The English Teacher

by Lily King

  “Why is your hair like that?”

  Damn. Her hair. “Will you check in there for my barrette?”

  Peter flipped open the glove compartment and plunged his hand into the mass of candy wrappers and receipts. “Nope. Nothing.”

  Vida pulled out the ashtray, stuck her fingers into other dark cubbyholes of the Dodge’s dash, then slid her hand beneath the seat. “Damn.” In nineteen years, she’d never taught a class without her hair firmly yanked back.

  “They have rubber bands in the office,” Peter said.

  It was true. But she avoided the office, and Carol, now.

  They drove through Fayer’s tiny center, a small deposit of buildings: a brick police station, a white clapboard church, a stone library, and a few green store awnings. Several people were out, tugged along by dogs or children. She had never known these streets well, never seen them at this time of day. And yet they beckoned to her now.

  The road out of town clung to the ocean. Even when a patch of woods or a summer estate blocked it from view, it was always with you, in the wet morning mist, the sandy roadsides, and the seagulls crying out.

  “Do you think those people will be killed?” Peter said. He reminded her of Tom already, the concern in his voice as if he personally knew each one of those unlucky paper pushers halfway around the world.

  “Not a chance. It would be suicide for the Iranians. There’ll be some sort of negotiations today and by supper they’ll be free. These things wrap up very quickly.” She tried to think of an example and couldn’t. She was hopeless when it came to historical facts. The events didn’t adhere properly in her brain. She never understood why moments in novels were unforgettable, while in real life the details slipped quickly away. A few weeks ago she couldn’t even explain the Bay of Pigs to Peter. All she knew was that she was reading Middlemarch at the time. She remembered Dorothea and the wretched Casaubon, and how they had just arrived in Rome for their wedding journey when her mother called her in to listen to President Kennedy’s speech. But she couldn’t recall what he’d said or in what order the events had unfolded or exactly how it had been resolved. All that came to her when she tried was Dorothea and Will’s trembling kiss by the window at the end.

  They passed through the stone pillars, Scientia carved into one and In Perpetuum into the other, and followed the slow-moving line of station wagons up the hill. She hadn’t been part of this carpool convergence for sixteen years. She glanced over the girls’ field to their old house and the path that ran across a ridge to the school. When he was younger, Peter had a small red canvas backpack that was never filled with more than a pencil and a few exercise sheets. He’d run ahead of her on that path to school, the nearly empty backpack bobbing behind him, stopping only to scoop up something from the ground and drop it into her hand, the soft brown ball of a frightened caterpillar or a long, sticky worm.

  There was no ancestral tug as the mansion came into view. There never was. The oversized house, with its bays, turrets, and copper-plated mansard roof, was a school to her, just as it was to everyone else creeping up the long driveway this morning.

  Vida pulled into her faculty spot beside the cafeteria. Through one window, a few students from Peter’s class hunched over their notes, cramming for something, and through another Marjorie and Olivia in their white uniforms and nurses’ shoes were already setting up for the lower school snack.

  They sat for a moment in the stilled car.

  “You have a test today?” she asked.

  “Quiz.”

  “History?”

  “Yeah.” He was poised to bolt. He didn’t like to be seen walking into school with her anymore.

  She could tell he was worried, but she couldn’t brush his bangs out of his eyes or lift his chin toward her. She couldn’t do that anymore, if she ever had. He was changing so fast and she was too scared to look at him for any length of time. “Did you get a chance to study last night?” she said gently.

  He gave some sort of stifled snort through his nose and shook his head. It was rude—the snort, the aversion of his eyes, the lack of words. She wasn’t used to rudeness in him. But before she could correct him, he got out and slumped away around the building to the front entrance where he would blend in with the rest.

