Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  Here’s what I thought, no kidding, this was really the line on the brain marquee: I can take him. Like it was going to be a wrestling match, a slow burn, touch football but I could sustain a full body blow. It was as if he had the words Worthy Adversary stamped on his forehead.

  I directed the same even look of hatred at him that I had given Alan, now crumpled off to the side on his hapless haunches by the radiator. Mr. P, who was not British but had lived there for a time and was also known as the MP, looked back at me.

  “I see what you mean,” he said, levelly, and we neither of us blinked.

  It’s surprisingly easy in a small town to get it on with a teacher. (Anyone who’s been there knows exactly what I am talking about.) It may be that after priests, teachers are the easiest mark around. Which doesn’t make me proud and should make them less so.

  Early on, driving me home from a rehearsal once, he said, “I’m not going to ask you up to see my etchings.”

  When I didn’t say anything, he tapped his right fist lightly on the gearshift twice, glanced over, and said, “Do you know what I mean?”

  I didn’t but I thought he was embarrassing himself and so I didn’t say anything. It was early evening and the world was all purple bruised shadows. Out of the car window, I saw Winnie Hastings, the elementary school art teacher, fiddling with the gas pump outside the Mini Mart on Main Street. I had a sudden longing for the smell of markers and those rich pigmented finger paints—what are they called?—for pungent glue and big hairy sheets of construction paper.

  Etchings? What kind of talk was that? What movie was he in?

  And anyway, of course, he lied.

  He would come up behind me in the hallway. The MP. He stood at the door of the auditorium and held it open. The Master Pretender, Titch called him. He waited by his office. The Maestro Player, the Manipulative Parasite, the Mixed-up Professor, the Mystery Partner, and then increasingly obscurely as time went on, the Meal Pincher, the Milk Pusher, and her final favorite, the Mad Peanut.

  Once: the Missing Parent.

  “What does that mean?”

  She rolled her eyes at me.

  “Well, you are missing one. And the MP is about that age.”

  “Gross,” I said, lapsing into junior high. “Don’t do that. Don’t Spock me. You’re not Dr. Spock.” (Titch’s name for the therapist her mother sent her to, following her parents’ messy divorce and their remarriages. “Going to be Spocked now. Spock time,” she would say, somehow acerbic and cheerful at the same time. “It’s for the ears,” she had told me, “not the detachment.”)

  She was silent for a minute, twisting her hair around her index finger, and frowning at the ends. We were sitting outside the public library waiting for her mom to pick us up and the breeze was spring cold.

  “Well, what is it then? What are you doing?”

  It was my turn to be silent.

  “Because I mean, it’s not like you have a shortage of boys,” she said jokingly, trying to defuse the direct question.

  I started to say something about how the MP’s attention was a different kind of attention, but I pretty much stopped before I started.

  “Seriously?” she said. “You want that? I mean I pay attention to you and I’m not trying to sleep with you. Double win.”

  Then, backing off when I went silent again, easily, good-humoredly, “Fine, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  At the beginning I had a fleeting new conviction, an unfamiliar power. I could feel the MP’s watching me, which made everything heightened, and for a while everything at school was also in part a performance for him. I thought about what I was wearing, who he would see me with, where we might cross paths in school. I knew he did the same—especially once he learned my class schedule—so the entire school was a charged zone. At any moment, he might materialize, or I might, around any given corner, just spring into view like a jungle cat. When that happened, as it was bound to at least once a day, we would studiously or carelessly ignore one another. I would turn to the person I was walking with and a burst of bright white energy would flood my voice, or if I was alone I would clutch my notebooks tighter to my chest and herald someone down the hall, but I would always feel simultaneously a wave of heat down the side of my body where he walked by. I didn’t have any sense of who was pursuing whom, just that we were on electrifying high alert all the time.

  He left letters in my locker. Also shells, dried flowers, a pair of earrings shaped like loons, a turquoise pendant, and four small, wooden carved animals. I kept everything, carefully, in a box under my bed. Not for romance, not for saccharine memory, but thinking, this is evidence, Exhibit A, although of what I’m not sure.

