A Terrible Beauty: What Teachers Know but Seldom Tell outside the Staff Room (8 page)

“You finished?” Solange moved out of the doorway.
“I’m finished.” Without a word, she returned to her guests.

Rene was absent the next day, and the day after that.
A week later she found out his mother had pulled him out of school.
Nothing Solange had said had helped. All she had done was make
Rene’s life harder.

Solange shut off the water, stood dripping amid
rising steam.

Where was he now? He’d be twelve, still young, but
Rene would be a very old twelve.

It was for kids like Rene that she did what she did,
for them that she had given up a life of her own.

And she was close. She was so very close.

It was too late to stop.

Too late to go back.

Too late even to think about it.

She dried herself, put on a pot of tea, burned her
fingers taking the plastic off her microwave dinner. As she took
her first bite of chicken, the phone rang. It was Hugh.

“Goodness, but you’ve been a busy girl! You
okay?”

“Yeah,” she lied, “I’m fine.”

“Mrs. Noble called, said you were there. Next I get a
call from Parnell. He tells me O’Connel blew his top over this kid,
Wagner, I guess his name is, bumping into you in the hall. Demanded
he miss this week’s game. Said if he were allowed to play, you’d
press charges.

Of course I knew he couldn’t be right about
that.”

“Of course not,” she said, wincing as she reached to
massage the small of her back.

She smiled to her reflection in the dark window. So,
he’d told off Parnell. It embarrassed her, but pleased her as well.
Just thinking it she felt traitorous.

“Parnell says this kid is one of his starters, and
they’ve got a tough game coming up this week. of course he’ll
apologize. Parnell says it was just an accident.” She said she was
sure it had been.

The boy’s sneer had been a vile thing, his eyes
anything but sorry. Solange’s stomach burned, and she pushed the
tray away, no longer hungry.

“The main reason I’m calling is to touch bases with
you on how it’s going. Are you making any headway?” She frowned.
How ridiculous. Why the ring around the rosy? Why didn’t he just
say it? What dirt had she gotten on him? “I’m rewriting my notes,
now.”

“And?”

“And I’ve documented several instances of
misconduct.”

“Ah, that’s exactly what I hoped you’d say. Why do I
get the feeling there’s going to be a but coming up here
somewhere?”

“I don’t know, Hugh,” she said, dredging up
enthusiasm she didn’t feel. “I’ve got them here.”

“Okay, you get some rest, now, and fax them over
tomorrow, will you?” She said she would. As she set the phone down
she tried a smile at her reflection in the darkened window. It was
no good. No good at all.

She set her dinner on the floor for the cat. Felix
sniffed at the low-fat chicken entree, and stalked off, tail
swishing. Chucking the meal in the garbage, she dug a pint of Dutch
chocolate burnt almond ice cream out of the freezer. This she
polished off at her desk as she composed her notes into something
she could read at a hearing.

A death sentence for a dedicated man’s career. Maybe
they weren’t so far off after all; maybe she was the angel of
death.

It was past midnight when she finished. She went to
bed and lay awake, mind refusing to be silent. The comforter
gathered under her chin, she watched as the streetlight sent
strange shapes flitting across her ceiling. A car’s horn from
somewhere down Fourth blared three short blasts.

She and O’Connel hadn’t spoken much in five years at
Elk River.

They’d run into each other at the copy machine,
passed in the lounge, seen each other at meetings... But he’d been
married at the time, and she’d been with someone.

There was something there, though. It wasn’t going
anywhere, but it was there, just the same. Two years hadn’t changed
a thing—at least not for her.

She was pushing thirty, and as any good Brazilian
girl knew, and her mother had of ten reminded her, a man was caught
in your twenties, or forever lost.

She smiled at the memory of her mother in the kitchen
of their tenth story apartment near the Capemi building in Sao
Paulo. On swollen feet at the stove, she waved a long-handled
wooden spoon in the air as she recited her cautionary tales. She
was so round, so wonderfully plump, her voice so comforting, even
when chiding.

“Que isso? What is this? Always your nose in a book!
A girl should be learning to cook so she can be a good wife, not
always hiding in a book! Come here, now, little one. Corta uma
cebola para sue Mae, querida. ‘Cut Mama an onion, sweetheart.

