Sarah Bynum - Ms. Hempel Chronicles

Now, having arrived at the future, they liked nothing better than to recall their days around the lunch table. They exclaimed over their miscalculations. Holding up their tearoom selves and measuring them against their lunchroom selves, they tried to account for the discrepancies. How did wild-eyed Beatrice become a teacher? How did she succeed in getting engaged before anyone else? The trajectory was not at all what they had predicted.

“Who would have thought,” Greta asked, loosening a strawberry from its stem, “that you would marry Amit Hawkins?”

“Can you imagine,” Kate said, “sitting there in practice and knowing, That penis, one day, is going to penetrate our beloved Bea.”

“I bet he never would have dreamt it,” Greta said.

“Did he?” Kate asked, excited. “Did he notice you then?”

Beatrice had asked him that very question, even though she felt it vain and somewhat despicable to do so.

“Oh no, not in that way. He was scared of me.”

“He was?” Kate and Greta laughed.

“Yes!” Beatrice said. “I can see why.”

Her infected nose piercing. Her scarlet bra straps. Her eagerness to take off her clothes: for the spring play, for the advanced photography class, for any tedious game of Truth or Dare. Her fits of weeping. Her steel-toed boots. Her term papers on “Edie Sedgwick: Little Girl Lost” and “Get Your Motors Running: The Rise and Fall of the Hells Angels.” A quote on her yearbook page from the Marquis de Sade.

“But who could be scared of Ms. Hempel?” Kate asked, cheerfully.

“Speaking of which — we have a present for you!” Greta said and dove beneath the tea table.

Kate cleared a space in front in Beatrice: “Whenever you wear it, you must think of us.”

Greta resurfaced, beaming, and brandishing a box.

“Open it!”

Carefully Beatrice tugged at the bow, lifted the lid, burrowed through the crackling tissue paper.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Keep going,” Kate said. “It’s in there somewhere.”

She felt something slippery and grabbed it.

“What can it be?” she asked, as she imagined, very clearly, a silk nightgown. She pulled her present from its box.

Greta and Kate shrieked. “Do you love them?”

Beatrice nodded.

“Crotchless panties!” they cried, and clapped their hands, as if applauding all the stunts she would perform while wearing them.

They weren’t at all silky. Beatrice brushed her cheek against them: 100 percent polyester. And smelling of something sweetly, sickly rubbery.

The saucers rattled. Greta leaned forward, dunking her lovely beads into her cup. “Do you like them? Really?”

Beatrice smiled bravely. “They’re perfect,” she said, though they absolutely weren’t. They were woefully inadequate. Not up to the task.

“I hope they won’t shock Amit,” Greta said, as Beatrice gently returned them to their box. She looked up from the present at her two best friends, her two talented, brilliant, unintuitive friends. They had no idea.

If someone had asked, Beatrice might have described her notion of sex thus: warm bodies in the dark, sighing and rustling, then arcing up in perfect tandem, like synchronized swimmers. Amit’s concept involved something much more strenuous and well lit and out of the ordinary. His requests often alarmed her. She knew the crotchless panties would strike him as silly, or simply beside the point. This thought made her feel sad, both sad and spooked.

Even worse, she felt duplicitous, as though she had worked on him an unforgivable deception. He now carried about with him a baffled, slightly disappointed air. But she couldn’t help it: how her body clenched, how the alarm was raised, how her every muscle responded with a panicked shout of Sodomy! He had mistaken her for something else entirely, and who could blame him? The scarlet bra straps, the Marquis de Sade. The fondness for acrobats.

She wondered at what point his appetite had turned. As far as she understood, an interest in anal sex was not something one was born with. She imagined an early, unsuccessful coupling; flickering filmstrips; a summer spent in Europe. All it took were some crooked signposts, some conspiracy of events and influences. Because he couldn’t have always wanted this. Why hadn’t she stopped the car? Why hadn’t she sprung out of the station wagon and loved him then? When a kiss was a surprise, the introduction of tongue an astonishment. When a small, black-haired boy would have swooned at the thought of her underwear. Would have died, nearly, at the touch of her hands, her chewing gum breath, her permission to enter. It would have been enough; it would have been the whole world, then.

So much more was asked of her now. Stamina, flexibility, imagination (or, perhaps, a quieting of her imagination). A willingness to endure, and to enjoy, what she feared would be a rupturing pain. It all made her feel exhausted and very far away from him, as if he were standing atop a flight of stairs and she were stranded at the bottom, too breathless to climb up. Even though he waited there, full of love, full of patience, full of expectancy, she wondered how long it would be before he stretched out his hamstrings, took a deep breath, and bounded off.

But maybe she was remembering it all wrong; maybe there was never a time when a kiss could stun and astonish. Maybe, if she aligned the years correctly, she would discover that while Amit was devoting himself to cross-country running, Greta was contorted (the true contortionist) over the stick shift in her mother’s car, offering an illustration of how to manage a penis inside one’s mouth, and Beatrice was sitting in the backseat, watching very closely. Greta, who now leaned across the tea table and grasped Beatrice’s hand and said, suddenly, “We love you so much, Bea.”

TO BEATRICE’S SURPRISE, Amit liked the crotchless panties. He wore them on his head and danced around the apartment. All of me, he sang. Why not take all of me.

He sang and danced with his eyes closed. He snatched her up, and held her close, and, with a snap of his wrist, unfurled her. She dangled out in space, teetering on her tiptoes, ready to crash into the snake tank — but then he spooled her back in again. Together they danced wildly. They dipped and spun and almost knocked over a lamp. He tried to lift her off the floor, but he wasn’t quite tall enough, so she gave a little push and folded up her legs, and it was nearly the same as being swept off her feet.

Can’t you see, he sang. I’m no good without you.

She hung on to his neck and they waltzed over her pop quizzes. And into the bookcase, where he stumbled, and books toppled, and he pulled away from her, doubled over. She stooped down to help and suddenly he shot up, taking her with him, slung over his shoulder like a squalling child. She flailed and shrieked. Staggering about the room, Amit huffed, You took the part that once was my heart.

With a thump, he deposited her onto the sofa. So why not take all of me?

He then twirled around and lurched down the hallway and out the door. To buy them two bottles of ginger ale.

Beatrice lolled on the sofa and hummed a coda to his song. What luck! What fortune! A thousand blessings had been bestowed upon her. A springy sofa, a clean apartment. A pile of pop quizzes that could wait until morning. A dancing fiancé. An airborne Beatrice. A pair of best friends, and a beautiful bridal shower.

Abruptly, she stiffened. For where was her present? Still perched atop her fiance’s head. Preening itself. And ruffling its polyester feathers.

And where was her fiancé? Walking down the avenue, with a small lilt, a small stutter, in his step.

Beatrice retrieved her shoes from beneath the sofa and ran out into the street. She looked both ways. She saw a dumpster, a dark alley, and a brand-new van with a voluptuous woman painted on its side. She didn’t see Amit. She didn’t see anyone on the street, as if she had rushed out of their apartment and into her own bad dream.