The English Teacher

by Lily King

Vida wrote. I got married yesterday. I am married. Hello my name is Vida Belou. She stopped again. She was a hopeless writer who taught writing. She was like Joe Cox, Fayer’s beloved lacrosse coach, who’d never heard of the game when he took the job. Like Mitch Calhoun, who taught Moby Dick year after year having only read the first page. I am a fraud. She wanted to try and write one beautiful sentence. What to her was beautiful? This morning the bridge stretched out over the Atlantic like a … Some kind of bird? A diver? Something more abstract like a promise or a long-awaited answer? Her mind burned in frustration.

  Michael cleared his throat and Vida looked up to find every student watching her. How long had it been? She had no idea.

  “Okay,” she said, closing her notebook, rising. “Let’s hear a few.”

  No one raised a hand. She was used to this. She scanned the room for a solid start. Danny had his head tucked into his neck, which meant he liked what he’d written. She nodded at him. “Let’s hear it, Dan.”

  The boy looked stricken, as if he never imagined having to share these words. He wasn’t the kind of student who would ever dare refuse, though his eyes begged her to choose again. On another day she might have relented and shifted her request to Helen beside him. But today she did not. Danny was from Norsett, too, and she was curious to know what he’d say about the place. “Go ahead.”

  His face splotched red and he inched closer to his page. “Norsett is an old fishing port from which in the nineteenth century sailors traveled as far as the Bay of Fundy to bring back tuna and cod. Behind the old white church lies the graveyard, the flattest patch of land in town and enclosed by iron gates with iron roses on each handle, where the town’s seafaring dead are buried.” He took in a wobbly breath. “My mother’s body is an anomaly there, a thirty-two-year-old woman who never learned how to swim.”

  She had known this child since he came to the school in fifth grade. She had taught him three years in a row. How did she not know that his mother had died? Had she once known, then forgotten? She was aware of the spreading length of her silence.

  “It’s only three sentences,” he said.

  “Three incredible sentences,” Helen said.

  Nearly everyone in the class grunted their agreement. Vida knew something more was needed, something that recognized the quality and sophistication of the writing. She felt incapable of those words. She hated it when students got so personal, and she never expected it of Danny. She hoped Fran and Caleb weren’t writing things like this in their English classes, tying up the tongues of their teachers. “Most of those fishermen didn’t know how to swim either.” she offered.

  “Oh,” Danny said, without looking up.

  “Would anyone else like to read?”

  “After that? No thanks,” Lindsey said.

  Perhaps it was cruel to have forced only Danny to read, but the thought of another soul bared this morning was more than she could tolerate. “Hold on to these descriptions, and when we’re done with Tess we can go back to them and see if you can see how you’ve been shaped by your geography the way Tess was shaped by hers. Now, let’s look at all that voluminous verbiage again.” She looked down at her copy of the book and the twelve years of notes crammed into the narrow margins in different colors and shades of ink. “Can you describe the Vale, or as we say, Andrew, the valley?”

  Heads bent over books. Then a hand shot up. “It’s different from other places nearby.”

  “How?”

  “It’s nicer, prettier.”

  “Where does it say that?”

  “Page three. ‘Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale.’”

  “Okay. Different from others, nicer, prettier, more delicate … ?”

  “He’s describing Tess, too,” Helen offered.

  “How do you know?”

  “When he introduces her he says something about her lack of experience. She’s sort of sheltered like the valley.”

  “Good. What else?”

  “At the dance, that boy notices her and then at the end regrets that he did not dance with her,” Danny said. “She stands out to him.” Vida felt there was forgiveness in his voice. “Like the Vale of Blakemore stands out among the others.”

  “Excellent,” she said, thanking him for understanding her. “What about Hardy’s insistence that the Vale is not brown and dry but green and fertile?”

  Heads dropped again, even Danny’s and Helen’s. They were deliberately avoiding this part. Pages rustled, but no one responded.

  Vida lifted her chin to the back of the classroom. “Kristina? What do you think?” Here was a girl who should know. She’d been caught this fall in the shower of the boys’ locker room.

