Claire and Present Danger (2 page)

maybe I’d understand. We’re even spared worry over whether Daddy’s gonna disapprove and disinherit me, ’cause there never was a thing to inherit except my good looks and charm.”

In a few short days, I was going to meet Mackenzie’s parents for the first time. I’d spoken with them on the phone. We’d exchanged notes and birthday cards and Christmas gifts, and in every instance they sounded warm, welcoming, and delighted 6

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with the prospect of my joining their family. I couldn’t have identified or quantified what worried me about meeting them, but worried I was. I constantly felt as if I had overdosed on caffeine, my blood hoppity-skipping through my veins and my skull expanding and contracting as if I were pumping up a leaky basketball.

“It’s stage fright,” I muttered. “That’s a pretraumatic shock.”

And as close to the feeling as I could get. Would my performance be adequate? Would I get flowers and curtain calls, or be splattered with rotten tomatoes?

Their impending arrival had stirred the muck of memory, so that I recalled fleeting anecdotes, funny stories told over glasses of wine a year or two ago—anything that had to do with my beloved and other women. Now, with painful clarity, I remembered being told about a girl in C. K.’s hometown who Gabrielle, a.k.a.

Gabby, Mackenzie had believed the “perfect match” for her son despite said son’s total lack of interest. That part was not exceptional, but I’d heard about her because Gabby Mackenzie continued to tout the virtues of the girl back home even after her son and I were living together. C. K. thought it was funny. I might have at the time, too. Now I didn’t.

I remembered everything I was supposed to have long forgotten.

Every casual aside made in the past years. Every response, however terse and reluctant, to every question I’d asked. Stories such as the one about the girl back home that had been told as a funny example of how silly his mother could be.

The original context no longer mattered. I’d sifted everything out until I was left with the facts, which I examined and analyzed with the zeal of a scientist.

I remembered the girl he’d actually been engaged to, years ago. Miss Bayou High—something like that. The prettiest and most popular girl in school. In town. And rich, he’d said, treating it all as a joke. “But you’ve got to know, our standards were so far down, they were subterranean. Her father was a partner in 7

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a not overly successful body shop, but compared with us—she was an heiress. And a nightmare. As soon as she had a ring on her finger, she dropped the sweetness and light and turned into a harridan and as interesting and deep as the paint jobs they did on pickups.”

At the time he told me this, I’d laughed and said her mistake was dropping the act with the engagement ring. As for me, I’d wait till I had a wedding band before I showed my true and ugly colors.

All in jest, and said in that phase of dating when you tell a carefully edited “all” to the new interest in your life. Now, with my new perspective on life, I think we should present ourselves as tab-ula rasa and never, ever write on our slates. No past, no first love, early loves, puppy loves, and no mistakes. Information has a toxic, delayed-release afterlife.

The thing was, I remembered the minor footnote to Miss Bayou High’s story as well. She was ancient history to C. K. and to her three former husbands—but he’d found it entertaining that his mother still exchanged Christmas cards and occasional visits with her. That, of course, was the portion upon which I fixated, giving me further reason to fear Gabby Mackenzie. It was painfully obvious that I was not her daughter-in-law of choice, and her sweet long-distance welcomes were simply good, insincere, Southern manners.

Mackenzie had delivered his reassurances while standing in the middle of the loft, doing that peculiar side-to-side jounce in place.

My in-law angst was delaying his run and doing harm to his heart and day. I had to admire him for staying around to convince me, again, that his parents were not coming north to blow this damn Yankee girl away. “Amanda, honey,” he said, shifting left to right to left to right, “they’re excited about meetin’ you. It’s no big deal to them. They’ve been through this kind of thing lots of times.”

“I thought you were only engaged once before.”

“I meant,” he said, bouncing as if he were waiting for a traffic light to change, “my vast collection of siblings, most of whom are already married, some for the second time and one for the third.

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I’m the last holdout, except Lutie, who is between husbands rather than never married.”

That didn’t help. Maybe they resented dragging themselves north for a redundant daughter-in-law, and not even the right one, at that.