  The sight of his handwriting on those notes in my locker made my heart race uncontrollably at first. Sometimes they were unmarked; sometimes they came in an envelope with my first name written tantalizingly on the outside. He signed with his initial only, if he signed at all. I would take the folded sheet of paper and slip it inside my notebook to look at later. Sometimes I would unfold the paper right in the middle of another class, casually uncreasing it by running my thumbnail over the paper, folding the page back. When I looked down at the writing the thumping of my heart would actually make it impossible for me to focus; individual words would jump off the page at me, a single word bouncing upward with each heartbeat: “beautiful” “tonight” “meet” “wrong” “feelings”—the words would levitate off the paper and explode in the air, like cartoon bombs.

  I thought the set of his trunk-like body and the outcroppings of hair (who knew? on the back?) were pitiable but fascinating. He had greedy, blunt hands that were repellent and thrilling at the same time. He smelled like cold metal and bay rum. He had a smile that was knowing, cheeky, lopsided, and then, out of nowhere, surprisingly sweet. He believed that I understood poetry, which meant that I overcame my private fear of it and for the first time I thought I might understand it, and that was a strange unexpected gift.

  I liked knowing how much he wanted to touch me and how hard he had to work not to most of the time. I liked that I could see his hands tremble from the effort. I liked that he asked me questions and listened to me intently, that he seemed so curious about and delighted by what I had to say. I liked the determined way he would lock the door and turn to me in a not untender way. I liked the fact that he wasn’t clumsy and I liked the way he looked right in my face when he touched me.

  I didn’t like the fact that the MP’s youngest son, Jason, was a grade behind me in school. I didn’t like the rumor that this had happened once before with another girl. I didn’t much like to think about what I didn’t like.

  The Middle-Aged Prick, Titch penned sweetly in my notebook in Latin class, but I scratched it out, furious, and wouldn’t look at her. She was crossing a line there. She would also occasionally hum snatches of that outrageously pretentious teacher-student song by the Police—“Don’t Stand So Close to Me”—like it was the Jaws theme, when she passed me in the hallway. This irritated me and was really, as I pointed out to her, at least as much about her obsession with Stewart Copeland as it was about me. She always thought she was especially clever for choosing Copeland over Sting, and that irritated me even more. But I was glad she knew even so. I was glad someone knew.

  I had a class with the MP. English 11: Shakespeare, the Histories and the Tragedies. It didn’t seem like there was a fat lot of difference between the two. Is there a history that isn’t a tragedy? Because if there is, we didn’t read it.

  Some days I would look at him hard while he was talking in class. It was a great luxury for me that he had to stand up and speak in front of all these people. He had to stand up and speak but I could sit, smug and scary, crossing my legs, looking at him. Some days I would purposely not look at him at all, feign inattention, or carry on animated conversations with Nick Harrow, who sat next to me and had large, worshipful, bo
vine eyes. Then sometimes the MP would call on me, briskly—please read Lady Anne starting at line 114 thank you—and I would know what effect I had. This was like a drug. It was better than a drug. It was totally addictive, a great rush, with no discernible side effects.

  Some days, though, the MP would say I need to see the following people after class and I would be on that rattled-off list, offhandedly lumped in toward the end of the group, like an afterthought, having no option, having no way to say, No I don’t think so I think I’ll just go to lunch now, thanks, catch you later. Or, You know what, fuck you, actually. And knowing too, with both slivers of dread and some anticipatory, hostile charge, that he would casually, thoughtfully talk to the others first and save me for last. The way he attended to other students, the way he angled his head, or laughed with another student, the way he would make me wait, made me quietly enraged. The happy ignorance of the other students, their pleasure in his attention, the secret sweat and roiling in my gut, the uncontrolled speed of my pulse, the high-wire tension of it all. It made me want to make him suffer.

  For the class we had to write a sonnet. We had to perform a monologue. We had to write a paper. I got A’s on all of them. I deserved the grades, but it was galling just the same.

  There was no way this was going to end well. But who thinks about the end at the beginning?

