Lily King - The English Teacher

Was there somewhere among his mother’s possessions, somewhere he hadn’t checked in all his years of rifling through her things, a clue? He’d forgotten until a few minutes ago how Gena always said your mama. Mama was such a cozy word, absolutely the wrong word for what he had.

In the bathroom water thundered out of the faucet again. He pictured her huddled up near it. She wasn’t like those women in ads who could sprawl out under a blanket of bubbles. His mother didn’t know how to relax. He thought of their trips to York Beach, her pile of books, her dash to the bookshop when she got halfway through the second-to-last one. She huddled on her towel on the beach just like she’d be huddling now. She never swam, never wanted to play Ping-Pong in the rec room. After dinner she might agree to a game of Scrabble, but never Monopoly or Stratego. And she took it so seriously. He tried to think if he’d ever seen his mother having fun. Even her wedding was more like a dentist’s appointment to her, the way she’d put on her dress at the last moment, and let out a big “uhhhh” when they reached the church parking lot. There was only one time he could think of, years ago, when she’d had people over to the house after he’d gone to sleep. He’d awoken to the sound of the blender and talking. He listened at the top of the stairs to his mother imitating people, other teachers who weren’t there. Suddenly she turned and ran up the stairs, giggling to herself. She ran right past him without even noticing him, into her room. Then she went downstairs again, wearing a wig, and everyone exploded into laughter.

The water was still running. He needed to get out of this house. Gena looked relieved when he said he was going to take a walk.

Her street, though narrow and quiet, extended perfectly straight in both directions. He went left because there were more palm trees that way. He’d never seen a palm tree before, and was surprised to find on the sidewalk long stiff straw-colored fronds that cracked under his feet like regular leaves. He didn’t recognize anything else on the sidewalk, not the smashed purple berries or the hairy red stalks. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen and Peter kept expecting to get hot and sweaty beneath the uninterrupted sun, but it just seemed to keep everything at room temperature. A car drove by, fast, with many people in it playing music he didn’t know.

All the houses were small and sunless like Gena’s, all made out of the same smooth clay. After about ten blocks they started to get fatter, their grass shorn, their driveways more elaborate. Some had gates with a keypad. There were beat-up trucks out in front of many of these houses, and small groups of men bent over a cluster of shrubs or flowers. They spoke in Spanish and did not look up when he passed by.

He had thought that the dark rim of blue on the horizon was part of the sky, but as he got closer it became the ocean. Stuart was right: it was so blue it looked fake. Gena’s long street dead-ended into a path that led down a steep incline to a strip of sand. Waves boomed against walls of rock on either side of the beach. He was too scared for some reason to go down there alone.

He wondered where on this coast Stuart and his mother had been. Perhaps one day they had stood right here on this cliff. Mrs. Belou, knowing what she did, might have held Stuart’s hand or put her arms around him, her chin on his shoulder. She might never have wanted to let go. She might have hidden her tears, pretended it was the wind coming off the ocean as she caught them on her fingers. She had loved her son, and she wouldn’t have been able to imagine saying good-bye.

Peter felt his own eyes begin to fill. Stupid, he said aloud, wiping them with his sleeve. Stupid, he said again, angry, unable to stop the tears or the clutch in his chest that was forcing them up. He squatted in the long grass as if there were people around, as if he had a cramp. He wasn’t a crier. He took pride in that. Even in grammar school, even when he got struck in the back of the head with a softball, he managed to get up and say he was okay. But now he was crying about a woman he never knew. Then he was crying for Stuart not knowing about the cancer and for Fran trying on her dresses and protecting her lilacs and for Caleb in his huge reading chair and for Tom on the phone asking, “What’s she doing now?” And then after a while it was just for himself and all that driving and his mother who was nothing, nothing like a mother, whining and complaining from the backseat but never explaining what she was doing on that soggy field, never explaining anything.

