The English Teacher

by Lily King

  When his mother finally left, he’d move into her room, to the double bed. He’d never slept in a double bed. And palm trees out the window. He wanted to see the beach again today. Gena wanted to take him over to the school. The idea of a new school was only good in theory. Look how badly he’d fared with kids he’d known all his life. What would happen when he was a complete unknown from the opposite end of the country?

  He fell back asleep.

  “Peter.” It was his mother, whispering. “Are you awake?”

  “Kind of,” he said.

  “Shhh.”

  “What’s going on?” He wasn’t going back, if that’s what she wanted.

  “Let’s go on a picnic.”

  “A picnic? What time is it?”

  “A breakfast picnic.”

  He pushed himself up to sitting, his head still thick with dreams. Beside him sat a wicker basket with a wooden lid. The stalk of a banana kept it from closing all the way. Beside that squatted his mother. She’d combed her hair and put on a dress.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  The dress was yellow with short sleeves and a full skirt that lay in folds on the floor. His mother, even in the summer, didn’t wear tiny sleeves like that. She didn’t wear yellow, ever. The whole thing—the dress, the basket, the secrecy, even the word “picnic”—was far stranger than any dream.

  “Okay,” he said, too curious to feel like there was a choice.

  She waited for him out by the car.

  “It’s not far. We could walk,” he said.

  “I’ll have to leave these behind then.” She tossed Gena’s shoes into the bushes by the door. “They’ve shredded my skin.”

  The dress could not have been Gena’s. It was the exact shape of his mother. She walked, as she always did, a little ahead of him, her upper body tipped into an imaginary wind. The morning was overcast but warm, and the plants and trees had resumed their exotic, unmenacing aspects. The picnic basket swung on her arm like something from a fairy tale. He offered to take it but she shook her head. It was very light, she told him.

  Soon this road would be his road, this sky his sky. He thought he should buy a notebook and write some of it down. Up ahead a car with surfboards strapped to the top pulled into a driveway and honked, then honked again. A kid in a red wet suit—the body was pressed so flat he couldn’t tell if it was male or female—came out, shoved another board on top of the pile, and got in back.

  The ocean was a softer shade of blue today beneath the clouds. His mother cut straight through the tall sharp grass to the edge of the cliff. Her hair and her dress blew in the same direction. She stood there for several minutes and if he didn’t know better he would have said she was praying.

  The path down was so steep you didn’t really have to take steps; you just slid on your heels through the sand. The cliff seemed far larger from down here. Peter bent his head up the enormous rock face to where his mother had just been standing. It was probably sixty feet high. They were protected from the wind down here, and the clouds had begun to burn off.

  His mother chose a spot on the dry sand a few feet up from the tide line. They sat and did not speak. Waves broke in great thuds and splatters against the rocks, and the foamy water rushed through the narrow passages to shore, then jerked back into the pull of the next wave. Peter was hungry but his mother had tucked the basket up in her lap, stretched her arms through the handles and around its sides so that it was now part of her belly. She was looking at her toes, or maybe a few inches beyond them. He’d never seen her sit still before, without a book or a stack of essays, without some purpose. When she raised her face to his, it was as if she’d pulled back the air itself, like a curtain he’d never known was moveable.

  “Here,” she said, unthreading her arms and hoisting the basket off of her. “Open it.”

  He raised the lid. On the top, beside two bananas, was a charcoal drawing of a man. It was elaborate, with shading in the cheeks and around the eyes, the cross-hatching Miss Conley was always trying to teach them.

  “I thought I owed you a better likeness.”

