Lauren Takes Leave

by Gerstenblatt, Julie

  “It’s mine,” Ben says, his voice floating up from the basement playroom. “Mom!” he calls. “Becca won’t give me back my Bakugan!”

  “But we traded!” Becca says.

  “Laney!” I say, knowing that she won’t answer.

  Fuck! I want to scream. Sometimes I feel like walking out on them and never looking back. Here’s the instruction manual, I would say, flinging a blank spiral notebook over my shoulder, to the surprise of the entire Worthing contingent. Have fun figuring it out without me!

  For the second time this morning, my pulse is racing. I’d love to blow up at someone, anyone, really, and just relieve the pressure mounting in my chest.

  But it’s 7:52.

  I take a deep breath and turn back to the phone.

  “Doug, I’ve gotta go. Before the kids kill each other. And before we do, too.”

  I put down the phone and check the time. “Kids!” I say. “Bus time!”

  I really need Laney to appear this instant and take the kids to the bus stop so that I can get to work before the first bell rings. I mean, it’s nice to live in the same town where I teach—my commute contains only four traffic lights, and if I time them right, I don’t have to stop for any—but still. Cutting it this close is not my style, even if I am feeling more lax about my job since that fateful meeting with my principal last month.

  “Laney!” I try one last time, her name echoing off the walls. Where the hell is she?

  I hustle the kids out the door and down the driveway, still clutching the envelopes in my fist.

  “Mom, you never take us to the bus!” Becca says. It sounds like an accusation.

  “There’s a first time for everything, Bec!” I chirp.

  Ben runs ahead and calls out to some of the boys waiting at the curb. “Look at my new baseball cards!” he brags, pulling them out of his backpack. The small crowd of elementary school kids parts to let him in. They all seem immune to the light rain, while I huddle with Becca under her small pink ruffly umbrella.

  Three moms in black workout leggings and different Lululemon jackets are standing together and laughing, each with a dog leash attached to her wrist. I look down at my tan pants, fancy raincoat, and ballet flats that pinch my toes.

  When and if I ever quit my job, I’ll celebrate by getting a puppy and a wardrobe filled with expensive, glam sweatshirts and matching spandex pants.

  I should be friends with these women, but I’m not. Stay-at-home moms and working moms exist on different schedules, like humans and vampires. We inhabit the same world, but go about our business pretty separately. Sometimes I worry there will be blood when we collide.

  “Hi!” I call out to the women, who break apart and look at me blankly. Then they return to their chatter.

  “I’m Ben and Becca’s mom.” No one says anything in my direction, so I add, “Lauren?”

  Still no response.

  Anyone? Anyone?

  This is getting embarrassing. I hide back under the umbrella.

  Becca tries on my behalf. “This is my mommy!”

  “Oh, hi!” one of the women says, coming forward. “We weren’t ignoring you, sorry. We were just talking about someone, but now we’re done.” She’s the tallest of the women, and she speaks very fast. “I’m Lisa,” she adds.

  “O…kay.” I smile. “It wasn’t me you were talking about, was it?” I glance over my shoulder in semi-mock paranoia.

  “You’re so funny!” Black Leggings Number Two adds. “But no.” She has wild red hair and big thighs. “Patty.” She points to herself. “And this is Pam.” The third in the group is bone thin. She waves in my general direction, thereby using up four calories and getting a jump on her daily exercise.

  “We’re not talking about you unless you kicked your kids out of your car and left them alone on the streets of Alden to fend for themselves,” Lisa adds by way of explanation.

  “Not recently, no. Haven’t done that for years, not since the kids were in diapers.”

  “She’s a hoot!” Pam declares. One of the dogs barks in agreement.

  I smile somewhat painfully.

  “Lauren!” Lisa chastises. She takes a step closer to me; she’s clearly the leader of the pack. “Don’t you read the Hadley Inquirer? It was the front-page story this weekend. This working mom who was just completely overwhelmed decided to…” She trails off.

