The English Teacher

by Lily King

From the backseat of the Belou station wagon Peter could see the heads of his mother and stepfather in the Dodge ahead. It was strange to see her in the passenger seat of her own car, the car she’d had all his life. She looked small. Tom’s head was turned to her and he was driving very slowly.

  “We might as well get out and walk,” Stuart said, slamming his palms against the steering wheel again. “What’s wrong with him?”

  This was the first time he’d ever been alone with the Belou kids without his mother. He’d imagined this moment differently, too. He thought their stiffness and reserve with him—and with each other—was due to his mother’s presence, but except for Stuart’s occasional outbursts, no one said a word, and Peter’s ears rang in the silence. Fran sat up front, her arms locked over her wool coat. Caleb was with Peter in back, turned away from him, breathing onto the window, then squeaking letters into the brief fog.

  The Belous lived across the bridge from Fayer in Norsett. Fayer was technically an island, though no one called it that. Norsett was on the mainland, a bigger, poorer town than Fayer with abandoned processing plants blocking most of its water views. There were a few shabby summer houses on the southern edge, but the year-round residents lived in small capes along an inland grid of streets. To Peter, who had lived in the same cottage in the grass sandwiched between playing fields all his life, a normal road lined with houses was deeply exotic. Even the sidewalks were part of a dream come true.

  As they crossed the harbor, Peter felt the same surge of anticipation of the wedding that he’d had each of the times they’d driven to the Belous’ house in the past month. But this time it was cut short by the recognition that it was done, no longer something still ahead but slightly behind. It was only now, in the backseat of the Belous’ car above the cold black water, that he let himself admit disappointment. Yet, as they headed inland, turning one unfamiliar corner and another, each street looking so similar Peter wondered if he’d ever find his way out, the realization of disappointment about the day (except the two dances with Fran, which he would treasure even if she never spoke another word to him) had no effect on his anticipation of their arrival at 81 Larch Street, where he would begin his life as a regular person who ate his meals not in a cafeteria but in a kitchen, whose neighbors were not his teachers, and who on weekends would not find himself moving furniture or passing hors d’oeuvres to alumni. Most of all he looked forward to siblings, and even their withdrawal in the car now did not chase away his image of what that would be like. There was bound to be some awkwardness at first, but in a few weeks they’d look back and laugh at how shy they’d all been.

  He wondered what Tom and his mother were talking about. She would be thinking about their dog Walt and how long he’d been left alone at a strange house. She would be thinking about all the papers she couldn’t grade this weekend. She didn’t like any disruption of her routine. Even their dinky three days at York Beach threw her. He could count on her being ornery (one of her favorite words to describe herself) for the rest of the month. But what she would be saying was a mystery. He’d never, before this summer, seen his mother in the company of a man.

  Stuart pulled into the driveway behind the Dodge. Peter got out last, and waited a few seconds for his mother, but she and Tom remained in the front seat, windows rolled tight. He followed the others into the house.

  Not to Peter, not to anyone in particular, Fran said, “Thank God that is over.” She collapsed onto the sofa in her coat. Stuart, who didn’t ever seem to wear a coat, went to turn on the TV. He turned the dial from channel to channel and when he finally stopped, he muttered, “Jesus, look at that,” but he was blocking the set and no one cared enough to ask him to move. Caleb snuck into the recliner in the corner, a chair so enveloping and puckered it looked like an enormous cupped palm. He picked up the library book on bats that had been left facedown on the arm, snapped on the standing lamp over his shoulder, and began to read.

  Peter stood alone near the door. He heard steps on the porch. Once his mother was inside it would become his house, too. There was shuffling and whispering but they did not come in. He picked up a Lucite cube of photographs from a table next to the sofa. He hoped Fran would notice him turning it over and narrate, but she just stared at Stuart’s back, as if she could make out, from the flickering edges of his body, the images on the screen.

