Saying Grace

by Beth Gutcheon

  She looked at Henry briefly and she could see his face was hard, as if he’d offered her his heart and she’d stuffed it back into his pocket. Maybe that’s what he thought he’d done.

  “We’ve shared so much,” he said.

  “Please—don’t say any more.” She wondered what she would do if he ignored her. Climb into the back seat? Throw herself out of the car? He could tell her whatever he wanted to.

  Finally, he said, with an acid edge to his voice, “Isn’t the truth supposed to make us free?”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Nothing will make us free.”

  The car flew past the turnoff to Monument Valley. They were averaging eighty mph, sometimes faster. When they hit Route 98 north, Henry turned onto it; Rue had no idea where they were going and realized Henry had studied the map. When, exactly? When they got into the car this morning? After lunch? They sped through the cool alien landscape in silence. There were moments in which Rue felt a plea rising like a prayer, to whom she couldn’t imagine. Stop, let’s start over again, there was a way this day might have come out all right. But there wasn’t. It had only felt like it, because for one day they had been in a world like an alternate universe.

  When they hit the town of Page, it didn’t take long to find the airport. It was small and clean, like Flagstaff’s. Henry pulled up to the curb and got out, taking the keys with him to unlock the trunk. He got out his suitcase and set it on the sidewalk, along with the raincoat she’d brought for him for some idiotic reason, even though he pointed out that Canyon de Chelly was in a desert. He walked back to her window on the passenger side.

  “I can’t stand to be with you but apart from you,” he said.

  “I can’t stand it either,” she said, looking up at him. His thick blond hair had gone mostly gray, a dense ash color. His eyes, blue and pale behind his glasses, were red-rimmed. She wondered if he had slept the night before.

  “Then we agree,” he said, and dropped the car keys into her lap. She watched him walk into the airport without looking back at her.

  She sat for a while at the curb, feeling how sore her body was. She wondered briefly if she should have let him confess, and then dismissed it. If she had ever believed that allowing someone to cause you that kind of pain would make you closer in the end, she didn’t anymore. It would cost too much. The tears, the learning of dates and times and images she would then have to learn to forget. It might have helped him, it might not. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t afford it.

  She got out and walked around to the driver’s side, got in, and started the car.

  The hardest thing about walking into the office on Monday morning was wondering how she could look at Emily. The anger and pain this thought caused her was so great she was almost grateful for it. The phrase “economy of pain” had occurred to her; why not take all the horror life had in store for you in one crushing dose, and if at the end you could still get up off the floor, maybe you’d be allowed some decades of happiness.

  One day at a time, she said to herself. One day at a time. If you can keep waking up in the morning, if you can keep going through the motions, maybe one day the excruciating tide will recede and you will find you are alive again, walking on dry land in the sun. Some years from now. The thing to do now is prove to yourself that you cannot be crushed.

  Emily was at her desk. She looked neat and pretty. Her blond hair was held by a velvet band and she was wearing a flowered shirtwaist dress. She had that friendly confidence that made her so good at this job, that had made her such a pleasure to have around. She did not seem to be working at anything; she seemed to be waiting for Rue. As Rue came through the door, their eyes met. Steady on both sides.

  “How was it?” Emily asked, her voice quiet.

  “Beautiful.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Canyon de Chelly. Monument Valley. Lake Powell.”

  “I’ve always wanted to see Lake Powell,” Emily said.

  “You must,” said Rue. She wondered if Emily knew where Henry was now.

  She walked to her office, pausing for a hug from Mike. On her desk she found messages literally stacked. She had been on leave for two weeks, which was a week longer, Chandler pointed out to the Executive Committee, than was industry standard for bereavement. As she looked through the pink heap of messages, she blessed Mike for keeping the peace as long as he had. On the stroke of nine, she carried her mug of coffee into his office, and closed the door.

  “Let’s get into it,” she said. “It looks as if expelling Glenn Malko hasn’t solved our problems.”

