She sat at her desk in her office, unable to touch the coffee or muffin or her work. She was aware of the black phone to her left, which she only used when Peter was home sick or once when a student fainted and she couldn’t revive him. It was a direct outside line, with an unpublished number and no connection to the office, so no parent could reach her here. It never rang. She could pick up the phone now and call Tom. She had his work number in her book, though she’d never used it. And he didn’t even know she had a phone up here. Just the idea of calling him made her heart race. What would she say? What had she done?
She thought of all those wary smiles at the wedding reception, some guests not even bothering to hide their astonishment. How did this Vida Avery, boyfriendless as far back as anyone could go, how did she receive this stroke of luck? A mere high school English teacher who wore old moccasins and drank too much at parties — who had suddenly aligned her stars? The same surge of victory collided with the same certainty she would fail.
For lunch Vida had to descend the two flights, then cross the length of the mansion and the two added wings to reach the cafeteria. Because there was not the room or the staff to feed the entire school at once, lunch was spread out over the three middle periods, and fifth-period classes had already begun in many of the rooms she passed. Through the window of Sally Haynes’s history class, three juniors stood before a homemade map, tracing what looked like the Silk Road. Next door, Roger Graver sat in the middle of his psychology elective, mouth open, eyes closed, while his students walked around him in a circle. In ninth-grade English, Yeats himself read “Innesfree” from a tape recorder: “… shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, dropping from …” His voice was old and Irish and lovely.
Students past and present hollered out hellos in the hallway as they passed, some sticking to her old name, some trying out the new.
At last she reached the theater, her favorite place to spy. She wedged the door open a crack to hear the two actors on stage beside a kitchen table. To her surprise, the girl was Helen from her sophomore class. It was impossible to reconcile the private, contained Helen with the Helen now hollering at her stage husband, slamming cabinets, hurling a pot against a wall. Within seconds, however, the incongruity was gone, for the Helen on stage obliterated any memory of any other Helen, obliterated the stage itself, forcing you to believe that this was the only reality, right here beneath these lights, these acts, this pain.
“Ticket, please.” The voice just behind her ear made her leap. Jerry Poulk held up a plate of french fries floating in ketchup. “They don’t seem to need to eat, but I was starving.” He bit off half a fry, then nodded toward the stage. “What do you think?”
Vida had assumed he was down there in front, but they had been performing alone, for themselves. They still were, sitting at the table now, Helen crying softly.
“It’s a one-act for this Friday’s assembly. They ready?” he asked. He was standing too close to her, chewing, the odor of ketchup coming out of his nose.
“She is. Adam, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that she outshines him.”
“Girls always do at this age.”
“Do they?” She shot him a sly eye. He was careful to ignore her.
Jerry had come to Fayer six years ago. He became the new novelty with all his energy and charm and the ridiculous little ponytail that hung over his tweed jackets. From the start, Vida understood his game. He made his students need him emotionally. In his classes he churned them up, then broke them down. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he was never again seen eating lunch, walking a hallway, or leaving the building without some student pressing beside him, the two in a deep, closed conversation. He built an extraordinary drama department. The spring musical, formerly a one-night embarrassment, now ran two weeks, attracted audiences from out of state, and earned the school nearly twenty thousand dollars each year. And each year, Jerry Poulk was screwing around with a member of the cast. At first, it was hard to tell which one. But Vida caught on to his method after a few years: it was always the girl in the fall that he was hardest on, the one who didn’t seem to be enjoying the class all that much, the one who wasn’t ever seen in fierce private talk with him. But by February she’d have a good part in the musical, if not the lead, and she’d often be found alone on his stage or belting out a song at his piano. By graduation the entanglement would be over, Jerry refueled, spouting off about some European vacation he was planning with his wife and children, the girl underweight and withdrawn. Whether Brick was aware of this pattern, whether any other teacher had caught on, Vida didn’t know. She’d decided long ago it was none of her business.
Without answering her, Jerry headed down the center aisle with his plate of fries. Helen and Adam moved downstage, where they stood close to each other in quiet conversation. Helen managed to convey, all the way to Vida at the back of the theater, that weary acquiescence in the wake of an argument, the listening and not-listening, the acceptance of the failure of real communication. Then her husband made a joke and she kissed him so impulsively it seemed impossible that even Helen knew it would happen.
“No!” Jerry barked from a seat in the third row, and Vida closed the door before he could destroy what she had seen. She was alone in the hallway with the smell of boiling oils and overcooked meats. Her lunch period was already half over. How she wished she could go back in and hop up on that stage in possession of new words and new impulses, a truly new identity and not just a different name. Instead she’d have to squeeze in at a corner of the faculty table, forced to listen to the petty November complaints about the soggy fields or disgruntled parents, or to her own mind full of yearning for youth and talents she did not have — and the unpleasant discovery that Helen Cavanough would be Jerry’s spring victim.
On Mondays, Vida finished teaching at 1:40. She monitored an eighth-grade study hall in the library from 2:25 to 3:05, where she intercepted notes, separated disruptive elements, and corrected a set of Macbeth quizzes. On her way back up to the third floor, where she would work until Peter’s soccer practice ended at five, she stopped in the lounge for more coffee. It was empty now. Nearly all of her colleagues had afternoon obligations: coaching, tutoring, supervising volunteer work or independent projects for the growing nonathletic population. It boggled her mind, the extra hours her coworkers would put in for a few extra bucks in their paychecks each month. On weekdays, she liked to have all her work done before she went home.
There were a few tablespoons of slow-cooked sludge at the bottom of the pot. She rinsed it thoroughly and began again. It was a pleasant place to be, the teachers’ lounge in the afternoon when the light, too weak to pass through the windows, clung quietly to the panes, and no voices were there to drown out the hiss and plock of the fresh coffee being made. Vida sat on the brown corduroy sofa and let her head fall back upon the soft lip. She was tired.
“Congratulations, Mrs. Belou.” It was the one voice she dreaded hearing. “You probably need a little shut-eye after this weekend.” Carol, Brick’s secretary, slowed but didn’t stop her trajectory to the closet, where the extra office supplies were stored.
Vida sat up straight. Had she slept? The coffee was still and silent in its pot. Carol’s knees cracked as she squatted to reach the mimeograph paper in the bottom cabinet. It was never too late to offer condolence. She needed to say something. If only she’d been able to finish that damn letter. She thought of the opening line, Shelley’s “Grief awhile is blind …” What good were her own small words if she uttered them now? The letter had so much more strength to it, centuries of wisdom. She’d worked on it for days at a time last summer; she had pages of notes filled with gorgeous quotes from everyone from Shakespeare to Bishop, but no coherent letter. If only she could just hand Carol those sheets of paper and be done with it.