Cruel Beautiful World

by Caroline Leavitt

  LUCY LEANS AGAINST the side of the school until she sees Mr. Lallo—William—striding out the door, pulling off his jacket so he’s wearing just a black T-shirt, acting as if it’s ordinary for a teacher to leave at the same time as the kids. All the teachers are expected to stay until four, to make themselves available to the kids, though most of them just end up hanging around in empty classrooms, drumming their fingers on their desks or reading the newspaper. But of course, today is different.

  Lucy watches William, admires his graceful lope. He’s thirty years old and he came to the school a year ago from a free school in California called the Paradise School, and he’s different from all the other teachers, full of new ideas. The first thing he did was to take apart the rows and put all the desks in a circle. The kids watched him, astonished, unsure what to do or where to go. “Sit wherever you like,” he told them, and the kids looked so confused he had to repeat it again. “Wherever you want. Claim your space,” he said. “It can be different every day.”

  At first, Lucy was anxious in his class. She wanted to do well, but she had always struggled in school. She wondered whether she was all that smart, something so dark and shameful she tried not to think about it too much. Could she really be stupid? Charlotte was worlds smarter. Charlotte could read before she even hit kindergarten, while Lucy was always in the third reading group, the one where all the dummies were. Whenever Lucy got a teacher that Charlotte had had, the teacher was always delighted. “You’re Charlotte’s sister!” they said, as if they’d just discovered a new planet. But then Lucy would start failing, and she would feel their disappointment like a fog settling over her.

  Charlotte helped her with her homework, but even so, Lucy brought home Cs and even a few Ds. It wasn’t long before Lucy was stuck in general ed with all the kids whose only possibilities after high school were the armed forces or marriage or being a cashier at Woolworth’s. Lucy felt her heart knot. How many evenings had Charlotte sat with her, patiently explaining quadratic equations and the Magna Carta, not caring if it took all evening, making Lucy laugh, being as excited as Lucy when Lucy brought home Bs? But then Charlotte started worrying about PSATs and then SATS, about colleges and essays. She began studying through the evenings, sometimes even taking her dinner into her room so she wouldn’t waste time. Charlotte looked helplessly at Lucy when Lucy was frowning over her books. “I’m fine. I can do it on my own,” Lucy said, and she saw the relief bloom on her sister’s face. After that, Lucy just stopped asking.

  Lucy studied for hours—the history dates, the math theorems, the French verbs—but it all flew out of her head. She tried everything. Flash cards. Repeating facts before she went to sleep like a mantra, because she had heard that information would imprint on your brain almost the way it did under hypnosis. She had gone to her teachers for help after class, but all the teachers did was to give her more take-home worksheets that she still didn’t understand. She knew her PSAT scores were so low she wouldn’t get in anywhere she applied, let alone get a scholarship. Even the guidance counselor had given up on her, telling her, “Not everyone is meant to go to college,” as if that was supposed to make her feel better. Iris told her brightly, “There’s always Katie Gibbs,” and Lucy knew she meant Katherine Gibbs, the secretarial school in the city where you had to wear white gloves and skirts and stockings and the best you could hope for was a boring job typing for some man who looked down on you. “I’m not going to Katie Gibbs,” Lucy insisted.

  “It leads to jobs,” Iris said. “I just want you to have a great life. To be able to take care of yourself.” But Lucy wasn’t so sure how great a life that would be. Not then, anyway.

  THE FIRST CLASS Lucy ever did well in was William’s English class.

