Read by Strangers

by Philip Dean Walker

  WHEN JOAN SLEPT with her daughter’s English teacher for the third time, she asked him to give her a grade.

  “Grade what?” Chad asked. He was ten years younger than her, with brown wavy hair and whorls of clipped chest hair that scratched her cheeks.

  “My performance. In bed,” she answered.

  Chad grinned. “Is there a curve involved here?”

  “Shut up!” Joan threw a pillow at him.

  “You were a bit late today. I typically dock a student an entire letter grade for that.”

  Joan looked up at him from her berth at his chest. “I had to find a sitter for Coral.”

  “Bring her next time.”

  “That’s ridiculous. She’s just a baby.”

  “I’ll accept your excuse…this time,” he said.

  “So the grade then?”

  “Let’s see. Considering effort, performance, enthusiasm—all of which were superb. And that bit in the beginning? With the—well…you know, extra credit.”

  “Yes,” she said, dragging the “s” out like the hiss of exhaust through a hose.

  “Mrs. Cashion, I give you an A+.”

  Joan leaned in for a kiss, so Chad pulled her on top of him, cradling her buttocks and combing her red hair with his fingers. She was only half kidding. She really needed that A.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER she had cooked dinner, Joan laid the placemats on the table. Each placemat was about three inches from the one beside it, for a total of four around the dinner table. The distance from one placemat to the next turned out to be roughly the size of the distance from the base of her thumb to the base of her pinkie. She pressed her hand on the table, palm facing down, and kept it there for a moment as she leaned against it. She imagined Chad having backed her up too quickly against the counter so that she had to catch herself with her outstretched hand, forcefully taking control but still being coy and feminine about it. She came out of the pose and continued with the rest of the placemats.

  The placemats were made of a rough oatmeal mesh. She and Russell had purchased them from a vendor outside of a pension they’d stayed in during a trip to Caracas years ago. It was 1994, she seemed to recall, the year fluttering into her field of view temporarily, like a butterfly just about to die.

  Joan put the last placemat down and looked at the table, each chair in front of it empty. Charlie would be down first, always early to dinner. He’d sit to the right of Joan. He was a good boy: studious, considerate of others, an overachiever, something she’d never encouraged yet secretly delighted in. There was also a tenderness to him of which she’d always been proud. He cared for others in a way that felt authentic to her. There was little, if anything, put-upon about him. He and his best friend Dale constantly volunteered to help out at a soup kitchen or drove a van that picked up the inner-city homeless on cold nights. Honestly, he was exactly the kind of kid Joan would’ve hated in high school. She probably would have laughed at him, convinced that his do-goodery was an affected tool to get into a good college or something to lord over the godless heathens with whom she’d always aligned herself. But because Charlie was hers, she couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather be like. She hadn’t immediately ascribed a name to these traits, but they always made him seem otherworldly.

  She heard his shuffle down the back kitchen stairs, coming down sideways like he always did, as if he were hopping over tiny wickets in the worn red-carpeted steps.

  “Can I help you finish setting the table?” he asked, as he popped down into the kitchen.

  “You always do.”

  He took hold of the top of the handles of the silverware from Joan’s hand, and she felt the smooth graze of his fingers. He kept his nails so well manicured, much more than she did her own. She had a habit of allotting herself two that she was allowed to bite at will; Charlie never would have put one of his fingers into his mouth, let alone bitten a fingernail.

  She held on to the end of the bunch of forks and knives for a second until Charlie playfully tugged them away from her and laid each utensil precisely on the placemats.

  Charlie was Joan’s; Dena, his twin sister, was Russell’s. That was how it always had been, as if by contract. Coral, the baby, was a neutral party, a swing vote. She was too unformed—too pink and chubby and clueless—to throw her weight to one side.

  “Mom, we have an away game tomorrow night, and I want to stay over at Kathy’s afterward. Last week you said it was okay.” Dena blew into the kitchen like a thunderstorm, with a duffel bag and several hair clips trailing behind her.

