Lynn Strong - Hold Still

Ellie’s mom stands up and walks toward her. Ellie holds tight to each of her elbows, her arms still crossed over her chest. Her mom stands close to her and grabs hold of her arm.

“I want to trust you, Ellie,” she says. She smells like this room, dark and shut in. “I want to not feel like an idiot for trusting you.”

Ellie leans closer to her mother. “I. .” She feels like she might vomit. “I want that too,” she says.

Maya gets to class early. She sits on the desk in the small old whitewashed room with the radiator clanking beside her, the barely used blackboard hanging anachronistically behind. She’s grateful for its sameness, how certainly it asserts itself as just like every other room in which she’s taught. She’s assigned “Cathedral” for this class. She’s been craving Carver as a sort of antidote to all the blur and complication of her life.

She watches all the girls carefully: the hopeful ponytails, the defiant extra bits of weight spread through their bellies and their hips. She wants to take them each aside and place her hand up on their arms and tell them to cherish this time, their freedom. They will squander it, she knows, mostly. They will be silly, worry too much, sleep with the wrong boys. At least they’re trying, though. At least they’re not locked up already, trapped inside a consequence from which there might not be escape.

She opens her book and reads the first few pages. She has made a class packet, all the stories, poems, and essays bound together in a red construction-paper-covered book, but she brings her own copies when she teaches. She likes looking at all the different notes and comments she’s made to herself over the years.

Charles comes in just after her. He carries a big coffee and a handful of books, a WNYC tote bag. He wears his thick round glasses, a long unbuttoned wool black coat. His beige shirt is covered in lines of pink and blue paisley. He does this often, shirts like this that make no sense.

“Morning,” says Charles. She brightens at the sight of him, at the idea of being the one who knows what to do.

She wants to be able to just listen to him, to sit back and maybe learn. She has sent along her own notes on Carver, notes she put together mostly straight from the text she now holds in her hand. He emailed a long outline of plans for every minute of the seventy-minute period, some of which was scripted. Maya’d skimmed it, smiling, sure he’d end up using very little of what he’d written down.

“Good morning,” Maya says. She straightens her legs and hops slowly from the desk. “You ready?”

He nods. “I think I am.”

“The plans look great.” She has them printed out and holds them now to show him. Five pages single-spaced. He’s broken the time up into painstaking ten-minute increments.

His nose scrunches and his ears redden. “I thought I’d go off-script a bit,” he says. “Maybe just discuss the story and then I’d assign a sort of reader’s response.”

“Sounds good,” says Maya. Her book’s still open and she runs her thumbs along the pages, dropping his script back onto her desk.

“I love this story,” he says, taking off his glasses. He lifts his shirt to rub his lenses. He always wears the glasses and she likes the look of him without them. His abdomen — the bottom part, just above his jeans — appears from underneath his shirt as he wipes carefully. His skin is taut along his hip, darker than she’d figured, firm.

Maya fixes her eyes on the snow that comes down in tiny flakes outside and holds her hands firmly on either side of the open book.

Two girls come tittering through the hallway, peacoats, soft black stretch pants. They come into the classroom; Jackie is the chubbier, the more self-conscious, and the smarter, and Chloe — the smaller girl, the one who wears a bright splash of sometimes pink and sometimes red lipstick, even with her T-shirt and sweatpants and artfully messed-up hair, who raises her hand before thinking of what she’ll say — Maya has ignored her hand a few times, looking out the window as she lectures, waiting for the other, more insightful kids to speak.

More kids shuffle in over the next few minutes. There are the few who are two and then five minutes late and they avert their eyes from Maya, who makes a big speech at the beginning of each semester about her strict lateness policy and then is terrible about docking or scolding them as the semester proceeds. Their coats and hair and shoes all have tiny snow splotches. Their faces are all flushed and damp.

Charles is patient. He looks down at his notes, then over at Maya once they’re seated, still shuffling, murmuring to one another, zipping and unzipping bags.

He welcomes them, stumbling a little, mumbling. His book is open on the desk and he lifts it as he dives into discussion. He looks up at them, makes eye contact with Chloe, then a couple of kids near the back. His is the same copy, Where I’m Calling From , that Maya has. Maya sits at one of the desks in the front of the classroom. She pulls her feet up on the chair, then places them back on the floor. She watches Charles carefully, feels the students’ attentions wander at first, then grow steady on him. He’s careful, speaks slowly, makes a point to look up from the text and around the room as he speaks. He brings his palms together and holds his index fingers firm against his chin.

He’s delicate with the final pieces of the story, the nuances of the main character’s ambivalence, that moment Maya’s always loved or hated depending on the men in her life — the point at which the man’s wife falls asleep and then her robe falls open. And he goes to close it, before realizing the other man is blind, and just leaves the robe as it is.

“Charl—” Jackie says, and then stops herself. “Professor Mega-

los.” He’s red, a little on the tops of his cheeks and ears, and Maya wonders if they’ve had a dalliance, if maybe they’ve been together, if maybe things unbecoming to their student-teacher interaction have taken place. Briefly, she feels something she doesn’t recognize at first, but then sees and is amused and then uncertain: jealousy.

“Do you think we’re supposed to like the narrator?” Jackie asks him.

Charles smirks and his shoulders square. He’s prepared for this. Perhaps he will not blunder; perhaps one day he’ll find and do all that he meant. She hopes this for him as he bounds through the answer. She hopes this in a way that’s overwhelming and complete.

“I’m not sure it matters,” finishes Charles, “though, especially with Carver, I’ve thought a lot about this.” He turns toward the class, addressing all of them, bringing them in. “Do you guys like him?” He’ll be a good teacher, she thinks. He will find his way.

A couple of the girls shake their heads; one nods. Jackie watches, interested but not willing to decide. A couple boys in back, who have hardly spoken all semester, shrug and look back into their books.

“Do you think you’d be more engaged with the story if you liked him? Would you be more likely to return to it?”

“I think it’s more interesting,” says Jackie, “him being kind of an ass.”

Charles is silent when Maya would have already jumped in to flesh the point out, but in this silence, she watches Jackie gaining strength.

“And in the end, it’s more, I think. I think it’s better. And that line, you know? At the end?” She flips the pages of the story. Charles, Maya, and the other kids join in. There are few things Maya enjoys more than pages shuffling. Jackie reads, “‘I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything.’”

Jackie glances briefly at Maya, then back at Charles. “I don’t know what it means,” she says. “It doesn’t even make any real kind of sense, you know? But it’s exactly right, I think.”