  How dare he be disillusioned already. She slid her bookbag from the backseat onto her lap and shoved open her door. Screw it if he didn’t like it. He’d gotten what he asked for. Welcome to life and all its shitty little tricks. Her irritation at him rose, chafing hard against her affection. This was the nameless emotion she felt most in life, this abrasion of love meeting anger.

  She walked up the scrubby knoll to the basement entrance, her tight fists bared to the cold, her head leading her body like a sledgehammer. She was a hard woman. Yet Tom said last summer, when he first kissed her, that she was like a heron, with her long neck and delicate bones.

  In the vestibule outside the auditorium there was a bronze bust of her grandfather. No delicate man, he. His wild wiry eyebrows, suspended at the edge of his enormous brow, and his thick, nearly detached jaw belonged in a natural history museum. He had the childlike impatience of an old man who did not want to sit for a sculptor, who did not care about his house being transformed into a school, despite all the undeserved credit bestowed upon him. He’d been forced to sell because his only child, Vida’s mother, had married a dreamer who’d whistled through the family’s money within a decade. Though she had no memories of ever having visited this house, she did remember him, a crooked branch of a man, speechless from strokes, tufts of white hair growing from the tops of his ears. He was the one who named her. He hadn’t spoken for months but when her mother placed her in his arms for the first time, saying, “It’s baby Vivian, Grandy,” he smiled so wide her mother said she heard his face crack, and he said eloquently, seemingly proficient in a language no one had known he knew, “No, mi amor, su nombre es Vida.” Another crack, then “Life!” That was his final word, though it took him several more years and the loss of his house to die. When Vida left Texas all those years later, without a map or a plan, nothing surprised her more than finding herself in Fayer, at the enormous front door of her grandfather’s house. No one had told her it had become a school. Within a few weeks she had a job as a substitute English teacher, and by the next fall she’d been given a full-time contract and the gardener’s cottage.

  Though she’d requested high school, they started her with the sixth grade and she’d had to push her way up a grade a year until she’d secured herself a spot in the English department of the upper school. Since then, she’d turned down every promotion offered to her: English chair three times, dean of students, dean of faculty, curriculum director, and assistant head of school. The only thing Fayer Academy had offered her that she’d accepted, above and beyond a teaching contract each year, was the Hutchinson Prize, chosen and awarded at graduation by the senior class for superior teaching, which she’d received four times, most recently last June. She didn’t know then, as she rose to accept another sparkling silver bowl, that a man named Tom Belou was seated in the seventeenth row. What she did know is that she was a fool at the podium, fighting back tears of all things, tears for the senior class with whom she’d formed a special, unexpected bond, and tears for her dear friend Carol whose son, she had learned that morning, had committed suicide. She’d pushed out a few platitudes of thanks and hurried back to her seat beside Peter, raw and embarrassed. At that moment, Tom claimed, Vida became the first thing since the death of his wife to disturb him, to make him anxious for the passing of time as one senior then another then another rose from a folding chair, ambled self-consciously across the grass to the lectern, received a diploma, and ambled back.

  By the end of the ceremony he’d worked his way to her row of seats and was the first to congratulate her on her award. He was the godfather of one of the graduates, he told her. Could she join them for dinner? She didn’t like thinking back on this day and the breaks in her voice at the pod
ium. What could he have seen in her then? Perhaps it wasn’t her at all but that crazy senior class whom she’d loved, who’d risen and hooted and whooped as she walked to the lectern, as if she were not a teacher but a stripper in nothing but high heels and tassels. Was it simply the energy of that moment, such a contrast to the wake of death he found himself bobbing in? Here was life, he might have said to himself; seize it now. Oh she would disappoint him. She was not life. They were all wrong about that.

