by Meg Wolitzer
Once, Dave Boyd added, “Abby Means is a vinegar douche.”
DO NOT TOUCH—PROPERTY OF ABBY MEANS, she wrote across the tape of her containers and bottles in block letters. Disliking Abby Means actually brought some of the teachers together in that room. Dory got to know not only Dave and his boyfriend Gordon through this connection, but also the new drama teacher. Fran Heller was small, arty, assertive, spiky-salt-and-pepper-headed, vehement, with hammered silver earrings that moved around her head like quotation marks when she spoke. You could picture her stalking the stage in the auditorium, or monkeying up a narrow metal ladder to change a gel.
While she was new, most of the others had long settled into their lives here. A few faculty members had come to the school after having been denied tenure at small colleges or universities. Abby Means had actually filled in for an instructor in a section of a class at Harvard one semester, though Dave Boyd had more than once insisted, “Oh, she probably taught at a college called Harver, and she mumbles the name so we’ll hear it wrong.”
Robby and Dory had moved here when two positions in the English department had simultaneously opened up. They joked that there had been a suicide pact between the departing teachers who could no longer tolerate the soul-killing demands of suburban home ownership. The Langs were hesitant to leave Brooklyn at first, where they’d lived since Robby had moved from Vermont to be with her; but after they had Willa, they outgrew their small apartment with its burnt-looking wood trim. At the time, both Dory and Robby had teaching jobs in local city high schools. Supplies were scarce, and once in a while the schools went into semi-lockdown mode, with a whooping siren like at a prison. Then they saw the ad for the jobs in Stellar Plains.
Stellar Plains, New Jersey, was a town that got mentioned whenever there was an article called “The Fifty Most Livable Suburbs in America.” Unlike most suburbs, this one was considered progressive. Though the turnpike that ran through it was punctuated by carpet-remnant outlets and tire wholesalers, and even an unsettling, windowless store no one had ever been to, advertising DVDS AND CHINESE SPECIALTY ITEMS, Main Street was quaint and New Englandy, with a cosmopolitan slant. There was an excellent bookstore, Chapter and Verse, at a moment when bookstores around the country were making way for cell-phone stores. (“Make Way for Cell-Phone Stores, a children’s book by Robert McCloskey,” said the wary owner.)
Everyone in town went out for dinner once in a while to Peppercorns. When the economy began to sputter and tank, the restaurant turned quiet, nearly empty, and Dory worried that it would close. She couldn’t bear to lose Peppercorns, with its baskets of snowy, soft rolls and its long, looming salad bar that made you remember that there were choices in life. But then business picked up a bit, and everyone came to Peppercorns a little more frequently, sitting with tall, sturdy menus in front of their faces once again. Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star, as opposed to a movie star, at a restaurant. A tenth-grade lacrosse player from Elro sitting with his parents might raise a hand from the next table, and his parents would glance over with shy smiles, and maybe the father would lift his glass of beer and say, “Here’s to a teacher who deserves an A!” The son would be humiliated by his father’s weird and pointless remark. But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.
Robby, Dory, and Willa Lang sometimes sat in the restaurant near the wood-burning oven in the back, and while the heat warmed their necks a little too strongly, and kitchen workers shoved flatbreads in and out on paddles, they traded anecdotes from the day at school. All around them, other families did the same. Later on, after they came home again, Robby and Dory would get undressed for the night. Every so often, maybe once or twice a week—not that Dory ever counted back then—one of them would turn to the other with sudden interest, or with the wish to create interest.
“You,” Robby would say, “are just who I was looking for.”
“Oh yeah. A wiped-out English teacher who’s headed for perimenopause in a bullet train.”
Sometimes, if he was standing in his untucked work shirt and pants, she might grab his belt by its buckle and pull it through the loops. Then they’d find themselves on the bed with the light blazing and their daughter awake but preoccupied down the hall—doing her homework or in touch with friends, though rarely on e-mail, for that was too slow; and less and less frequently on the phone, for that form of communication was apparently fading away. Or maybe she was sending a text message or going to some random website or was off once again into the depths of good old Farrest, all the while floating in her ergonomic desk chair like a dental patient in space.
