by Lily King
“All right,” she said, straining for the appropriate tone to cover up the hollowness she felt, as if all her emotions and the words for her emotions were scurrying to the farthest side of her brain where she couldn’t reach them. Years ago, her first year at Fayer, Gena had flown in for Christmas wanting to talk, wanting to know what had happened, why Vida had left home so abruptly, and though she’d planned, that whole fall, to tell her sister everything, when the time came her mind went blank. She had let Gena hold Peter, feed him a bottle, walk him around the pond in her arms, but she was never able, not even with an easy lie, to explain his presence.
Tom began talking. He had a lot of things to say, rehearsed phrases that he’d clearly refined over the course of days and maybe even weeks, phrases like “off on the wrong foot” and “between the sheets.” Her years at Fayer, with all their assemblies, banquets, and dedication ceremonies, had made her an expert in the art of not really listening. She let his clichés roll easily over her. She did not let their eyes meet, and instead looked at the cuff of his dress shirt, a wedge of which poked out from beneath his jacket sleeve. His clothes did not have tags. They were softer to the touch than regular men’s clothes; their colors were unique. The tweed of the jacket he wore today had bits of scarlet, bits of turquoise, though looking at it from a distance you’d never guess it had anything but shades of brown. And the jacket fit him in a way that men’s clothes off the rack wouldn’t. Even though he was sitting down, there was no bulge at the back of the neck. He was pleasing to look at, pleasing to touch, without trying to please at all. His clothes fit because he had been making them for himself since he was nine years old. There was something she resented about the comfortableness of his clothes, the comfortableness of his body in this world. Even now on the green sofa beside her he seemed to be pretending to be nervous, pretending to be awkward and wary of her reaction to his words, pretending to care about who she was and what would become of them. But no matter who she turned out to be, no matter what happened to them as a pair, if they could really call themselves that, he would be fine. In his soft tagless clothes in his little mouse house (he was talking now about the house, how it was a challenge, merging families, merging lives) with his precious, badly educated children, he was going to be just fine.
“Hey.” His eyes, squinted, fierce, accused her of not listening. He clutched her two hands, his fingernails stinging the flesh of her palms. “Please talk to me. Please.”
“I really don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you to share yourself with me. I want you tell me how I can make things better for you.”
“I’m fine. You don’t need to do anything for me.”
He dropped his face into his hands, rubbed, and then sat up again with a red forehead. “I keep going back to certain moments. At Emma’s, remember that night? It was the first time I’d spoken of my children, really. You had so many questions, so many insights.” He went on and on, each date, each conversation.
He was right. She’d been good at talking; she’d been good at listening. She had that English teacher’s ability to communicate, to draw out meaning, to produce the larger picture. She had taken great interest in his children as characters. But he had expected more from her when they became flesh and blood.
“Everyone said to take it slowly but I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. When I saw you go up to that podium last June I knew. Honestly, it was all I needed to see. I felt I knew you, and I wanted to be with you.”
“I can’t be that person you saw. You’ve got to forget about her. She existed for a few minutes and then she sat back down.”
“But Vida—”
“That morning my friend Carol’s son hung himself in an apartment in Boston. My favorite class was graduating. It was an emotional day.”
“And you’re saying you’ll never be emotional again?”
“It’s not something I can turn on and off.”
“Just turn it on. Forget about off.”
He took her hand with the rings on it and cupped it in both of his. It quickly warmed to his temperature. She wished they could just stay like that. Why did relationships have to be so verbal? All day long she dealt with words, adjusting them, negating them, praising them.
“I know you’ve begun drinking to stop it from turning on.”
“Begun drinking?”
“From what Peter says this is pretty new.”
From what Peter says.
“When I was a little boy I watched my father disappear every night. He came in from the shop joking and laughing and by the time dinner was over that man had died. And a bitter disappointed man was in his place.”
Oh Lord. She couldn’t bear the cliché of it. Had he plucked it directly from one of Fran’s books?
“I can’t watch that happen all over again in my house. I know where it leads. I’d like to ask you to stop.”
“Stop drinking?” She was still incredulous.
He nodded.
She laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Oh God. You’re way off track.”
“Am I?”
“I’m a hell of a lot better with a few drinks in me.” Didn’t he at least understand they’d never have sex again if he cut her off?
“I don’t think so.”
“Trust me.”
“I don’t, Vida. I don’t trust you at all.”
And then, like the junior boy who’d sat on this couch last week begging for a better grade, he began to cry. He made no attempt to stop his tears or cover his face or turn away. Her eyes, which had been locked on the sleeve of his jacket, drifted up toward his, and when they met she felt a shifting of the weight inside her and she could feel how it might be to speak about the falling falling falling feeling she got sometimes even when she was drunk and Tom was touching her, a feeling as close to feeling like you don’t exist, have never existed, as you can have in this life, like the whole universe is a joke, an enormous joke and you’re finally being let in on it, and how somehow this feeling was worse than the terror she had felt in that bathroom that afternoon all that time ago. How a memory could be worse than the thing itself made no sense but it was the remembering she was scared of, and if she unplugged that memory for him it would always be there between them. It would spread everywhere; it would spread to Peter, and then her life would truly be over.