  But Kristina was saved by a knock. Vida’s students sat in perfect stillness as she went to the door. Whatever it was would be serious, and the only way to hear the whisperings between teachers was to stop breathing.

  Vida stepped outside the classroom to find Charlie Grove in the dim attic corridor.

  “Jesus, Vida, it’s like the House of Usher up here. I can’t believe you actually choose—”

  “What’s going on, Charlie?” She was aware of noise coming up from the bottom of her stairs, some sort of clanging down on the second floor.

  “We’ve just had a call from the hospital. It’s Lydia. She fell getting into the bathtub this morning and broke her leg and I don’t know what else.”

  “In the tub? She broke her leg in the tub?”

  “There may be some head injury as well,” he said, as if to preempt further ridicule. He didn’t like ridicule, probably having suffered, like most teachers, so much of it in school as a child.

  She realized that the clanking below was from the chairs that Lydia’s students were already carrying up her stairs. “But Peter’s in that class.”

  “It will just be for a few days at most. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Why have them disrupting the library when you’re teaching the same thing up here?”

  It was hardly the same thing. Lydia didn’t teach, she emoted. She was incapable of thought. She was only interested in the characters’ feelings, particularly the female characters’ feelings as they related to their oppression by men. Lydia was Fayer’s lone feminist. But arguing with him about stylistic differences would just mean losing more minutes. “Okay,” she said. “Send them up.”

  And so the other section of sophomore English staggered in, lugging their chairs with the thick flat right arm that served as a desk. Lydia liked to arrange her students in a horseshoe, but Vida kept hers in rows. She maintained it was in nobody’s interest to allow teenagers to ogle each other’s bodies. She directed the newcomers to the back and had them make three new, albeit tight, rows. Peter was the last to come in, and put himself at the end of the back row, the farthest point possible from her. The only thing she had ever asked of Brick was that she never have to have authority over Peter, not even for forty minutes, not even for a study hall. How do you break your leg in the tub? She was careful not to look directly at him and yet she was aware of his every movement. He leaned down and tugged a notebook impatiently out of his bag, then the book. He hadn’t even started it; the binding was unbroken. He got a pencil out of a side pocket, then slumped even farther down in his seat. They were equally miserable that he was here.

  “What page are you all on, Caroline?” Vida asked one of her best students from last year.

  “Forty-six.”

  She couldn’t resist. “And what have you been discussing?”

  “We talked about upward mobility and downward mobility, how some families are on their way up, like a lot of ours, and how the Durbeyfields were on their way down, having once been rich d’Urbervilles.”

  “I see,” she said, chastened. Maybe there was more teaching happening in Lydia’s classroom than she had realized. “Well then, you’ll be able to help us. We were just talking about the parallels between Tess and the Vale of Blakemore, the way she emerges as
a sort of living doppelganger, if you will, to the land itself. The Vale is sheltered and set apart, constructed on a more delicate scale, and—this is where we left off—not dry but green and fertile. Kristina, you’ve had a few extra minutes to think about that, what say you?” She didn’t know if it was Peter or a sudden sense of competition with Lydia that was making her show off a bit.

  Kristina peered into her book.

  “Let’s hear one of Hardy’s descriptions of her.”

  She tussled with a few pages but came up with nothing. Here was an intelligent girl who’d let her boobs grow bigger than her brain.

  Vida glanced at the clock. Half the period was over. She hadn’t taught them a thing. “Here. Page twenty-six. ‘As she walked along today, for all her bouncing, handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.’” She looked up from the passage to see if there were signs of comprehension anywhere. A piece of her hair had fallen across her cheek and she pushed it away. By mistake she caught eyes with Peter, who seemed to be not just looking at her but seeing her, seeing through her taut face to one of her own younger selves, the seven-year-old who lost her two front teeth at the same time and never stopped smiling about it. She remembered exactly how it felt, the two tender pockets in her gums and the noises she could get her tongue to make with them. She forgot where she was going with this. “Can anyone find anything else about Tess? Mark?”