  Assembly had already started. On stage, Greg Rathburn, the history chair who took every world occurrence personally, was explaining the events in Iran. Vida remained in the doorway instead of taking her seat with the juniors across the room. Greg asked for a moment of silence for the ninety Americans being held at the embassy. Vida bent her head but did not shut her eyes or think of the hostages. It was hardly silence with the irrepressible hum of four hundred and twenty-four students who had been separated for a whole weekend. It lasted a long time. After a while, she raised her head in impatience. As always, Brick Howells and Charlie Grant, headmaster and sidekick, stood at their podiums bathed in their own private spotlights. When Greg solemnly thanked the school, Brick jerked his head up like a choirboy feigning prayer while Charlie kept his head bowed for a second too long, as if the interminable moment had not been quite long enough for all of his good thoughts. Phonies to a man, she thought.

  “On a much happier note,” Brick said, glancing down at his notes as young Greg, heartthrob, former Fayer swimming star, swung himself off the stage. “A little bird has told me that our very own Mrs. Avery was married this weekend.” Bursts of applause as surprised heads craned toward her usual seat and then, after a struggle, found her at the door. The applause was stronger now, accompanied by repetitive grunts as if she had made a touchdown. Vida endured the attention, wishing she could see through the heads of the upperclassmen to the front where Peter sat with the rest of the tenth graders. What expression would he have on his face? Why had he been so angry this morning? Brick spoke through the clapping: “You will be courteous enough to call her Mrs. Belou from now on.” More cheers, as if replacing your identity were some great achievement.

  The presumptuousness of Brick Howells. What right had he to change her professional name without asking? And here, before the whole school, when she hadn’t even thought to mention her marriage to her students, let alone present them with a new label for her person. “Have a fruitful day,” the old git concluded. Vida spun away from the auditorium before anyone could catch her.

  Her classroom was the only one on the third floor of the mansion. Brick had put her up there nine years ago to teach an unruly group of eighth graders, and the next year she’d insisted on teaching all her classes in the room. Her students made a fuss about the steep climb, but Vida loved those old uninstitutionalized back stairs that carried her from the loud reverberating blend of instruction, curiosity, and resistance that could be heard down the long hall of former bedrooms on the second floor to the musty silence of her attic. All they’d had to do to make a real classroom for her up here was punch out a wall. The ceiling was high, and the series of long lean windows at the far southern end brought in so much light Vida rarely had to switch on the fluorescent bars they’d installed.

  The rest of the mansion, despite the sweeping front staircase and many fireplaces, no longer looked or smelled like anything but a school. Up here, however, Vida felt the old house. She could hear the rustling haste of the servant girls as they dressed in these rooms before dawn, just seconds ahead of the summoning bell of her mother’s impatient ancestors. Other teachers did not understand her insistence on remaining on the third floor, especially now since the science wing was finished and there were classrooms to spare. She didn’t understand how they could bear the distractions of first- and second-story teaching: people idly peered through the eye-level window on each door, interrupted for chalk or Kleenex, or delivered thoroughly unurgent messages, all as if forty minutes were not already a totally insufficient amount of time in a day to plant a few new ideas in the heads of these students. No one barged in on her classroom up here unless it was dire. If one of her colleagues ever made the journey up, they would inevitably complain about the smell. It was so moldy, they all said, like a wet wool blanket left for about a hundred years. But Vida loved that smell. It smelled the way Texas never could. And most important, she had her own private bathroom with a dead bolt she installed herself.

  It was a dark morning and Vida reluctantly turned on the overhead. She pulled out Tess from her bag, set it on the desk, then went to the board and wrote

  Sir John

  green malt in floor.

  blighted star

  It was all completely rote. This was her thirteenth year of teaching the book. The bell rang. Up here it was more a vibration than a noise, followed soon after by stronger tremors as every student in the building headed to their first class. Soon she could hear her tenth graders heckling each other up the stairs.

  “Nice boots, Frizz.”

  “He parked his Harley out back.”

  “Walk much, Lindsey?”

  “Eat much, Tank?”

  “Jesus, Michael. Quit touching me.”