  He recognized him. Even from the hasty sketch he’d demanded of her so long ago he recognized him. The thin hair, parted on the right, the small eyes, the uncertain mouth. It was an angry face, but whose anger was it, his father’s or his mother’s? He could hear his mother breathing unevenly through her nose. He figured he had one question, maybe two. What was most important? He knew he should ask the man’s name, but something stopped him. It was both too little and too much. He held the drawing out to her—he didn’t want those narrow eyes watching him anymore—but she flinched back and would not take it. He couldn’t think of the words for what he wanted. Not another fucking drawing. He crumpled the paper and tossed it at the sea. It landed in the wet sand. Within seconds he regretted it and wanted to get up and grab the picture in case the water came up and carried it away, but it remained stubbornly in place. He heard her breathing and knew that he didn’t have much time. One question maybe two, right now or never again.

  “Tell me.” It barely belonged to him, this voice from the clenched depth of his stomach.

  She recoiled, pulling up her legs and wrapping the yellow dress over them. She rested her chin in the dip of fabric between the knobs of her knees.

  “Tell me who he was and why you married him and where he is now.”

  “We were never married.”

  He waited for her to go on but she didn’t. He felt like shoving her right over into the sand. “Tell me.”

  “I lived with my mother then.” Her voice was so faint he had to lean toward her, but imperceptibly; too much interest and he’d scare the words away. “She was a …” A wave smothered the rest.

  “I can’t hear you!” he yelled into the sudden hush of the water peeling back.

  She didn’t react to the shrillness of his voice the way she normally would. She just pushed the basket away with her feet and slid herself closer to him. She did this not with her usual teacherlike alacrity but with the creepy deliberateness of an old person. “My mother was a true matriarch. She was that imperious blend of insecurity and strength that Faulkner and Lawrence capture—”

  “I don’t care about Faulkner and Lawrence right now, Ma.”

  She nodded and pursed her lips and he figured he’d lost her. He’d gone too far. What was wrong with him? Why was he behaving like this when he was so close to getting some answers? But she started speaking again. “I lived with my mother and liked to spend as little time around her as possible so I often stayed in my classroom until evening, doing my work.”

  “Where was this?” He regretted his own interruption immediately.

  “Solano, Texas. It’s a small town about a hundred and fifty miles from the Mexican border. My father had bought a cattle ranch there, but the land was better for spinach and sorghum. We were there for a year, then my father died. We stayed because my father couldn’t push us on to the next place anymore. I went to a two-year college, then started teaching at the school there. My mother converted the whole ranch to sorghum and finally started making some money.”

  What the hell was sorghum? He didn’t know and he didn’t care, and he held his tongue this time.

  “There was one afternoon at school. Normally other teachers were around.” She curled and uncurled the hem of her dress and the thin cloth quivered in her fingers. “But everyone had gone across the street to the football, an important game, division something or other. The whole county had turned out for it. I could hear the roaring at my desk. I was planning to catch the second half, after I finished my grading. I had a few students on the team and I’d promised to show up. Everyone was gone. Even the construction workers—the schoolhouse was being renovated that fall—had permission to watch the game. There was one of them I had a terrific crush on. He used to visit me in the afternoons. He was too shy to get close to my desk so he’d circle the edges of the classroom, examining whatever was up on the walls, asking ‘Who�
��s Menalaeus?’ or ‘What’s synecdoche?’ He was so curious. His name was Eric. He always reminded me of Levin, that wonderful scene when he takes Kitty mushroom picking and—”

  “Is Eric my father?”

  “No.” She shook her head, which she’d tucked down into her neck like a goose. “Eric went to the game. I did my work, gathered my papers, and stopped in the bathroom on the way out.” She was talking with her eyes shut now. Peter could see the raised pupils jerking from side to side beneath their lids. “I was at the sink, washing my hands.” She stopped there, and he waited. He didn’t ask why she was talking about washing her hands when he wanted to know about his father. He took a deep breath. A pale-eyed dog trotted past them on his way to the water, two halves of a coconut shell wedged loosely in his mouth. “Sometimes it helps to think of Leda and the Swan.” She was whispering now. “To think of Io, Persephone, and Europa.”

  Maybe there was a part of him, a cluster of cells somewhere in his small brain that knew, that was trying to tell the other parts that would not listen, but he needed her to say it, not in code, not in references to people that were only real to her. He didn’t need this shit. This was the shit he’d gotten all his life. Leda and the fucking Swan.

