Lily King: The English Teacher

He took a seat at a table with some children he didn’t recognize and their babysitter. The children were tying her wrists together with the strings of balloons and none of them noticed when he sat down. He swung his chair toward the dancers and sipped on a flat Coke someone had left behind. He felt suddenly grown-up, beside but apart from the screeches of the little boys, his right ankle on his left knee which made a box of his legs, the way most of his male teachers sat during assemblies. The babysitter was pretty and probably thought he’d come over to try and talk to her so he was careful to ignore her. All three of his stepsiblings were out dancing now: Fran, with her father, still shining like a star; Stuart, the oldest, old enough to be in college but for some reason wasn’t, glumly twitching with a fat cousin of theirs; and little Caleb up on the shoulders of Dr. Gibb, who had been Mrs. Belou’s oncologist. She had only been dead a couple of years and now his mother was Mrs. Belou.

Peter started to wish he’d invited Jason. His mother had told him to invite as many friends as he wanted, but he thought they’d get in the way of the beginning of his life with his new family. He’d envisioned the whole wedding differently, with him and Stuart and Fran moving through the day together, comparing parents, trading information like spies before a mission. He pictured them all sitting around one table, pointing out relatives and telling their stories. Well, Peter only had one relative there, his aunt Gena, but she had a good story. Years ago, she’d gone into the Peace Corps and fallen in love with a guy in her village in Africa. One of the guy’s wives had tried to strangle her with reeds from the river. She still had the scars on her neck.

As if beckoned by his thoughts, Gena took the seat beside him. “You look a little gloomy.”

“I’m not.”

“Really?”

She put a finger under his chin and guided his face to hers. Even though Gena was four years older, she was like looking at his mother through magic glass, the creases gone, the cheeks soft shiny bulbs above her big smile. His mother once said she wanted to skate on Gena’s skin it was so smooth.

“I’m just taking a break from dancing.”

“You glad she did this?”

“Yeah.”

“You like the steps?”

“I don’t know them really.”

They were all dancing together now. Stuart had tied a napkin around his head and was jutting his arms out like he was putting a hex on people.

“They must be pretty tough.” She meant because of their mother.

“I guess.” He didn’t like it when people dwelled on Mrs. Belou’s death.

Gena looked away. He was afraid she was preparing a move. He hadn’t been a great conversationalist, though usually he liked talking to her. He’d only met her twice before, but he felt comfortable with her. She said what she thought.

“What do you think about Tom?”

Gena watched Tom, who was dancing in that shoulder-bouncing way that people who did not grow up with rock music did, then turned back to him, as if he were the real subject of study. Finally she said, “He’ll call a spade a spade.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he said with sudden defensiveness, as though they were in the middle of a fight.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know what he’s going to find in there.” She looked at Peter and seemed surprised by his disturbed face. “Oh honey, for you this is fantastic. It’s a nice family. And you’ve got brothers and sisters now.”

“One sister.” He felt sulky. What did she mean by find in there?

“One sister.” She looked at Fran, twirling beneath the bridge of her father’s arms. “Who will hog the bathroom and torture you with all the gorgeous friends she brings home.” Her head fell back, laughing at her vision, and he could see the three ragged white stripes just below her chin.

The bass player, Mr. Carbone, struck the last chords of a song with a long flourish and an embarrassing scissor split, then announced the band would be taking a breather. Peter hoped his stepfamily would join him. There was plenty of room — the children were playing at the dessert table now, smashing pieces of cake faster than the babysitter could push the plates away. But the Belous drifted over to their side of the room where Tom’s friends and family all congregated. Peter scanned the top of the crowd for his mother’s hair, but she still wasn’t up from the bathroom. He had a flash of her climbing out a small window but he knew that was ridiculous. Where would she go? Their house on campus had been emptied out that morning; Mr. Hoyle, with his wife and new baby, would be moving in tomorrow.

Dr. Gibb took a seat on the other side of Gena. He leaned across her to shake Peter’s hand for the third time that day, then said something that made Gena smile. He was neither young nor old, but in that long dull part of life Peter dreaded. He had a squat face and an oxbow of hair just above his forehead, cut off from the rest of his scalp by the bald patches on either side.

He and Gena plunged into a serious discussion. Their voices dropped to exclude him. Peter feigned disinterest and slowly turned his back on them so that gradually their voices rose again.

“I don’t know about that,” Dr. Gibb said. “Youth is very resilient. But it’s true that there are easy declines and difficult declines and this was a very very difficult one.”

“Slow?”

“No, relatively speaking, it was swift. But she fought it with her bare hands. This was a woman who did not want to die, who did not believe she could die.”

“My father always told us no matter what, die with dignity.”

Dr. Gibb took a deep breath as if to stop himself from saying something more acerbic. “There is not a lot of room for dignity with cancer of the brain.” He said “cancer of the brain” like it was a French delicacy. Peter felt a sudden hatred for this man who had brought death to his mother’s wedding.

Why did people have such a fascination with death? Once they’d found out Tom was a widower, everyone at school wanted all the details about how his wife had died. Wasn’t it wonderful, they all agreed, that Tom had found Vida. Like a rose in winter, his English teacher had said.

Peter had stopped himself from thinking about dying long ago. When he was much younger, for no good reason that he could remember, the reality and certainty of death struck him all at once. He went through a long scary stage of believing he would die in his sleep like in the stupid rhyme Jason’s mother always said before bed. Sleep itself began to feel like death, and he would jerk himself awake whenever it came over him. He felt, late at night, the pull of his father, the mystery of him that was as large as the mystery of death itself and all tangled up with it. He began to wonder if his father was dead, dead and wanting Peter to join him in death. It was the winter of fourth grade, with its short bleak days and long nights and everything snapping and cracking outside his window. Finally spring came, with its softening and loosening, and his mind loosened too, relinquished its grip, and he began sleeping again.

He tuned out Gena and the doctor after that, and looked around the dreary room for distraction. This restaurant they’d rented out was one of the summer shacks in Fayer right on the water. It would be a great place to go on a hot August night when you wanted to feel a breeze against your skin. It was not a great place to go in November when all the windows were covered with thick plastic which billowed out and collapsed back in loudly with the wind. He was filled suddenly with a familiar loneliness, and he stood up quickly, desperate to shake it, anxious to find his mother among all these strangers.