Lily King - The English Teacher

He’d forgotten, until he entered this classroom, that most of his grade had stopped speaking to him. They were working in small groups today, pretending to be landholders from 1749 working out their income and assets. Peter’s group was ignoring him. The truth was, even when he wasn’t being ignored, he didn’t contribute much to group work. Group work was just a way for teachers to get another free period. By this time of year Mr. Hathaway had given up the pretense of visiting each group, listening with fake interest, and moving on. Now he just worked at his desk, scratching out his illegible remarks at the bottom of each of their takehome tests from last week. When he looked up suddenly, Peter turned back to his group and nodded. Sarah, Kristina’s best friend, shot him a scowl and he had nowhere to put his eyes but back out the window.

Kristina had told her friends that he’d locked her in that bedroom in Scott Laraby’s house, that he’d tried to have sex with her. She even claimed to have cuts and bruises. Jason had not come to his defense.

He remembered how big that JV field used to seem to him, how when he was four or five he’d watch the games at dinnertime, kneeling backward on their couch, a plate of fish sticks balancing beside him. His mother hated the games out the window and always went to her room and shut the door. Those boys he had watched, so hard and tall and serious, with smoke rising off their skin into the cold fall air, were no older than he was now. He’d played on that field this fall, though only once, when a Fayer victory was certain, and even then only for a few minutes at a time. He’d never known what those boys he’d watched had known — the red steaming face, the burning chest, the ache to win, the ability, he saw now, to become with his others teammates one victorious organism. Looking at the field was making him feel worse than looking at his classmates ignoring him and just as he was about to turn back to them he noticed a mark at the far side of the field, a sort of gray-brown gash in the turf. Who would have dug a hole in the soggy grass? A dog? A fox? He thought of the military term “foxhole.” Was this what a foxhole really was?

“Mr. Avery, I’m sure your groupmates would appreciate those penetrating thoughts of yours,” Mr. Hathaway said, not even noticing how his group had shut him out of their conversation, which had quickly moved more than two centuries beyond the issues of 1749 landholding.

As soon as Mr. Hathaway’s attention fell away, Peter returned to the hole in the field. Now he couldn’t determine if it even was an indentation; at certain moments it seemed to be something on top of the grass. It was like that trompe l’oeil when the little girl’s shoulder becomes the witch’s hideous chin: first it was a hole, then it was a clump. It was part of the earth, part of the torn earth, he was certain, until it moved and then suddenly he no longer needed to see — he knew. The coat. The hair. It was his mother.

He was nearly to the door before Mr. Hathaway looked up.

“I’m going to throw up,” Peter said, capping his mouth.

“Gross!” a chorus of his enemies exclaimed before he shut the door on them all.

He took the absurdly curved and elaborate staircase three steps at a time.

“This is not the Indy Five Hundred,” a teacher called out above him, and he slowed obediently for a few seconds.

Now he was in the front hall. A portrait of his great-grandfather hung over the fireplace. A lot of good you can do me from up there, he thought, crossing over to the back staircase. The side door of the boiler room would be the quickest, most discreet route to the field.

Coming up those stairs at an erect and steady clip was the photography teacher. No sophomore had a free period this early in the morning, but Mrs. Dilworth simply said “Hello, Peter” under her breath. Her viewing room, Peter remembered, had a large picture window that framed the field. Was she coming up to report his mother to Mr. Howells?

He took hold of the thin banister and leapt, his feet touching down lightly only once before the bottom. The boiler room was to the right. When he was younger and his mother had an after-school meeting, he’d come down here with Lloyd and play slapjack at a little table he used to have in the corner. It was down here that you really felt the age and the immensity of the old house. It took three oil furnaces to heat the place. And the noise they made, the shuddering and screeching and hissing that went on all day and night. It was creepy alone — he’d never come down here without Lloyd. Jason had told him junior and senior couples snuck down here to make out. He wondered as he cut through the dim enormous room if somewhere in the shadows hands and mouths were momentarily suspended. He pushed on the bar of the far door and was outside, running now, not directly toward her but down the back driveway to the dirt road to their old place; then, making a wide circle around the house, trying to blend in with the pines, he followed the tree line around to the far side of the field. She was still there, still facedown, unmoving. He thought for the first time today about the way Walt’s body had fallen into the grave, like something that had never been alive at all.

“Mom!” He hadn’t meant to cry out; his voice an ugly squawk.

His knees were cold and soaked the minute he hit the ground. He rolled her over, half expecting, half sickly excited by the expectation of a gray face and blue lips. But it was just her, a little grass on her cheek. Since she never wore makeup there was no shock in the morning, nothing like seeing Jason’s mother at breakfast. She was breathing evenly.

“Ma,” he whispered, calmer now.

She continued sleeping. He looked toward school and was surprised how close it was when from that second-floor classroom she had seemed so far away. The mansion, so dark and cavernous from the inside, appeared to be all windows. How many people had seen, were watching him right now? They would send an ambulance. Mr. Howells would follow in his car, and at the hospital the examiner would tell them that she was simply inebriated.

“Get up now. C’mon, Ma. Get up.” He gave her a shove. It should have hurt — he’d shoved harder than he’d meant to and his wrist began to ache — but she was out.

He had so little time. The bell would ring in five minutes or so. He had to get her off this field. He pulled her up to sitting, her arms through the coat so thin and free of muscle. When had she become so small? When was the last time he’d put his arms around her or been so close to her face which hung contentedly now against her shoulder?

“Ma, please, let’s get out of here.”

He heard a voice and looked up with dread, his mind spinning an excuse, but it was just Mr. Mayhew at the circle, his back to Peter, calling his retriever Buckeye, who always wandered.

Peter hoisted his mother over his left shoulder. He expected her to be lighter, or at least more manageable. But she was so long. Her feet seemed to be dangling somewhere down by his ankles. He felt one of her shoes, then a few steps later the other, knock against him and fall off, but he couldn’t stop. By the tenth step there was no part of his body that didn’t ache — and how many more sets of ten were there to go? Hundreds, maybe thousands. And first there was a hill. He’d never, not even when he was a little kid, considered this incline up past the cottage as a hill. Even when he was three, he’d taken his sled to the real hill close to the main road. But now, with his mother draped across him like something he’d just shot in the woods, this patch of grass was his own Kilimanjaro — without the snows. Everything hurt: his ankles, the backs of his calves, every single muscle in each thigh, lower, middle, and upper back. And his neck — the whole weight of her seemed to be pressed against his neck. Even his lips hurt from how his teeth had clamped them shut from the inside. It was such a myth, the weight of a woman, the way in the movies men were always tossing women over their shoulders and running here and there with them. And what about that short story they’d read last year, the one about the boy and his father who go out hunting and the father dies and the boy has to carry him out of the frigging woods. Imagine how heavy a father would be. And that boy was only nine or ten. It was a bunch of bullshit, everything he’d been taught.