personally furious that Goody Farnham would waste our classroom time using us as pawns in a mercenary game, but I also needed her for a recommendation in a few months and couldn’t afford to risk her goodwill. So I said nothing and jotted the assignment—imbecilic title and all—down in my notebook. Then I went back to brooding at Phoebe and Charlie, feeling crummy that I obviously hadn’t picked up my cue when Phoebe chose to send me a vibe.
* * *
Things got even stranger that Thursday. I was at home, helping Joani with homework in the den as my mother and father watched The Cosby Show and Grandma fell off to sleep on the couch, her ragged snores beginning to annoy us. (Nobody has come to a decision about Grandma yet, so she’s still with us.)
We heard the front door slam. Brenda walked into the middle of the den and stood there like a totem pole. She still had her little name tag from the card shop pinned to her shirt.
“I can’t believe it,” she said once, in a strained half-whisper. “It’s like a nightmare! I can’t believe it.”
We all looked up while Cosby prattled on, and Grandma stirred from her nap with the crashing noise of an interrupted snore.
“Honey, what is it?” my mother said, scared. I knew she was thinking something had gone wrong with the baby.
“You remember Kerrie Lanouette, that slutty girl I graduated from high school with?” Brenda said, collecting herself a little.
“Slut,” Joani repeated, and broke out into hysterics.
“Watch your mouth,” Grandma said through a yawn.
“Isn’t she working at the package store on 136 now?” my father said. “I went in there the other day on an account and she was behind the counter.”
“She was,” Brenda said ominously. “She was. But not anymore.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Because—because I was at work tonight, and Kathy Fanuele comes in, whose father’s a Statie, and she tells me that this afternoon they found— Oh, my God, this is so sick!”
“Joani, honey, will you go in the kitchen and bring Mummy another cup of decaf?” my mother said.
“I wanna hear!” Joani whined.
“Joani, don’t be a brat!” my mother said. “Get Mummy a cup. You can have a Ring-Ding and some milk if you want, over the kitchen table. On a plate!”
Joani lumbered up and padded out of the den, rolling her eyes.
“They found what?” I said again, even though I already had a good enough idea.
“They found her body all—mangled up—off a dirt road in Harold Porter State Park today.”
“Jesus Christ,” my father said, low.
“Jesus Christ, Mary, and Joseph!” my mother said. “Now I’m gonna have nightmares for a week.”
“You think you are!” Brenda said. “I’m already having them, and I haven’t even gone to bed yet.”
“That’s what the world is comin’ to,” Grandma said, fully awake now, and unfazed. “Every day, it’s rape this, murder that. I can’t watch the news no more. You know whose fault is it, don’t you? God forgive me, it’s those damn P.R.’s that took over Leicester.”
“Ma, stop it!” my mother said, distracted.
“God forgive me, it’s true,” Grandma said.
“Kathy said her father said there was a witness who saw Kerry walking down 136 after she got out of work this morning,” Brenda said. “And the witness said she was walking down 136 with some dark-looking guy.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” my father said, but I couldn’t understood what he meant.
“Brenda”—my mother lowered her voice and craned her neck toward the kitchen to see if Joani was out of earshot—“did Kathy’s father say it had also been a—you know—”
“A rape?” Brenda said bluntly.
“Yeah, if you have to shout it out with Joani in there,” my mother snapped.
“Kathy said her dad said that’s what it looked like, but they’ve got to examine her, and give her, you know—”
“The autopsy?” I said.
“Yeah, that. But Kathy said her clothes were all ripped off.”
“Oh, good Lord,” my mother said, and she and Grandma both crossed themselves.
“What the hell was she doing in Harold Porter anyway?” my father said. “It’s right on the Leicester line, it’s totally deserted. Nobody goes in there now except for drug dealers. It’s not a family picnic place like it used to be when I was a kid.”
“Some kids from West Mendhem High hang out there at night to drink,” I said, “but they go in big groups.”
“How should I know what she was doing in there in the middle of the day, anyway?” Brenda said, bristling. “I’m not her keeper. She was always kind of a slutty lowlife anyway, always hanging out at the Showcase Cinema and the mall with guys from Leicester and Methuen.”
“It’s not fair to call her a slut just because she socialized in a lower economic bracket, Brenda,” I said.
“Oh, shut up, Eric. You know what I mean,” Brenda snapped at me. “Anyway, Kathy thinks she was seeing some Puerto Rican guy and she didn’t want anyone to know about it. She should have known better. I called Frank at work and told him about it and he said the same thing. But isn’t it horrible!” She slipped back into the aggrieved mode with which she had entered the room. “It’s like, this could almost happen to any girl. It’s like, even West Mendhem isn’t safe anymore.”
“I told you, that’s what the world is comin’ to. It’s the devil’s work,” Grandma said again, as though we had all missed her point the first time.
“So what are they doing about it?” I asked.
“Kathy said the West Mendhem and Leicester police were teaming up and searching all over Leicester looking for guys that fit the description of the person that the witness saw Kerrie with.”
“All they know is that he’s a dark-skinned guy?” I said. “That’s, like, two-thirds of Leicester.”
&nb
sp; “Kathy said they also said he was kinda fat. Not fat, like, but kinda beefy. And I think she said he had a beard, too.”
“That’s a big help,” I said. “Aren’t they going to look in West Mendhem and other places, too?”
Brenda shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess so. Anyway, Kathy said the Leicester Tribune and even the Boston Globe were on the story and it’s gonna be on the front of all the papers tomorrow. And Kathy also said that her mother’s so upset that this kind of stuff is leaking into West Mend-hem that she’s going to organize some kind of rally on the Common on Sunday afternoon. Some kind of ‘Take Back Our Town’ rally, where everybody speaks out against the crime and drugs that are coming in from Leicester.”
“That’s good,” Grandma said, nodding. “You gotta stand up and fight this stuff. That’s what we would have done in the old days.” Nobody had any idea what she meant by that, so we just let it pass.
“Everybody should just take a deep breath and calm down first,” my father said, his usual exhortation in any crisis short of an earthquake. “One little incident doesn’t mean the Puerto Ricans and the others in Leicester are coming in to take over.”
“Art, would you call this just a ‘little incident’?” my mother said sarcastically.
“Terry—”
“What?”
“Why do you wanna give me backtalk like my kids give me backtalk?”
“I’m not giving you backtalk.” My mother looked like she was going to explode. “I’m just saying, maybe this is more serious than you think. Joani!” she called into the kitchen. “Are you gonna bring me my decaf, honey?”
“Tonight, I’m prayin’ twice as hard for God to stop the world from comin’ to this,” Grandma said.
Joani padded back in, sloshing coffee in a mug with one hand and carrying a Ring-Ding on a plate with the other. “Isn’t anyone gonna tell me nothing?” she said.
Getting Off Clean Page 8
