by Sean Oliver
Did he really just say that? She didn’t speak, instead she lost herself in studying his face. She had no idea why. She was pissed, but she was silenced.
Ineffective, he’d said. Oh, that magically destructive word. It was the lowest category on the all-important teachers’ evaluation. Administrators could put a teacher’s license in jeopardy with that single word. It was vague and without real meaning, except for its cutting potential.
It was likely intended to weed out teachers whose students weren’t learning. That would deem a teacher ineffective, would it not? There were days when teachers in P.S. 21 broke up fistfights, took guns and knives away from students. There were impromptu hallway counseling sessions with children coming to school from motels, shelters, or cars in which they slept. No one asked them if they had homework, because no adult was home until eleven. Public school buildings in Carson were filled with young people who would fail these tests, announce themselves as ‘below proficient’ on the grading scale. And that number could negate the social work that went on by the teachers, free of additional charge to the city, and render them ineffective.
It was a bad, bad word.
“Perhaps,” he said, completing the thought.
“Perhaps what?”
“Ineffectively, perhaps. I don’t know—I’ve not been in your classroom. Maybe you need no guidance at all. But do any of us really not need some guidance?”
She shook her head. She couldn’t get her thoughts together to respond. She felt as though she’d just been awakened from REM sleep and couldn’t form thoughts or get her mouth to comply with her head.
“I hope there’s something you can take from our time together. Maybe not the entire change in perspective that I hope to achieve with the teachers here. But something. Will you keep an open mind?” He smiled again. It seemed like a summation of sorts.
She’d get out now. She nodded.
“Good. Because some teachers are reachable and some aren’t. Just like students.” He leaned in, lowering his voice. “Because that’s what you believe, isn’t it, Deanna?”
She leaned away slightly, still locked on his blue eyes with pinpoint pupils. They were almost completely gone—his irises looked like just pale circles floating in the whites of his eyes. He smiled and lowered his voice.
“I won’t tell anyone. You repeat a mantra in here that all students have infinite potential—brain surgeons every one of ’em. But we both know how you feel in there.” He was slowly moving his index finger toward her, pointed at her heart. She was frozen, and his finger got closer. He was looking down at it, guiding it with precision.
He smiled again, this time very widely, opening his mouth. His teeth were small for his head, spaced a bit from each other.
He was laser focused on his finger, which kept moving and was a centimeter from her left breast.
“Dee?” Jared called from the other side of the doorway, behind the hulking Albrecht, who dropped his hand and turned, stepping aside. “You find them?”
She held up the keys to show him.
“Good. Hi, Mr. Albrecht.”
He smiled at Jared and nodded. “School is over. You can call me Elias.”
“Right on,” Jared said. He looked to Deanna. “You ready? We’re gonna be late.”
She nodded, but still stood pat.
“Off to look at photographers?” Albrecht asked. “Pick invitations?”
“Done and done,” Jared said. “Dinner at the in-laws.”
“Not in-laws yet,” Albrecht said to Jared, patting him on the shoulder and smiling.
“I think they become in-laws during the planning of the wedding,” Jared said, “based on the amount of say they seem to have.” Albrecht let out a friendly guffaw.
“Well, you two should be off, then.” He turned to Deanna and smiled. He made a grand gesture to the doorway.
“You should go,” he said to her.
EIGHTEEN
“I CAN’T HEAR you,” Lorenzo said, standing in the parking lot across form Mariana. She just waved him off, having noticed the front door of the school opening.
“Tell you later,” she said. Jared and Deanna exited the building and passed Mariana on the way to their car. Lorenzo and Mariana turned away from each other.
“Good night,” Jared said as he passed between them.
“Still daytime, Loco,” Mariana said.
Jared and Deanna were soon gone and Lorenzo started his car. He pulled out of the school lot and smiled at Mariana as he passed her sitting in her SUV. He was out onto Richmond Parkway—a busy two-way, four lane road that led to the Skyway and all parts west if you headed in one direction, and Columbus Parkway and the Downtown waterfront scene if you went in the other. Heading east, Columbus took you to the Hudson River, Manhattan views, and gentrified, high-rise living. They called it downtown, but it was uptown in all manners but geography. If you went west, the Skyway hit the New Jersey Turnpike, I-78 west, and anything the hell out of Carson.
Lorenzo was born-and-bred Carson—what they called Chill Town, if this were the 80s. The streets of Lorenzo’s youth were bouncing with kids of all ages. Footballs and Wiffle balls flew all over the block, chased by the kids of varied ethnicities. Discarded quarter juices—colorful sugar water in little plastic jugs, costing twenty-five cents each—littered the streets. The corner bodega, filled with tinny merengue music squeezing out of an old man’s transistor radio, was the whole world. Anything a kid needed that wasn’t sold in there was considered very much a luxury.
Lorenzo jumped off Richmond and pulled into his old haunt. He’d moved into a condo near work several years back, but his mother, now pushing seventy, still lived in their old apartment. He’d swing by every so often, spend an hour or so, drink her cafe con leche, and be off.