  They all look at me expectantly.

  “Um…I didn’t have time?” I begin. “I’m a working mom who is completely overwhelmed?” It’s meant as a joke of sorts, but it hangs in the air between us like a challenge.

  Good way to make friends, Lauren.

  “Well, you’re missing out.” Patty sniffs. On both the local gossip and the camaraderie forged by spreading local gossip, it seems.

  “Too bad,” Lisa adds as the bus lurches around the bend and stops in front of us.

  They turn away from me in what can only be called a collective diss.

  Let’s just add this to my morning tally of Ways in Which My Life Sucks. Not that I’m keeping score.

  “Bye, kids!” I call, the stack of mail fluttering over my head in my grand farewell gesture.

  Ben and Becca smile and wave. My heart swells with love just as the school bus door closes and my children disappear from view.

  The bus pulls away and a hearty gust of wind blows past me, Mary Poppins–style. I feel a definite shift in the air.

  Only then do I notice the blue envelope.

  After I wave to the departing school bus, that particular piece of mail gets separated from the others, caught by the wind and released from my grasp. Instead of flying away from me, however, the envelope drifts slowly and deliberately to the ground at my feet.

  It’s almost as if the letter is daring me to pick it up and read it.

  Chapter 2

  Which, of course, I do.

  It’s a jury duty summons addressed to me.

  How do I know this? Because written on the outside of the baby-blue envelope, in bold type so I won’t miss it, are the words Jury Duty Summons Enclosed. Immediate Attention.

  Damn Doug.

  Hands shaking, I remove the tri-folded paper from the envelope and begin to read aloud, scanning the words quickly. “Your services are requested…yadda, yadda, yadda…County Courthouse…yadda, yadda…ten a.m. on Monday, April tenth.”

  That’s today.

  “Failure to show up on appointed date…yadda, yadda…incarceration or fines. Fucking fuck me!” I cry out, sprinting back toward my house.

  I explode into my front hall and race to the phone, jumping over Laney’s coat and bag that lie in a heap in the middle of the floor. I try to find the substitute-hotline phone number pinned somewhere to the bulletin board at the small kitchen desk. “There it is!” I say, dialing furiously.

  “Good morning to you, too,” Laney scoffs in her lilting Spanish accent, passing me with an armful of laundry and attitude.

  “Seriously?” I shout.

  She whips her long black hair around the banister in response and disappears into the basement.

  The substitute-service answering machine beeps. I leave the most frantic, discombobulated message known to man, pleading for a substitute to arrive by 9:30 this morning and take over my classroom for the remainder of the day. Then I grab my school bag, stuff the jury summons inside it, and clamber into my minivan with six minutes to spare before I’m officially late for work.

  Weaving in and out of traffic, I pretend I’m playing Mario Cart Wii and get to school in less than four minutes.

  The middle school parking lot is jammed with cars and I can’t find a spot. “What the hell?” I ask the air, as if it will know why my day is already so royally screwed.

  People are heading toward the gym en masse, and I remember that it’s a local election day. Knowing he’s still out on sick leave, I park in the assistant principal’s space and sprint toward the building just as the first bell rings.

  I take the steps of the tur
n-of-the-century schoolhouse two at a time and narrowly avoid bumping into one of the voters streaming out of the building.

  “Excuse me,” I say, wasting a half moment on pleasantries. The woman’s perfume trails behind her, carrying the scent of hope mixed with summer flowers. She’s dressed expensively, and her long ash-blond hair is bohemian perfection.

  “Lauren?” the woman calls.

  I turn back. “Shay?” I say, surprised that this specimen of flawlessness remembers me. We’ve only met a couple of times at PTA functions, where Shay Greene is an officer and I am an underling underachiever barely holding up the T in PTA.

  I say the first thing that pops into my head. “So, who’d you vote for?” My heart is hammering in my chest and I’m silently counting down to the second bell. If I could have any super power, I’d want the ability to beam myself instantaneously from place to place at the snap of a finger.

