Lily King: The English Teacher

There she was, weaving her way slowly back across the room. She looked like another person today, all that hair everywhere and a faintly pink dress swirling down to her ankles. She lifted a flute of champagne gently from a passing tray.

Peter’s French teacher, Miss Perry, asked Dr. Gibb to dance and Peter was surprised to see how eagerly he accepted her, leaving Gena’s side without another word. His aunt turned back to him without a trace of injury.

“When are you going to come visit me?” she asked. When he didn’t answer she said, “I’m not worried. You’ll come. Someday, when you’re a little older, you’re going to get in the car and not even know where you’re going, and five days later I’ll see you pull up into my driveway.”

“I’d call first.”

“No you won’t. You’ll just show up. And I’ll be real glad to see you.” She gave him a rough hug, clubbing him on the ear with one of her thick upper arms.

What he had wanted to say was that every fall his mother promised they’d visit Gena during spring vacation, but when the vacation drew near his mother always had some excuse for not having bought the tickets — that senioritis was going to be bad this year, that not one junior was going to get into college at the rate they were going, or that it had been years since she’d taught King Lear and really had to do some thinking. That was her most frequent excuse for everything they didn’t do — she had to do some thinking. Peter understood that they didn’t have a lot of money compared with most of the kids at Fayer, since they lived off one teacher’s salary, but they’d never taken anything but the same three-day vacation every year. On the first weekend after school ended each June, they drove north to York Beach to stay at the Sea Spray Inn, an aquablue, three-story motel across Route 1 from a gray beach and gray water. During the day he would swim, going back and forth between the pool and the beach, while his mother sat upright reading on a towel near the rocks. They shared a room and if he woke up in the night there was often a bright orange circle of ash floating above her bed. He felt comforted by her wakefulness, the smell of her smoke, and the rattling wheeze of the ice machine down the hall. He always wished the trip was longer.

But Gena probably didn’t want to hear about almost-visits, and Peter was glad when his mother joined them. He leaned closer to her, ashamed of his need of her, that secret ache he kept expecting to grow out of.

“How much longer are we going to stay?” he asked her.

She turned to him but didn’t answer.

“Mom?”

She was looking right at him, with that smile that had been fixed on her face all day, but she still didn’t reply.

“Mom!” He waved a hand at her. “I said, how long are we going to stay?”

“You can stay as long as you like.”

“But how long are you going to stay?”

“I don’t know, Peter.”

“Are we going to have dinner all together when we get home?”

“We just ate.” She spread out her arm at all the round tables still covered with dessert plates and coffee cups.

“Wasn’t that lunch?”

“It’s past six.” She was irritated with him and looked off toward Tom, who was making his way to her. He passed a table of Fayer teachers, all women, and Peter saw them admiring him.

When Tom reached them he said, “I feel like Lindbergh in Paris the way people are carrying on.”

“You smell a little better,” his mother said. “He was soaked in urine.”

Peter noticed how Tom’s fingers, like organisms separate from the rest of him, folded into his mother’s as they spoke. It was weird, much weirder than he expected, to see his mother standing there holding hands with a man, a husband. And she had an unnatural expression on her face, like she knew the whole thing was weird, too. He wondered, for the first time, if his mother was in love with Tom, really in love, the way he was with Kristina. She couldn’t be — she’d only known him since June and he’d known Kristina since sixth grade when she was new at Fayer. They sat together at study hall. They became partners in earth science. Neither was popular; they didn’t get asked to meet at the beach on weekends where their classmates smoked cigarettes and made out behind the rocks. In the spring, Peter tried to kiss her when they were alone in the woods, collecting salamanders for their terrarium. He’d caught one, fluorescent orange like a bike reflector, and she bent over to watch it scramble in his palm. Her hair was loosely woven in a braid, strands curling free in the damp air. Even now he could remember how he wanted to press his lips to the pale skin beneath the braid as she stood there so still. But he thought you were only supposed to kiss a girl on the lips so he buried that desire and tucked his head around to find her mouth. She screamed in fright. She said she’d thought he was a bird, a crow come to snatch up the little glowing salamander. She seemed really sorry for the confusion and Peter knew that if he tried again she would have kissed back, but he’d used up all his courage in the first attempt, and they walked back with their salamanders to the science wing in silence. He never got another chance that year, and by the next fall she’d cut off her braid and grown breasts and became the most popular girl in their grade. She still was, and he still loved her.

Peter remained beside his mother and Tom, though they were as far away as stars. Even if they had both been shorter and spoken audibly, he wouldn’t have understood half of what they said to each other. It was like that with couples. Kristina was like that with Brian Rossi now. Gena had gotten pulled into a conversation with three tiny old ladies Peter didn’t recognize. Beside him, their backs to him, Miss Rezo and Mrs. Shapiro, two of the other English teachers at Fayer, were talking quietly.

“No, I never did. No one did. When she interviewed she said her husband would be joining her, but then he never came. I don’t think anyone dared mention him after a certain point.”

“It’s like Lena Grove showing up in Jefferson looking for Lucas Burch. Where’d she come from exactly?”

“Texas, I think. I can’t recall for sure. But there was never a mention of him, not even to my cousin Lucy who sat for them for years.”

“Really? The one with the wired jaw?”

And then they launched into a long discussion of jaw-related dentistry. It seemed to him teachers often did that, picked the least interesting angle of a story and pursued it like bloodhounds, leaving behind all the more promising trails. It’s why he hated school, history in particular. The past had to be more intriguing than what they were given to learn.

“He’s no longer in the picture” was what he remembered his mother saying the first time he asked about his father. Another time she said, “He was a man,” and he waited for her to go on because she liked talking about people and what she noticed about them. But she said nothing else and he knew by her changed expression not to ask more. The two times Gena had visited, he asked, when he got her alone, if she knew anything about his father. She said his mother had never confided in her about things of that nature.

Tom turned to him. “You ready to go home, Peter?”

It sounded so normal, as if Tom had been asking him that for years. “Definitely,” he said.

From the backseat of the Belou station wagon Peter could see the heads of his mother and stepfather in the Dodge ahead. It was strange to see her in the passenger seat of her own car, the car she’d had all his life. She looked small. Tom’s head was turned to her and he was driving very slowly.

“We might as well get out and walk,” Stuart said, slamming his palms against the steering wheel again. “What’s wrong with him?”