“It’ll be fun. You’ll see. We’ll show ’em the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall and take a buggy ride through Society Hill and they will not only fall in love with you, but with Philadelphia, too. It’s all taken care of, so relax. You’ve got enough on your plate today without worryin’ about them, too.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I know you’re right.” That wasn’t exactly true, but I couldn’t bear talking about in-law worries any longer.

With another kiss, he was at the door, opening it as the phone rang. I took a deep breath, then lifted the receiver. A call at this hour could only mean disaster. Or—

My mother. “Mom,” I said, and Mackenzie relaxed his vigil, waved, and closed the door behind him. “Mom,” I said again. “You caught me about to leave. First day of—”

“I know. That’s why I called now. I just spoke to Beth—”

We’d bought my mother a cell phone for her birthday. The sort with low-rate long-distance perks. We’d explained that she could now wait until we were awake to phone, and it wouldn’t cost her any more. “I get up so early,” she said in response. “There’s nothing else to do at that hour.”

And so she phoned. I geared up for a recital of what the day held for her between her clubs and charities, her card games and shop-ping expeditions. This was a woman who could devote an entire day to finding the right drain-stopper, and consider the time wellspent when she found it. Further, she loved to relive the hunt and the triumph by reciting it in detail to her daughters.

“I’ve got a surprise for you.” Her voice had lowered to a mis-chievous chuckle.

I was now officially engaged, so she’d stopped sending me clippings and books about ways to meet men. Nowadays, I received domestic trivia: a soap-holder she’d discovered in her daily rounds, 9

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a subscription to a decorating magazine, a sleek vegetable-peeler, clippings about perfect weddings. I wondered what today’s discovery might be.

“I spoke with Beth,” she said again.

“Uh-huh.” She was primed to re-create her conversation with Beth, thus doubling the pleasure of whatever tale she had to tell.

I carried the phone around the loft, checking that I had the necessary supplies for the day and evening. Roll book. Lesson plans for all five classes. My annotated copies of the novels I was teaching. The key to Ozzie’s office. The wrapped and beribboned gift for old Mrs. Russell, a set of Pavarotti CDs. Pavarotti was second only to my cat on her shortlist of loves. And thinking of Macavity, I checked that his dish of kibble was full. Ticket for Beth’s fund-raiser.

“She said Chuck’s parents are coming up.”

It was my fault she called him Chuck, which wasn’t his name at all. Early on, when I didn’t know that C. K. stood only for itself, when I was sure they were the initials of names he wouldn’t share with me, I assigned him “C” names at will. Unfortunately, during one of those guessing-game sessions, I identified my new gentleman caller to my mother as “Chuck.” It was a joke, but I delayed setting my mother straight because, unlike C. K.’s parents, she wouldn’t consider a set of initials a proper name.

My fault, too, for telling my sister anything about my life without considering the ways my loving mother could mess with the information when she found it out, which she always did.

Of course, this time, I’d had no choice but to tell Beth, because I wanted her involved. She was Good Family, and she’d make a great impression with her weathered stone palazzo on the Main Line, and her talents as a hostess. She was making dinner for the Mackenzies the night they arrived. That was the favor I was prepaying by going to her event tonight.

But still my fault because I’d failed to tell her to keep the entire business a secret from our mother.

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“So I thought—what could be a better time than now? It’s almost an omen, don’t you think? It’s so awfully hot here in Florida now, and this way, we’ll all meet each other! Bingo! Won’t that be fun? We’re flying up Thursday in plenty of time for dinner, so don’t worry—staying at Bethie’s and . . .”

I’d missed something—the moment when I’d be asked whether this was a good idea.

Let me make it clear that I love my parents dearly. They are kind, decent people. And that includes my mother.

But when I thought of what currently occupied her mind—C. K.’s decision to turn away from his “nice, steady” job, concern that we hadn’t set a wedding date, upset that the Mackenzies had produced eight children without considering what it would do to Bea and Gilbert Pepper’s daughter’s wedding budget—and then I thought of Gabby Mackenzie’s easygoing, soft voice on the phone and her laissez-faire attitude . . .