  “Well, if I said yes once, I’m sure that was enough. Have you finished your paper on F. Scott?”

  “Is the night tender?”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “It’s finished.”

  Dena sat to Joan’s left and Russell’s right, although she always inched a bit closer to Russell during the course of a dinner. Daddy’s little girl. Joan didn’t mind because, after all, she had Charlie.

  “Could you please pass the mashed potatoes, Dena?” Charlie asked, waiting patiently with his hands out, poised to accept the platter.

  “Here. Will you be pocketing extra to feed the great unwashed masses later?”

  “You’re an absolute peach,” Charlie said.

  “Dena, doll, pass your brother the mashed potatoes. He can do whatever he wants with them,” Russell said from the head of the table, uncharacteristically getting involved in the twins’ business.

  Not too smart, Dena was, and she seemed to be headed down the high-school-slut route, if Joan were being honest with herself. Dena did, however, possess a certain saber-toothed precision that she could apply to something she really wanted. Joan had seen it before in Dena’s pursuit of a particular boy at school or in the way she’d work on Joan to get her to buy an expensive piece of clothing at the mall on one of their forced mother-daughter days (which always seemed to end in a slammed car door and at least forty-eight hours of mutual avoidance). It was true that Dena lacked the traditional ease of book smarts that allowed someone like Charlie to glide through life, but there was no way Joan could say Dena didn’t go after and often succeed in getting what she wanted.

  Russell didn’t see Dena’s faults. He was blinded by the uncultivated admiration he had for Dena that was based almost entirely on the fact that she resembled the girls he hadn’t been able to sleep with in high school. This was Joan’s theory, and she stood by it indefatigably.

  Joan wasn’t fooled, though—smoking pot, hanging out with those glassy-eyed wastoids who insisted on wearing black tank tops and plaid skirts. And the boys wearing eyeliner—when had that come back into fashion? So very the Cure of them, Joan seemed to recall from her own high school days. Even Dena’s recent participation in cheerleading, which Joan had coveted as the beginning of something potentially encouraging, a path toward normalcy—was no more than a front to gain easier access to the better parties, an open ticket to harder liquor, hotter boys. Behind the cheerleading practices and away games lay secret dens of football players and drunk girls with pompoms that she could only envision as after-school specials. Quick, foggy rapes on beer-slicked linoleum.

  She never could understand how different they could be from each other, Charlie and Dena. Dena and Charlie. Twins. Fraternal, but still. All that time inside her together, learning each other’s rhythms, playing patty-cake, tickling the bottoms of each other’s still-forming feet, making plans, one twin curled into a ball in the other’s lap like a chrysalis. Then out they popped, more different from each other than if she’d found one of them on the street in a recently bombed Latvian village. It startled her. Even when she’d tried to dress them up alike as toddlers, Dena had always found some way to sabotage her outfit: deface the smiling baby in the puff-paint hot air balloon on her sweater, rip up her white tights so they resembled something left over after a serial killer had butchered a child.

  Joan pulled Coral’s high chair up to the table to her left so the baby would be positioned between Dena a
nd herself. Dena angled her body away from Coral and more in Russell’s direction.

  “Dad, guess who made it to the top of the pyramid?” she asked.

  “Is that supposed to be metaphorical?” said Joan.

  Dena glanced over at her as if she’d only just realized another female was at the table.

  “It’s a cheerleading pyramid, Mother,” she said, barely looking Joan in the eye. “The one we’re doing is referred to as a ‘teddy sit,’ ” she turned to say to Russell.

  “Let me guess—her name starts with a ‘D’ and ends in an ‘a’ with an ‘e’ and an ‘n’ in between. What’s that spell?” Russell said with a huge grin.

  “Dad, you’re such a dork!” Dena said, laughing.

  In all the sudden laughter, Coral caught wind of a potential game and clapped her little hands in glee.