  “Expelling him was all right. But unexpelling him was a disaster,” said Mike. “That walk of triumph of his did more damage than Kenny Lowen caused in a year. The whole grade is running wild because we cut down their homeboy hero. And they learned there’s safety in numbers too: we can’t expell the whole grade.”

  Hughie Bache, Robey Hearne, and Jose French were vying to outdo each other in rudeness and intractability. Each had been suspended by Mr. Dianda with a warning of expulsion, and each had laughed it off. The way they saw it, if they got expelled they’d be heroes too, like Glenn. Robert Noonan would no longer allow Hughie in Latin class; he sent him to the library with extra homework during classtime, which made life difficult for Mrs. Nafie. Since Hughie had drunk the slush from Mrs. Moredock’s ice pack, he and Jose had decided to specialize in terrorizing her during art class, which was by no means hard to do. They had frequently provoked her to unprofessional language and behavior. Some of the girls were even in on the uprising, and the upper-school faculty was now so hostile to the class that they were refusing to go along as chaperones on the annual three-day science field trip to Santa Catalina. Without chaperones the trip would be canceled. Every parent in the grade was up in arms about that, since the Santa Catalina trip was a god-given right of eighth-graders, and all had appointments with Rue to demand that she fix it. And the only person, bizarrely, who seemed to have no part in the mess was Kenny Lowen.

  The faculty was exhausted because the minute Rue left campus Chandler made his presence felt in a dozen threatening ways. He now not only hated Rue, he saw the whole faculty as his enemy. The teachers felt left without protection or leadership, and on top of it they were frantically trying to write curriculum reports that would satisfy Chandler before their contracts came up for review.

  Of course there was another Catherine crisis. One day Mrs. Bramlett, upset because her daughter had scored poorly on her ERBs, demanded a meeting with Mike to denounce Catherine Trainer. Mike told her to go discuss the matter with Mrs. Trainer first. Karen Bramlett marched down to where the faculty was eating lunch, asked Mrs. Trainer for a minute of her time, and then railed at her through the lunch period and right through recess. By the time she was done, Catherine’s food had been cleared away and she had a headache from hunger and a Civil War class to teach. The next day, Catherine had just emerged from the kitchen with a plate of hot lasagna when Karen Bramlett appeared again, demanding to talk to her.

  “I am entitled to forty minutes off for lunch, Mrs. Bramlett,” Catherine had said.

  “This is the only time I can talk to you,” Mrs. Bramlett answered angrily. “I have a meeting at the courthouse at one-fifteen.”

  “This is the only time I can eat my lunch,” said Catherine, sitting down.

  Karen whirled off, furious, to find Mr. Dianda, who was in the development office trying to help the temporary secretary work the mailing list program.

  “Mr. Dianda, I have to talk to you right now.”

  Mike wheeled on her. “Mrs. Bramlett, you will have to make an appointment.”

  “This is urgent. Mrs. Trainer has been outrageously rude.”

  “Mrs. Bramlett, it will have to wait! I only have this temp for a day, we have to get out our Annual Report, and this goddamn program has printed a hundred and twenty dollars worth of mailing labels in ASCII!”

  Mrs. Bramlett was momentarily halted.

  “W
here’s the book, the whatchamacallit, the documentation?”

  “There isn’t any.”

  “What program is it?”

  “It’s a homemade thing that some Luddite software genius gave us ten years ago. The only person who can work it is Rue.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Why don’t you just go buy a program that you can understand?”

  “Because we could buy a new program for thirty-nine-fifty, and then pay two thousand dollars in secretarial costs to reenter the data. The Board won’t authorize it.”

  By the time Rue had spent a half-hour with Mike, which wasn’t nearly enough, the line of people waiting to see her was out the door.

  First was Carson McCann.

  It turned out that Ashby had gotten a failing grade on a spelling test and claimed to his mother that Mrs. Percy had made him sit in the corner where he couldn’t hear.

  “What did Mrs. Percy say?” Rue asked.