  CHAPTER 8

  When I sat opposite Sarah’s heart-shaped face forgetting to drink my coffee after our first day of classes, I was possessed by a sense of immense lightness and agitation, as if I had shape-shifted into a hummingbird. When Titch picked me up that afternoon and drove me back to Truro, talking all the while about what she had done that day, I responded still occupied by this unfamiliar sensation of vibration, of anticipation, of hovering lightly in the air. She was busy with her discoveries—with having located a walking path behind the house, shopped, and reorganized the kitchen (“And wait until you see the bathroom!”)—and she did not appear to notice. I followed her up the stairs to the house, carrying my satchel, her voice swimming past my head.

  The Davidsons’ house, the housesitting house, was wonderfully distracting, like finding ourselves let loose in an electric toy train museum after hours. I couldn’t believe it was all ours. We shared it only with the two cats, an older, sedate fat white cat named Chester and a lean, black teenage cat named Jack, barely out of kittenhood and bored out of his mind with Chester. Jack was a recent addition, in anticipation of the demise of Chester, but it didn’t seem to me that Chester was going anywhere anytime soon. He looked like a good thirty-year cat, a Guinness Book of Records cat, like he’d dug his claws into this life, settled, content. Jack was jumpy, cranky, likely to scratch. He spent his days complaining at doors, shredding furniture, and stalking Chester. They were a really poorly paired set of roommates. Also, they weren’t allowed outside, which seemed like kind of a crime to me, because on the farm cats roam far and wide and conduct their private cat business in the hidden recesses of the barn and fields. These two were housebound. Since their dander made it difficult for her to breathe, Titch was happy to leave their general care to me. She took on the extensive detailed care of the many indoor and outdoor plants. The owners had left four pages of instructions for the plants on a legal pad by the phone.

  The house, which we had been told the Davidsons had designed with a local architect four years earlier, was swanky and modern. Surrounded by Cape Cod National Seashore conservation land, in the middle of the woods, it spread out comfortably down a hill in three separate levels. There were a lot of photographs of blond smiling grandchildren in seashell-encrusted frames, but not so many of the home-owning grandparents, so my ideas about them came almost entirely from their library and the organization of the house, the smaller traces of evidence here and there. They had a Solar Power! sticker on the fridge and a sticker that read Three Mile Island: Never Again, for example, as well as Audubon bird magnets and an anti-Seabrook poster in the study. That seemed all of a piece. But most of their books were as unknown to me as Arabic. The complete works of Julia Child, cheap paperback mysteries, histories of the Cape, and books on religion and spirituality and what colors you were supposed to wear based on your blood type or astrological sign. These last were like reading binge candy, disgusting and delicious all at once. I wanted to gobble them up by the fistful.

  One room, the second-level bathroom, was completely dominated by biographies of Elvis Presley. Titch immediately called it the “Elvis” room (as in, “does anyone need to visit Elvis?”). When we returned from the first day of the workshop, Titch dragged me in to see what magic she had wrought in this room. She had set up sculptures and bits and pieces of installations in and around photographs of the King. I could see that I was going to learn a lot about Priscilla Presley on this toilet, shadowed by a giant distorted cardboard cutout of Graceland that Titch had mounted behind the seat.

  That night when we were finishing our dinner, the MP called. Titch answered and then held the phone out to me, mouthing, it’s the Mad Peanut. I looked back at her uncomprehendingly, and she rolled her eyes at me and exaggeratedly mouthed MP, while drawing the letters in the air with her index finger in big swoops.

  He was checking in, he said. He wanted to tell me that he had started seeing a therapist but not to worry because he hadn’t mentioned me. I mentioned that mentioning me might be important, if not in fact critical to his therapy, and he got very quiet. I wished him luck and said I expected I would be too busy to talk much.

  After that conversation, I went back into the kitchen where Titch was finishing her ice cream. I told her that I didn’t think I wanted to talk to the MP anymore.

  She pulled a slightly disbelieving face at me over her bowl. When I made a face right back at her she looked a little surprised and drank the melted ice cream from the bottom of her bowl for a minute.

