“Fate.”
“What?”
“It’s a play about fate. The gods told him he was going to have to do this; he had no choice.”
“That’s not right! We all have choices! It’s not like God makes us do stuff!”
This from the boy with the black-rimmed glasses.
Do not do not do not label him a nerd, Nina.
He’s a young individual with multiple tastes and strengths, and he should not be labeled as a geek or a nerd.
Amanda responded:
“But these are different gods! This was like two thousand years ago!”
“It doesn’t matter,” the nerd responded. “Gods are gods! It’s a question of free will versus determinism!”
LaMarcus was not to be moved away from his original point;
“He still had no business blocking the damned road!”
Amanda:
“But that was his decision!”
Somebody else she didn’t know:
“Listen, you guys!”
None of the ‘guys’ seemed particularly ready to listen, but the new speaker, a chunky girl with a red ponytail, was loud:
“He’s supposed to be wise, right? But he doesn’t act wise! You’re told by the gods that you’re going to marry your mother. So what do you not do? You do not marry somebody old enough to be your mother! Like, how smart is that?”
“But he had to marry her! He was the new king and she was queen! He had no choice!”
“But what about Tiresias?”
“Who?”
“The blind guy! Oedipus is going to have him executed! For nothing!”
“Yeah but if Creon…”
At this point, Max Lirpa stepped out from behind a movie screen in the corner of the room, and yelled:
“All right! Enough!”
Everyone looked at him.
“You have to go!” he repeated. “The bell’s ready to ring!”
Everybody looked up at the clock.
Someone said:
“It’s time already?”
Twenty three students, Nina found herself thinking, do not realize that fifty minutes have passed. Unbelievable.
And they weren’t even talking about phallic imagery.
Amanda tried to make herself heard above the din of people getting backpacks together.
“Mr. Lirpa?”
“Yes, Amanda dear?”
“What do we do for tomorrow?”
“We vote! The jury votes! Oedipus: guilty or not guilty!”
Responses came like popcorn from a sea of exiting bodies:
“Guilty!”
“Not guilty!”
“The Dude is toast!”
“Guilty but not of murder!”
Max Lirpa shook his head:
“Get out of here get out of here get out of here YOU’RE LATE FOR THIRD PERIOD! Now be off with you, you rabble!”
He finally saw Nina.
“Headmistress! You’ve come! So good of you!”
“Max…”
Both of them approached the desk in the front of the room.
“Max, what were they yelling about?”
“Oedipus.”
“You’re teaching Sophocles?”
He shook his head, while raffling through an impossible mixture of multi-colored papers and dog-shaggy paperback books.
“No, I’ve nothing to teach Sophocles. But Sophocles, on the contrary, is doing a beautiful job of teaching our students.”
“Max, Oedipus is not on the MOCK MACE. Or in the real MACE! We have to teach what’s on the MACES!”
“Oh yes, I meant to ask you about that.”
“About the MOCK MACE?”
“Yes, yes, that…can we go to your office?”
“But your next class is at ten o’clock! That’s when you’re supposed to be MOCKMACEING!”
“Yes, yes, I know but I shall only need a second.”
“All right.”
“I have this packet of tests. Where is it? Ah, here. I’ll just grab it up, and…off we go!”
The two of them left Room 102 and hurled themselves into the whitewater rampage that was the hall between bells.
“I love the term MOCKMACE, don’t you? It reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s Mock Turtle. His school teaches ‘reeling’ and ‘writing,’ remember? Well, just look at this hallway! Completely appropriate, what?”
“I suppose. But Max, the tests…”
“Yes, yes, I’ve got them right here. Ah, here we are!”
They entered her office.
He closed the door behind them.
“The tests are extremely important, Max.”
“Oh yes, I know! By the way, I’ve heard that there exists this crow of a witch named April or May or June or some month nomenclature, who has offices downtown and is making everyone’s life holy hell. That it was in fact she who was responsible for the disgraceful Nazi-like ouster of our lovely lesbian, the Sappho of Health and Recreation, our dear Queen Meg. Is this true?”
“No, Max. There is no such woman as April van Osdale. She does not have offices anywhere; and everything that’s happened is our own fault because the somebody that you describe doesn’t exist.”
“Fie, there’s no such creature! It’s impossible! But of course, there is, you know. Iago does exist. As does, I assume, this woman. I should like very much to speak with her. Would that be possible?”
“No no no no no no no no no no no no not ever! Never never never never never are you even to be in the same building with this woman!”
“Well, we shall see. Now, as for this packet of––what are they called, ‘standardized examinations,’ that I am to give next period?”
“Yes?”
“Well, I simply…oh! Oh my god, they seem to have fallen into your wastebasket! Can you imagine such a thing?”