Once she got ahold of herself again she grew bored by his performance. She had the impulse to get up and grade a few papers until he had finished. Then she understood that he wasn’t going to stop until she stopped him.
“All right,” she said. “If it’s so important to you.”
“Not just to me. To all of us. Stuart, Fran, Caleb, and Peter.”
“Peter has nothing to do with this.”
“Peter has everything to do with it.”
“I’ll see you at home.” She got up off the couch, sat down at her desk, and swung the stack of freshman essays around to face her.
When she looked up again, he was gone. She was soothed again by the sensation she’d had in her kitchen the day he proposed, that this was practice, and that the real event, the one that counted, the one that would be graded and put in the book, would happen later, when she had studied harder and knew her lines.
Her sophomores were in the midst of some intrigue. She could tell at once by the sound of their feet, which were clustered together and moving quickly as if trying to keep up with the pace of their gossip. Even the boys were in on it, their voices cracking with surprise. By the time they reached her door they had all composed themselves somewhat, greeting her with their usual blend of resentment that people like her existed and reassurance that the world, dastardly as it was, had not changed over the weekend. Peter seemed out of the loop. He was the last to enter the room and took his regular seat, which was removed from the froth of gossip. She admired him for this, and tried not to think about Tom’s words.
Whatever it was had gotten them all stirred up, and they took longer than usual to
get settled. Lindsey scribbled something and handed it to Brian, who giggled like a third grader.
Karen was the only one who’d gotten out her book. “God, Mrs. Belou, why did she tell him?”
“Why did who do what?” She wished she’d had time to review last night’s reading.
“Tess! Why’d she have to tell Angel?”
So they had gotten there already. “All right,” she said to the most agitated corner of the room. “Give it a rest now. Why don’t you take out”—the commotion stopped and she could hear them breathing, waiting—“your book.”
A ripple of relief spread through the room, though there were a groaning few who had read carefully in hopes of a quiz to boost their grade.
“Brian, could you give us a little summary of what happened last night?” she said. Then, as an irritating little grin grew on Brian’s face, she added, “In the book.”
“Well,” he began, clutching the unopened novel like a football, “after a lot of talking talking talking Tess finally agrees to marry Angel. On December thirty-first, which I think is a really weird day to get married. And then she tells him about the Alec dude and the baby and it’s all over.”
Vida was surprised he’d understood that much of it. “Anyone want to add anything to that?”
“She tells him because after the wedding he tells her about some woman in London he was with for a while and he asks Tess to forgive him,” Harry said. “She is so psyched because she thinks now it will be easy to finally let out this secret she’s been keeping from him, but when she tells him he has a completely different reaction.”
“What does he say?” Vida felt an energy returning to her, an energy she’d begun to suspect she’d lost. Lately, she found herself vacillating between anger and lassitude, unable to find the vigilance and rigor she once had. But today she would talk about the ill-chosen location of the honeymoon, the crumbling d’Urberville mansion, and how Hardy plants his Darwinian theories of social determinism in the faces of Tess’s two ancestors on the wall (paintings built into the wall that cannot be removed), one representing treachery, the other arrogance.
“At first he wonders if she’s joking or going crazy, and then he gets mad.”
Helen raised her hand. “He doesn’t get mad, exactly. He’s kind of in a state of shock. He tells her that he can’t forgive her because the woman he has been loving is not her, but another woman in her shape. It’s just like that poem we read by Hardy last year—about the guy who meets that ghost on the road.”
“‘The Well-Beloved,’” Vida said quietly, wondering exactly who she was, that woman Tom had seen going up to the podium in June.
“I think she was so stupid to have told him. They could have gone to a different part of England and he never would have found out,” Kristina said.
“But it would always be there in her heart, eating away at her,” Helen said.
“I think it was selfish of her. She like ruined this guy’s wedding night.”
“He ruined it. He couldn’t forgive her.”
Vida interrupted the two girls. “You have to understand Angel’s point of view. Tess was a poor, uneducated, unreligious girl. Purity was her only asset, the only way he could justify her to his parents.”
“She wanted to start the marriage honestly, no secrets.”
Vida was sick of Helen’s whining. She looked to the back, careful to avoid Peter in the corner, who actually seemed to be paying attention. From what Peter says. She felt a burning on the underside of her arms. Caroline was beside him and hadn’t spoken in several days. She caught the girl’s eye. “What are your thoughts, Peter?” Peter? Had she truly said Peter?
Caroline, whose mouth had opened slightly in preparation, turned in relief to her left.
“I don’t think you can have a real relationship with someone without being truthful.”
“But Tess’s ‘truth’ isn’t true, Peter,” Vida said calmly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He glared at her, defiant.
