Lily King - The English Teacher

Vida sat up straight. Had she slept? The coffee was still and silent in its pot. Carol’s knees cracked as she squatted to reach the mimeograph paper in the bottom cabinet. It was never too late to offer condolence. She needed to say something. If only she’d been able to finish that damn letter. She thought of the opening line, Shelley’s “Grief awhile is blind …” What good were her own small words if she uttered them now? The letter had so much more strength to it, centuries of wisdom. She’d worked on it for days at a time last summer; she had pages of notes filled with gorgeous quotes from everyone from Shakespeare to Bishop, but no coherent letter. If only she could just hand Carol those sheets of paper and be done with it.

She watched her old friend retrieve the reams of paper, balancing on the balls of her feet, her camel-colored skirt stretched tight. Her son had died. Her son had killed himself. And yet little about her had changed. Vida avoided the front office now, but she could still hear Carol’s laugh occasionally, spilling down the hallway. Within moments she would rise and pass in front of Vida once more. What could she possibly say to her now, now that she’d missed the funeral, neglected to call or write, had been unable, that first week of school, to catch her alone, though she had tried, she really had. Carol couldn’t know about the pages of notes, the hours of research, the pleasure she had taken in finding just the right line. Because of this terrible misunderstanding they had barely spoken all fall (she’d sent her a wedding invitation and Carol had checked the regret box, offered no words at all), and they used to be such friends. Carol used to arrange her lunchtime around Vida’s schedule. She wished she could follow her back to the office, pull up that green chair in the corner, and gossip as they had before at this hour of day. Carol might even ask about the wedding night and maybe Vida could have implied something, maybe Carol could have given her some sort of advice. She’d been married nearly thirty years. But Carol was rising now, her heels sinking back into her shoes, paper in arms, and Vida had yet to say a single word to her. Something would come, she knew, when their eyes met. Carol backed out from the closet and, a few feet from the couch, looked directly at her with a tight smile. The windows were behind her, two pale panes like wings on Carol’s back. Vida smiled far wider, opened her mouth, and heard the word “Angel” come out. Carol nodded and vanished around the corner.

Angel? Had she really said the word angel for Christ’s sake?

Vida poured herself the largest mug of coffee on the shelf and slunk back up to the uncomplicated solitude of her third-floor suite.

At five, she drove down to the gym parking lot and waited in her car with the other parents for the JV soccer players to trickle out the locker room door. Peter emerged with his friend Jason. Both boys were bent over from the weight of their knapsacks and talking in that way that made boys so distinct from girls of the same age: brief remarks, no eye contact. It was hard to tell, when they separated near the hood of the Dodge, if they had even said good-bye.

The passenger door creaked, the enormous bag thunked onto the floor, and Peter slumped in.

“Hey there, big guy.”

“Hey,” he said at the end of a breath. He shot her a quick glance, then stared straight ahead as if the car were already moving.

“How’d it go?”

“What — practice?”

“Practice, history quiz, the day in general.”

“Okay.”

“Just okay?”

She put the car in gear and headed down the school driveway, relieved to be moving away from Carol, from Tess, from the classroom in which suddenly Peter was a student.

Peter didn’t answer. She was afraid he was going to bring up the class, the way she had let things unravel. That horrible new boy, Kevin, and his cousin in the mental hospital. It was physical, the mortification this memory produced.

“How’d French go?” French was always a safe subject; they could make fun of Cheryl Perry. His mediocre marks in that class never bothered her as much as they did in other subjects.

“It was stupid. She showed us this movie about this sort of lonely kid. One day he’s walking through a kind of junkyard and he sees this painting of a girl. He looks at her a long time, and then this real girl just appears out of nowhere. She’s supposed to be the one from the painting, but she doesn’t look anything like her. Why do they do that, act as if you can’t tell the difference?”

“Suspension of disbelief. They want you to use your imagination.”

“In a book maybe. But it’s so stupid in a movie.”

The car weaved through the unlit narrow roads, then the lighted stretch of the town center and on toward the mainland. The black surface of the water held the soft yellow light from shore, the bluish neons on the bridge, and the slow red and white streaks from the crossing cars.

“Where are you going?’ Peter said, slicing through their silence when the car didn’t take the right toward Larch Street.

“We need groceries.” The word was strange in her mouth.

“Oh.” A trace of delight in his voice.

She had come into this store only once before, with Tom last summer before a picnic. They had bought egg salad sandwiches and lemonade. Every person in the place had greeted Tom: the teenager shelving soup, the woman buying toilet paper, the old man laying out the fish on crushed ice. The cashier and the bagger barely let him out of the store with all they wanted to talk about. Out in the parking lot Vida had glanced back to see a line of them at the plate glass, gawking, all their mouths moving at once.

“Be right with you,” a man shouted above the gnarl of the meat grinder, then, upon recognizing her, quickly cut the machine, wiped his hands on a rag, and hurried up to the counter. “What can I do you for?”

She looked down into the case of purple meats. In fourteen years she’d made nothing more elaborate than a cheese omelet. “Any suggestions?”

He chose a small roast. In one long complicated gesture, he wrapped it in a fresh sheet of white paper, tied it tight with twine, and marked the side with a black hieroglyph only his daughter at the register could read. “I was really happy to hear about you and Mr. Belou,” he said, sliding the package at her. “Mrs. Belou — the former — she was a customer of ours from the very beginning. Special lady.” His pale eyes swam unsteadily. “He’s a lucky man. Twice blessed.” He looked unconvinced.

Vida thanked him, set the roast in the child’s seat of the cart, and headed for produce.

“You’ll want to put that in at three-fifty for an hour and a half,” the butcher called out to her before turning on his machine once again.

In the vegetable aisle, she pulled the string off the meat and tied up her hair.

Peter was waiting for her at the magazines. He looked at the roast, the eight potatoes, the bag of string beans, and the bottle of bourbon. “That’s it?”

“I need to get the roast in.” Maybe tomorrow night she’d have more stamina for all the choices and the scrutiny.

Larch Street made Vida uneasy. All these houses pressed together seemed to demand something of her as she drove past — a normalcy she couldn’t deliver. She hated the curtains in the windows, the decorations at the door. She still had to look carefully at the house numbers to find the right one. She pulled in behind Tom’s wagon and cut the engine. The car shook a little, then was still. Above the squat little house, long clouds floated pink in the dark sky, as if it might snow. Here, too, lights were on in every window; everyone was home. Her throat had seized up; she couldn’t even swallow her own saliva.