  The pictures were only of Stuart, all taken when he was much younger. In each one he had the same enormous smile. They were all typical scenes from childhood: riding a tricycle, frosting a cake, building a sand castle, fishing. Peter turned the cube from side to side to side, trying to catch him without that smile. That smile bore utterly no resemblance to this Stuart who stood muttering and shaking his head in front of the TV. This Stuart had no expressions at all. It was as if all his facial muscles had been snipped. His mouth hung flat and motionless, even when he spoke. But here in these snapshots, the smile covered his whole face, a combination of joy and shock and love, his forehead wrinkled in surprise and his head bent to one side affectionately. The pictures spanned seven years or so, and his joyful face was the same in each one.

  “There’s not going to be a quiz at the end of the period, Peter,” Fran said without looking at him.

  He put the cube down. Where was his mother? He didn’t even know where his room was. He didn’t know where anything was, except the kitchen, where he’d had dinner twice. But he liked it here. It was a real home, lived-in, with soft carpet everywhere and lots of places to sit. Even the smell was better.

  Something brushed against the front door. Peter waited for it to open, for his mother to help him begin his life here, but nothing happened. Another scuffle—an attempt at a knock?

  “Answer it,” Fran barked.

  Peter swung the door open and found his mother limp in Tom’s arms.

  “Oh my God,” Fran said, disgusted.

  Caleb lifted his eyes briefly from the bats. “What are you doing?”

  Tom took a few small steps into the house. “I’m carrying my bride over the threshold.” His face was flushed from either strain or embarrassment and he lowered Vida feet first to the ground, steadying her carefully as she took back her own weight. It was such a delicate, silent motion, and Peter felt comforted by it. It was, in fact, the first comforting moment he’d had all day.

  “Congratulations,” he said, the sound lingering unfinished because he’d wanted to add “Stepfather” or just “Father,” but at the last moment couldn’t say either. Father was such an unused, alien term. He thrust out his hand like Dr. Gibb.

  Tom encased Peter’s hand in two warm palms. “Thank you, Peter, thank you.” He, too, seemed to want to do something else then—give him a hug or ask him an important question. Peter waited, his hand hot and buried, but nothing came.

  When he was released, he turned to his mother. “Congrats, Mom.” He felt, in the presence of the Belous, that he should hug her. They had gotten into a bizarre habit of performing in front of them, pretending they were another breed of mother and son. At their first dinner all together his mother, in the middle of the meal, had stroked the top of his head while bragging about his interest in writing. She’d exaggerated completely—he’d won a stupid poetry contest in seventh grade, that was all.

  He stepped toward her and they raised their arms. It was a show; they hugged without pressing. He remembered this from childhood, this weak hug, as if he were made of paper.

  “What the hell?” Tom said, stepping toward the TV. “Oh, no.”

  Peter tried to make sense of what he saw: fires, screaming, mayhem. Every few seconds the TV camera itself seemed to be struck by a passerby. The jolted footage made him slightly nauseated. Then it rested on one image, a long lean Uncle Sam, his striped pants in flames, surrounded by dancing, chanting men whose robes flipped in and out of the fire.

  “Those lunatics are going to burn themselves up, too, while they’re at it,” his mother said.

  “They’ve seized our embassy,” Tom said gra
vely. “Goddammit they’ve taken our embassy.”

  Peter didn’t know who they were. He glanced at his mother for an explanation but he could tell she didn’t know either. She didn’t follow the news very carefully. All on-campus teachers got a paper delivered to their door every morning but theirs usually ended up in the trash can, the rubber band still fastened around it.

  “Why did they agree to let him in?” Stuart said. “He could have had that operation in Mexico. They knew it would stir up trouble.”

  “He’s been our ally for many years. We owed him.”

  “Ally? He’s been our stooge. Our oil guy.”

  “What are you talking about?” Fran asked.

  Tom began explaining about the Shah of Iran. Peter tried to focus on what he was saying but a man on TV came up to the camera shouting angrily through brown teeth, then spat at the lens. The spit was thick and green. A hand reached around quickly with a cloth and wiped it off. It was eerie to Peter, the hand and the cloth, like a taboo had been broken. He’d missed Tom’s explanation.