The new drama teacher Fran Heller had apparently come to Stellar Plains from a high school in the more conventional, malldefined suburb of Cobalt, about twenty miles away. “I can’t even get a new language lab,” Señor Mandelbaum had complained when they first learned about the new hire, “and they bring in a drama teacher? I mean, come on.”
“Oh, Mandelbaum, stop,” said Leanne Bannerjee.
“Leanne, aren’t you supposed to want to hear my problems? Isn’t that your job?”
“If you were an adolescent I would,” she said. “But you’re not. And don’t you like being in a school that cares about the arts? Or do you want this place to be like so many other places in America? Do you want everybody here to be the same as they are all over the country?”
No one said what they were thinking, which was that, of course, despite the semi-specialness of the town, you couldn’t make people more unusual than they actually were. The teenagers here had a sameness about them that seemed universal. For one thing, this whole generation of kids had fully integrated sex into their lives. Until it was called to the attention of the principal, Leanne’s secret lover Gavin McCleary, two girls had been wearing T-shirts to school that read SLUT I and SLUT II. When brought into McCleary’s office, the girls insisted that the administration had failed to see the irony embedded in the word “slut.” The principal asked them to explain it to him, but neither girl could. “No offense, Mr. McCleary, but why do you wear that tie?” asked one of them. “It has little boxes inside boxes on it,” she pointed out. “What do you mean to say by that?”
He dismissed them quickly; the T-shirts never reappeared at school, and neither did the tie. Young people today, everyone was told, hooked up with one another—“hooking up,” a phrase that, if put into quotation marks, made the person referring to it seem like an old, tragic loser whom the world had left behind—but if not put into quotation marks, made the person seem to have accepted the concept of hooking up fully and completely.
Bev Cutler, the fifty-two-year-old guidance counselor with the well-tended honeyed hair, expensive linen jackets, and appealing face, but, over time, the very large body, sometimes held court around the faculty cafeteria table. She discussed the subject of hooking up in a voice meant to impart something sorrowful, and several teachers would have much to add about “the way the world is now.” This conversation usually was accompanied by meditative chewing, and a shaking of heads.
“In the past,” Bev had said at lunch recently, “sex just seemed like it was so much more extracurricular. It was almost like Model U.N.—something that a number of them signed up to do after the school day was over. It served no actual purpose, but they enjoyed it: ‘I’m Burma, and I object!’ And that was fine, of course, except for the occasional pregnancy—remember Cami Fennig and Jason Manousis?”
Everyone nodded solemnly, including Dory. “God, them,” said Mandelbaum. “I would never have thought of them again in my life if you hadn’t mentioned them. It’s been what, four years? Five? What happened to them?”
“They broke up after the baby was born,” Bev Cutler said. “Jason Manousis joined the military and went to Afghanistan. He was blinded in one eye and sent home.”
“Oh my God, that’s right,” said Dory.
“There
was a fund for him,” said Bev. “Ed and I contributed.”
“I do remember this now. It’s so sad,” Mandelbaum said. “And what about the baby?”
“Joint custody, I heard,” said Bev. “And I swear to you that this next part is true: they named the baby Trivet.”
“Oh, they did not,” said the music teacher, Ron di Canzio. “You are making it up, Bev. You are embellishing.”
“Yes, they did,” the guidance counselor insisted. “They apparently thought they were naming it Trevor, or Travis, but they got confused.”
The teachers often talked in such a free-floating way about their teenaged charges. The students alternately compelled and appalled and bored them. Right now, on the first day of classes in September, there was nothing that needed to be said or done about any particular students, at least not yet. Class lists had been handed out, and all the teachers were busy with the clerical tasks of the new year. The spell would not hit any of the women until December. They went about their business during the day without knowing that at some point in the next couple of months, their sexual lives, their love lives, would be upended. They were as happy as they ever were, happy and preoccupied, simply doing what they were meant to do and not at all anxious or fearful that something important would be stolen from them.