I broke out in a cold sweat. My mind boggled. My imagination envisioned tossing these incompatible sets of people together in Beth’s living room and I cringed.

For starters, my mother’s relief and joy at the prospect of finally!—that word was always there, always with loud punctuation, as if my shelf-life expiration date was years past—marrying me off would terrify any sane person, which I dearly hoped included Gabby Mackenzie. And my father barely spoke. He knew how, of course, but to date, he hadn’t found much worth mentioning.

Mackenzie claimed his parents would be sanguine, even casual about our status and plans or lack of same, but my mother could drive anyone crazy. I envisioned her arriving with a clipboard, shaking their hands, then moving on to her itinerary.

When was The Event going to be?

Where?

What sort?

Color scheme?

Who’d marry us?

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Who’d—

Pit that against the Louisiana contingent, the laissez-faire let the good times roll side—

“I know you have to run, honey, so I’ll say goodbye now, and we’ll call when we get to Beth’s. I’m so excited! Love to you and Chuck!

I said that an early morning call was either news of a disaster or my mother. I hadn’t fully realized it could be both.

12

Two

I’Mwilling to bet my students think that at term’s end, I’m taken to the basement of the school, deflated via a secret valve in my foot, and stored on a hanger until school starts again.

And I’m willing to bet they accepted and believed my happy-faced expression all during this first day back to school. My real life had begun again!

They might even think I believed their feeble expressions of pleasure, or at least acceptance, at being back in harness for another full school year, spending time with me, rather than the beach, camp, mountains, videos, CDs, or computer games.

We all pretended we’d missed each other terribly, and the day 13

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flowed on, busy with book distribution, my contracts with each class, and the assignments I’d prepared. My theory is to slam them into the school mode so quickly, they’re not sure what hit them.

Homework the first day and no turning back.

In a school like Philly Prep, where the majority of our students couldn’t—or wouldn’t—perform elsewhere, it’s better to be whispered about with hushed horror (“she’s so hard!”) than taken for a teacher they can easily dupe. You always can—I always do—ease up and relax the standards, but you can’t tighten them once they’ve discovered the joy of tromping all over you.

This seemed particularly important on an enervating hot and humid day like today. We used to call it Indian summer, but in fact, it’s all-ethnicities and origins summer. It is, in fact and reality, still summer. We invented this premature, back-to-school autumn. We fill magazines with cute woolen sweaters and bright-colored scarves when, in fact, it was a day designed to sit on a porch and sip lemonade or, better still, go to the shore. Surely not a day to find yourself back behind a desk. But while I saw children looking groggy from the heat, and I felt beads of perspiration on my own forehead by midday, nobody complained or made a case for starting school when the weather improved. That’s the first-day glow.

Today was also the day to get a handle on the feel of each class, what a business would call its culture. Every class is a new and unpredictable chemistry experiment. I wish I knew the secret formula, because when the personality elements combine the right way, teaching is one long high.

This is a rare situation.

Even when it doesn’t work, I remain fascinated by the mismatches, and by how nothing really changes in the basic politics of school. On this first day, the class hasn’t jelled into what it will become, but the players are there, ready to adopt roles that remain the same, year after year.

I could spot the potential queen bee in each group, the future 14

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Miss Bayou High. Just as when I was in high school, she was the girl who looked closest to how girls have been told they should look. She always had great hair, however that translated this year; a slender build; clean, even though not necessarily gorgeous, features; and a self-assurance she hid under an elaborate dance of self-deprecation. If a girl is too obviously secure about her appearance, it counts against her, sets the rest of the girls against her. This is not a good situation, but it is how it is.

Boys aren’t taught to be modest and self-effacing. Their king—

or perhaps duke, if The King is in another section—can acknowledge his divine rights. Then there are the imitators, the hangers-on, the king’s and queen’s courtiers, and somewhere on the fringes, the serfs, the unaccepted. The outsiders, the ones who don’t fit the precut ready-made puzzle pieces, are the most interesting. They’ll someday spin being different—another word for unique—into gold or dross. They’re the future inventors of obscure cyber components, the performers and poets—and the highway snipers.