It wasn’t just her silence for the past four days but her silence all of his life. She’d drawn him a goddamn picture of his father and that was it. And she didn’t even know how to draw. She drew like a child, worse than a child. He could have done better than that, better than a few lines of hair and smashed-in mouth. There wasn’t even a nose. Maybe that would have been fine if she had made up for it — Mrs. Belou would have made up for it — but she hadn’t, she couldn’t, she didn’t like him. His own mother didn’t like him. It was true and he’d never seen it before. All the ways he disappointed her. His very first memory was her saying he needed to grow up. You need to grow up. It was her refrain. Until it happened and then she’d get angry when his pants were too short or he’d walked to the gas station alone for candy. Only those nights when she’d tiptoe into his room and sit on the side of his bed and listen to what he’d watched with Lucy on TV did she seem to accept him the way he was. She’d stroke the hair off his forehead and sometimes, maybe twice, she’d told him that she loved him. He should have convinced Tom that she was better off drinking.

The tears had stopped and he was sitting in the grass, whose tips rested at his shoulders. His head had begun to pound and his shirt was wet in front and around the neck. His whole face felt swollen. The sun had fallen toward the ocean, darkening it, and the waves still smashed into huge white fans against the rocks below.

Gena would worry if he didn’t get back. He followed the path out to the road, crossed it, and began the long walk to her house. In the weaker light, the unfamiliar vegetation seemed sinister. He hadn’t known that a life could run amok so quickly. He wondered why he kept walking toward Gena’s. In the movie of his life he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t ever go back. He’d make a left right here on something called Caballo Way and head toward the pink and blue lights of a strip of shops he could see at its end. He still had fifty-six dollars in his pocket. He wished he could be that kind of boy they always read about in school, the kind who trusted his luck. If there was one thing Peter didn’t trust anymore, it was his own luck.

Gena’s house seemed smaller than he remembered. She’d put a light on outside, above the door. The Dodge sprawled in the small driveway at the same angle he’d pulled up in. His mother would be in bed; Gena would be making dinner. She’d feign relief at his return, as if she didn’t know he was incapable of anything else.

WHEN I MAKES TEA I MAKES TEA AND WHEN I MAKES WATER I MAKES WATER. Buck Mulligan imitating that old lady — Old Mother Gowan? Grisby? — and she couldn’t get it out of her head. It was a habit from childhood, letting a senseless cluster of words get lodged like that. She tried to concentrate on the hummingbird whirring its wings against the screen across the room as it tried to push itself into the long tube of a white flower. Water I makes water. She wondered what a cup of tea would taste like. She’d always been a coffee drinker, never understood the teachers with their delicate cups of tea, the little paper tassel hanging off the side. Davis Clay had switched to tea. Not right after that summer his wife sent him off but a year or so later. Coffee’s an addiction like any other, he’d told her. His wife had probably flown people in for that, too. Tea drinkers were like that. Sheep. Look at the Irish and all they put up with for centuries. Then again the English themselves were obsessive about their tea. In novels they packed it in their suitcases with their toothbrushes when they went abroad. Anger spiked down her arms. Why was she getting so worked up about tea? Could there be anything more innocent than a poor cup of tea? And when I makes water I makes. She heard, beyond the closed door, voices, soft, companionable. She should have given him to Gena and he could have been raised among guinea pigs. And then that feeling again that these choices were still ahead, not behind. It had always been a comforting sensation, a protective nook where she took cover. She remembered her mother throwing a dish towel at her father’s face and her father taking her mother’s head in his hands and knocking it five times fast and hard against the wall then walking out of the room and Vida laughed even though her mother was in the bathroom crying because she knew when this exact moment happened again, her father wouldn’t do that and her mother wouldn’t cry. How did you go about convincing yourself that this instant right now was real and solid when it felt so flimsy in your hands, bleeding into the next, porous, full of holes and puckers, and the mind was so bad at recording anything correctly? How did you make this moment right here with the hummingbird moving now onto the flat yellow flower and the voices dwindling toward the kitchen and her own quick breaths pushing up against her hand — how did you cut that into a granite block and slide it perfectly into place beside all the others?