  He took the gray Manter Hall vocabulary books and put them in his closet. “You can learn vocabulary by reading.” He had the students underline words they didn’t know in books and look them up. He said that you should write about how a story made you feel rather than parrot what you thought the symbolism was and what the author really meant, because no one really knew that other than the author, and sometimes the author was clueless. “A table can be green just because that’s the first color the writer thought of,” William said. He made them all buy notebooks, which they were to call their journals, and when Lucy stared at the page, paralyzed, he crouched down by her desk. “Write about the thing that scares you the most,” he encouraged. That night, she wrote four pages about how afraid she was of getting stuck in Waltham, having to be a secretary or a cashier, living at home because she couldn’t afford her own place. She wrote about missing her sister, who was always studying now, how it felt as if she had lost her partner in crime. When she read her story over, it surprised her that her writing didn’t seem that bad. That it actually felt honest and even fun, like when she and Charlotte made up stories when they were kids. Later, when William handed it back to her, he was grinning. “I liked this lots, Lucy,” he said, and then she looked from him to her journal and saw the big inky A. She had never received an A, not even in Home Ec, where all you had to do was show up and make sure your apron was ironed and clean. She couldn’t wait to write more in the journal, just to get an A again, maybe on something a little less personal so she could show it to Iris and Charlotte. This is something I can do.

  William played movies in class, clips from Fellini and Antonioni. The films were surprising and strange, and while a lot of the kids put their heads on their arms and dozed, Lucy loved them. She even sort of understood them, which made her begin to wonder whether maybe she wasn’t as dim as everyone seemed to think. When William asked what they thought about the imaginary game of tennis at the end of Blow-Up, kids hunkered down in their seats, trying to be invisible, but Lucy hesitantly raised her hand. “Isn’t it about what’s real and what isn’t? How we can’t tell the difference sometimes?” she said. William beamed. “What a good point, Lucy,” he said, and she felt the flush rise up to her cheekbones. He actually thought she was smart, and it made her feel like a light that had just been switched on.

  “Ask me anything,” William would say, and slowly, hesitantly, their hands popped up. He had never been married. He had had lots of girlfriends. He had been born in Belmont and gone to college at Tufts. His father was dead, but his mother still lived in the house where he grew up. He’d tried grass, opium, acid, but was completely straight now. Yes, it had felt great, that’s why people got addicted. That was the whole point and why drugs were so dangerous. “And no, none of you should even think of trying any,” he said.

  Not only did he support the antiwar movement, but he’d marched in Boston a few months ago and even got to talk to Abbie Hoffman, who was there giving a speech. William wore a Not-So-Silent Spring button on his jacket lapel, a dot of yellow imprinted with an upraised red fist that held a sprig of greenery. “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?” he chanted, and then he told them the answer, writing on the board the Vietnam death toll for 1968—16,899—a number so staggeringly high that the kids shifted uneasily in their seats, because they knew there was a draft. The boys could be called up one day. Their lives could end, just like that. “Not if you resist the draft,” William assured them. He drew a map of Canada on the blackboard and tapped the chalk on it. “Or go here,” he said. “What a beautiful country.” His voice was silky as a promise. “It’s possible to live in a perfect world,” he said. “Peace. Love. They aren’t just dreams, but you have to fight for them.”

  William believed in civil rights, women’s lib, and progressive education, in teaching to the kids’ own personal level. School curricula were too regimented for him. They killed any desire for what he called never-ending learning. He talked about this school Summerhill in England, where there were no classes at all and you could learn whatever you wanted on whatever day you wanted. Success there was defined not by grades but by what the child himself thought was successful. “What’s a grade?” he said dismissively. “Einstein flunked math. I give gr
ades because the school requires it, but don’t think for a moment that grade is all you are. You’re all so much more.” Lucy thought of the F on her latest French test, all those past-perfect verbs swimming by her like a school of wild fish. She thought of the As and Bs he was giving her, his constant praise.

  The kids all loved him (except for Charlotte, who actually dropped out of his class the year before because she said she wasn’t learning enough). The kids all thought he was hip and cool and wonderful. He wore a tie and jacket like the other teachers, but his tie had dancing dogs on it, or words in French that he would teach them. C’est si bon. It’s so good. His suit jacket was sometimes bright purple or paisley, and even though boys were being sent home for having their hair too long, forced to cut it or slick it back with grease, William’s hair dusted his collar.