“Max, YOU HAVE TO GIVE THE TESTS!”
“And I would love to do so with all my heart, dear lady headmistress mine, with eyes a shining…but as you can see, they are quite irrevocably lost.”
“Max…”
The door opened; a student, out of breath, stuck her head in and gasped:
“Mr. Lirpa, LaMarcus and Thomas are in the hall!”
“What a lovely place for them!”
“They’re getting ready to fight about Oedipus!”
Max Lirpa’s hands flew up to cover his face, then fell to his side.
“How delightful!” he shouted.
Then, to Nina:
“My God, I love your students!”
He ran toward the doorway, passed through it, then turned abruptly and said to Nina:
“By the way, word has it you were tossed from the pitch last night.”
“Tossed from the pitch?”
“Yes, everyone is saying you were thrown from the pitch.”
“It’s a court, not a pitch.”
“Of course it is, of course it is, and what of any slightest importance happens anywhere at all except at court––but were you indeed tossed from it?”
“Yes,” she sighed, “I was tossed from it.”
He smiled broadly and said:
“Good show, old girl! Jolly good show!”
And he was gone.
She had no time to worry about disciplining Max Lirpa, who probably could not be disciplined anyway, and who, if everything were considered, was proving to be the most effective teacher in the high school.
She had no time for anything, actually, except being sure that the tests were administered properly.
As it happened, they were.
They were collected promptly at 11:45, graded by Scantron machines by two o’clock, and back in their packets by mid-afternoon.
At the end of the school day, Nina had the grades.
They were not good.
This was hardly surprising; what was surprising was the elegantly written letter she found in the mail holder that had been affixed on the wall beside her office door.
Dear Nina:
&nbs
p; By now you should have the results of your first set of MOCKMACES. I sincerely hope they reflect all the hard work I know you and your staff have been putting in.
I’d like to invite you over for dinner tonight, at, say, seven thirty. We can go over the scores together and drink a glass of wine with some boiled shrimp. The address is 2245 Fairway Drive.
PS: Sorry I haven’t invited you over before now. I’ll try to make up for it in the future.
April.
Where had this letter come from?
Ask the people in the office:
“Have any of you seen Dr. van Osdale? Was she in the building today? Did she leave a letter?”
No.
No, haven’t seen her.
“Anybody here from city hall?”
No.
Nobody.
“Then how did this letter get here?”
…well. No way to know. Somebody obviously brought it by and dropped it off.
Now it’s here and must be acted upon.
Okay.
Bad scores.
An invitation from April, so that the two of them can go over the bad scores.
And eat shrimp.
Well. There was nothing to do but do it.
And so she did.
“From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene”
––William Faulkner, Light in August
Seven twenty PM.
Her Vespa seemed out of place on Fairway Drive. It was fine along the beach, and it fit well with the bicycles, skateboards, Mini-Coopers, and bandaged pickup trucks that populated the rest of Bay St. Lucy.
But this was the land of true foreign exports: Mercedes, BMW, Porsche…this was oil and gas money, political clout money, Big Fishery money…and anyone able to live here had to be one of the shining stars of the Southern Riviera.
Which, of course, any friend or ally of the senator was.
Still, she wondered, was he that powerful in the state?
She’d never been in one of these homes before.
And she wondered, as she braked, accelerated, scanned addresses, peered beneath the just-now-illuminating blue street lamps, and cautiously urged her little cycle over speed bumps…whether April would have been housed in a porched and pillared plantation home, magnolias dropping huge oily-green fronds on the lawn and rocking chairs sitting motionless on the second floor verandas…or if she would have opted modern, living in a one-story brick ranch house, giving up in historicity and charm what it gained in having bathrooms that actually worked.
The streets grew smaller. Jack Nicklaus Way; Arnold Palmer Trail; Tiger Woods Drive…and the vast low hanging pines obscuring the houses thickened, so that she could see only patches of yellow light seeping through the great picture windows behind them. The automobiles too became, not larger, but blacker and greyer and shinier and more redolent of old money.
She turned again, this time merely a slight curve to the right, but the street changed names yet again and narrowed still further, only allowing room now for one car at a time to pass between those few vehicles parked on the street.
What was this street?
Fairway Drive.
And, yes, there was the fairway, and the greens, and the perfectly sculpted hundred or so acres set aside for the truly rich. The golf course, meandering through evergreens that towered above the steep and slate gray roofs, not reaching all the way to the sky, but brushing just slightly a moon that seemed particularly round and improbably jocund.
Twenty two forty one; twenty two forty three…
There it was. Twenty three forty five.
She pulled meekly into the driveway, feeling a need either to ask permission to be here or to reach out and take a parking ticket from an automatic vendor.