  “Myself, of course!” She laughs.

  “Of course!” I say, pretending to know what the hell she’s talking about. “Good luck, then! Gotta run!”

  Shay waves good-bye. I watch her graceful descent, amazed that someone in four-inch heels can make walking down stairs look like floating.

  And then I see the sign: VOTE HERE TODAY! SCHOOL BOARD OFFICERS ELECTION! POLLS OPEN 7 A.M. TO 9 P.M.

  I push past a few more voters and dash down the hall like I’m really, really excited to be here.

  My mailbox contains nothing except a small, handwritten note scribbled on our principal’s personalized stationery, reading: Please see me.

  Now, that can’t be good, I think, leaving through the nurses’ office door so as to avoid bumping into our fair leader, Martha Carrington, before homeroom.

  I should probably inform her that I’ll be leaving for the county courthouse as soon as my substitute shows up, but that will have to wait until I’m on my way out the door in an hour’s time.

  Usually, I would stop by Kat’s classroom to say good morning, but since I don’t want to be spotted and I’m running exceptionally late, I head directly to the middle school wing, slip inside my own classroom, and close the door behind me. Safe, I think. At least for now.

  A nanosecond later, the bell rings and my homeroom students start pouring in. I take a deep breath, put on my happy teacher face, and say, “Welcome!”

  Let the games begin.

  A few minutes into a one-on-one reading conference during first period with a kid named Martin, it hits me: He has not read this book.

  Problem is, neither have I.

  It’s a novel called Ice Glory. While I read tons and tons of young adult literature, this is one that I have missed. In fact, now that I think of it, when we were in the library last month and the kids were taking out books, Martin kept asking me about titles. “That’s a good one; I think you’d like it!” I had said about The Westing Game, and, when he put it back on the shelf and picked up a Gary Paulsen novel instead, I had said, “He’s my favorite author; I’ve read all of his books!” Finally, Martin found one I hadn’t read. “It looks good,” was all I could muster. And that’s the one he selected.

  And now he’s bullshitting me with bizarre details that just wouldn’t make sense in a story about ice hockey.

  “Then the dad, he’s the brain surgeon, gets into this car accident and is paralyzed from the waist down,” Martin says.

  “Wow,” I say. “That’s so…unexpected.”

  “I know!” Martin says, like he just can’t believe it himself.

  “So, how does it end?”

  “With this huge alien invasion.” He doesn’t miss a beat, this kid.

  I take the book from his hands and flip it over to study the blurb on the back. The story centers on a boy from a small town in Montana who wants to skate his way to fame and fortune. It’s based on the true story of an Olympic gold medalist.

  “Extraterrestrials, huh?” I ask, my eyes locked on his.

  Martin squirms in his seat.

  “Did you really read it?”

  Martin makes an I-don’t-know-don’t-ask-me-I’m-just-the-messenger face, but he will not speak.

  I believe Martin is pleading the fifth.

  I look past Martin to where my New York State Middle School Association “Teacher of the Year 1998” plaque hangs forlornly on the wall, crooked and in need of a dusting. There had been a ceremony in Albany, a new dress, champagne filled with bubbles of hope. I shook hands with the governor, who suggested I come work for him, help overhaul the failing schools across the state.

  But I had just met Doug, and I didn’t want to move upstate and away from him and from the middle schoolers that I loved, for a job in educational policy.

  When I first started teaching, and for quite a while after that, education was a field full of promise and excitement. I spoke at conferences nationwide and planned on using my classroom research to write books on educational theory. I created a writing inventory checklist now used by every teacher in my school district.

  There was so much to do, to look forward to.

  And now?

  I still have that folder filled with research notes in the top drawer of my desk, and occasionally I revisit it. When I do, I get inspired all over again and promise myself that during the summer I’ll write up a proposal and send it to an educational journal for review. But then I never do.

