The presumptuousness of Brick Howells. What right had he to change her professional name without asking? And here, before the whole school, when she hadn’t even thought to mention her marriage to her students, let alone present them with a new label for her person. “Have a fruitful day,” the old git concluded. Vida spun away from the auditorium before anyone could catch her.
Her classroom was the only one on the third floor of the mansion. Brick had put her up there nine years ago to teach an unruly group of eighth graders, and the next year she’d insisted on teaching all her classes in the room. Her students made a fuss about the steep climb, but Vida loved those old uninstitutionalized back stairs that carried her from the loud reverberating blend of instruction, curiosity, and resistance that could be heard down the long hall of former bedrooms on the second floor to the musty silence of her attic. All they’d had to do to make a real classroom for her up here was punch out a wall. The ceiling was high, and the series of long lean windows at the far southern end brought in so much light Vida rarely had to switch on the fluorescent bars they’d installed.
The rest of the mansion, despite the sweeping front staircase and many fireplaces, no longer looked or smelled like anything but a school. Up here, however, Vida felt the old house. She could hear the rustling haste of the servant girls as they dressed in these rooms before dawn, just seconds ahead of the summoning bell of her mother’s impatient ancestors. Other teachers did not understand her insistence on remaining on the third floor, especially now since the science wing was finished and there were classrooms to spare. She didn’t understand how they could bear the distractions of first- and second-story teaching: people idly peered through the eye-level window on each door, interrupted for chalk or Kleenex, or delivered thoroughly unurgent messages, all as if forty minutes were not already a totally insufficient amount of time in a day to plant a few new ideas in the heads of these students. No one barged in on her classroom up here unless it was dire. If one of her colleagues ever made the journey up, they would inevitably complain about the smell. It was so moldy, they all said, like a wet wool blanket left for about a hundred years. But Vida loved that smell. It smelled the way Texas never could. And most important, she had her own private bathroom with a dead bolt she installed herself.
It was a dark morning and Vida reluctantly turned on the overhead. She pulled out Tess from her bag, set it on the desk, then went to the board and wrote
Sir John
green malt in floor.
blighted star
It was all completely rote. This was her thirteenth year of teaching the book. The bell rang. Up here it was more a vibration than a noise, followed soon after by stronger tremors as every student in the building headed to their first class. Soon she could hear her tenth graders heckling each other up the stairs.
“Nice boots, Frizz.”
“He parked his Harley out back.”
“Walk much, Lindsey?”
“Eat much, Tank?”
“Jesus, Michael. Quit touching me.”
Slowly they began to fill the room with their insults and self-consciousness, their collective hours at the mirror, and all their elaborate, transparent airs. They exhausted Vida with their attempts at self-possession, the boys and their cynicism, the girls and their shiny smelly lips.
She heard a girl whisper to another, “‘Green malt in floor’?”
The second bell rang and by the time it had finished the great mass of them had divided like cells into individual seats.
Harry Knox, an earnest young man with a feeble frame and large head, addressed her. “Forgive me, Mrs. Avery, but I’m not sure I under—”
“Mrs. Belou!” someone bellowed beside him.
This gave Harry pause. He looked at Vida, then down at his notebook. He seemed to have forgotten his point. Then he flipped his head back up at her. “How do you spell that?”
She sucked in a breath and wrote Tom’s name on the board. BELOU. Then she put a MRS. in front of it. It seemed to stare back at her, mocking her in some way. What had she done?
They were all looking at her, not as their teacher but as a woman who had just gotten married. Married. She felt heavy and mealy, like there was wet sand beneath her skin.
“Hey, now you’re like Vida Blue, the baseball player.”
“She’s Veeda, not Vyda.”
“Why aren’t you on a honeymoon?” someone in back asked.
“Let’s talk about Tess. She’s far more interesting.”
“So far in this class I’ve liked what we’ve read.” Amy said.
“Everyone struggles with Tess at first,” Vida said.
“When do people start liking it?”
“Around page four hundred and sixteen.”
Amy flipped through the fat paperback. “I knew it. The very last page.”
“Tess is a rite of passage,” Vida offered, and they wrote it down in their notebooks. Only a few would know what she meant, but she felt impatient with them for stepping behind the curtain of her private life. They could look it up themselves.
“Why do they have to describe everything so vociferously?”
“First of all, Andrew, who is ‘they’?”
He looked on the front of his book. “Thomas Hardy.”
“One person, singular. And do you really mean vociferously, or might you be referring to another word in the V section of your PSAT study guide?”
Vida could see the long lists of words twisting around in Andrew’s head. The class offered him other choices.
“Verbosely.”
“Voluminously.”
“Vacuously.”
Andrew nodded. “All of the above. They go”—she gave him her eye—“he goes on forever.”
“Example, please?”
“Here. Page twenty-two. ‘The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor aforesaid’—if he already said it why’s he saying it again? ‘The Vale was known in former times as the Forest of the White Hart, from a curious legend of King Henry the Third. …’ Oh my God, the guy can’t stop himself.”
“Okay, Hemingway, I want you to remember that paragraph when you get to page four hundred and sixteen.”
“I can’t conceive of getting to page four hundred and sixteen in this book.”
“You will, because you’re going to need a good grade in this class to balance out your abysmal verbal test scores. And when you get there, I want you to go back and read that passage and you’ll see Hardy has managed to stuff most of the plot of this novel into that description of Tess’s hometown.”
“Does Tess die like the white hart?”
You couldn’t get much past Helen Cavanough. You could only throw her off with a flat-faced lie. “Of course Tess doesn’t die. Now take out a piece of paper.” The class groaned. “Not for a quiz. I want you to write four interesting detailed sentences about your hometown.”
They liked this kind of exercise, and began writing immediately.
Vida moved to the other side of her desk. She sat in the uncomfortable captain’s chair with the school’s insignia stamped in gold at her back, and opened her own notebook to a blank page. Lydia Rezo, who also taught the creative writing course, always did the exercises she assigned her students and even read what she’d written aloud to them. Vida never did, but she felt agitated today, and the act of sitting and holding a pencil was soothing. Norsett. Though it had been her town for less than forty-eight hours, as she began writing the word she felt she had a lot to say; but once it was there on the page her thoughts evaporated.