Every minute she wasn’t in school Solange spent at
the battered table in Mama’s kitchen. In a frightening world, it
was a place of warmth, of safety. She read, steam from a simmering
pot of black beans billowing about her. Neighbors yelled, fought,
laughed, sang, made love—all on the other side of cracker thin
walls. When the bedstead began its rhythmic thumping, her mother,
cheeks hot with anger, would beat on the wall with her spoon,
dressing the energetic lovers down in words Solange heard in the
markets, but never at home, and certainly not from her mother’s
mouth. Her laugh of delight silenced by her mother’s hard look, she
went back to her book.

At meals, four brothers, all older, crowded into the
small room, moving in chairs from the hall. Towering over her, they
gave her a pet or a pinch—she was the baby and they tolerated her.
To Solange they were strangers, busy with lives of which she
understood nothing.

Much better were the quiet afternoons in Mae’s steamy
kitchen.

Now, like black beans scattered across the table from
hastily ladled feijoada, they were cast wide across the world. One
here, one there, each busy with families of their own, children of
their own, some of which Solange had seen only in pictures sent in
Christmas cards.

Mae, they left to Solange. After all, who better than
the youngest daughter? Who better than she? Who better than one
with no family of her own to take care of Mama? Solange smiled
bitterly into the dark.

Let them go, all of them. She would never ask them
for a cent.

She would show them what the baby could do. Now, like
in the old days, it was just Solange and Mae. The flesh of her
mother’s meaty arms wasted away to sagging wrinkles, back humped,
now, her eyes were as sharp as ever, perhaps sharper.

A vague thought tickled at the back of her mind—what
was it? What was she forgetting? Though she strained to remember,
nothing came. She would have to drive home and see her this week.
Take her bags of pigs feet, linguica, tea and the cheap orange
jelly candies she loved so.

Though Solange paid the bills, her mother refused to
take any money, so whenever she visited the little trailer on its
weedy acre, she would sneak a few tens into the pickle jar on the
shelf by the sink as she rinsed the dishes. When Solange suggested
she get her an apartment in town, her mother set her lip
stubbornly, dark moustache bristling.

Unconsciously, Solange’s fingers felt at her upper
lip in the dark.

Reassured by the silkiness she felt there, her hand
slipped back under the covers. Mae wanted only her chickens, her
garden with its peppers and tomatoes, and the skinny mongrel,
Pepino.

Ah, Mae— if only life t were as simple now as it was
in your kitchen.

Exhausted, aching for sleep, she willed her mind be
still.

It refused.

• • •

Patti O’Connel brought her Volvo wagon down the on
ramp onto 1-5 just as the sixty-foot tractor trailer swept by in
the fast lane, rocking the car in its wash. Accelerating into the
flow of cars on the rainy highway, she watched as the speedometer
passed seventy, then eighty. She was late—doubly so, having called
to postpone her presentation once already. She would play hell
making even the later one, now. She glanced at the sleeping two
year old strapped in the car seat beside her and reached over to
brush a strand of hair from her perfect face. Smiling to herself—
she glanced over her left shoulder and, giving the signal time to
blink only twice, moved into the fast lane.

Topping eighty-five, she came up close behind the
eighteen wheeler, mirror-polished stainless double doors reflecting
a fun-house view of her car, lights on bright, white lines flashing
by.

The truck’s black lift gate, a 480 pound, eight by
six foot sheet of three-eighths diamond plate, hung on one hinge
pin, buffeted by the wind, a single quarter-inch retaining chain
the only thing keeping it upright. The day before a fire safe had
tipped off its pallet onto the ramp, shearing off one of the
inch-thick pins and putting a stress crack most of the way through
the other.

Patti looked down at the dashboard clock and pressed
the accelerator. Why wouldn’t he move? Dear God, don’t let her be
late, not after all she’d done to get them to listen. If she could
just get past this guy, she could drop Nikki at her sitter and just
about make it. She checked the slow lane and found it blocked by a
land yacht, car in tow.

Damn, damn, damn! At that moment the truck passed
into a stretch of highway becalmed, and the quarter ton gate, freed
from the constant pressure of wind, slammed back against its safety
chain. A gust from the west sent it back again, harder this time,
and a hairline crack appeared in the tack weld binding chain to
frame.

