The English Teacher

by Lily King

  “No.”

  “Horse walks into the bar and the bartender says, ‘Why the long face?’”

  Caleb waited for him to go on.

  “That’s it.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s a short joke. I don’t remember the long ones very well.”

  They both returned to their reading.

  At dinner all of his stepsiblings were silent and sulky. One by one Tom tried to draw them out, but they resisted. It was Peter’s turn to do the dishes with Tom. When he was through, he found them in the living room, speaking in low voices. They stopped when he came in. He headed for his room, then paused in the hallway. They resumed.

  “It’s like something out of a bad movie.”

  “She’s sick.”

  “Totally unsubtle.”

  Peter had no idea what they were—then he knew. The picture. He’d forgotten to put it back on the wall. The realization was physical, like something shattering inside him, his skin pricked from the inside by all the shards. He’d have to explain, release his mother from blame. He’d wait and tell Stuart later; maybe he’d think it was funny that Peter talked to her sometimes.

  But later Stuart did all the talking, his mind whipping around his usual topics like a race car: the body, the Tao, Eastern medicine, college….

  “I’m rethinking the plan. My stomach has been sort of sinking ever since it was”—he gave Peter a forgiving smirk—“revealed. I would like to go back to California.”

  “To Berkeley?”

  “No. Just to live. Forget college.”

  Peter felt responsible for this devastating change of heart. His stomach began to sink, too. “Why?”

  “It was pretty amazing there.”

  “I thought you said the water looked fake.”

  “It did. Everything did. But that’s what’s cool about it. Every morning you felt like you were stepping onto a movie set, made especially for you and your day. Mom said the place made her feel twenty years younger. She must have said that twenty times. You know what it was? The place was hopeful. Full of hope.” His head fell off his elbow, and he stared up into the swirls of plaster on the ceiling. Peter waited for him to say this place was full of death, but he didn’t. In the silence, he remembered again the misunderstanding about the picture. He didn’t want them to think his mother would do such a horrible thing, but confessing was impossible. How could he explain the disgusted look their mother had given him?

  “I got mad at her for saying it so many times, that stuff about feeling younger. Because each time she said it it was like she was having the thought for the first time. The thing is, she was. She was having the thought for the first time each time. The tumor was sitting right on her temporal lobe, erasing the thought as soon as she said it. My father hadn’t wanted her to take me, but she’d insisted. I thought he was just being an asshole. And then he was calling all the time. Practically every time we went past the hotel desk there was another message from him. And then when he met us at the airport she just sort of collapsed into his arms, as if she’d just run a marathon. You’d think I could have put it all together. If it were on TV you’d be screaming at the kid: ‘She’s got a brain tumor, you moron! Can’t you see that?’” He pushed the heels of his hands hard into his eye sockets. “But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”

  Peter dreamed his first dream of her. The dream had no plot; it was just a moment, her in his room, his old room, in a shiny yellow raincoat. He moved toward her with no idea what he would say or do, with no idea if she was real or imagined. But when he reached her, all uncertainty was gone. He hugged her tight, so tight, and breathed her in and she smelled like flowers and old leaves, and then he was crying, aching, and she held him close until the tears running into his ears woke him up.

  FIVE

  MEMORY DOES ITS WORK UNDERGROUND. BENEATH CONSCIOUSNESS, A PAST moment finds its kin all at once. Like a fish returned to its school, it frolics in remembered waters, and stirs up others. Above the surface, at first, there are only a few brief innocuous ripples which are all that you can allow yourself to know of the commotion below: a checked shirt, the white rim of a porcelain sink. The fluid sequence of moments seems, luckily, irretrievable; there is no line to follow with a finger, no story she feels able to tell. Yet even awful, unlivable memories want to be relived; the fragments yearn to be whole once more.

  Vida stood immobile before the half-renovated house, its windows and doors blown out, and workmen, even today, a Saturday, running their tools within its gutted insides. All it took was this smell—the smell of a freshly built room—for the taste of his mustard breath to come into her mouth.

  “It looks like they’re going to put a balcony off every bedroom,” Tom said.

  Dutifully, Vida raised her eyes to the second floor.

  “And some sort of turret over there.”

  She followed his gesture to the left.

  “I guess the moat will come later.”

  She knew from the change in tone that a smile was expected, though his words fell between them unheard. Her ribs seemed to be straining inward, strengthening their cage against the growing panic inside. Her limbs felt light, as if they might break off and float away.

  “This whole neighborhood was once just a huge field covered in Queen Anne’s lace in the summer and children in snowsuits dragging toboggans up there to Blake’s Hill in the winter. We used to take Stuart and Fran here nearly every weekend. And now look at it.”

  Vida tried to concentrate on the circle of new houses and their even newer additions, their pools of asphalt out front, the freshly raked grass in back.

  “What’s wrong?” This was a question Tom often asked, as if, having missed so many warning signs with Mary, he was determined to find the first one in her.

  She always tried to give him an answer, even when there wasn’t one. But now, as they moved away from the house, nothing came to her and she felt depleted by the strain of trying to assure him that everything was fine.

  “Hey?” He pulled her by the hands to him, forcing her to face him directly. “What is it?”