When the new drama teacher appeared in the doorway of the teachers’ room, Dory Lang got a good, long look at her. There had never been an actual drama teacher at Elro before; in the past, when Robby directed the play, he tended to choose works by Sam Shepard or David Mamet or other writers about whom the word “terse” was often used. Teenaged boys stood onstage in their fathers’ boxy old double-breasted suit jackets, or red-and-black-checkered flannel jackets, scowling. Every time their heads moved, powder was tossed into the air like seasoning from a shaker. As the mothers of girls began to point out, there were never enough female parts, and this didn’t seem fair, for girls were generally the ones who wanted to be in plays in the first place.
Many girls lived to be in plays—notably, Willa’s friend Marissa Clayborn, a tall and beautiful African-American girl with the best posture and the best diction of anyone in the school. She was almost always given the biggest female part available. Marissa could both project and emote, and you found yourself tearing up a little when she spoke onstage, even if she seemed pretty much like an elevated, costumed version of herself. Boys, except for a few, had to be bribed or tricked to be in plays, but girls were forever standing with a prepared monologue in hand, their hair pulled back tight, their hearts pushing hard in the narrow birdcage of their chests as they strode out under the lights to audition.
After Robby was confronted by the unhappy mothers of girls, he picked The Crucible, and the high school stage became a sea of bobbing bonnets, with Marissa at the center of them all. But finally he was tired of directing. He said he wasn’t particularly gifted at it, he had too many papers to grade, the compensation wasn’t good, and he wanted to spend more time with Willa and Dory, so he told Gavin McCleary that he was done.
Now, on the first day of school, Fran Heller entered the teachers’ room, then came right over to Dory, who, she had noticed, had been looking at her. “I’m Fran Heller,” she said with a New Jersey accent.
“Dory Lang. Welcome.” The drama teacher’s hand was small and cold, with a few odd gemstone rings, the kind that you could buy—but mostly never did—from artisans at street fairs in the city. The rings pressed into Dory’s hand briefly and a little painfully.
Fran, as though she’d been on faculty longer than five minutes, went to the fridge and peered in, then finally took out a bottle of diet soda and sat down beside Dory, twisting it open with a good ten seconds of air-release sibilance. It turned out that the Hellers—Fran and her son Eli, who was in Willa’s grade—had just moved into a house at the other end of the Langs’ long, straight street. Dory immediately knew which house it was: the one that had had the FOR SALE sign up for a long time, then the SOLD sign; and then, this summer, that had been painted in a Southwestern color scheme. The paint job was jaunty but too assertive. There were no adobes around here; the house just looked bohemian-pretentious. The drama teacher was married, but her husband Lowell, she explained, lived in Lansing, Michigan, where he was an accountant for small, struggling nonprofit companies.
“It works better for us this way,” Fran Heller told Dory Lang. “It’s not a separation; nothing like that at all. It’s just a marriage, and a solid one. The only part that’s less than ideal is that Eli misses his dad, and vice versa. But they’re very close. When I tell people, they have a hard time wrapping their heads around it, but there you are. We’re a pretty happy family, the three of us.”
Dory said that this was very interesting; the two women talked lightly, and Dory asked her what play she was thinking of putting on that winter. Fran Heller murmured that she hadn’t even begun to decide.
“I have to meet the kids first,” Fran said. “When I see what kind of talent pool I’ve got to work with, then I’ll have a better idea of what sort of play would be best.”
Ambient chatter floated through the teachers’ room. Fran was lifting the soda bottle to her lips when Abby Means appeared above them in one of her full-bodied skirts. She was like a skater who had silently glided over. “Hello,” she said.
The new drama teacher looked up. “Hello,” she said. “Fran Heller.” She put out her hand again.