“The subtitle of this book is A Pure Woman. Tess is no less pure for her encounter with Alec d’Urberville. In fact, it is what she learns from her experience with Alec and losing her baby that makes her so intriguing to Angel. He doesn’t love her for her innocence. He loves her for her depth of feeling and knowledge, which comes from her experiences. ‘Tess’s corporal blight was her mental harvest,’ Hardy writes.”
“But she was miserable, Mrs. Belou!” Vida let Helen override any noises Peter had begun to make. “She had to tell him. She was never going to be happy otherwise.” It was the first stupid thing Vida had ever heard come out of her mouth.
“Well she sure as hell ain’t gonna be happy now.”
“Don’t tell us!” several of the girls squealed.
“This is what is known as a tragedy. It says so right there on the back of your book. I don’t teach fairy tales, folks.”
“Does something terrible happen to Tess?” Karen asked quietly.
Peter’s neck had splotched up. He was still glowering at her.
Vida nodded, then pulled on an invisible rope around her throat as her head fell limp against her shoulder.
“She dies?” they gasped.
Helen’s voice was cold and serious. “But you said she wouldn’t die.”
“Of course she dies.” She looked down at their faces and for a moment she couldn’t have said who any of them were or how she knew them; even Peter fell away from memory. All she knew was that she wanted to hurt them somehow for all they didn’t know. “We all die.”
The lunchroom of a high school is a disturbing place. Everyone’s neuroses gather here. The combination of food and voluntary seating releases uneasiness into the air like a gas. At Fayer Academy, the teachers suffered no less than the students. Of the sixteen tables in the lunchroom, two were designated for faculty. Brick always came to lunch first and stayed through all three periods. He sat at the table closest to the door, making it, for the twenty-four years he had been headmaster, the desirable table. The rules of the lunchroom seating for faculty had never been uttered, yet every teacher, within days of arriving at Fayer, understood where he or she belonged. Somehow, without words, Brick made it clear who was in and who was out. In the course of one’s career, adjustments were made. Mark Stratton, when he was a part-time geography teacher, would have never dreamed of sitting at the first table, but the computer revolution changed all that. Davis Clay had sat at Brick’s table for years until he stopped drinking and lost his sense of humor. There were more teachers popular with Brick than there were places at the table, but room was always made, chairs borrowed from other tables to accommodate them.
Today Vida arrived for the second period of lunch. As she stood in line, pressed between students she had never taught, she was not aware of discrete thoughts but of an inaccessible roar that tossed up every now and then, as if from the depths of the sea, some image or phrase to antagonize her. The bright flecks in Tom’s jacket. We all die. From what Peter says.
Vida looked down at her tray. Shepherd’s pie, wax beans, and sponge cake. A meal like this was perhaps the most humiliating part of her job. But at least she hadn’t had to make it herself. She was hungry and moved swiftly to the faculty corner.
It happened so quickly that later she wondered if she’d imagined it all. She approached the crowded table, knowing she’d already been seen: Brick and Cheryl Perry and Greg Massie had all been looking in her direction while she’d been filling her glass from the teat of the milk vat. But now, at the moment for hellos and scootching over, her tray hovering over the table, no one looked up. So this is how it’s done, she realized. Without breaking her pace, she traveled the arc of the table to the one behind it, joining the librarian, the substitute Spanish teacher, the school nurse, the head of development, and the entire math department. They all stared at her as if she’d dropped down from Neptune.
“Mmm mmm good,” Vida said, lifting the first bite of the pie to her mouth. “And people won
der why there’s a shortage of teachers in this country.”
“Actually,” the librarian said, “I read three days ago that a large percentage of teaching positions will be cut at the end of the year.”
“I read that article, too!” Bob Crowse said, pressing his small chest into the table in his excitement.
“You did?” The librarian blushed.
Vida looked around for someone to share her cynical mirth, but these misfits were either unnaturally engrossed in their meal or smiling jealously at the coincidence.
At the other table, Brian Rossi was whispering something in Jerry Poulk’s ear. Jerry frowned, tossed his napkin on his tray, and stood abruptly. Vida, watching his surgeonlike urgency with amusement, was startled when, as he passed, he said, “Heard there’s been a lot of drama in your classes lately. Tryouts are coming up—we could use you.” This last sentence was tossed over his shoulder, his absurd little ponytail flipping into the air. If she’d had a retort, he wouldn’t have heard it.
Halfway through her sponge cake, she felt a familiar pressure on her arm, then Brick’s ranch dressing breath at her neck. “Swing by my office when you’re done, will you.” Before she could give an answer he, too, was gone.
“Vida,” he said, manufacturing surprise while sliding a slip of paper beneath his fingertips toward the center of his clutterless desk. “Have a seat.”
Every April, before the next year’s contracts were distributed, each teacher was called into this office for what Brick called “The Chit Chat.” Carol, who had to type up the notes from these meetings, called it “The Shit Shat.” It was an evaluation of sorts, though Brick had trouble complimenting people and relied on oblique references in the passive voice. “Word is,” he said to her last year, “you’re only getting better.” But it was not April yet and Vida sensed the word was no longer good.