  “Okay,” she said mildly, getting up to take the bowl to the sink, “Just Say No.”

  Her left eye was twitching.

  Titch got her nickname because she used to twitch a lot—I don’t know if she had a real tic or was just irritable—but mostly she’d twitch when she had to say her name out loud in school. This was not a small flinch, a scrunched-up face kind of thing; this was a full body jump like someone had thrown a hard rubber eraser with deadly accuracy at her side rib. This earned her the nickname twitchy from horrible Mr. Harrelly in second grade and by the time we joined forces in fourth grade homeroom everyone had resorted to Titch.

  Harmony Carmody. Can you imagine? I mean, her parents are perfectly good people, but it’s hard to respect them for giving Titch that handle. I like my own name because Nina’s not common, but it’s not objectionable either. Also my parents apparently had a moment of relative and rare agreement about it. My mother told me once that she would have liked to name me Virginia, with the nickname of Nina, because she’s fond of Woolf and has rows and rows of her books and letters. But my father liked the simplicity of Nina better, and I don’t mind because you can just hear the name-calling awfulness that will ensue from Virginia. The worst anyone could do with my name was to lump me in with the Pinta and the Santa Maria, which wasn’t entertaining after about third grade and is nothing compared to the one-two punch of virgin and vagina that Virginia offers up so effortlessly. So I got off easy there. Titch did too, because no one ever thought to call Titch bitch, which says a lot about how she’s regarded. She was one of those lucky few who leapfrog from being totally ignored to being really well liked. I would have envied that if she wasn’t in my camp, but since at the time I was sure we had each other’s numbers forever, it was okay.

  When Titch stood at the sink, rinsing her bowl, I heard myself say again in a calm and oddly definite voice that I was done with the MP. I believed that I was. As I was speaking I believed suddenly that it was within my power to decide this. I was filled with relief to be far away from him, to be in this foreign, unreachable place. But also, sitting with
Sarah that day—being in any kind of proximity with Sarah, the very existence of Sarah—had given me this strange lightened, almost effervescent confidence, a new humming certainty.

  “Well, praise be,” Titch said, neutrally. She began to refer to him as RIP MP, or ripmip. She has always been monumentally fond of acronyms and shorthand.

  Listen, obviously I had my own doubts about the MP from early on and they weren’t lingering, or what you might call subtle, sneaking kinds of doubts. Once I was sitting cross-legged on the unmade bed in the MP’s apartment and I said to the MP, who had three sons, You always wanted a daughter, didn’t you? And he stuck his head out from behind the bathroom door, toothbrush in hand, and said, That’s amazing, how did you know? He really was amazed is the thing.

  My father once told me—sometime in the year before he left—he told me that he had always thought he wanted a son till I came along, but then he couldn’t imagine wanting anything more than a daughter because it was so great to be part of raising a strong girl. He raised his fist in the air when he said this in something like the Black Power salute. If I’d had any idea what that was back then, maybe I would have known enough to have been suspicious about the mixed messages. But I didn’t. Whatever he wanted, it did not turn out to include Black Power or a strong girl as far as I know.

  The MP’s multiple sons were in pictures all over his apartment, boys with their arms draped around each other’s shoulders, always outdoors, at the tops of mountains, standing triumphantly or sheepishly by canoes, or holding up fish they’d caught. Plaid barn jackets, goofy hats, backpacks, hiking boots. If you looked around, there wasn’t anywhere for these boys to be except propped up in photos on the desk because the MP’s apartment was just a sparse one-bedroom rental over the bike shop in Strafford. It smelled of old dog (a lame chocolate lab named Vincent who was a casualty of his divorce) as well as more generally of loss and dampness, moldy laundry around the edges. The toilet bowl was never really clean, which also depressed me. There wasn’t room even to sit down and have dinner with more than two people. The two older sons were in their twenties with jobs and their own homes, although they were not far away; one was a policeman and one worked in a logging mill, both in New Hampshire. All three boys looked like dark-haired versions of one another and I had trouble keeping them straight.