  “Is President Carter in there?” Caleb asked from his chair. Peter was certain that when he was seven he’d had no clue who was president.

  “I doubt it,” his mother said, though what did she know. “It’s probably just a bunch of functionaries.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Good decent hardworking diplomats who were brave enough to remain in the country during a revolution.” He’d never heard Tom use that tone of voice before.

  “Mom?” he said quietly. “Do you know where my room is?”

  “I don’t even know where mine is.”

  “I’ll show it to you, Peter.” Caleb slid dramatically off his chair.

  Peter followed him out of the room and down a corridor to the first room on the left.

  “We dragged your boxes in this morning.”

  “Thanks.”

  Caleb slipped his hand behind a bookshelf. “The switch is a little tricky to find.”

  Peter waited, surprised by his desire to be alone, when just this morning being alone was what he’d hoped to renounce for good.

  “There.” A single bulb, painted green, cast the small room in lime-colored light. At first glance, it looked like a decorated storage room. The walls were covered with pen-and-ink drawings of body parts: ears, fingertips, knees. Some had Chinese characters beside them; others had typed-out English quotations Peter couldn’t decipher. There was only one full-size poster, also handmade, of a pair of closed eyes and below it the words

  What is one is not one

  And what is not one

  Is also one.

  There was nothing in the room immediately identifiable as furniture. It simply looked like a huge mound of junk—notebooks, winter coats, football pads, coin wrappers, a stapler, a fishing rod, balled clothing, a rubber Richard Nixon mask, a bike pump, a rumpled suit—that spread from the doorway to the far wall. As Peter leaned closer, he could see, beneath the only window, jutting out through all the crap, the flowered corner of a mattress.

  “So that’s my bed?”

  “No. That’s Stuart’s bed. You’re here.” Caleb pointed to the near wall, which was stacked with boxes—his own boxes, Peter realized. “It folds out of the wall. It’s pretty cool. Look.” Caleb pushed into the cluttered center of the room all of Peter’s boxes, then lifted a metal lever and caught the bed as it exploded out of the wall. “Ta da!” he exclaimed, gazing at the whole room—at the exploding bed, the warty cactus, the burnt thumbs of incense in a dish—with un-disguised reverence.

  “So why didn’t you move in here?”

  “He didn’t want me to.”

  At this Peter felt a small bit of pleasure mingle with his horror, but it was short-lived. No one had told him he’d be sharing a room with Stuart. Stuart frightened him. Stuart didn’t even speak to him.

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Right next door,” Caleb said, still eager to please.

  Peter stepped into the little bathroom and locked the door. He stood at the sink, a hand on either side of the basin, as if he were bracing himself to throw up. Maybe he’d feel better if he threw up. He tried to coax something out. Then he noticed a tiny little screen fastened to the drain and a clot of moist hair caught in it. With his fingernail, he pried up the screen, tapped it empty on the side of the plastic bucket below, and snapped it back in place. All this he did without thought. He was in a state beyond thought. In the mirror he saw, for an instant, the real Peter, the Peter he was when he was not conscious of looking. But after that all he saw was his mirror face, flattened out by self-awareness. Usually, when he looked in mirrors, he tried to figure out what it was about his face that no longer attracted Kristina. He’d read somewhere that handsomeness was not the result of a certain combination of features but of symmetry. The human eye gauged the degree of symmetry of the two halves of a face because, research had shown, people with symmetrical faces tended to be less prone to disease—thus a better biological choice. But tonight Peter did not try to find the asymmetry in his face. He knew that wasn’t it. He wasn’t unattractive. Girls who didn’t go to Fayer often thought he was cute at first, before they spoke to him. It was something else. He was undeveloped in some way that was not physical and seemed beyond his control. He suspected it had to do with being an only child, or having only a mother, and there was a part of him that had hoped the Belous would help him change. Now he feared they would only make it worse.

  “Are you all right?” Caleb said through the door.

  “Yeah.” His voice came out funny, more a breath than noise. He wasn’t sure Caleb had heard him, but after a while his feet scuffled away back down the hall.