  Coral was one of those accidental babies. Joan never wanted to push abortion off the table, but Russell was enthralled with the idea of their having another child. She knew he wanted a boy, some randy hellion who’d play little league and football and all the things Charlie had always shied away from. When Coral had finally popped out, a chubby baby with a salmon-pink hue (hence the name Joan had chosen on the spot), Joan felt Russell’s disappointment, but it seemed eclipsed by her own. She’d somehow convinced herself that an additional child would be the staple on their marriage—a small, winking adhesive. But she wasn’t.

  “Babe, you make the best pot roast that’s ever been created. Mother of the year, kids?” Russell said.

  “The century,” said Charlie, looking over at Joan with that side smile, the special one he reserved for her, with one dimple tucked under his glasses.

  “The century’s only ten years old. Can we aim a little higher, Charlie?” she said, grabbing his shoulder and smiling.

  WHEN JOAN AND Russell had gotten married she’d experienced (on her fabled wedding night no less) something akin to a death in the family: a localized yet still-yet-to-be-contained plague. It was the unfortunate—and bizarrely swift—death of her sexual attraction to the man with whom she’d put in almost a year preparing to spend a lifetime, which threw her into a state of absolute terror. It wasn’t something she’d planned for, but as she looked back, she realized there had always been signs.

  For starters, she had met Russell on the rebound. Her boyfriend before him had been in a heavy metal band called Nails on a Chalkboard. What initially had attracted her to Gage, Chalkboard’s leonine front man, besides his golden mane and the smoky way his voice made the most terrible lyrics sound beautiful (“I hide/My love for you like genocide”) was the fervent sexual chemistry they’d shared almost instantly.

  Joan had met him at the Delta counter at Dulles Airport, where she worked part-time as a ticket agent; Gage had been traveling with his band to San Francisco. She didn’t think much of him when she first saw him at the back of the long line that had started to curve out to merge with the line for American Airlines. He was sitting on his big Samsonite suitcase, as if it were a lawn chair, reading a book while his band mates stood in front of him. As they moved closer up the line, she noticed that it was a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos. She’d seen it in a display case at the bookstore in the terminal and had picked it up one day during her lunch break.

  “How do you like the book?” she asked, as she printed out his boarding pass.

  “S’okay,” Gage said.

  “I like it when the schoolteacher is about to suffocate herself with the dry cleaner bag. But then she just…stops,” she said, scanning the small computer in front of her for an upgrade option.

  “You get to the brink, and then you yank yourself back. Right?”

  “Exactly,” she replied. “I’ve upgraded you and your companions to first class. You’ll be at Gate B-4.”

  “Before,” he said.

  “Well, B-4, but yes.” His band mates began to walk toward security.

  “What I mean to say is before I take off, I want your number.”

  Joan nodded and quickly produced her number on the back of his baggage claim ticket.

  “Just to let you know, I’m anything but a Yoko Ono,” she said.

  AT BACK TO School night the fall before, Russell and Joan showed up in separate cars. Russell had been working on a case downtown, and she had an early-evening shift at the airport, so they’d decided to meet at the high school. When Joan entered the front door of the school, a wash of tension passed through her. The hallways seemed cramped and the ceiling low.

  Other parents walked in pairs alongside them and were commenting on the displays set up at strategic points in the hallway, demonstrating some of the more superior work from the student body.

  “How about I check in with Charlie’s teachers, and you take Dena’s? We should switch things up, yeah?” Russell had approached her and placed his hand on the small of her back as he led her through the small crowd.

  “Seems fair,” she said.

  The twins had been in separate classes since they’d begun school. It had never really been up to Russell or Joan, but then again, they’d never objected to it. Joan easily could imagine Dena cheating off Charlie or manipulating him into doing her work.

  She and Russell pulled out the twins’ room assignments and traded.

  “English with Mr. Chandler. Sounds thrilling,” Joan murmured.

  “Meet you in the cafeteria in about an hour,” said Russell. He shuffled down the science wing to meet with Charlie’s chemistry teacher.

  When she finally located Mr. Chandler’s classroom, he was finishing up with a squat woman in a black bun and her lanky husband. The teacher was smiling and nodding enthusiastically. Younger than she had expected. Thirty-three maybe. Very handsome. He noticed her through the black crisscrossed glass window in the door and waved her in.

