Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

The voice of the new boy rose from the backseat. ­“Monica Lewinsky walks into a dry cleaner who’s a little hard of hear­ing.”

Scott’s enthusiasm was immediate. “Ooh, Temple, have you heard this one?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Monica says, ‘I’ve got another dress for you to clean.’ The dry cleaner says, ‘Come again?’ and Monica says, ‘No, it’s mustard.’”

Scott and Temple dissolved into laughter. I glanced into the rearview mirror and caught the gaze of the boy, his broad grin conveying pride at his own joke. Black hair, razor-cut at the edges, mostly hid one of his eyes, but the other sparkled with mischief. I raised my eyebrows at him in the mirror.

“Not a good joke for mixed company,” I said.

“Sorry, Mrs. McFarland,” he replied with great insincerity.

“Yeah, Zach,” Scott added, clearly gleeful at the chance to gang up on his friend. “Don’t talk to my mom like that. What’s your problem?”

Muted thuds ensued, the sound of punches being thrown. When I came to a stop at a traffic light I turned around and barked, “Knock it off!”

Temple, in the middle seat between the two, looked relieved as Scott and his friend quickly straightened up. After years of being a double authority over Scott’s buddies—both parent and teacher—I was not shy about correcting them. I looked the black-haired one in the eye again and demanded, “How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Then please act like it. I don’t mind giving you a ride home, but I will if you all act like a bunch of wild animals.”

“Green light,” said Scott. As I turned around he mumbled, “Zach, you wild animal, you.”

“That’s what your mom said,” Zach retorted, sotto voce. As they convulsed with suppressed giggles, I propped my elbow against the window ledge, rested my head in my hand, and sighed deeply. In addition to the pile of duvets, a glass of wine might be nice. Or two.

My erotic dreams about my boss began not long after he arrived on the job from a large, flourishing Waldorf school in the Bay Area. With an overgrown mop of thick dishwater-blond hair and icicle-blue eyes like a husky’s, he was reasonably good-looking, if young, and not a bad candidate for a subconscious fantasy. But Dan Beckett was only one of many. Since my husband had exchanged his libido for entrance into his Ph.D program three years before—or so it seemed—I’d begun dreaming about random men in bizarre situations, as though my mind, in its deprived state, grabbed whatever scattered ideas were available and smashed them together. This was comical when it involved my neighbor’s landscaping guy or my former physics professor, but problematic when my coworkers or a kindergartner’s father stepped in—or both, as in the case of Dan, whose son Aidan was in my class. Facing these men afterward, I couldn’t help feeling as though we were all conspiring to keep the affair under wraps. Dreams had this effect on me: I knew where they ended and reality began, but they tended to bring ideas into an area where the circles overlapped, making the absurd seem more feasible.

And so after a glass of red wine and a chin-deep hot bath foaming with Weleda’s lavender bathing milk, I had drifted off into a slumber that ended in an awkward, boss-induced dream hangover. At least this time I had managed a full night’s sleep. Sometimes the incubus awoke me, memorably but inconveniently, at 3:00 a.m.

As I went off to work the next morning, I made a mental note to avoid the front office. With luck, I would make it all the way until dismissal time without encountering Dan.

“Oh ho ho, what do I see?” I sang to the small people clustered at my sides. “Has a gnome come looking for me?”

The children peered at the classroom before them. A moment ago they had been outdoors, digging in the sand and playing on the cooperative swing, racing along a line of tree stumps. Now they had returned to find an amber playsilk square strewn on the floor and a piece of driftwood from the nature table upset beside it. Disorder was always the work of gnomes.

“Oh ho ho, they come and go,” the children sang back, “quickly as the wind does blow.”

I smiled and sank to my haunches to speak to the children at eye level. “In a few moments our mothers and fathers will be here. Let’s clean up the mess this naughty gnome has made and then have our puppet play.”

The children got to work. I felt anxious to draw the workday to a close, for it was Friday and the weekend held great promise. My husband and I would be celebrating our anniversary at Fallon, a bed-and-breakfast in the Blue Ridge Mountains which we’d first visited long ago, before even Maggie had been born. Given that I’d barely seen the man since he began his doctoral dissertation on sustainable aquaculture, and despite the fact he’d been hopelessly surly since then, I anticipated the trip as if it were a first date. I needed this weekend with Russ, if only to refocus my mind from the ever-growing list of men my subconscious was plundering.

But until then, I had work to do. I led the puppet play and the afternoon verse, rang the small brass bell three times, and sent the children off one by one with their parents. Each time the classroom door opened, I caught a glimpse of an unfamiliar black-haired woman, unquestionably pregnant, standing in the hallway chatting with the headmaster. Most likely she was the mother of a prospective student, and my romantic weekend would need to be put on hold for a few more minutes while I schmoozed her.

After all the children but Aidan were gone, I shook her hand in the hallway and invited her into my classroom. She wore a scarf stylishly tied in her long hair and the sort of kid-leather Mary Janes popular with the yoga crowd. I guessed her age to be in the middle thirties, possibly younger, but her muted Asian features threw off my guesswork. Dan sidled up beside her, his face plastered with his beatific pastor smile. I blinked away a snapshot memory of him sneering and dripping with sweat, stark naked.

“Judy, this is Vivienne Heath,” he said, and I imitated his smile. “She’s volunteered her son to help you with the Christmas bazaar. He needs to earn some service hours, so I thought, why not give Judy a hand?”

Indeed. The last thing I needed was a Boy Scout to supervise while I attended to my annual frenzy of unappreciated volunteer work for my employer. In an exulting voice I said, “Wonderful.”

“We just moved here from New Hampshire,” she explained. “He’s building a playhouse to auction as a project for his woodworking class, but he’ll need more hours than that. He’s very creative. I’m sure he’ll work hard for you, although he might need a little refresher about some of the crafts.”

I nodded and tried to mask my surprise. Woodworking was an eleventh-grade subject. I realized she must be considerably older than I had guessed. Yet here she was, about to have another baby. Better her than me, I thought. I was ready for a second shot at a lot of things in life, but mothering a newborn was not one of them.

“If you want to talk crafts, Judy’s your woman,” Dan told her, and patted me on the shoulder. I stiffened. “She can probably spin straw into gold.”

Vivienne grinned. “Is that a course at the Steiner teachers’ college?”

I twitched my shoulder out from his grasp. “If it was, he’d have me locked in the workshop right about now.”

He laughed, and I watched Vivienne Heath’s gaze shift from me to my boss and back again. Dan always upped his show of goodwill and camaraderie around me to compensate for the fact that we hated each other. Upon his arrival the previous year, it had quickly become clear that he thought I was a dinosaur excavated from Woodstock; I disdained him for being a bourgeois bohemian. The ideological tension ran deep even before I began having vivid dreams of coupling with him. Whatever uptight vibe Vivienne was observing could have come from either source.