In her first-period class, a boy named Calvin Reed throttles another boy, named Jonathan Lawrence. Reed is a juvie, in school to avoid being sent to the county’s juvenile detention center. But it’s not the kid’s t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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circumstances that are particularly unusual. It is, instead, Calvin Reed himself.
Tolerance, that happy but complicated matter, dictates the confidence that treasures are hiding inside a painfully unappealing countenance, and, of course, Elizabeth believes this. In any case, she has to.
Unfortunately, Calvin Reed is epically unattractive, and it just so happens that sometimes, regrettably, ugly is as ugly looks.
She had Calvin all last year, and progress was glacial. He took up way too much of her time. There were arguments with his parents about it—two people of such enormous, grasping, busy selfishness that several of Elizabeth’s conferences with them became like wrangling at the marriage counselor’s office, with Elizabeth in the unwanted role of the counselor. The father described himself as an independent entrepreneur.
He was bald to the crown of his head, and wore a long, graying pigtail, so that it looked as though his hair had simply begun to slide off to the back. His independent entrepreneurship, it turned out, was the transporting and sale of marijuana. Over the summer, Elizabeth read about his arrest and incarceration. He’s serving a two-year sentence in Norfolk for possession of an enormous cache of dope, which he attempted to sell out of the trunk of his car to an undercover agent. Calvin himself has possession and assault charges pending. Elizabeth knows this from the student affairs office.
She knows also that the boy’s mother is gone, too, now—spending her time in a Buddhist commune somewhere in Texas. Mrs. Reed, apparently, still lives the hippie lifestyle, an exemplar of how certain fad-dish developments in the cultural landscape can hang on in the lives of the pathetic and the uninspired.
Calvin’s uncle, according to the information on his forms, has been the responsible party since the middle of August.
The law requires that children in the schools be given whatever they seem to require for their education, and what Calvin has required, in nearly every instance, is constant attention. The boy exudes that air of gloom that makes one fear that his soul is as misshapen as his body. He’s a couple of fractions over six feet ten inches tall, and breathtakingly thick through the hips and legs. His whole form suggests one of those 110
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orange traffic cones the Department of Motor Vehicles uses to close off a lane. His eyes are so small that they look like dull, facetless, hazel-colored stones, flat and cold. And, during the summer, in some unconscionable lapse of discipline or sense, his parents or his uncle allowed him to dye his hair a terrible shade of green. It’s the hue of the bottom of a very dirty fish tank. And he has it done up in stiff, polished-looking spikes that add another six inches to his height. He could be some kind of pre-historic creature. Calvinosaurus.
As if all this were not enough, there’s the matter of his voice: when poor Calvin opens his mouth to speak, what comes out is a squeak more girlish than Betty Boop’s, and his small, uneven teeth are something like the algae shade of his hair. He has a terrible overbite, bad, splotched, pocked, too pale, pasty skin, a weak jaw, and a small, unattractively upturned, large-nostriled, piggy nose.
Mostly, though, it’s those hard, dull, pebble-like eyes.
One of the exercises she has devised for her own sense of the personalities behind the facades of ignorant savagery in the room is to have them think about themselves metaphorically: she writes on the board, “People think I’m . . .” and “But really I’m . . .” and tells them to fill in the answers. Because the exercise is fairly simple and short, she breaks them all into groups of four or five and spends some time talking to each group. She joins Calvin Reed’s group last. In barely readable scrawl, he has written: “People think I’m a pig. But really I’m a hog.”
When he reads this aloud in that group, the other three—Jonathan Lawrence and two girls in identical shades of blood-dark lipstick—break into laughter. It’s unclear whether they are laughing at the expression or the voice. Calvin looks at them, obviously surprised, and then surly and suspicious; the little squeaky voice comes: “Don’t laugh at me.” And he reaches across the small space between the desks and grasps Jonathan’s throat. The boy’s eyes bug out; he immediately turns blue. Elizabeth has to work to get the bigger boy to let go, and when he does, he glowers at her. A familiar look. It all comes back to her, as if for the first time—the whole strain of last year.
“Oh, Calvin, not already,” she says.
He folds his arms and hunches down in the seat.
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Elizabeth goes on, “Don’t do that again.” It occurs to her, the memory of a curse, that in a way she’s already been forced to put herself among those who have brought this huge, unappealing boy to his present state of social maladjustment. The school year isn’t even five minutes old. Quickly, she adds, “And Calvin has shown confidence in us by letting us hear what he wrote. So we’re going to respect that. Right?”
Jonathan presses his hands to his throat, staring with terror at Calvin. The others have gained some control, because of the threat Calvin now poses, sitting there with his scowling, doughy, mottled face.
They’ve put their collusion into hiding, exchanging frightened looks, and putting their hands over their mouths.
“Let’s just do the assignment,” Elizabeth says.