The smaller streets around his mother’s apartment building, a four-story, dark brick box on the corner, weren’t like they were in the 80s and 90s. Back then, Lorenzo and his posse walked the neighborhood on summer nights, eating quenepas, maybe stashing a six-pack if they could find a legal age accomplice to get it for them. Now there was outright danger on many of those streets. The corner boys, half Lorenzo’s age and not even born when he and his friends roamed that hood, were brazenly doing business in broad daylight. People were beaten and robbed after dark. Every few days the newspaper reported someone was shot and left under the amber sheet of sodium vapor streetlight. Some lived, some expired on the cold Carson pavement.
Lorenzo’s mother lived alone and he feared for her. He loved the city—it was in his soul. It nourished all the kids who needed a sense of neighborhood, whether or not they knew it. And there were parts of Carson that were fine. Downtown he couldn’t relate to. No one that lived there now had grown up there. It was flavorless—heresy to the sofrito-loving ethnic.
He pulled onto her block and miraculously found a parking spot across the street from his mother’s building. He parked and called her on his cell phone before cutting his engine.
“Mama, estoy parqueando el carro, right across the street,” he said. “You need anything from the store before I come up?”
“No. Yo voy mañana. I go.”
“But I’m already down here.”
“No necesito nada. I have. Why, what you want?”
“Tiene café?”
“Si. I have.”
“Then I’m good. I’ll be up in a minute.” He hung up.
Yolanda Fernanda Restrepo was a beautiful soul. Born in midcentury Puerto Rico, she came here in her twenties, found Hudson County, New Jersey, and never left. She had Lorenzo and his older brother, Raul, raised them with a husband that was in and out, around and not around, awake and passed out, for a quarter century. He’d been dead nearly ten years and, with Raul having moved down to Miami, Lorenzo shouldered the spot-visits and overall management of their mother.
He needed to get her out of that building and somewhere more secure. The way he saw it, it would take two months of convincing and one month of actual
searching, packing, and moving. She was rock-stubborn.
Today, over her intensely strong coffee, he would start that discussion with his mother. The new calendar year had set much into motion. Lorenzo needed to begin preparations in his personal life. He was on the clock now.
They all were.
The Diamond Inn, along with its three or four counterparts on the Tonnelle Avenue truck route, saw very little activity outside the illicit brand. These no-tell motels were shrouds over the voids in societal morality. There were a few legitimate truckers looking for some shut-eye on their route through the Eastern Seaboard. There were always students from the Carson Public Schools who showed up every morning straight from one of those rooms, their families having been displaced from proper housing.
Lorenzo hated the time he spent in there. But loved Mariana.
He lay in the motel bed, forcing himself not to think of what those sheets had seen all week. Instead he focused on the curve of Mariana’s nude silhouette as she dressed, backlit by the bathroom light. She was reason enough for him to forget just about anything. He would watch her in the school office all day, longing. She was a powerful Latina, like he’d gown up around his whole life. From day one, she felt a part of him.
Except—she was married, and had been for her entire adult life. They were the same age, from the same city, having grown up in a very similar situation. Yet Mariana had found love and had children. She and her husband, Eddie, had built a very stable foundation. Their lives were normal. Kids were great—heavy hitters in Little League.
Then there was this thing with Lorenzo. He always felt she was out of place in this kind of relationship. He felt that this was what he deserved—some mama’s boy with no woman ever meeting his impossible standard, a guy couldn’t get his shit together. His brother, Raul, was a marine who wore that uniform well. When Raul came home and would go out in it, Lorenzo was proud to be seen with him. He could never join up himself. Just being beside Raul was all he could muster. Had the same blood. Maybe people would be impressed by that.
Lorenzo started Hudson Community College, but didn’t get out of there on a stage. He was just a few credits shy of his diploma and still told people he was going to finish up. Just needed twenty credits.
But why bother? What would change for him at forty years old? He was comfortable in the office at P.S. 21. He was well liked and worked hard for Principal George and all the teachers. What would that Communications degree really change?
There was no wife. No kids. But there was Mariana, embedded deeply in his heart. What was there in this thing for her? He had no idea. He doted on her, firmly accepted his role as her subordinate in the office. He told her endlessly that she was beautiful. He worked overtime to bring her to unforgettable heights in bed. She just seemed to enjoy him—all of him. She liked being courted and she liked anyone working overtime on her and for her, it appeared.
They’d first met as bus drivers in the school district’s transportation department. Mariana landed the clerical spot first and headed across town to the main office at P.S. 21. Lorenzo kept in touch with her, just his friend at the time, and eventually another office spot opened at the school. Mariana had mentioned it to him and he jumped at the chance to be beside her again. Soon after, the friendship morphed into something physical.
She’d kept him moving forward, but never moving away. Lorenzo was offered many opportunities by his brother in Florida. Friends in the district recommended him for openings in other schools, some in far better areas. He ducked them all. Mariana was at P.S. 21. And so that’s where he wanted to be, continuing what seemed his most important purpose in life—making her happy, which was probably impossible.
Love? Probably not for her, he assumed. But certainly for him. Yes, this was the love of his life. And whereas she was once an unattainable pursuit, there was now a different picture crystallizing in his mind.