  This was what he was always asking, in one way or another. What is it? What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you who I thought you were?

  Her mind scrambled for a way out of a whole day of his scrutiny. Mercifully, something arose, not even a lie. “I completely forgot. I have this miserable computer tutorial at school.” She’d never planned to go. She’d gotten the memo and torn it up. “I’m sorry.”

  She unfastened her hands and resumed the walk home. Beside her, Tom said nothing, though she felt him questioning her. She’d made quite a passionate speech at dinner a few nights ago about the evils of technology in the classroom, how it weakened the already weakening grasp on language, how it was the enemy of creativity and spontaneity and the fortuitous mistake. Tom had been amused by her rant; he’d taken her hand under the table. He’d looked at her for the rest of the evening as if he’d remembered why he married her, and that night she found the right equation of alcohol and forgetting and they’d managed, to his great delight, to have a form of intercourse. But now she was drained of words and she could feel his bewilderment returning. Was this how marriage was, bewilderment giving way to reassurance giving way to more bewilderment? Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?

  She thought of that Hardy poem, the one with the young man walking at night toward the home of the girl he is to marry the next day. A spirit sidles up next to him, a beautiful woman who resembles his bride. She tells him she is the dream he has dreamed of love, and that he loves only her, not the poor girl he has been projecting his illusions onto. When the spirit finally convinces him, he insists on marrying her instead, but she says she cannot, and disappears. When he reaches the home of his bride-to-be, he finds that all the life has been sucked out of her.

  “Vida,” Tom said softly, so softly she could pretend not to have hea
rd. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Vida.” He stopped on the sidewalk and waited for her to turn to him.

  She was still thinking about the end of the poem, straining to remember the last lines.

  Her look was pinched and thin,

  As if her soul had shrunk and died,

  And left a waste within.

  “What’s that from?”

  She didn’t know she’d spoken the words aloud.

  “A Hardy poem.” She felt protective of it.

  “Which one?”

  She didn’t want to explain. She wanted to think about this idea of love’s being cast onto someone like a spotlight, making her shimmer and glow for a little while, lending her qualities she doesn’t possess. Is this really what we do to each other, find a victim and shine the light of all our dreams on them? Angel Clare places all his fantasies of the pure innocent country girl onto Tess, and when she finally forces him to listen to her story of Alec and the baby, she becomes vile to him and he banishes her. As if her soul had shrunk and died, / And left a waste within. She could hear Tom saying her name again, but he seemed so much less important, so much more immaterial than this theory of Hardy’s, which she’d always taught to her students, but had never suspected would ever apply to her own life.

  The computer room had cost over five hundred thousand dollars. On Thursday evening there’d been an unveiling for parents and faculty, and on Friday the day’s schedule had been reorganized to allow every student in the school a chance to sit at the helm of one of these machines. Now, in one Saturday afternoon, the teachers were expected to learn how to integrate them into their curricula.

  For two years, the administration had been aggressively brainwashing the school community, producing pamphlets with titles like “The Modern Miracle in Education” and “Learning Finally Becomes Fun!” The need was so great, they said, and money so scarce, that faculty members were being asked to give a portion of their salaries each month to the cause. Vida had heard that some of the younger teachers, in fear of not getting their contracts renewed, had actually agreed to the tithing, poor suckers.

  Now they were all suckers, crammed in this room on a Saturday. There were not, thank God, enough computers to go around, so the overflow sat on metal chairs at the back. Vida took a seat next to Cheryl Perry, who smelled like cheese and handed her a few mimeographs, general instructions for the IBM System 370.

  Mark Stratton, the computer guru, and Brick Howells stood practically hand in hand at the front of the room. Brick declared, in a voice far too loud for the size of the room, that what they were about to witness was nothing short of a revolution. And that no other school in the area, not even Hunt, Fayer’s wealthier rival, had implemented this kind of technology.

  To Vida’s astonishment, her colleagues clapped. Then Mark asked everyone seated at a computer to turn it on by pushing the large rectangular button on the left. He said something else but his voice was drowned out by the sudden snap and whir of the machines. Vida waited for the noise to die down. It didn’t. A smell like burnt hair filled the room.

  Then they were asked to divide up into their departments. The math, science, and history departments should all take seats at the computers; the arts and languages should find their own classrooms in order to brainstorm ways in which they could use their weekly lab time. This transition was as difficult and bitter as if they had all been third graders. Jose Costa refused to give up his seat: he’d been the first to arrive. And Leon, the frail Latin teacher, put up an equally impressive fight on the other side of the room. The art teachers seemed to have a difficult time simply identifying each other. When she and the rest of her department finally settled around the thick walnut table in the conference room, Vida added nothing to the list her colleagues chirped out, as she had absolutely no plans to ever bring her students into that awful place.

  When her department was called back to the smelly, roaring room, Mark assigned them a computer and asked them to simply type onto the screen a paragraph. “You could begin a letter, a short story, or,” he said looking specifically at Vida, Lydia, and Liz, the three women in the English department, “a recipe. Anything. Then we’ll go from there.”