  He stood up. “Forget it, Ma. When I have my Ph.D., maybe you can tell me. But I’m going back now. Gena’s showing me my school today.”

  She leapt up and grabbed him before he could take more than a few steps. “Listen to me, Peter Avery.” Her nostrils flared white but the rest of her face was a purplish red, raw and ugly as a slab of meat. “I’m going to tell you what you want to hear, but I’m going to tell you my own way, the only way I know how. Now sit.” She stood over him with her back to the roiling sea. “A man came into that bathroom.” Her voice broke on the last syllable and she looked straight up to the sun behind him, breathing hard. There were streaks down the sides of her face, though he hadn’t seen her crying.

  “Whenever I thought about telling this to you I always thought I’d find in that moment some beautiful way of constructing it so that it would seem somehow magical to you. I know that’s crazy but it happens. It can happen. The right words can transform even the grossest brutality. But they’re not …” She dragged her fingernails across the inside of her wrist. “They’re not coming to me now. A man came in. A stranger to me. He came into that bathroom while I was washing my hands.” Her face twisted and she looked at Peter helplessly, as if she herself could not believe what she was about to say. “And he raped me.”

  The crumpled paper rocked in the sand near her bare foot. Leda and the Swan. He remembered it now. The Swan was Zeus, swooping down to rape a mortal girl. He’d gotten an erection in class when they’d discussed the poem last year: the loosening thighs, the shudder in the loins.

  She dropped back down onto the sand beside him. He wished she weren’t so close. He wished she had the sense to leave him alone.

  “A few months later I got in my car and drove away.”

  “To Fayer?” he heard himself ask, though he didn’t care, didn’t want the rest.

  “Yes, though I didn’t know it at first. I just drove east and that’s where I ended up. At my grandfather’s house.”

  If Peter hadn’t just done a similar thing in the opposite direction he’d have thought she was lying.

  “And you were …”

  She nodded. “I was pregnant.”

  He wanted to stop her now. But she was not to be stopped. It would have been like trying to stop one of those waves.

  “It was eerie, discovering the house had become a school. I turned around before even going in the driveway. And then that night I saw in the paper they were looking for a substitute. I was so curious to go inside the house. I never thought they’d actually hire me. The faculty then was nearly all male and they were so stodgy. And I was a pregnant woman from Texas. But they did, and I rented an apartment off campus. Then when they offered me a full-time position, I moved into the cottage. Summer school was in session. My water broke while I was walking in the woods with Walt.” She lifted her hand to her mouth to pull out hair that had blown in, but her fingers were shaking so much she couldn’t trap it and gave up. “The pain was immediate. I thought it would be more gradual. It took me so long just to get back to the house. By then everything was confused in my mind. The pain and the fear seemed to trigger it all again. I knew I needed a phone but for hours at a time I thought I was back in that bathroom in Texas. And he was there and there was no phone and I was just screaming and screaming and no one heard. I couldn’t see the phone in my own kitchen with the doctor’s number taped to the wall and then I was pushing and I couldn’t stop myself from pushing, and even when I knew where I was and I could see the phone on the wall plain as day, I couldn’t bear the thought of some doctor coming in, some other man hovering over me, so I just pushed.” He saw the tears now, sliding down quietly. “I remember your warm slippery head in my hands and how I felt like both an animal and a god at the same time and I lifted you up and you were screaming and I was still screaming and then it felt like my whole insides drained out onto the kitchen floor and I lost consciousness. I woke up in the hospital and Carol was in a chair beside me, holding you. I think I always thought of her as an angel after that.

  “I used to have these dreams, after you were born, in which he’d come back. To steal you. And I’d fight him off. I’d kill him. I’d wake up standing rigid next to my bed or in the hallway. Every night I stood guard. Then once I dreamed”—her voice was growing thinner and thinner—“he was inside of you, inside of your little baby body, and I killed you both.” He could just barely hear her now. “After that, I was so scared, so scared of myself.” She covered her face from him, and only cracking sounds came out of her throat.