  “It says, ‘She was a fine and handsome girl—not handsomer than some others, possibly—but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to color and shape.’”

  “How old is Tess?” There. That’s where she was going.

  “It doesn’t say,” Michael said.

  “Take a guess,” Vida said. She was aware of speaking only to the side of the room Peter was not on. It was utterly unnerving, having him in her classroom. Without saying a word, he seemed to bring a sort of skepticism to the place, the only place where she was truly comfortable.

  “Sixteen?”

  “Why?”

  “You said guess.”

  “She’s part woman and part girl,” Helen said.

  “Good. And her mouth is a peony. Know what a peony is?”

  “A flower?”

  “Yes, a fat red flower. This girl is blossoming. She’s ripe. She’s fresh. She’s like those green fields of Marlott.” She was trying to look past them all, out the window, but again her gaze fell on Peter’s. Why was he looking at her like that? Briefly, unwillingly, Vida saw herself at sixteen reading a book on a porch, and felt for an instant that lost intoxication of youth, that faith in life. Then Peter looked away.

  “What about those?” Karen asked, pointing. She was not a strong student, but she was highly organized and didn’t like to leave class with any loose ends.

  Vida glanced at the board behind her. “Okay, good. I was just getting to that.” She’d completely forgotten about the three terms she’d put up there. “Let’s start with Sir John. Anyone?” She watched how students like Helen and Danny didn’t bother with easy ones like this, waiting instead for the more intricate puzzles only they could solve. “Peter?” She needed to establish to the class that she would not play favorites, even if it meant humiliating him.

  “It’s Tess’s father. He’s walking along and that guy”—he quickly corrected himself before she could—“that parson”—(clearly he had no idea what the word meant but pushed on—“passes by and says, ‘Good-night, Sir John.’”

  “And?”

  “And?”

  “How does Tess’s father respond?”

  “I’m not sure.” He hadn’t even read the whole of the first page.

  Without looking at her book, Vida said, “‘Then what might your meaning be in calling me “Sir John” these different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield the haggler?’” To a group of tenth graders in New England, her nineteenth-century Dorset accent was quite authentic. Even Peter laughed.

  Lindsey raised her hand. “Once he finds out he’s a d’Urberville, he starts acting differently, even though he doesn’t have any more money than he had before.”

  “So by simply calling out ‘Good-night, Sir John,’ instead of ‘Jack,’ the parson sets the whole novel in motion.” She watched them scribble. That sentence would appear on nearly every essay next week. “Okay, moving on. Blighted star.”

  “But what about ‘green malt in floor’?” Karen said in alarm.

  “Anyone?” She had hoped to skip over that one. She didn’t feel like discussing sex and its repercussions now that Peter was in the classroom.

  They all turned to the page and pretended to think.

  “Why would someone say that Tess is so pretty her mother should mind she doesn’t get green malt in floor?” Let’s just say it and be done with it, she thought. But they kept their heads tucked down into their chests like sleeping pigeons. “What would make people in the late nineteenth century worry about a sixteen-year-old girl with a mouth like peony? What was the one thing that could ruin her?”

  “If she got knocked up?” Kristina blurted.

  Knocked up. The expression startled her, and she only managed a nod.

  “What would happen to an unmarried girl if she got pregnant back then?” Jennifer asked.

  The whole room began speaking at once, including Lydia’s students, who’d been so quiet up to now.

  “She’d be a total outcast.”

  “She’d be like an untouchable.”

  “She’d never be able to marry.”

  The class was galvanized by the subject, by its proximity to sex. Peter wasn’t looking at her now. Nor was he speaking. He was wagging his pencil between two fingers, making it thump like a tail on his notebook. He was smirking at Kristina. It was something in the smirk that brought it on, or in the steady, nearly hostile whacks of the yellow pencil on the page.

  “And the guy? What happened to the guy?”

  “Nothing would happen to the guy. He was a stud.”

  “Just like nowadays.”

