Helen raised her hand. “He doesn’t get mad, exactly. He’s kind of in a state of shock. He tells her that he can’t forgive her because the woman he has been loving is not her, but another woman in her shape. It’s just like that poem we read by Hardy last year — about the guy who meets that ghost on the road.”
“‘The Well-Beloved,’” Vida said quietly, wondering exactly who she was, that woman Tom had seen going up to the podium in June.
“I think she was so stupid to have told him. They could have gone to a different part of England and he never would have found out,” Kristina said.
“But it would always be there in her heart, eating away at her,” Helen said.
“I think it was selfish of her. She like ruined this guy’s wedding night.”
“He ruined it. He couldn’t forgive her.”
Vida interrupted the two girls. “You have to understand Angel’s point of view. Tess was a poor, uneducated, unreligious girl. Purity was her only asset, the only way he could justify her to his parents.”
“She wanted to start the marriage honestly, no secrets.”
Vida was sick of Helen’s whining. She looked to the back, careful to avoid Peter in the corner, who actually seemed to be paying attention. From what Peter says. She felt a burning on the underside of her arms. Caroline was beside him and hadn’t spoken in several days. She caught the girl’s eye. “What are your thoughts, Peter?” Peter? Had she truly said Peter?
Caroline, whose mouth had opened slightly in preparation, turned in relief to her left.
“I don’t think you can have a real relationship with someone without being truthful.”
“But Tess’s ‘truth’ isn’t true, Peter,” Vida said calmly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He glared at her, defiant.
“The subtitle of this book is A Pure Woman. Tess is no less pure for her encounter with Alec d’Urberville. In fact, it is what she learns from her experience with Alec and losing her baby that makes her so intriguing to Angel. He doesn’t love her for her innocence. He loves her for her depth of feeling and knowledge, which comes from her experiences. ‘Tess’s corporal blight was her mental harvest,’ Hardy writes.”
“But she was miserable, Mrs. Belou!” Vida let Helen override any noises Peter had begun to make. “She had to tell him. She was never going to be happy otherwise.” It was the first stupid thing Vida had ever heard come out of her mouth.
“Well she sure as hell ain’t gonna be happy now.”
“Don’t tell us!” several of the girls squealed.
“This is what is known as a tragedy. It says so right there on the back of your book. I don’t teach fairy tales, folks.”
“Does something terrible happen to Tess?” Karen asked quietly.
Peter’s neck had splotched up. He was still glowering at her.
Vida nodded, then pulled on an invisible rope around her throat as her head fell limp against her shoulder.
“She dies?” they gasped.
Helen’s voice was cold and serious. “But you said she wouldn’t die.”
“Of course she dies.” She looked down at their faces and for a moment she couldn’t have said who any of them were or how she knew them; even Peter fell away from memory. All she knew was that she wanted to hurt them somehow for all they didn’t know. “We all die.”
The lunchroom of a high school is a disturbing place. Everyone’s neuroses gather here. The combination of food and voluntary seating releases uneasiness into the air like a gas. At Fayer Academy, the teachers suffered no less than the students. Of the sixteen tables in the lunchroom, two were designated for faculty. Brick always came to lunch first and stayed through all three periods. He sat at the table closest to the door, making it, for the twenty-four years he had been headmaster, the desirable table. The rules of the lunchroom seating for faculty had never been uttered, yet every teacher, within days of arriving at Fayer, understood where he or she belonged. Somehow, without words, Brick made it clear who was in and who was out. In the course of one’s career, adjustments were made. Mark Stratton, when he was a part-time geography teacher, would have never dreamed of sitting at the first table, but the computer revolution changed all that. Davis Clay had sat at Brick’s table for years until he stopped drinking and lost his sense of humor. There were more teachers popular with Brick than there were places at the table, but room was always made, chairs borrowed from other tables to accommodate them.
Today Vida arrived for the second period of lunch. As she stood in line, pressed between students she had never taught, she was not aware of discrete thoughts but of an inaccessible roar that tossed up every now and then, as if from the depths of the sea, some image or phrase to antagonize her. The bright flecks in Tom’s jacket. We all die. From what Peter says.
Vida looked down at her tray. Shepherd’s pie, wax beans, and sponge cake. A meal like this was perhaps the most humiliating part of her job. But at least she hadn’t had to make it herself. She was hungry and moved swiftly to the faculty corner.
It happened so quickly that later she wondered if she’d imagined it all. She approached the crowded table, knowing she’d already been seen: Brick and Cheryl Perry and Greg Massie had all been looking in her direction while she’d been filling her glass from the teat of the milk vat. But now, at the moment for hellos and scootching over, her tray hovering over the table, no one looked up. So this is how it’s done, she realized. Without breaking her pace, she traveled the arc of the table to the one behind it, joining the librarian, the substitute Spanish teacher, the school nurse, the head of development, and the entire math department. They all stared at her as if she’d dropped down from Neptune.
“Mmm mmm good,” Vida said, lifting the first bite of the pie to her mouth. “And people wonder why there’s a shortage of teachers in this country.”
“Actually,” the librarian said, “I read three days ago that a large percentage of teaching positions will be cut at the end of the year.”
“I read that article, too!” Bob Crowse said, pressing his small chest into the table in his excitement.
“You did?” The librarian blushed.
Vida looked around for someone to share her cynical mirth, but these misfits were either unnaturally engrossed in their meal or smiling jealously at the coincidence.
At the other table, Brian Rossi was whispering something in Jerry Poulk’s ear. Jerry frowned, tossed his napkin on his tray, and stood abruptly. Vida, watching his surgeonlike urgency with amusement, was startled when, as he passed, he said, “Heard there’s been a lot of drama in your classes lately. Tryouts are coming up — we could use you.” This last sentence was tossed over his shoulder, his absurd little ponytail flipping into the air. If she’d had a retort, he wouldn’t have heard it.
Halfway through her sponge cake, she felt a familiar pressure on her arm, then Brick’s ranch dressing breath at her neck. “Swing by my office when you’re done, will you.” Before she could give an answer he, too, was gone.
“Vida,” he said, manufacturing surprise while sliding a slip of paper beneath his fingertips toward the center of his clutterless desk. “Have a seat.”
Every April, before the next year’s contracts were distributed, each teacher was called into this office for what Brick called “The Chit Chat.” Carol, who had to type up the notes from these meetings, called it “The Shit Shat.” It was an evaluation of sorts, though Brick had trouble complimenting people and relied on oblique references in the passive voice. “Word is,” he said to her last year, “you’re only getting better.” But it was not April yet and Vida sensed the word was no longer good.