“That’s my Diet Splurge.”
There was a moment of bewilderment, then Fran looked at the drink in her hand in slow comprehension; the math teacher reached down and rotated the bottle so that the other side of the curve revealed a strip of masking tape, on which was written A. MEANS. The drama teacher had just assumed the refrigerator was communal and that anyone could take anything. That was the way she saw the world; that was the way she conducted herself in it.
“Sorry,” Fran said neutrally.
“You know, I don’t really ask for much,” said Abby Means. “But the one thing I do expect is that when I reach into the fridge each day, my soda will actually be there. That no wildebeests or hobos have come and taken it away in the night.”
All the teachers watched with open interest. By the copy machine, Dave Boyd laughed at Abby Means’s latest outrageousness. The gym teacher Ruth Winik, a big strong blonde, sleepless from a nursing infant and twin toddlers at home, backed away silently, as if from the stirrings of a knife fight. Dory thought that if she herself were the new drama teacher and someone had criticized her like that, she might even have teared up a little bit in front of everyone. But Fran Heller said to Abby Means, “Oh, relax. I’m not a wildebeest and I’m not a hobo. You just like saying those words. I’m new. Cut me a little slack, and it will all be fine.”
Everyone was surprised by the drama teacher’s composure. In the background, other teachers murmured that Abby Means had gone over the top yet again. There were eye-rolls, and Ron di Canzio made the international crazy sign in the air, but Dory Lang was the one who decided to befriend Fran Heller.
“Come to dinner tomorrow night,” she said. “You and your son.”
“That’s so nice of you. But I don’t want to put you out. I know it’s a school night and all.”
“We’ll do it early. We’ll live dangerously,” Dory said, and Fran smiled and nodded, and her earrings moved, and she accepted the invitation.
It was true that school nights were a big deal. There were in-class exercises to grade, sex to have sometimes, car insurance forms to fill out, chicken breasts to marinate, standardized-test prep classes to drive a kid to, hours that had to be spent in the sheer unwind from the tight spool of the day. Feet had to go up on a footstool, eyes had to flicker and close. Everyone in Stellar Plains was embroiled in the way they lived.
On the day that Dory Lang met Fran Heller, she was struck by how the unflappable drama teacher had stood up to Abby Means—something that she herself would never have been able to do—so she insisted that Fran and her son Eli st
roll down Tam o’ Shanter Drive the next night, and that they bring nothing except themselves. That evening, at the kitchen table with Robby and Willa, Dory said, “The new drama teacher seems kind of great. Unconventional. Her husband lives in Michigan, but they’re completely married. They live in that house up the street; you know which one I mean.”
“Santa Fe, New Jersey?” said Robby.
“Exactly.”
“Maybe you’ll even try out for the play this year, Willa,” said Dory.
“Not likely,” said Willa, snorting.
“Did you just snort?” Robby asked her.
“Sort of. So?”
“It’s not like your mom suggested you try out for the Nazi Party,” he said.
Willa lightly shoved her father’s arm across the table, and they both laughed. “I wonder what play she’s going to pick,” Dory went on. “Hope it’s something good. Oh, and she has a boy in your grade—Eli. Know him?”
Her daughter looked up at her mid-milk; the fluid in the glass rocked as she shook her head. She finished drinking and said, “No, the grade’s too big.”
She was a slightly homely girl, with the suggestion of an overbite that somehow years of braces and little translucent retainers hadn’t corrected. In tenth grade Willa was very young for her age, inexperienced in life and love and pain. She was one of those redheads whose skin was always in an uneven pink and white state, like a sky streaming with clouds. She played the flute, and though she wasn’t a natural and was never chosen for solos in the orchestra, her face always grew flushed with purpose and intensity when she practiced. Dory would sometimes discreetly watch from a doorway as Willa played, noticing how her red hair swung around her, her eyes closing and popping open and then closing again, as if she were flickering in and out of consciousness.