  It began so small, small as a pinprick, in her chest. It was the familiar sting of fear but then it spread, its great wings opening all at once, her breath gone, her mind seized like an animal caught in a trap. It was the terror of the mornings and the terror of dream—a terror that had never ever visited her in her classroom before.

  She was only partially aware of a new boy from Lydia’s class saying something about his cousin. “She was in eleventh grade. Now she’s in a mental hospital.” Kevin, she suspected his name was.

  “What about the baby?”

  “They made her get rid of it. That’s why she went crazy.”

  Peter seemed to love the disruption, the cacophony, the mutiny in the room. The pencil looked so small in his hand. When had his hand grown so big?

  “Can abortions make you go crazy?”

  She looked at the other hand, nestled near his knee. It seemed smaller, weaker. Like a wave, her fear of him began to pull back.

  “This one did her. She’s a complete nutcase now.”

  Her own class was watching her, waiting. Never were they allowed to pursue a tangent like this.

  “Oh for crying out loud,” she said finally. “That’s enough.” She could feel cool dots of sweat on her forehead. A warm weakness spread over her limbs like a balm.

  “It’s true, I swear, Mrs. Avery.”

  “Mrs. Belou!” several of them said.

  “It’s utter nonsense. Let’s move on. Why does Tess claim they live on a blighted star?”

  The clock spooled out its remaining minutes as she led them through the thicket of their own language, through Tess’s first recorded day and into the dawn of the next when, delivering the load of beehives her drunken father could not, she falls asleep while driving the cart and kills the family’s only horse.

  The bell reverberated at their feet. Vida marveled at how ea
sily they shut their books, stuffed them brutally back into their bags, their minds having moved on to the algebra test or a crush in the hallway or an urge for a particular candy bar inside the vending machine. Vida bid them good-bye from her perch on the desk, unable to dismiss the image of the girl in the narrow lane beside the family horse, trying to stem with her hand the strong stream of blood spurting from its chest. She had always balked at Hardy’s heavy hand, the way he put Tess on a conveyor belt of tightly orchestrated events that led to her destruction. But Vida could not find that resistance now. Hardy had all but disappeared, leaving this inexperienced girl to carry on alone.

  Peter left without a glance, in a cluster of boys, their voices like the low grunts of large animals, their laugh on the stairs sharp and sinister. Then they were gone, and silence, having been kept at bay for forty minutes, rushed back in.

  As she turned to erase the board for the next class, she was aware of the thoroughly irrational hope that this time it would turn out differently for Tess. When she reread tomorrow’s forty pages, Tess might not meet Alec the fake d’Urberville, or fall asleep in the bed of leaves he gathered for her, or allow him to lie beside her. And in a week or so, perhaps Angel Clare would not mind about her past, would not reject her for so long with such dire consequences.

  Her seniors came in, the boys with their size 12 feet, the girls in their mothers’ expensive blouses, slapping down their copies of The Sun Also Rises on their desks. She was grateful for the shift to Hemingway, to Spain, to characters who would remain characters, silly drunken characters who mattered nothing to her.

  Vida picked up the eraser. At eye level were the words MRS. BELOU. With one stroke, they were gone.

  At break she went down the two flights of back stairs to get a cup of coffee. Once the servants’ pantry, the teachers’ lounge, with its buckling linoleum squares and wall of tin sinks, was not the coziest in the mansion. There was a couch and an end table and some desks and chairs for the math and science departments, who could easily correct their multiple-choice tests in the midst of gossip and complaint, but it needed a rug and standing lamps for real comfort, and most teachers only lingered for a few minutes to read their mail or wait for yet another pot of coffee to brew. Today, however, the place was jammed. Faculty crowded around a card table, loading flimsy paper plates with smoked salmon, croissants, muffins, and cubes of fruit. It was the time of year, a month and a half before first-semester grades came out, that the mothers of less than stellar seniors grew frantic and tried to bribe the faculty with expensive food and a little place card in the center of the table declaring, above their carefully written names, their deep appreciation for all the teachers at Fayer.