  “She said he’s been in the corner before and can hear there fine. But it’s his word against hers. Chandler said the fairest thing would be to give him the test again.”

  “What did Mr. Dianda say?”

  “I didn’t ask him. I told Mrs. Percy that I wanted him retested….”

  “Carson. For heaven’s sake. Read your Trustee Handbook. Page thirty-one, Board members cannot dictate decisions to staff. You have no right to give a teacher an order. You’re her employer, don’t you understand? You carry a huge sword, and if you can’t see it, she can. You can make your wishes known as a parent, you can discuss it with Mike or me, but I can’t run a school if every member of the Board is running it with me! I can’t run a school if every child who gets a poor grade can get the Board to order a retest!”

  Mrs. McCann was slightly abashed. “Oh,” she said. “Well, she refused to do it.”

  “Good. Do you have a copy of the Handbook?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “Why don’t you ask Emily to get you another one?”

  Emily was at the door. Rue’s meetings were scheduled every fifteen minutes. Some were going to have to be cut to ten, or she wouldn’t have a chance to go to the bathroom.

  “Mrs. Bramlett is here.”

  Karen Bramlett came in loaded for bear. “Here are Melanie’s ERB scores from last year. Look at this…a twenty-percentile drop in math from last year. Rue, she’s saying she hates math, that girls can’t do math. Last year it was her favorite subject!” Rue studied the two sets of scores.

  “I tried to explain to Mrs. Trainer how important it is to praise Melanie when she gets something right. She needs a grade, or a star, or something.” Karen was near tears. “She did fine last year with Mr. Merton. But when she hits a snag and nobody helps her, she feels like a moron, and when she’s depressed she can’t learn. Nobody can!”

  “What did Mrs. Trainer say?”

  “She said that Melanie hadn’t been turning in her homework. Then Melanie told me that she did hand in the homework, but Mrs. Trainer never graded it. Or else she handed it back so late that Melanie never knew what she needed help with before they moved on. Now she’s at the point she can’t do any of it because she didn’t understand what came before! And when I came back to explain that to Mrs. Trainer, she refused to talk to me.”

  Rue felt utterly overwhelmed. It was nine-fifty in the morning, there were three-alarm fires all over campus, and she wanted to tell everyone to take their miserable problems and their spoiled living kids who had futures, and shove them. She wanted to get into bed with a bottle of scotch and cry.

  Her next appointment was with Catherine Trainer.

  Catherine came in in a swivet. Nobody appreciated her, the parents were out of control, Cora Alba-Fish in Primary was putting out food for feral cats, and the cats lurked around the campus and murdered her birdies.

  “Catherine,” said Rue, “Did you tell Mrs. Bramlett that Melanie doesn’t do her homework?”

  “No! I said she doesn’t apply herself.”

  “Does she do her homework?”

  Catherine blustered. “There are many blanks in the grade book for Melanie. I believe that when I have the children grade their own homework, she fails to enter the grade because she’s done poorly.”

  “You believe that.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t know for sure. It may be she hasn’t done the homework at all, it may be you returned it ungraded.”

  Catherine flared. “I am sure I have never returned a paper ungraded.”

  “Do you remember I warned you that you were to grade all papers yourself and return them within the week at the very latest? That I preferred them graded overnight?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember that I told you absolutely that you were to observe all guidelines in the Faculty Handbook, and that includes grading tests yourself? No self-grading, except for a sound pedagogical reason?”

  “I had a good reason.”

  “What was it?”

  “I showed that I trusted them.”

  “Mrs. Trainer, did you refuse to have a meeting with Mrs. Bramlett when she asked for it?”

  “I had met with her for over an hour the very day before! She…”

  “So the answer is ‘yes’? You refused?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Catherine, I’m sorry. You’ve been a valuable part of the school for many years, and I think of you as a friend. But you have been warned repeatedly, you’ve been given clear guidelines for improvement, and if anything, things keep getting worse. I am sorry. But you are fired.”

  Catherine was stunned. As she stared at Rue, the color drained from her face, like a person going into physical shock.

