Lily King - The English Teacher

Peter dreamed his first dream of her. The dream had no plot; it was just a moment, her in his room, his old room, in a shiny yellow raincoat. He moved toward her with no idea what he would say or do, with no idea if she was real or imagined. But when he reached her, all uncertainty was gone. He hugged her tight, so tight, and breathed her in and she smelled like flowers and old leaves, and then he was crying, aching, and she held him close until the tears running into his ears woke him up.

MEMORY DOES ITS WORK UNDERGROUND. BENEATH CONSCIOUSNESS, A PAST moment finds its kin all at once. Like a fish returned to its school, it frolics in remembered waters, and stirs up others. Above the surface, at first, there are only a few brief innocuous ripples which are all that you can allow yourself to know of the commotion below: a checked shirt, the white rim of a porcelain sink. The fluid sequence of moments seems, luckily, irretrievable; there is no line to follow with a finger, no story she feels able to tell. Yet even awful, unlivable memories want to be relived; the fragments yearn to be whole once more.

Vida stood immobile before the half-renovated house, its windows and doors blown out, and workmen, even today, a Saturday, running their tools within its gutted insides. All it took was this smell — the smell of a freshly built room — for the taste of his mustard breath to come into her mouth.

“It looks like they’re going to put a balcony off every bedroom,” Tom said.

Dutifully, Vida raised her eyes to the second floor.

“And some sort of turret over there.”

She followed his gesture to the left.

“I guess the moat will come later.”

She knew from the change in tone that a smile was expected, though his words fell between them unheard. Her ribs seemed to be straining inward, strengthening their cage against the growing panic inside. Her limbs felt light, as if they might break off and float away.

“This whole neighborhood was once just a huge field covered in Queen Anne’s lace in the summer and children in snowsuits dragging toboggans up there to Blake’s Hill in the winter. We used to take Stuart and Fran here nearly every weekend. And now look at it.”

Vida tried to concentrate on the circle of new houses and their even newer additions, their pools of asphalt out front, the freshly raked grass in back.

“What’s wrong?” This was a question Tom often asked, as if, having missed so many warning signs with Mary, he was determined to find the first one in her.

She always tried to give him an answer, even when there wasn’t one. But now, as they moved away from the house, nothing came to her and she felt depleted by the strain of trying to assure him that everything was fine.

“Hey?” He pulled her by the hands to him, forcing her to face him directly. “What is it?”

This was what he was always asking, in one way or another. What is it? What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you who I thought you were?

Her mind scrambled for a way out of a whole day of his scrutiny. Mercifully, something arose, not even a lie. “I completely forgot. I have this miserable computer tutorial at school.” She’d never planned to go. She’d gotten the memo and torn it up. “I’m sorry.”

She unfastened her hands and resumed the walk home. Beside her, Tom said nothing, though she felt him questioning her. She’d made quite a passionate speech at dinner a few nights ago about the evils of technology in the classroom, how it weakened the already weakening grasp on language, how it was the enemy of creativity and spontaneity and the fortuitous mistake. Tom had been amused by her rant; he’d taken her hand under the table. He’d looked at her for the rest of the evening as if he’d remembered why he married her, and that night she found the right equation of alcohol and forgetting and they’d managed, to his great delight, to have a form of intercourse. But now she was drained of words and she could feel his bewilderment returning. Was this how marriage was, bewilderment giving way to reassurance giving way to more bewilderment? Was it possible in any relationship to not disappoint, to do anything more than only briefly rekindle the initial fatal illusion?

She thought of that Hardy poem, the one with the young man walking at night toward the home of the girl he is to marry the next day. A spirit sidles up next to him, a beautiful woman who resembles his bride. She tells him she is the dream he has dreamed of love, and that he loves only her, not the poor girl he has been projecting his illusions onto. When the spirit finally convinces him, he insists on marrying her instead, but she says she cannot, and disappears. When he reaches the home of his bride-to-be, he finds that all the life has been sucked out of her.

“Vida,” Tom said softly, so softly she could pretend not to have heard. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Vida.” He stopped on the sidewalk and waited for her to turn to him.

She was still thinking about the end of the poem, straining to remember the last lines.

Her look was pinched and thin,

As if her soul had shrunk and died,

And left a waste within.

“What’s that from?”

She didn’t know she’d spoken the words aloud.

“A Hardy poem.” She felt protective of it.

“Which one?”

She didn’t want to explain. She wanted to think about this idea of love’s being cast onto someone like a spotlight, making her shimmer and glow for a little while, lending her qualities she doesn’t possess. Is this really what we do to each other, find a victim and shine the light of all our dreams on them? Angel Clare places all his fantasies of the pure innocent country girl onto Tess, and when she finally forces him to listen to her story of Alec and the baby, she becomes vile to him and he banishes her. As if her soul had shrunk and died, / And left a waste within. She could hear Tom saying her name again, but he seemed so much less important, so much more immaterial than this theory of Hardy’s, which she’d always taught to her students, but had never suspected would ever apply to her own life.

The computer room had cost over five hundred thousand dollars. On Thursday evening there’d been an unveiling for parents and faculty, and on Friday the day’s schedule had been reorganized to allow every student in the school a chance to sit at the helm of one of these machines. Now, in one Saturday afternoon, the teachers were expected to learn how to integrate them into their curricula.

For two years, the administration had been aggressively brainwashing the school community, producing pamphlets with titles like “The Modern Miracle in Education” and “Learning Finally Becomes Fun!” The need was so great, they said, and money so scarce, that faculty members were being asked to give a portion of their salaries each month to the cause. Vida had heard that some of the younger teachers, in fear of not getting their contracts renewed, had actually agreed to the tithing, poor suckers.

Now they were all suckers, crammed in this room on a Saturday. There were not, thank God, enough computers to go around, so the overflow sat on metal chairs at the back. Vida took a seat next to Cheryl Perry, who smelled like cheese and handed her a few mimeographs, general instructions for the IBM System 370.

Mark Stratton, the computer guru, and Brick Howells stood practically hand in hand at the front of the room. Brick declared, in a voice far too loud for the size of the room, that what they were about to witness was nothing short of a revolution. And that no other school in the area, not even Hunt, Fayer’s wealthier rival, had implemented this kind of technology.

To Vida’s astonishment, her colleagues clapped. Then Mark asked everyone seated at a computer to turn it on by pushing the large rectangular button on the left. He said something else but his voice was drowned out by the sudden snap and whir of the machines. Vida waited for the noise to die down. It didn’t. A smell like burnt hair filled the room.