  He hadn’t known that the truth would feel like this, like having limbs pulled off. All these things he’d thought he wanted—her marriage to Tom, a night with Kristina, the story of his father—turned out to be corrupt in some way. He had been created by the opposite of love, had been the opposite of wanted. It all made too much sense.

  “I dreamt I killed you once. Because you wouldn’t tell me all this.” He put his arms around the little ball of her. Her whole body shook and he shook with it. He thought of the lurching beast they’d been on the field at school. Now they were something else. He didn’t know what.

  She was terrified he’d take his arms away. Stay stay stay. He was the only skin she had. Everything else was gone. Stay. She had no more words, no more energy left to push them out. This was the last time he would ever come near her, she was sure of it. He’d never truly forgive. He was Angel, she saw now, like in her dream. He would leave her. Stay, she cried. The sun rose higher and hotter and the waves grew even larger, rising to thin tremulous ridges before smacking the rocks. And Peter stayed.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”

  He’d come out of her like a slimy blue fish. She had forgotten her own animalness.

  After a while, a group of teenagers came down the path loudly, carrying surfboards to the far end of the beach where there were fewer rocks.

  “I’m hungry,” she said, and straightened up, permitting Peter to let go. He would feel embarrassed, hugging his mother in public.

  She dragged the picnic basket around. They each ate a banana and a hard-boiled egg.

  When they were done Peter said, “Should we go feel the water?” and stood with his hand out to help her up. She was far too depleted to move, but when she placed her hand in his and was lifted to her feet, she felt a rush of life. A wave broke and sent cold foamy water across the tops of her feet.

  “It’s freezing!” Peter cried and leapt away.

  “It’s the ‘scrotum-tightening sea!’” she screamed and waded in farther, lifting her dress up over her knees.

  “What!” Peter said, laughing.

  Perhaps it was for this moment that she’d been remembering Joyce all week.

 
; She lifted her feet up off the bottom, her dress billowing in great air pockets around her, her face to the sky and its strange California blue, a blue so deep you could almost see the blackness of space beyond. She’d forgotten how easily a body could float in saltwater. All she had to do was move her hands in nearly imperceptible little flaps below the surface every now and then, to glide along.

  Couldn’t his mother feel how cold it was? A huge wave began to swell behind her. The water at his feet retreated, sucking the sand out from under the edges of his feet. The wave grew and grew, hovered, then curled over with a thunderous crash and spray. His mother had gone under, near a cluster of rocks. She could have banged her head. He’d never be able to find her in all the foam, and churned-up sand. He took a few more steps into the surge and scanned the murky bottom. Then he saw her, bobbing in the chaos, her hair pressed down around her face, her mouth open, laughing, saying something to him that the noise of the sea carried off. She was young, he saw now, with freckles across her cheeks. In all his imaginings he’d never guessed that his mother had gotten hurt. Always in his mind there had been love on his father’s side, and sadness when she could not love him back. There had always been that man in his yard, raking leaves and waiting. Peter saw now that maybe that man was himself. Maybe he was the one who’d been waiting.

  On the way back to Gena’s he said, without rehearsing it, almost without knowing he was going to speak, “I like it here.”

  “I do too,” his mother said, to his unexpected relief.

  FOURTEEN

  October, 1980

  THE TRIP FROM GENA’S TO BERKELEY WAS LESS THAN AN HOUR. PETER WISHED it were longer. When the bus wheeled into a slot in the terminal, he didn’t look out the window at the trickle of people coming through the heavy doors to greet them. Stuart says there’s an eleven o’clock bus and you should be on it, Fran had written. The driver was opening up the luggage bin below him. Why was he so nervous? He’d had far more nerve-rattling days than this. In the past year he’d started a new school, called up three different girls for dates, and read two of his own poems aloud at assembly.