Immediately before her sat a car the size of her beach shack, but cleaner, and with more dining space inside. She inched her way to within a few feet of it, so that the Vespa’s front bumper just extended a foot beneath an overhanging wooden roof which protected the car that mattered.
She killed the engine and got off, slinging her purse over her shoulder. Night had actually fallen now, but golden illumination from the high windows of the house itself, the yard lights standing sentinel along manicured clay walkways…all of it made her feel that she was in a private midway, and that, only a few yards farther along, arcades would have been set up and it would be possible to throw balls for Kewpie dolls.
She glanced at her watch and read the luminous dial: 7:30
Exactly on time.
She walked around a corner of the house, skirted a hedge that seemed to have been trimmed to the exact rectangular dimensions of a densely limbed and web-infested cracker box—and approached the main door.
“The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the house itself, after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times.”
––William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
It was slightly ajar.
Strange.
She pressed the doorbell and heard, very clearly through the open door, a cascade of chimes detonate throughout the house.
Then silence.
Nothing except a few winter-hardy cicadas complaining in the trees back over the street.
She waited.
Finally, she said, not really shouting, but still in a tone that seemed to her intrusively loud:
“April?”
No response.
The door stood open before her.
She rang the bell again.
Same response.
Dong DONG dong DOOOOOONG!
She became aware of the ticking of a clock in the room before her.
No one was at home.
She reached once more for the doorbell, which glowed reassuringly pink, and seemed to draw her index finger to it by a warmth that, if it did not really exist, at least produced a kind of imaginary antidote to this world of stillness and shadow.
Ring again?
Why bother?
The door had ornate glass designs, backed by wisps of hanging curtains, dark now like everything else…and a black space of slightly more than an inch separated it from the door jam.
She peered through the glass and could see nothing.
Reaching forward, she felt the smooth mahogany of the door frame scratch the tip of the same finger she would have used to press the doorbell button.
Go home. Go home. Just go home. Something’s not right here. Just go home.
She pushed.
The ponderous, lead-weighted door swung inward, brushing over a throw-rug lying just inside, the door itself now two inches open, now four, now six…
A vast and dimly lighted room spread before her like the set of a movie. Plate glass window far across the Angora carpet…she did not know what an Angora carpet was, but if there was such a thing, soft and giving and firm and colorless and never-spilled on at all…this thing sponging beneath her shoes was it; furniture of dark green leather and black-iron tubing, books like soldiers guarding every inch of wall space, separated from other books only by paintings, which hung perfectly straight, like windows with Dutch sailors and English ships looking out of them.
She could hear behind her the sound of a plane overhead, probably on a landing approach to Bay St. Lucy’s small airport. Far down the street there was the occasional baying of a dog; and beyond that she could make out traffic noise, muffled and distant, on the Interstate circling the city.
Why was the door unlocked?
The room stared back at her, grey and inert, its sharpened corners and clear lines blurred now by darkness and near silence. But the clock, almost as tall as the ceiling itself, stood watch, pendulum swinging easily within its panel-casing, a face surrounded by Old English numbers.
Seven thirty five.
She stepped further inside.
The room grew more distinct as her eyes accustomed themselves to its half-light. A staircase be
yond and to the right, leading up into complete darkness; a decorative cupboard on the wall opposite, circular shapes that must have been dishes gazing out into the center of the room; several feet beyond that, the doorway leading into the kitchen, where she could see counter, shelves, refrigerator, a table.
In her purse was a cell phone.
She felt a mad desire to call the police.
And tell them what?
She had been stood up?
There was no one here. And that was all.
“April?” she shouted.
Her voice echoed back at her.
But there was no response, of course.
Was there something wrong here?
No.
No, of course not!
This was completely like April van Osdale. Nina did not exist to her.
Someone important had called. Someone from the state educational center, perhaps flying into Bay St. Lucy on the very plane that she had heard only moments ago.
April had received a dinner invitation and had simply forgotten once more about little Nina, the woman she’d met years earlier at The University of Mississippi and not retained the slightest memory of.
This was the nature of Aprils. To completely forget Ninas.
And that had happened once again.
Nothing was wrong here.
No need to call the police.
But, why was the door open?
The door was open, she told herself, because April had simply forgotten to close it securely.
Happens all the time.
She took a deep breath, then another.
Then she turned, walked out of the house, closed the door firmly behind her, and pushed on it.
It had locked itself.
“Just one of those things,” she whispered to the knob. “Wasn’t in a mood for shrimp anyway.”
She walked away, wondering what April would have to say to her the following day.
She did not know that she was not to see April the following day.
Or any other day.
Ever.
CHAPTER 17: THE WILDS OF MISSISSIPPI
“Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur, becomes ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertness out of and into light slumber again.”
Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) Page 18