  At the toilet he unzipped his fly. He had already begun to pee when he saw her photograph. She was looking right up at him, grinning. Love, she seemed to be saying. Yes, he replied. All this happened in the interval between conscious thoughts, between recognizing that this, this woman tying the shoelace of her sneaker on an overgrown path, was Mrs. Belou, the real Mrs. Belou, and remembering that she was dead. When that last thought came, his stream of urine stopped abruptly, painfully. She had died in this house. She had stood right here, and there by the sink, and in his room. She had touched everything he would soon touch. There was no place he could ever be in this house where she had not breathed. He put down the lid of the toilet seat and sat, the black and white tiles on the floor flashing in time with his slamming heart. He didn’t want to live here, in the house of a ghost.

  He went back out to the living room.

  “Mom?”

  She wasn’t listening. “We need air in here,” she was saying, lifting up a window near Caleb’s chair.

  “I don’t feel well.” He didn’t know what he wanted, what he expected from her. I want to go home, he wished he could say, even though he didn’t completely mean it.

  “Go rest on the couch for a bit,” she said without looking at him.

  “Could have been the shrimp,” Fran said. “I spat mine out.”

  “Maybe that was it.” He was unsure which cushion to choose—the middle one right next to Fran, or the far one, so far away it felt rude, unsibling-like. Finally he sat between the two and now they lifted like wings to either side of him and their stiff edges were not comfortable beneath him. But still he felt frozen, unable to choose a direction. Everyone else was focused on the TV. His mother had never allowed TV. Even now by Tom’s side she wasn’t watching. Her eyes were wandering off—to the lamp, to the curtains, to the little dish on a table in the corner. She wasn’t interested in the present. For all her reading, she never bought a contemporary novel. The books she read always had some gloomy old portrait on the cover. He couldn’t ever remember having a conversation about a current event with her. And here were the Belous, every one of them, even Caleb now, transfixed by this indecipherable mayhem that had not changed in the hour since they’d been home, Tom looking as if the hostages had been seized from his own house.

&
nbsp; Time passed, Peter wasn’t sure how much. Fran scooped up Caleb, who’d fallen asleep with his head on the arm of his chair, and took him down the hallway. He could hear the water running and Caleb moaning about having to brush his teeth.

  Having been interrupted the first time, Peter still had to go to the bathroom. He didn’t want to return to Mrs. Belou, didn’t want to run awkwardly into Fran back there. Did you say hello to your own siblings in the hallway as you passed them? He didn’t know the first thing about how regular families behaved. So he went down the other hallway instead. There was only one room here, at the end, and he went in. Tom’s bedroom, he determined, from the size of the bed and his mother’s boxes in the corner. He found a bathroom off to the left, but the light was out. He shut the door anyway and pushed open the curtain of the small window to let in a wedge of streetlight. He peed, then stood at the window. There had been no street lamps on campus. He tried not to miss his house, tried not to think of Mrs. Belou either, that this was her bathroom and she’d stood right here, too, at times thinking about the past, with maybe her hand on the sill just like this. He put his hand in his pocket and looked across the street into another family’s life. They had the TV on, too, and there was lots of movement—a woman carried a bowl into the room, a child hopped on one foot, a man stood up and fiddled with the antenna, the woman ran out, perhaps to answer the telephone. Were they friends with the Belous? Had they been at the wedding? He couldn’t see them well enough to know. Maybe the phone call was someone wanting to hear all about it. What was she like? Did they seem happy? And what about the kids, those poor kids?

  When Peter had learned Tom was a widower, he’d been relieved. It meant his kids lived with him full-time, and didn’t just visit every other weekend like Craig Hager’s stepsisters. It meant, ultimately, a real union, a true synthesis, without any loose ends. He’d put their mother in the same category with his own father: permanently absent, wholly and completely unpresent. How mistaken he’d been. He could feel her. It was like she was standing beside him here in the dark, saying, You’re touching my flowered curtains, you know. I know, he said back. I’m sorry.