  Slowly they began to fill the room with their insults and self-consciousness, their collective hours at the mirror, and all their elaborate, transparent airs. They exhausted Vida with their attempts at self-possession, the boys and their cynicism, the girls and their shiny smelly lips.

  She heard a girl whisper to another, “‘Green malt in floor’?”

  The second bell rang and by the time it had finished the great mass of them had divided like cells into individual seats.

  Harry Knox, an earnest young man with a feeble frame and large head, addressed her. “Forgive me, Mrs. Avery, but I’m not sure I under—”

  “Mrs. Belou!” someone bellowed beside him.

  This gave Harry pause. He looked at Vida, then down at his notebook. He seemed to have forgotten his point. Then he flipped his head back up at her. “How do you spell that?”

  She sucked in a breath and wrote Tom’s name on the board. BELOU. Then she put a MRS. in front of it. It seemed to stare back at her, mocking her in some way. What had she done?

  They were all looking at her, not as their teacher but as a woman who had just gotten married. Married. She felt heavy and mealy, like there was wet sand beneath her skin.

  “Hey, now you’re like Vida Blue, the baseball player.”

  “She’s Veeda, not Vyda.”

  “Why aren’t you on a honeymoon?” someone in back asked.

  “Let’s talk about Tess. She’s far more interesting.”

  “So far in this class I’ve liked what we’ve read.” Amy said.

  “Everyone struggles with Tess at first,” Vida said.

  “When do people start liking it?”

  “Around page four hundred and sixteen.”

  Amy flipped through the fat paperback. “I knew it. The very last page.”

  “Tess is a rite of passage,” Vida offered, and they wrote it down in their notebooks. Only a few would know what she meant, but she felt impatient with them for stepping behind the curtain of her private life. They could look it up themselves.

  “Why do they have to describe everything so vociferously?”

  “First of all, Andrew, who is ‘they’?”

  He looked on the front of his book. “Thomas Hardy.”

  “One person, singular. And do you really mean vociferously, or might you be referring to another word in the V section of your PSAT study guide?”

  Vida could see the long lists of words twisting around in Andrew’s head. The class offered him other choices.

  “Verbosely.”

  “Voluminously.”

  “Vacuously.”

  Andrew nodded. “All of the above. They go”—she gave him her eye—“he goes on forever.”

  “Example, please?”

  “Here. Page twenty-two. ‘The village of Marlot
t lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor aforesaid’—if he already said it why’s he saying it again? ‘The Vale was known in former times as the Forest of the White Hart, from a curious legend of King Henry the Third. …’ Oh my God, the guy can’t stop himself.”

  “Okay, Hemingway, I want you to remember that paragraph when you get to page four hundred and sixteen.”

  “I can’t conceive of getting to page four hundred and sixteen in this book.”

  “You will, because you’re going to need a good grade in this class to balance out your abysmal verbal test scores. And when you get there, I want you to go back and read that passage and you’ll see Hardy has managed to stuff most of the plot of this novel into that description of Tess’s hometown.”

  “Does Tess die like the white hart?”

  You couldn’t get much past Helen Cavanough. You could only throw her off with a flat-faced lie. “Of course Tess doesn’t die. Now take out a piece of paper.” The class groaned. “Not for a quiz. I want you to write four interesting detailed sentences about your hometown.”

  They liked this kind of exercise, and began writing immediately.

  Vida moved to the other side of her desk. She sat in the uncomfortable captain’s chair with the school’s insignia stamped in gold at her back, and opened her own notebook to a blank page. Lydia Rezo, who also taught the creative writing course, always did the exercises she assigned her students and even read what she’d written aloud to them. Vida never did, but she felt agitated today, and the act of sitting and holding a pencil was soothing. Norsett. Though it had been her town for less than forty-eight hours, as she began writing the word she felt she had a lot to say; but once it was there on the page her thoughts evaporated.

  “Don’t think, Mrs. Belou, write,” said Brian, mimicking her when she caught her students staring into space for too long during essay tests.