Calvin turns his attention to the paper on which he has expressed the terms of his self-loathing. Elizabeth takes him aside.
“Do you understand the exercise?” she asks him.
“Yes,” he squeaks. “They can’t laugh at me.”
“Maybe they think you meant it as a joke.”
He stares. Those little eyes. It’s hard not to turn away from him. She holds what he’s written toward him and says, “Is this what you really feel?”
He looks at her. “Huh?”
“It isn’t a trick question, Calvin. I really want to know. This exercise makes it so I can be a better teacher.”
He simply gapes at what he has written. “I get it—the exercise.”
“I’m talking about what you said.”
“I said I get it.”
“I mean, what you wrote.”
He looks at it again.
“Calvin?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t like it.”
“I’m not trying to give you a hard time,” she says to him. “Why don’t you try the exercise again.”
He looks at the paper, picks up one corner of it, as though it is something under which he might find a worm or an insect.
“What do you think?”
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He takes the pencil and holds it and seems to concentrate, and she rises, thinking to move on to one of the other groups, but then pauses, because he has begun to write, and she’s curious. He writes: People think I’m a jerk. But really I’m a pig.
“No,” she says. “You don’t think that.”
And she’s suddenly seized by a feeling of such exasperation that she nearly gasps. It comes to her that she lacks the energy for even one day of trying to penetrate the leaden exterior of distrust and unawareness in which this lumbering boy is encased. She has the rest of the day to get through, the rest of the year. All the other fragmented or incomplete personalities await her attention. She says, “Try again. No pigs or jerks or hogs this time.” And she moves off, to Jonathan, who’s staring at Calvin with a kind of astonishment.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asks Jonathan.
“Indubitably,” he says.
She waits a moment while he writes. “People think I’m shy, but really I’m gregarious and outgoing. When I enter a room, I’m always looking for a friend. I live with my mother and little sister, and grandfather an
d he’s going to teach me how to play guitar. The terpsichorean muse interests me greatly.” Elizabeth thinks of reading this about the terpsichorean muse to Will. The boy pauses, one hand going lightly to his throat again. He’s ruddy and freckled around the eyes, which are dark blue and rather sad. “Some people think I’m a bit stand-offish but it’s really that I’m reserved. I like conversing with others. I like to draw.
Cliffs and rocks and buildings pique my interest.”
She visits the other groups, and then has to take a few minutes resolving one more tussle: Calvin Reed and another boy, over something that the other boy said about basketball. Calvin, she remembers, is sensitive about his height. The other boy brandishes a cuticle knife. It’s about to be a knife fight. She writes referrals for them both to the present assistant principal, Mr. Petit, who will, of course, do little—beyond an hour or two in the STOP room and the confiscation of the makeshift weapon. Mr. Petit’s failing is that while he’s an excellent teacher of math and a gentle, accepting soul, he is also far too lenient.
She sends the two boys off to him, and then returns to Jonathan, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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who’s tapping the end of his pencil against his front teeth, staring out the window.
“You’re through with the assignment?”
“Indubitably.”
“That’s a yes?”
He looks at her. There’s now something caught-out in his expression.
She has embarrassed him about his choice of words.
“Write me something else,” she says to him. “Just for the fun of it.”
By one o’clock, when James The-Savior-of-Humankind (one of her secret pet names for him) comes with his cart and his neatly stacked lessons and mimeographed sheets, she’s gotten into the flow of things.
Though there’s something nagging at her in the back of her mind, a sense of something crowding her. She knows perfectly well what it is, of course, and she tries to put the Crazies away from her thoughts. Mr.
J. Christ (another of her pet names for him) approaches, and she has the thought that he is indeed a dour, gloomy man, without a trace of humor or lightheartedness anywhere in his countenance, and it isn’t just his last name. She has seen him in restaurants in the town, with the same stern, mirthless, stonily miserable expression, chewing on a sandwich or swallowing spoonfuls of soup. Sometimes she sees him in the cafeteria during lunch, eating something whitish—chicken salad? tuna fish?
coleslaw? potato salad?—out of a Tupperware container. He’s deeply secular—in what seems to Elizabeth to be a nearly fanatical and studied reverse of what anyone might expect from someone with his name.
“I’m not staying through the semester,” he tells her. This is something he has talked about so frequently over the last couple of years that she almost fails to hear it. “I’ve got another job lined up. They’ll have to get somebody else.”
“It’s the beginning of the year, J.C.”
“I’m getting another job. I just applied at the Census Bureau. The government. Better benefits and better pay. I’m gone. You’ll see. And I’ve told you not to call me that.”
“Well, and I’ve told you I don’t want to hear any more about your frustrations on the job.”
She stands there, waiting for him to respond to this if he wishes to.