  Lucy saw the way some of the other teachers eyed him suspiciously. She heard that parents had begun to complain about the antiwar articles William handed out in class, taken from love-me-I’m-a-liberal magazines like the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly. Where were the things these kids really needed to know, like grammar and vocabulary, and the tests to prove they had mastered them? Shouldn’t they be writing research papers? Parents complained that instead of having students in Lucy’s class read Romeo and Juliet, which the other English class was reading, he had handed out paperbacks of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and even though he had paid for the books himself, the principal had made all the kids give them back, standing over William to make sure it was done. “The book is subversive,” Mr. Socker said. “It’s inappropriate. Plus, the author is one of those nut jobs who rides around in a painted bus and takes LSD, and why give these kids ideas?”

  “Why not?” William asked. “Isn’t that what school is about, ideas?” Mr. Socker just gave him a pained look and walked away.

  The next story William had the class read was taken from the Atlantic Monthly, put on ditto sheets. The kids all put the pages to their faces to inhale the fumes, eyes closed, and then Lucy saw the pages were censored, whole paragraphs blacked out. William refused to meet anyone’s eyes. His mouth was a line. All Lucy could get from the story was that it was about a soldier in Vietnam and he had killed someone and now he was wandering lost in the jungle and everything was rotting: his clothes, his skin, his mind. Too much of the story was gone for her to follow it. She was lost and she began to feel thick and stupid again. One kid complained, “This doesn’t make sense with all these words crossed out,” and William said, “You’re right, it sure doesn’t,” but his voice was weary, his head lowered, when he said it. “Put the story away,” he said finally. “Open up your vocabulary books.”

  “But we never use them—” someone said, and then William narrowed his eyes. “Just do it,” he said, and everyone dug out their Manter Halls.

  It wasn’t long before it became official, before everyone somehow knew. William had been warned, not just by the principal, but by the school board. There had been too many complaints from parents, and a few from other teachers. There had been meetings with everyone trying to decide what to do. Lucy said nothing about any of this at home, afraid that Iris would think the warning was appropriate, that Charlotte would chime in and agree. William was put on probation for not following the curriculum, for talking about the war, for discussing his personal life, for encouraging the students to call him William, which was not school policy, and which certainly broke the barriers that needed to be there.

  One day, William was absent from class. They had a substitute, an older woman in a green suit and tight, dry curls, who scratched her name across the green board in chalk: Mrs. Marmoset. “Like the animal,” she told them, and one of the boys in the back made his hands into claws. “I saw that,” Mrs. Marmoset said. “And my talons leave scars. Just so you know.”

  “Let’s get this room in order, shall we?” she said. She made them put the desks back in rows, took attendance so she could seat them alphabetically, and then drilled them on vocabulary words, raising her arms as if she were conducting an orchestra, shocked at how they couldn’t conjugate irregular verbs or diagram a sentence or use the word mendacious in a sentence. She shook her head, clucking her teeth. “This is not good, people,” she said. “What have you been doing all year?”

  Halfway through a drill of past-perfect verbs, William showed up in the doorway, his shirt rumpled, his hair askew, his tie like a noose around his neck. As soon as he strode into the room, the air felt charged. “I’ll take over now,” he said to Mrs. Marmoset. He said something to her quietly. Mrs. Marmoset looked at him doubtfully. “Well, I don’t think—” she said in her normal voice, but he murmured something else to her, something more insistent, and then she nodded reluctantly.

  “Work hard, people,” she said to the class. Then she left the room.

  Everyone waited, rustling in their seats, but William didn’t teach. Instead he surveyed the class, as if he were taking their measure, as if he expected them to do something for him. He looked at all the conjugated verbs on the blackboard, the books open on their desks, all set in fierce rows, and then he sat at his desk and put his head in his hands. “Mr. Lallo?” someone in the back said, but William stayed motionless. “William?” a girl called, and he lifted his head for a moment and then lowered it again. They could see he was crying. Lucy sat frozen at her desk. No one spoke, and then the bell rang and everyone quietly filed out.