  The faculty reacted to Catherine’s firing as if it were one maddened animal. They were already feeling taunted and jeered, but this was a frontal assault. Rue had broken a cardinal rule; she had listened to an unreasonable parent and acted without hearing the teacher’s side. In one swipe Rue had sliced herself out of the net of support and comfort that had been her hope for safety.

  If anyone, including Rue, thought any allowance would be made for her emotional state, they got over it fast. Things piled up too quickly in a school; people’s children, their jobs, their dignity were at stake. Everyone had problems. It seemed that once they started piling faggots onto this fire, no one could stop. Rue was biased, out of touch, old-fashioned. Rue thought that conventional spelling was important. She thought children should memorize poetry and do math worksheets. (“Drill and kill, drill and kill” was the name of that pedagogical antique.) She had told the third-grade teacher that the singular of dice was not dice, and turned out to be right. She had pointed out that kudos was not plural and turned out to be right. She had told the Latin teacher that you did not spell it “beyond the pail.” She corrected when teachers used “lay” for “lie” or “hung” for “hanged,” and people were stung, and they remembered. There was resentment. There was a sense of a pot on the boil, pressing for an outlet.

  After a few days of this, Rue went to seek out Bonnie. She found her sitting with Evelyn Douglas at one of the lunch tables under the live oaks. The were both holding empty coffee mugs; Evelyn was talking and Bonnie was listening. Rue hoped she could join them, but as soon as she approached, Evelyn stood up. “To be continued,” she said to Bonnie, and walked away.

  Rue looked after her for a moment, then sat down.

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” Bonnie asked her.

  “Please,” said Rue.

  When Bonnie had returned with two mugs of hot coffee, she settled down across from Rue, watching her with her smokey diamond eyes.

  “How are you finding married life?” Rue asked.

  Bonnie smiled. “Just as I hoped it would be,” she said. And after a pause, “How are you finding married life?”

  “Are you a witch?” Rue asked.

  “I had a great-grandmother in Nova Scotia who was supposed to be. I’m sorry to say I never knew her. Who named you ‘Rue’?�
��

  “My mother. ‘With rue my heart is laden.’ One hardly knows how to interpret it. My father preferred the line from Hamlet: ‘O! You must wear your rue with a difference.’”

  “Names are important.”

  “Yes. We named Georgia after the Ray Charles song.”

  Bonnie smiled. Rue smiled too, bitterly, and studied the weathered wood of the tabletop. Her heel tapped, as if she was hearing the song in her head.

  “‘No peace I find.’ To answer your question, I think my married life is over.”

  Bonnie reached across the table and touched her hand.

  “I hope not,” said Bonnie.

  “I hope not too. But hoping won’t help.” Rue sat silent for a bit. “When you marry young, especially if you marry the first person you really love, you imagine that being together gives you some special protection. That just holding on to each other will keep out the dark.”

  She took a deep breath, and it was hard to do, since she felt that her body was bound around by constricting bands of pain and pressure. “But now I see that nothing keeps you safe. Not love, not rules, not principles. And yet, you have to behave as if they do. You have to lead a principled life because you have to, but it won’t keep chaos at bay. In fact, it won’t make any difference.”

  Bonnie watched her gravely, and mercifully said nothing.

  After a pause, Rue said, “I don’t suppose you can tell me what Evelyn Douglas was talking to you about?”

  Bonnie shook her head no. But she said, “The faculty seems quite upset.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Someone told me that Catherine Trainer is going to sue.”

  “Of course she’s going to sue. Everybody’s going to sue everybody. It’s a brave new world, if actions have consequences you can have them legally removed.”

  Bonnie sat quiet until Rue, sounding suddenly exhausted, went on.

  “She should sue, because I fired her completely wrong. I had laid all the groundwork to counsel her out, at the end of the year or next year at the latest. At the very least, I should have listened to her side of the story. There are always two sides. There are always two sides. I knew it. I just didn’t care. She whined.”