  “Come in, please. I’ve just finished up here with these folks, so please take a seat.”

  The other couple regarded her politely and headed out. The wife looked at her a second or two too long, but she didn’t think much of it. The combination of Joan’s sky-blue blouse and red hair was striking. She couldn’t really fault people for taking a second look, male or female.

  Mr. Chandler was leaning against a large metal stool that towered over the two student desks the woman in the bun and her husband had just vacated. When Joan sat down in one of them, she was forced to look up in order to meet his eyes. Otherwise her eye-level was in direct line with his groin. She had noticed a very visible penis line when she first sat down that brought an unexpected rush of heat to her face.

  “So which one is yours?” Mr. Chandler asked.

  “Joan. I mean, Dena. I’m Joan. Joan Cashion. Dena’s mom.” Joan held out her hand and Mr. Chandler grabbed it. His hands were soft, like they’d been sitting on top of a warm radiator.

  “It’s wonderful to meet you, Mrs. Cashion. Let’s talk about Dena,” Mr. Chandler said. He wore a dress shirt that looked like graph paper.

  “Eek. Is it okay that that just made me a little nervous? Suddenly I feel like I’m in trouble, Mr. Chandler.”

  He laughed, and Joan noticed how white his teeth were.

  “Oh, gosh no. Not at all. This won’t be too painful. And please call me Chad. ‘Mr. Chandler’ makes me feel like I’m a hundred and five years old.”

  “Hardly,” Joan said. She felt a flush in her cheeks. There was a slight pause, and Mr. Chandler—Chad—smiled.

  “Dena has had kind of a rough start to the school year. She’s a smart girl, and she participates when she actually shows up to class, but that’s been a fifty-fifty situation since the first week.”

  “I’m completely embarrassed.” Joan brought her hand up to her forehead as if to shield herself from the supposed embarrassment.

  “We’ve read The Scarlet Letter and The Awakening, and we’ve just started Tender Is the Night.”

  Just the mention of those books, made her think of Gage. When they were together, they’d lie in bed and read just as
much as they had sex. It had thrilled her to talk about all those books with him. She got such a kick out of the fact that Gage didn’t look like the type who’d like Iris Murdoch (or even know who she was), with the long hair and the tattoos of scorpions and raven-haired biker chicks running up his arms like they were chasing each other across his body. But he spoke as passionately about novels as he did about his music, the lyrics of which Joan liked to think had gotten better since he’d started dating her.

  “Dena had to write a paper on one of these books. I asked the students to provide an outline. It was due last week.”

  “Let me guess—she didn’t turn it in,” Joan said.

  “No, no, that’s not it at all. Not only did Dena turn her paper in early, but it also was one of the best student papers I’ve read on this material. I’m using it as a sample for next year.”

  “I’m…well…I’m shocked,” Joan said.

  “Dena has a ferocious quality that will serve her well in her studies. She acts like she doesn’t care, but I’ve rarely seen this kind of dedication. It’s inspiring.”

  Joan’s cheeks flushed. She couldn’t have seen it all laid out more clearly: her daughter had a crush at the very least.

  “I’m inspired just by hearing about this,” she said.

  AS JOAN LEFT Chad’s apartment building and got into her car, she studied the surrounding street. People were generally rather quiet this early in the evening: folks coming home from work, or out on their lawns raking the fall leaves. She saw one couple having cocktails on their porch. She and Russell never shared a cocktail together. Only if they were at a party and they were offered would she even have one herself. She drank a glass of Cabernet once in a while with dinner, but that was rare. Russell’s mother had been a raging alcoholic and, in one of her more lucid moments, had warned Russell that if he weren’t careful, he’d be completely seduced by the sauce and go full-blown The Lost Weekend. Russell, so afraid of the prediction delivered to him from the gaunt, sallow-faced woman he barely recognized as his mother, stayed away from the stuff. Consequently so did Joan.