For the past couple of weeks a wave of optimism had washed over him. Every morning was the first day of spring and there was purpose forming in the distance. Yes, it seemed this would be the year. It was like a gas had been slipped into the air around him and every day new thoughts and new plans were hatching in his mind.
And now, from the sounds of it, in hers, too.
“Really?” he asked from the bed.
“Yeah,” she said as she clasped her bra in the back. “He has to find something closer to home. I told him, ‘Jacob and Ricardo are sixteen and thirteen. They’re not grown-ups. What if something happened to me? You’re working all the freaking way down the NJ Turnpike, an hour and a half each way. Who’s doing practices? Dinner? All that shit?’”
“What did Eddie say?”
“Come mierda,” she said while holding up a yapping hand. “‘Oh, I requested a transfer…I’m getting a promotion…me and my cousin are gonna start this business.’ Bunch of bullshit.”
She kept dressing and Lorenzo rolled over and grabbed his phone. He lay there, still naked, and checked emails.
“You moving in here?” Mariana said.
“For $179 a week, I’m thinking about it.”
“With cable.”
“Wi-fi, too. I messed up getting that condo.” He smiled at her and she returned one.
Mariana had spoken of the future for the first time. It was a future without Eddie. Well, more precisely, it was Eddie and the boys’ future without her, but Lorenzo didn’t necessarily hear it that way. It was the first time she’d spoken of anyone’s future without anyone.
“Mariana,” he called, stopping her on her way into the bathroom. “What would happen to you?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged.
“You said it. To Eddie. Why would you say that?”
“Oye, don’t get all serious about it. I just meant he can’t be all unavailable. I just feel that he needs to get closer to home.”
“Right.” Lorenzo sat up in bed and faced her. “But why now?”
She thought, tapping her hairbrush on her hand.
“I really don’t know, but I just have this feeling.”
“Is it scary?”
More thought.
“Not really. It would just make me feel better if he did it this year.” She looked at Lorenzo, who just nodded. She went into the bathroom. Lorenzo got up and slid on his underwear. These occasional blurry feelings, starting in his back, rolling up his shoulders and into his head, were too cloudy to discuss. He didn’t even know what was real about them and what was just a strong cup of good coffee on a perfect morning. Though he felt like that a lot—usually at night.
He was searching to understand it, trying to figure it all out. Maybe it was Mariana making him feel that way. Maybe it was turning forty, which was supposed to be awful, but perhaps was not.
Something was going to happen this year. Of that he was certain. And it was big.
“We gonna be together?” he asked, leaning on the bathroom door frame.
NINETEEN
SHE WAS ALONE. She hadn’t even realized it was dark, but once five o’clock hit, it was too late. And there seemed to be no shortage of man-hours required by the district’s new grading software. It was easy to plan on staying after school for a half hour and losing track of time.
Trisha finally logged off her laptop and headed for the exit, resolving to get the rest of the writing tests graded and in the system tomorrow. There was nothing to rush home for, really. There was no him in her life just then, and not even an it to which she’d need to head home and feed.
Where was her car? The parking lot had been full that morning so she’d resorted to the wide, fenced-in pathway that went behind the building. It looked so different when it was empty—like a thick alleyway of asphalt. She parked in a different place each morning, the spots all blended together. Usually she’d head right after descending the front stairs and would follow the bends around the building until she saw the car. It was back there somewhere. Damn those suburban schools with real parking lots.
Trisha k
ept rolling a writing rubric around in her head as she walked. In scoring essays for third grade, the highest score on the writing rubric was now a 3, down from a perfect 4 when she had fifth grade at her previous school. On how many papers had she mistakenly written a grade today that was a whole digit off? Probably a few.
There were no 4s that should’ve been 3s, of that she was certain. It was always remarkable to her how little students in these schools valued communication, basic language skills. Lots of kids were challenged because English was not the first language spoken at home. She got that. Mohammad’s essay today might well have been in Arabic, because she’d had no fucking idea what he was writing about. It was like English words were chosen at random and thrown on the page.
Talking with any of the English-speaking parents for five minutes answered any questions about the state of their kids’ speech and language. Everything was slang. Parts of speech deemed annoying or useless were just dropped. There was zero effort on the part of so many parents to even speak correctly in front of their children. Naturally, the kids follow that path, and I been got that shows up on an essay instead of I had that. Trisha could spend an entire semester just breaking the bad habits of language in her classroom.
As she considered just how little time there was to correct them in the face of new, aggressive curricula, she rounded to the corner to the rear of the building and saw her car sitting alone about halfway down the alleyway. The pools of light from the floodlights on the building were spotty on that rear stretch of asphalt. It was only a little wider than an alley but ran the length of the entire building, from the rear service entrance to the main parking lot.
The only sound back there was the thin click-clack of Trisha’s flats on the ground. The school towered over her to the right and to her left was a chain-link fence, twice her height. Beyond it were the dark backyards of the houses on the adjacent street. The smell of curry from one or more of them danced around her. She loved it.
