“When did this happen?” Ms. Hempel asked.
“It happens all the time!” the girls cried out, and like a flock of startled pigeons they seemed to all rise up at once. Didn’t Ms. Hempel know? Weirdness was lurking everywhere: behind the bank, holding a broom; on the subway, grazing your butt; at the park, asking if he could maybe touch your hair. What book are you reading? What grade are you in? The girls bounced up and down in their chairs, seething, commiserating, trying to outdo each other. When I was walking to school. When I was visiting my cousin. No, wait! Listen: When I was, like, twelve….
Homeroom discussions always seemed to end this way. The girls in a glorious fury; the boys gazing dumbly at the carpet. What would possess a clown, Ms. Hempel wondered, to kidnap one of these beautiful girls? So lively, and smart, and suspicious. Such strong legs, from kicking soccer balls and making jump shots. So full of outrage.
The boys, though: brash and bewildered, oddly proportioned. Some of them were finally beginning to grow tall. They wore voluminous pants that hung precariously on their hips. They grinned readily. During the winter, when it was very cold, they refused to wear their coats in the yard: We get hot when we run around! they said. Their T-shirts flapped against their thin arms; their chests heaved. The ball rarely made it into the net, but they didn’t seem to mind. It was all about the hurling and the frenzied grasping and the thundering down to the other end of the court. And even though the girls were always plucking at Ms. Hempel’s sleeve, demanding that she listen, it was the boys who tugged at her heart, who seemed to her the ripest for abduction.
MS. HEMPEL WONDERED IF her story of that morning could be true, or if it were, factually speaking, impossible. The detail about chloroform bothered her; it struck her as transparently dramatic, like a woman who dashes about with a long, fragile scarf fluttering behind her. It was an anachronism; something from the days of white slavery, and opium smuggling, and jewel heists. Where had she learned about chloroform, anyway? Probably Tintin.
“If you wanted to kidnap someone, what would you use?” she asked Amit. They were lying in bed, with the lights off. “To knock them unconscious. So that you could drag them into the back of your van.”
“Chloroform, I guess.”
“Really?” She brightened. It made her happy that the person she was marrying would commit crimes in the same way as she would. “There isn’t anything more modern you would use? Aren’t there all sorts of new chemicals?”
“No, I think chloroform would do the trick,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “That’s what I thought, too.”
“Are you planning on kidnapping anyone?” he asked.
“Maybe.”
Then, “Of course not!” she said, and laughed, and slapped him on the arm. They settled into each other.
She had gone to the same high school as Amit, even graduated the same year, but they had barely spoken then. She remembered him as black-haired and elfin and somewhat aloof: in an innocent, not a superior, way. His one distinguishing trait had been his devotion to cross-country running. Sometimes her carpool passed him on the road, and she would lean her forehead against the cool glass, wondering how many miles he had already covered and feeling glad that she was splayed across the backseat of a station wagon. She never once saw him panting; it seemed as if he could bound along interminably. Both of her best friends had seen his penis. As part of a short-lived weight-loss regimen, they had joined the crosscountry team, and as they straddled the lawn, stretching their muscles, they glimpsed the head of his penis, appearing from beneath the edge of his delicate, shimmering shorts.
When she saw him again, years later, this detail reared up before her as soon as she sat down beside him. It was an alumni event, an idea that embarrassed her, but her school had reserved seats at a French-Canadian circus that she badly wanted to see. Amit was there, he said, for exactly the same reason. They discovered many other things in common: warm feelings for Mrs. Kravatz, the biology teacher; a passion for the novels of Thomas Hardy; regret that they hadn’t joined a circus themselves. They admitted to each other that even though, as students, they had regarded their high school as detestable and oppressive, they now sometimes caught themselves yearning for it.
The circus, too, filled her with longing. As soon as the lights fell, and the audience hushed, and the circus master appeared barking out his welcome, and the acrobats came tumbling into the ring, and the quaint little orchestra struck up its tinkling song, and the lovely women pranced about with thin velvet ribbons tied around their necks, as soon as all this began, she felt herself missing the circus even as it unfolded before her. Folded and unfolded — this circus was famous for its contortionists. But what they did seemed like the most normal thing in the world; their bodies, glittering in the blue light, appeared enormously relieved, as if they had been permitted, finally, to relax into their most natural states. Clearly she saw how the feet longed to roost behind the ears, how the spine was as stretchy as chewing gum. It made her feel sorry for her own creaking vessel, shuffling along dimly, made to stand upright on two feet. No, not vessel — because if this circus, so full of secrets, revealed anything, it was that the body does not contain, but is contained; rather than comb through the jungles of Asia and Africa and bring back, in shackles, the wildlife found there, this circus had coaxed out of hiding a strange beast, the body.
“Oh, those Canadians!” she murmured, and Amit nodded ardently, as if he understood precisely what she wasn’t able to say.
It was the circus, she felt sure, that had made possible all that followed. Where else but in the company of acrobats could she imagine her own body fitting with his? Watching him from the station wagon, his black hair, his small frame skimming along the road, she could not have imagined it. Her imagination would have balked, recoiled: why, she wasn’t sure. But it was subdued now, compliant; she sat beside him at the circus and the unimaginable became suddenly, forcefully possible. Everything else seemed easy: the long correspondence, the breaking off with his girlfriend, the bringing together of their two libraries.
And his penis she forgot all about, even after she had herself encountered it. Her two best friends had to remind her of the story.
HER BEST FRIENDS, GRETA AND KATE, had their hearts set on a bridal shower. It was held at a Victorian tearoom, with mismatched china and plates of watercress sandwiches. Only the three of them were invited.
In a wobbly rattan chair, her legs firmly planted, sat Kate. “Don’t sit there,” she said to Greta. “Floral chintz is for Beatrice. The Angel in the House.”
Greta tucked herself into a wing chair. With a great show of ceremony, she unclipped her beeper and stuffed it deep inside her purse. “No interruptions!” she declared. The symmetry was pleasing: a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, the professions you aspire to when you’re a child, before you learn about all the other possibilities.
“Ooooh, look at you!” Greta said to Beatrice, who had removed her sweater.
Beatrice looked down at her breasts. “Do you think it’s too much?”
“No!” they said at once.
“You wore that to school?” Greta asked, and Beatrice nodded.
“Those poor boys,” said Kate, reaching for the sugar cubes.
“Pup tent!” Greta cried, and though Beatrice tried to protest, tried to explain that her students didn’t look at her that way, that they were inflamed by other teachers like Ms. Burnes, who taught science, and Madame Planchon, who wore seamed stockings, her two best friends were already slapping hands above the teapot.
“Your breasts are lovely.” Greta leaned over and squeezed Beatrice’s leg. “You should show them off.”