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But he folds his arms and turns slightly, facing the door. Students are filing in, chattering, pushing and shoving one another, throwing pieces of balled-up paper and straws from the cafeteria. Elizabeth raises her voice in the usual manner, calling for everyone to settle down, feeling the sameness of it, and realizing that, whereas she had once felt this very sameness as a kind of refuge or respite in the middle of the various crises that were always arising, now even the crises have achieved a sameness.
It’s discouraging, but, for some reason also weirdly exhilarating, as if something in her expectations has been vindicated and the vindication is satisfying. She looks at James Christ, whose class in mathematics this is, and decides to let him control the disorder erupting through the door.
“I don’t even like math anymore sometimes,” Christ says. He’s very thin and has trouble keeping weight on. He has told Elizabeth he has a condition that makes it hard for him to digest anything. He’s always having to run to the bathroom. Nervous lower abdomen, he calls it.
There’s often the faintest redolence of stomach acid about him, like the fumes of colic in an infant.
Elizabeth wonders why he wouldn’t simply change the spelling of his name, take the h out of it. There’s something obstinate about it, as if he secretly likes the circumstance and only complains about it to draw attention to it and to himself.
Christ goes on: “Will you miss me when I go?” This is another familiar tack. He asks her this nearly every day. It would be like a running joke between them if he didn’t ask it in complete earnestness.
“We’ll all miss you,” she tells him. This is what she always tells him.
Then she goes on to say, “But you’re not leaving yet, right?”
“Soon,” he says portentously. He’ll be here ten years from now.
Twenty. Forty. He’ll never change a thing, because he enjoys his misery. His days are spent in the delectation of his status as a victim. He’ll avidly tell you that when he was a child, he was abused. It’s hampered him, he’ll say, his whole life. Crippled him. Lazy parents. Bad priests, sexual pillage, bungling school authorities, the cruelty of other students.
The full gamut of offenders. Especially, of course, the parents and the priests. It’s all one story of his walking sorrows, and she has grown progressively more annoyed by it every time he brings it up.
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But, then, a lot of what she has to do in a day annoys her now.
She thinks of Will, sitting in the peace and quiet of the bookstore, tending to the accounts, talking to the customers who come by, some of whom are there simply to visit with him. He has his life arranged quite well.
When they were first married, the arrangements—her teaching, his tending the bookstore—seemed natural; it was the way things were in the first place and there seemed to be no reason to change anything.
Now she has to work to dispel the sense of being depleted by it all. It’s the Crazies, she knows. But she feels that there’s a kind of leveling going on in her heart.
It’s become difficult not to see Will as someone who’s simply drifting, not really doing much of anything except coasting through the days in that little store. Because she’s always having to evaluate students, she finds herself evaluating him—and it has occurred to her that he lacks ambition or very much in the way of initiative. He’s oddly passive with her, malleable and sweet, but also rather lackluster and stolid. Nothing seems particularly to engage him, as if he has reached some plateau in himself and wishes not to move from it, not to make waves or disturb the calm. Conflict or confrontation of any kind always distresses him; he’ll do anything to avoid a scene. At night, she’s been visited by a re-curring dream that the first Elizabeth returns and wishes to claim her rightful place at the table. That is the phrase the other woman uses in the dream. And, in the dream, rightful place seems quite logical and just.
A moment later, like a stirring of the world to teach her about the connectedness of everything, her cell phone vibrates. It’s Will. She presses the little button and says, “I can’t really talk now.”
“Just wondering how your day’s going.”
“Fine,” she says, though she doesn’t really feel fine at all.
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1.
In the first week of October, Oliver meets with the old ladies about their plans for the house. He drives over there in the truck, in a rainstorm.
For a time, he has to wait outside, while the two ladies gesture at him from the house. Fiona starts toward him with an umbrella, b
ut a gust of wind blows it backward, after nearly pulling her with it across the drenched lawn. She hurries back inside, having dropped the umbrella on the sidewalk. The rain comes down in sheets. Oliver takes a section of the day’s newspaper and sits, reading it for a minute, then, holding it over his head, hurries to the doorway and in. They bustle around him, offering a towel and wiping up the water that spills from him where he stands in the foyer. He accepts their ministrations, noting with a little shock that the broken glass still lies in its area of dust in the dining room. It seems to him that they’ve forgotten it altogether.
They give him a deposit check for materials, in the amount of nine thousand dollars. They’ve drawn up detailed plans—Holly has experience with this sort of thing, having worked for a time with an architectural firm, just out of high school. There has been a rather lengthy discussion between the two women about whose side would get more windows. The t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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argument is not what you’d expect: each wants to give what would be the side with more windows to the other. Their disagreement is the result of attempted sacrifice. Fiona says she’ll offer it up to Jesus, living in the part of the divided house that has one less window. Oliver stares for a moment, wondering if she can be serious.
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