“Don’t think, Mrs. Belou, write,” said Brian, mimicking her when she caught her students staring into space for too long during essay tests.
Vida wrote. I got married yesterday. I am married. Hello my name is Vida Belou. She stopped again. She was a hopeless writer who taught writing. She was like Joe Cox, Fayer’s beloved lacrosse coach, who’d never heard of the game when he took the job. Like Mitch Calhoun, who taught Moby Dick year after year having only read the first page. I am a fraud. She wanted to try and write one beautiful sentence. What to her was beautiful? This morning the bridge stretched out over the Atlantic like a … Some kind of bird? A diver? Something more abstract like a promise or a long-awaited answer? Her mind burned in frustration.
Michael cleared his throat and Vida looked up to find every student watching her. How long had it been? She had no idea.
“Okay,” she said, closing her notebook, rising. “Let’s hear a few.”
No one raised a hand. She was used to this. She scanned the room for a solid start. Danny had his head tucked into his neck, which meant he liked what he’d written. She nodded at him. “Let’s hear it, Dan.”
The boy looked stricken, as if he never imagined having to share these words. He wasn’t the kind of student who would ever dare refuse, though his eyes begged her to choose again. On another day she might have relented and shifted her request to Helen beside him. But today she did not. Danny was from Norsett, too, and she was curious to know what he’d say about the place. “Go ahead.”
His face splotched red and he inched closer to his page. “Norsett is an old fishing port from which in the nineteenth century sailors traveled as far as the Bay of Fundy to bring back tuna and cod. Behind the old white church lies the graveyard, the flattest patch of land in town and enclosed by iron gates with iron roses on each handle, where the town’s seafaring dead are buried.” He took in a wobbly breath. “My mother’s body is an anomaly there, a thirty-two-year-old woman who never learned how to swim.”
She had known this child since he came to the school in fifth grade. She had taught him three years in a row. How did she not know that his mother had died? Had she once known, then forgotten? She was aware of the spreading length of her silence.
“It’s only three sentences,” he said.
“Three incredible sentences,” Helen said.
Nearly everyone in the class grunted their agreement. Vida knew something more was needed, something that recognized the quality and sophistication of the writing. She felt incapable of those words. She hated it when students got so personal, and she never expected it of Danny. She hoped Fran and Caleb weren’t writing things like this in their English classes, tying up the tongues of their teachers. “Most of those fishermen didn’t know how to swim either.” she offered.
“Oh,” Danny said, without looking up.
“Would anyone else like to read?”
“After that? No thanks,” Lindsey said.
Perhaps it was cruel to have forced only Danny to read, but the thought of another soul bared this morning was more than she could tolerate. “Hold on to these descriptions, and when we’re done with Tess we can go back to them and see if you can see how you’ve been shaped by your geography the way Tess was shaped by hers. Now, let’s look at all that voluminous verbiage again.” She looked down at her copy of the book and the twelve years of notes crammed into the narrow margins in different colors and shades of ink. “Can you describe the Vale, or as we say, Andrew, the valley?”
Heads bent over books. Then a hand shot up. “It’s different from other places nearby.”
“How?”
“It’s nicer, prettier.”
“Where does it say that?”
“Page three. ‘Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale.’”
“Okay. Different from others, nicer, prettier, more delicate …?”
“He’s describing Tess, too,” Helen offered.
“How do you know?”
“When he introduces her he says something about her lack of experience. She’s sort of sheltered like the valley.”
“Good. What else?”
“At the dance, that boy notices her and then at the end regrets that he did not dance with her,” Danny said. “She stands out to him.” Vida felt there was forgiveness in his voice. “Like the Vale of Blakemore stands out among the others.”
“Excellent,” she said, thanking him for understanding her. “What about Hardy’s insistence that the Vale is not brown and dry but green and fertile?”
Heads dropped again, even Danny’s and Helen’s. They were deliberately avoiding this part. Pages rustled, but no one responded.
Vida lifted her chin to the back of the classroom. “Kristina? What do you think?” Here was a girl who should know. She’d been caught this fall in the shower of the boys’ locker room.
But Kristina was saved by a knock. Vida’s students sat in perfect stillness as she went to the door. Whatever it was would be serious, and the only way to hear the whisperings between teachers was to stop breathing.
Vida stepped outside the classroom to find Charlie Grove in the dim attic corridor.
“Jesus, Vida, it’s like the House of Usher up here. I can’t believe you actually choose—”
“What’s going on, Charlie?” She was aware of noise coming up from the bottom of her stairs, some sort of clanging down on the second floor.
“We’ve just had a call from the hospital. It’s Lydia. She fell getting into the bathtub this morning and broke her leg and I don’t know what else.”
“In the tub? She broke her leg in the tub?”
“There may be some head injury as well,” he said, as if to preempt further ridicule. He didn’t like ridicule, probably having suffered, like most teachers, so much of it in school as a child.
She realized that the clanking below was from the chairs that Lydia’s students were already carrying up her stairs. “But Peter’s in that class.”
“It will just be for a few days at most. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Why have them disrupting the library when you’re teaching the same thing up here?”
It was hardly the same thing. Lydia didn’t teach, she emoted. She was incapable of thought. She was only interested in the characters’ feelings, particularly the female characters’ feelings as they related to their oppression by men. Lydia was Fayer’s lone feminist. But arguing with him about stylistic differences would just mean losing more minutes. “Okay,” she said. “Send them up.”
And so the other section of sophomore English staggered in, lugging their chairs with the thick flat right arm that served as a desk. Lydia liked to arrange her students in a horseshoe, but Vida kept hers in rows. She maintained it was in nobody’s interest to allow teenagers to ogle each other’s bodies. She directed the newcomers to the back and had them make three new, albeit tight, rows. Peter was the last to come in, and put himself at the end of the back row, the farthest point possible from her. The only thing she had ever asked of Brick was that she never have to have authority over Peter, not even for forty minutes, not even for a study hall. How do you break your leg in the tub? She was careful not to look directly at him and yet she was aware of his every movement. He leaned down and tugged a notebook impatiently out of his bag, then the book. He hadn’t even started it; the binding was unbroken. He got a pencil out of a side pocket, then slumped even farther down in his seat. They were equally miserable that he was here.
“What page are you all on, Caroline?” Vida asked one of her best students from last year.