  After that, William’s classes weren’t as much fun. He stopped showing movies except for one he said he was required to show, which was about the dangers of drugs. A boy in the film went crazy after taking one drag of a joint and was put in a straitjacket and led away by two doctors, while his parents helplessly cried. A girl took a tab of acid and then shouted, “I can fly!” and jumped off a roof, flapping her arms, while her friends cheered. Lucy glanced at William to see whether he thought this film was as moronic as she did, but he was staring at his hands, his face unreadable.

  He began using textbooks, and everyone knew it was because the principal kept showing up without notice, sitting at the back of the class, almost as if he were daring William to go ahead, make trouble, and see what would happen.

  It made the kids love William more, making him an even greater hero. Everyone swapped William stories as if they were trading cards. This kid, Ronnie Bortman, had called him at two in the morning, wanting to kill himself, and William had stayed on the phone with him until dawn, talking him down. Now, thanks to William’s recommendation letter, Ronnie was headed to Berkeley. There were rumors that he had helped a girl get an abortion, a safe one, even though it was illegal, because William had a doctor friend who owed him a favor. No one even knew who the girl was. That was how good William was at keeping your secrets.

  NOW, WALKING OUT of the school, William doesn’t even glance at Lucy. His gaze is a laser, straight ahead. Debbie Polley and Andrea Dickens, two other girls who have crushes on him, are running to talk to him now, and Lucy feels a whip of jealousy, before she reminds herself that the only one he loves is her.

  It’s been going on for six months now and they are both very careful. Today they are leaving Waltham and moving to rural Pennsylvania, where he has a new job lined up, where they can be together all the time, where Lucy won’t have to feel that she is about to spontaneously combust if she can’t touch his face, his hand, the slope of his back. Lucy will never feel alone again. No one will ever call her stupid. She can write all she wants—which is all she’s been doing now—and he will help her. But she knows what else could happen. She’s a minor. William could be arrested, especially for taking her over state lines. She shakes the doom-and-gloom feeling off. No one will find them, she tells herself.

  As soon as Lucy sees William, she wants to run and kiss him, but instead she sticks to their plan, checking her watch and pretending to be waiting for someone. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees him get into his little yellow Bug and peel out. She knows exactly where he’s going.

  When t
he crowd of students has thinned out, when she’s just about the last one left, she walks over to the Star Market, two blocks away. She strides casually across the parking lot, past the silver skeletons of the shopping carts, the occasional shopper wearily getting into a car, probably pondering the price of groceries and not taking any note of Lucy. She remembers the way William looks at her when they are making love (she would never call it balling, the way the other kids do, a coarse, ugly word—that’s not what they do), the way he always says, “I love you so fucking much,” when he comes, as if he is crying it, while she lies quietly underneath him, just watching his face. He tells her not to worry that she hasn’t had an orgasm yet, he will teach her. But she doesn’t really care. What she loves is the feel of his skin against hers, the way he keeps saying, “How did I get so lucky?”

  She remembers the day he found her eating lunch in his empty classroom way back in December, because it was the only room that was open all the time, the one place where she might have some privacy. She was crying into her peanut butter sandwich because she had come out of gym class to find that one of the tough girls who didn’t like her—and for no reason at all, as far as Lucy could see—had tied her tights in a knot again, that the silver bracelet she had hidden in her shoe was missing. She walked out of the dressing room to look around, and the girls were watching her, smiling. “You ever hear of one of these?” one girl said, holding up a comb, and the others laughed while Lucy’s face flamed and her hands flew to her hair. Lucy had strode past them to the gym teacher’s office, but the teacher had sighed. “Who wears an expensive silver bracelet to gym class?” she asked Lucy.