  I shouldn’t be so hard on myself. I mean, I recently bought a small notebook to carry in my pocketbook and jot down ideas for classroom research. But most of the pages are filled with lists of things I need to buy at CVS.

  The fact is, I’m rooted in the great countdown of tenured life. In twenty-four years, I can retire at eighty percent of my salary and with sixty-five percent of my sanity, with a gold watch and a gray head of hair.

  I turn away from the plaque to study the rest of the sixth graders in my first-period class. They are quiet, hunched over their books, but are they reading? And how much do I care if they are or are not? Is everyone just going through the motions and faking their way through, trying to coast?

  Or is it just this one little asshole?

  I look back at Martin, his eyes too big for his face, his head too big for his body, his hair cut unevenly. At the open house last fall, his father insisted in front of one hundred other families that I should be teaching the composition of e-mails, not essays, because that’s a skill these kids are going to need in the real world.

  I decide, Nah, it’s just this asshole.

  What is the appropriate sentence for Martin, book faker, in this particular case?

  I’m thinking about one of three punishments. I could make him reread Ice Glory and we could conference again in a week. Or, better, I could select another book, one that I know inside out, and make him read that one. In fact, I could take that one step further and say that for the last three months of the school year I will handpick all of his reading material and get written as well as oral reports from him each time he finishes a book.

  I know what will happen here. Instead of reports I’ll get phone calls from Martin’s parents. I’ll have to defend my point of view to the guidance counselor. Next thing you know, I’ll be roped into spending more time with Martin than I do already, giving him help after school and during lunch recess, eating at my desk instead of with friends in the teachers’ café. And all the while, he’ll continue to look at me with those bulging eyes and that crooked hair, stressing me out with his inherent awfulness. Eventually, I’ll fantasize about running him over with my car in the parking lot, and I’ll end up in jail.

  Whose punishment is that, I ask you?

  “Hey, Martin,” I say, snapping back to attention.

  “Yeah?” He looks at his watch. There’s only a minute left in the class period and he’s counting down the seconds.

  “Good job.” I smile, giving him a thumbs-up. Like a rabbit freed from the jaws of a raccoon, he darts from the room, bewildered but not unpleased.

  The other children file past me and I wave goo
d-bye, wish them a nice day, remind them of the homework.

  A weight lifts from my shoulders. Like Martin, I feel like I’ve just dodged a bullet.

  My substitute is nowhere to be found. Neither is a pen. I scribble an unimaginative lesson plan for the remaining sections of sixth-grade English, using a hot pink highlighter, and leave it in the center of my cluttered desk, hoping the sub can find it.

  Then I call down to the guidance counselor’s office, explaining my situation. “So you’re going to miss the lunchtime grading session for the state exams?” she asks accusingly.

  Oh crap. Forgot about that.

  “It looks that way, Shirley,” I say.

  “Well, that’s not fair to the other members of the English Department, who are going to have to work longer now to grade your papers as well as theirs. They’ll probably have to stay after school.”

  I picture the seven other members of my department silently cursing me for my absence while they sit, hunched over test booklets, trying to decipher chicken scratch and determine whether the responses are worth a random score of a 3 or a 4. I search my brain for a solution. “Maybe…I can…how about if I come in early tomorrow to do it?”

  “You know they have to be completed today. The state needs them by the end of the week.” She sighs.

  Like I’ve planned this or something. Like I’ve concocted a lame excuse to get out of my responsibilities.

  “Shirley, I have jury duty for God’s sake! It’s not like I’m going on a tropical vacation! I’ve had a tough morning, okay? So just…let it go!” I slam the receiver back onto the phone, knocking the whole thing off the wall.

  “Jeez!” I cry. My hands are shaking as I pick up the phone and reattach it. Now I’m going to have to buy Shirley some Lindor truffles. From experience, I know she likes the peanut butter ones.

  I’d like to crawl under my desk and hide from the world for a while, but there’s a knock at my classroom door.

  It’s my principal, Martha Carrington.

  Of course it is.

  And she doesn’t look happy to see me.