Patti looked down and saw a single pinhead size
bloodstain on her bone silk blouse.

Dh, just great. She dabbed a tissue to her tongue and
worked at it. It was no use. She would never get the blood out of
her blouse, now.

A second gust and the chain tore free, sending the
gate in a slow arc downward. When it reached horizontal it severed
the remaining pin. Caught up on the eighty-five mile an hour draft,
the rearward edge, worn smooth and sharp, knifed downward through
the air.

Patty, seeing it come at her on the slipstream,
knowing in that instant she was to die, opened her mouth wide as
she reached out to shield Nikki with her right hand.

There was time for nothing more.

• • •

O’Connel, grunting in terror, flung back the covers
on the four poster and came erect.

The dream again.

A peacock shrieked from its perch high in a fir along
the bank of the river, and shivering with cold sweat, he staggered,
trembling, to the toilet. Just the dream again.

Returning to sit on the side of the bed, he squinted
through sand-filled eyes to see the time, 5—58. Groaning at his
dashed hope for further sleep, he switched on the lamp and, wiping
his face, hoisted himself to his feet.

Stiff of mornings. Forty, and mornings he felt every
day of it.

Drawstring O.R. scrubs barely hung on his hips as he
padded bare foot down the squeaking stairs. He’d worn them in the
delivery room the night Nikki was born, and worn them every night
since.

He hit the power button on the stereo as he went by
on his way to the laundry room, and the house echoed the trill off
lute and orchestra as he rummaged in the dryer for a clean pair of
socks.

“Jean Pierre Rampal with the Academy of St.Martins in
the Fields, Sir Neville Mariner, conducting,” he said.

Roused by his voice, an old liver Dalmatian bitch
teetered through the kitchen, hindquarters wobbling.

With a grunt of disgust, he settled for a navy and a
black. “I’m telling you I’m right this time, Sonny.” A mellifluous
voice named the performers. “There, you see? What’d I say.” Happy
for the attention, the dog’s eyes brimmed.

• • •

About the house hung tenebrous phantoms of wife and
child—a family dissolved into mist. When least on his guard they
came, leaving him shaken and trembling.

Up on the mountain, in the midst of thinning, over
the growling of the chain saw, he’d hear Patty’s call to dinner
echoing up the mountain. So real, he would kill the saw, raising
his hardhat to listen, voice still sounding in his mind. There was
never more than the wind in the firs—just that.

More than once he’d started from sound sleep,
‘Daddy!’ whispered an inch from his ear. A two-year-old��s laugh in
the silent kitchen, the sound of bare feet on the stairs.

Once while shaving, he felt Patty’s cool hand on a
bare shoulder.

A presence so tangible, he’d smelled her hair. Gone
in an instant, the feeling of her hand on his skin he would keep.
He could feel it now.

Her last morning she’d been in a hurry, as she was
every day of her life. Making tea, she slammed the pan down on the
stove, spilled water sizzling on hot iron. “The boat needs oil and
there you sit! I’ll be late again!” To his shame, he had teased her
about being in a hurry to die.

“And why in the name of all that’s holy do we have to
live way to hell and gone? Why can’t we live on a street like
normal people? With garbage collection, and electricity that
doesn’t go out every time a leaf falls, and neighbors, and children
for Nikki to play with?” After five years, he’d learned when to
back off Nettled, he went out to add the oil. By the dock he found
a peahen, back torn open by an owl the night before. He held the
animal in his lap on the porch stairs, knowing he’d have to wring
its neck, and not willing to do it just yet. The wound was too much
to heal on its own. Way too much. As much as he hated to do it,
there was nothing else to do.

Patti came out dressed and ready, Nikki in tow, and
seeing him sitting, opened her mouth, ready to explode. When she
saw the wounded bird, she sent Nikki in to play, running a finger
softly down the bird’s green neck. “Poor baby, what happened to
you, huh?”

“I’ll put her down,” he said.

She looked at her watch, sighed, eyes shut, tension
draining from her. “No, you won’t. Bring her in.” The phone cradled
at her neck, she tied an apron over her best suit. An illness in
the family, she said. They’d have to put it off for an hour.