Alissa Nutting - Tampa

This situation resulted in my jumping at any offer of outside social engagement, no matter how banal. I attended school board meetings, PTA functions and even Janet’s birthday party. This latter fete was held at a small strip-mall bar called Raccoons, in the back near a modest karaoke setup and a few arcade games. Mrs. Pachenko and Mr. Sellers and I were the only attendees. Janet began to act overserved almost immediately; perhaps she’d done some pre-partying in the parking lot.

“Why don’t you have a wife?” she demanded of Mr. Sellers less than an hour in. Mrs. Pachenko seemed to grow increasingly nervous, particularly once Janet launched into a series of derogatory comments about the administrative staff’s genital size. “It’s a small dick,” Janet loudly announced of AP Rosen’s plumbing. “You can tell that just by the way he walks.” In the bar’s dim lights, Mrs. Pachenko had a forlorn, dumbfounded expression, like a slow-witted child trying to force together two puzzle pieces that didn’t fit.

“Mrs. Pachenko,” I said warmly, trying to serve as a distraction from Janet’s invective. “I don’t believe I’ve ever gotten your first name.”

She took a long sip of her club soda. “It’s Eleanor. But I really prefer Mrs. Pachenko.”

I nodded, willfully clenching my sphincter to avoid my eyes involuntarily rolling in disgust. “And what does Mr. Pachenko do?”

She shook her head slightly, informing me this was not the correct question to ask. I tried again, cheating this time.

“Where do you live?”

“Bloomingdale Green,” she said. This was her first answer that reflected any sort of pride or acceptance.

“Oh.” I nodded. “Nice neighborhood. Quiet.”

“It could be a little more peaceful,” she said. There was another round of expletive shelling from Janet, and Mrs. Pachenko stood to leave.

“Happy birthday,” she announced, flashing a nervous smile. “I believe I need to get back to my son now.” Then she turned and walked toward the door so quickly that she appeared to be running.

“Nice lady,” Janet said to us. “Gonna help me out again next year. But boy is she wound up tight.”

I became more and more fixated on getting back to school and the delights I might find waiting on the first day. I’d often spend Ford’s entire shift online, looking at adolescent pornography and stealing features from separate photos to fuse together into the perfect student. The disparaged statements about how quickly the summer was flying by that other teachers made at preparatory meetings gave me strength to combat the day-to-day waiting game, and I tried injecting my dead engagements with Jack, passionless though they now were, with new perspectives of fantasy; my favorite tactic was to look at his body, never his face, and pretend that he was a boy I’d found on the side of the road, struck down by a car—that he had one last burst of life left inside of him and he wanted to use it to lose his virginity with me. This made the wounded aspects of Jack’s posture, like his curled shoulders, his wincing squint I couldn’t help but catch in my peripheral vision that made it look like he was fighting any good feelings with equally opposed reserves of pain, all make sense. Only by crafting these fatalistic and temporary contexts surrounding our sex was I able to convince myself that I could indeed last until the end of August, that I wouldn’t have to go fishing at the mall or the supermarket for an untested, unvetted boy who could ruin me.

But the final trial of my will came just two weeks before school started. Ford wanted to take a weeklong vacation at one of the beach houses his father owned. “Can Bill and Shelley come too?” I asked. Even though I didn’t like them, a couples’ trip would be better than isolated alone time with Ford. But that was of course what he wanted.

His face stretched into a charmed smile of surprise. “Whoa, there, social butterfly,” he teased, clearly happy that I’d asked. “Glad you’ve warmed up to the two of them. But no way. This one’s you and me. Before school starts up and I hardly see you again till next summer.” I shook my head at him to suggest he was exaggerating, but secretly I was happy he’d voiced this expectation: it meant I’d established a shared understanding that when the school year started, everything about me—my presence at home, my focus, my attention—would become extremely scarce. This sense of achievement gave me the needed courage to enter into one last hurrah of summer tedium.

Incredibly, I would go so far as to call that week one of the greatest successes of our marriage, probably due to the knowledge that a fresh onslaught of young men would soon be greeting me each morning and afternoon on the hour, save for the cognac-driven conversation on the porch the night before we returned home. In the dark, I kept feeling Ford stare at me with confusion, then look off in the distance. I knew it was a look of failed reconciliation; he was trying to understand how our life together could look so good from the outside but somehow fail to actually feel that way. I could sense him palpably restraining himself from speaking—Ford excels at never admitting he’s disappointed—but a few glasses later his filter was finally breached. “I guess I thought things would be different once you started teaching,” he managed to say. The dark amplified the near-mechanical sound of the cicadas’ screams all around us; they seemed like an audience goading him on. “That you’d be happier,” he finally added.

“I am happier,” I countered. “It’s just a busier, more distracted sort of happy.”

I worried about what would come next but he left it at that; he stood and went inside while I remained on the porch in the warm air, hearing the ocean and wishing the eighth grader I’d soon pluck from my roster was there now to go for a naked swim. The moon’s thin light upon the moving waves lent itself well to illusion; I could almost see us together out in the distant water, bobbing heads whose bodies could mingle unworried beneath the ocean’s cover.

When I did finally go to bed, Ford was asleep with the firmness of denial. It was only in times like these, when he would ask a funny question but then show he was overtly ignoring the answer, that I wondered if Ford suspected more than he let on. He seemed to understand that resolution didn’t need to have anything to do with truth, and to choose a sense of harmony over insight every time.

I lay down as far away from his reach as possible and had a dream about the first day of class. I entered through the classroom door wearing only a silk bathrobe that I shed as the bell rang. Every desk was taken by a young man and they all stood in unison, using their numbers to lift me into the air, their collective centipede fingers crawling across every inch of my flesh.

When I woke with a gasp it was morning. Ford’s head sat mere inches from mine. It took a moment for me to realize his hands were resting atop my hard nipples, as though my chest was a control panel he’d been manning. He gave me a smile that didn’t fade as confusion and a slight terror overtook my face. “Some dream you were having,” he said. “You feeling horny, babe?”

The timid affect and classroom behavior of Jack’s eventual replacement so belied his hidden perversities that I missed him entirely at first and had a failed attempt with a new boy named Connor, whom I misread from the first day forward. I began each class simply by smiling—perhaps my nervous hope showed through—then scanned the room for any eye contact that was returned to me with a promising streak of restraint. Connor initially seemed to be perfect: he was quiet, studious but not exceptionally smart, and didn’t appear to have a great deal of friends nor an interest in gaining any.