  The first thing that came to her mind was Shakespeare. Even though it had been several years since she’d pulled her college typewriter out of the closet, her hands knew the keys immediately.

  If it were now to die

  ’Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear

  My soul hath her content so absolute,

  That not another comfort like to this

  Succeeds in unknown fate.

  How ludicrous to see poor Othello in fluorescent yellow on a little TV screen in front of her. After a few minutes, Mark explained how to check the paragraph for mistakes. Vida’s computer bleeped seven times. It had opinions about not only spelling, but grammar and syntax as well.

  Mark Stratton moved quickly toward her and nestled his upper body on top of her monitor. “Stumped already?”

  “Mr. Computer’s style is pretty rigid.”

  “It will only accept the best configuration.”

  “You can’t expect a machine to have a sensitivity to the rhythms and nuances of the English language. Sometimes the least grammatically correct sentence is the best choice. I don’t want a computer holding back my students’ creativity.”

  Mark laughed. “In fifty years, these babies are going to be writing better books than anything you’ve ever taught them.”

  “You can’t believe that.”

  “I don’t have to believe it. I know it, my friend.”

  Before the creation of this room. Mark had been a part-time geography teacher. Vida watched him now, pacing the length of his royal-blue carpet, gazing with possessive pleasure at his hot droning monsters. She thought of the threshing machine, Hardy’s symbol for the Industrial Age, that despotic contraption that forced an inhuman pace on fieldworkers, separating their souls from the land forever. Her chest tightened. She felt it, right here, right now, what Hardy had felt, the ache of modernism.

  They had left it that Tom would make dinner, but when Vida got home just before six, the house was empty. She called out into the darkness. Only Walt came, slowly, his back legs reluctant to separate after hours of napping. He sniffed her pants, then snorted out the smell, as if he, too, were disgusted by Mark Stratton and his machines. She called out again. Nothing.

  She’d never been in this house alone. She tossed her shoes down the hall toward her room and sat in one of the wing chairs facing the sofa. When she shut her eyes, the head and neck of a computer monitor lunged at her. Brick had drained the scholarship fund to pay for the lab. The board of trustees had just stood back and let him do it. And now she was expected to take each of her classes down there once a week. They wanted her to become the engine man, the half-human, coal-grimed creature who kept the threshing machine running. The undersides of her arms burned with anger. It was time for a drink. But she could wait a little longer, wait until everybody got home.

  The mud-gray screen of the TV gaped at her. Had she ever been in this room when it was not on, when it was not blaring its garbage? The hostages. The hostages. How much more could we take of the hostages? Every now and then a few were trotted out onto the embassy steps, a tattered white rag tied tight around each face, beards growing in clumps like bad grass on their necks. Every day the newscasters seemed shocked anew that it was still going on. It irked her how they had begun to count, numbering the days since the takeover and her wedding. Today was Day 33. She didn’t even know how she knew. They had programmed her, like a computer. These babies are going to be writing better books than anything you’ve ever taught them. What kind of viper would want to believe that? And where was everybody? Fran and Caleb, she remembered now, were at friends’ houses for the night, but Peter, Tom, and Stuart? It was too dark to see out to the driveway now. Should she start making something? The thought of making another damn dinner pinned her to her seat. She hadn’t realize
d how good she’d had it on campus. Every meal had been made for them. Except for the first and last weeks of summer and a fortnight at Christmas, she’d never had to cook. And when she did, Peter had expected so little—a bowl of soup, scrambled eggs, he didn’t care. But the Belous were different. They asked at breakfast what she’d be making that night. They came in while dinner was cooking to lift up the lids and smell. They had begun to make suggestions, one at a time, choreographed hints about what to cook and how to cook it. They liked to set the table. They enjoyed, in fact, all rituals. They were like some prehistoric tribe, the way they found meaning in the repetition of acts. Once Vida had read “Annabel Lee” to Caleb before bed and now he wanted a poem read to him every night. She had driven Fran to the mall last Friday afternoon and now the girl wanted to go shopping on the first Friday afternoon of every month. Stuart still wanted nothing to do with her, but even that had its own pattern. He always sat in the chair farthest from her, and was sure to be out of the house on Saturday mornings and Sunday evenings when she did her grading in the kitchen. She felt grateful to Stuart for one reason: his presence in Peter’s bedroom. If she had that dream, he’d be there—and most likely awake—to stop her from hurting Peter.

  She had planned to just turn on a light or two and sit back in the wing chair, but her legs kept moving, into the kitchen, into the pantry closet. She brought out the bourbon, the glass, the ice, then shoved them all away. She sat down at the green table, not in the seat at the far end where she did her grading, and not to the left of Tom’s place where she usually sat at dinner, but to the right of him, Mary’s old seat. It was an odd choice, pressed in close to the wall. Vida felt a little suffocated in it even without the kids on all sides. Mary, she imagined, was part Mrs. Ramsay and part Marmee March, intoxicated by her role as Mother.

  The red hands above the stove were clutched at six-thirty. Where the hell was everyone? She imagined the station wagon skidding into the headlights of a monstrous truck. I’m sorry, ma’am, the cop at the door would say. Her heart raced at the thought of a man at the door with a gun.