This Is Not Your City (9 page)

“I guess it's in the forties,” Eril told her mother.

“You know what it's like here?”

“Nice?”

“Like you wouldn't believe. I'm sure you'll have another freeze before spring, too.”

“Probably.”

“How's the boyfriend?”

“There's no boyfriend. Not since August. You know that.”

“That was August. Plenty of time for someone new.”

“There isn't anyone.” Eril curled her legs beneath her on the sturdier coffee table.

“Are you looking?”

“I'm trying not to get devoured by small children.”

“The job's going that well?”

I tortured a child today, Eril wanted to say. I made a boy touch a dying rat. “The bathroom's right in my classroom, practically,” she said. “Just this flimsy door. You can hear the kids peeing. It's too weird.”

“I put the old amaryllis, you know, from the backyard, in the guest bathroom here but it hasn't bloomed. I don't think there's enough light.”

“The kids are pretty crazy. I can't make them shut up.”

“Hats off, Eril. I wouldn't teach kids. You were enough, and there was only one of you.”

“I really don't know what I'm doing.”

“I'm sure you're doing just fine.”

“I'm really not.” I should quit, she almost said. I should get out before I hit one of them. I don't know what's happening to me.

“Modesty gets you nowhere. Your father and I are both very proud of you, you know. Really showing your independence.”

“Thanks,” Eril said, swinging her legs out to rest them on a box behind the coffee table. Her feet sank through the top and she felt the plush fur of old stuffed animals squish beneath her toes. “That means a lot.”

 

The next week the ground refroze into ridges and canyons of mud and weeds, footprints and tire tracks caught rigid by the cold snap and dusted with snow flurries. The kids came to school in boots again, left them at the door and went to their desks in sock feet. Eril passed out a grammar worksheet and tried to get them to work in pairs, boy-girl: it was mutiny. They shouted in protest, they howled about cooties. The biggest boy poked a girl in the eye, and Eril couldn't tell whether or not he meant to do it. The sound level in the room rose, tidal and swelling; it broke over her, and she turned to the board and wrote, Third Conditional:
If the class had listened to Ms. Larcom, they would not have had to go outside.

“Recess!” the eye-poker said.

“No,” Eril said. “This is a punishment. Get in your line.”

“Boots come first,” the eye-pokee reminded her. “Then line.”

“No boots,” Eril said, and stared them all down. It was strange, she thought, the way they didn't protest. They howled bloody murder at boys working with girls, but she could lead them like lambs out onto the frozen dirt of the yard. They stood there in a line in their socks, without coats, and she looked at each of their feet: stripey, mismatched, Spider-man, Barbie, plain white athletic. Two girls were in tights, one boy barefoot. She saw faces at the windows of the other portables and waited for someone to come outside, to tell her to stop. No one did. Finally she looked at her watch. It was almost time for math. “Back inside,” she said, watching them file past, shivering. Surely they'd tell their parents, the parents would tell Steckelberg, and she'd be fired. She felt only relief.

But Steckelberg never came to talk to her. No one came,
and Eril wondered if the kind of parents who sent their kids to Morningcroft ever actually asked what they did there. Eventually the children had neat lists of sample sentences written in their notebooks, four kinds of conditionals plus mixed clauses.
If Sammy had not made farting noises, Ms. Larcom would not have taken his lunch. If Lindsey had not passed notes about Ms. Larcom in class, Ms. Larcom would not have cut a piece of her hair off. If PJ had not put a tack on Donald's seat, Ms. Larcom would not have made him sit on a tack himself to see how he liked it. If Donald weren't always such a know-it-all, Ms. Larcom would never have put masking tape over his mouth.

The animals were getting worse, too. The fish tank was thick with algae and thicker with snails. One night Eril had worked late with only a desk lamp on, and she'd seen them emerge, inching out of their hiding places to climb up the walls, their slimy gray bodies pressed against the glass. That night, at another staff meeting where no one would meet her eyes, Eril stayed after to talk to the principal.

“It's about the animals,” she said. “Something needs to be done.” She explained about the death, the stink, the strange, unsettling ways they were all falling apart.

“That's good material,” Steckelberg said. “The circle of life. Plan some lessons around it.”

“Is that really a lesson we want them to learn? Aren't they kind of young?”

“You seem to be teaching them all kinds of lessons, Ms. Larcom. I'm really not sure why you're objecting to this one.”

Eril looked at him, swallowed, tried to think of a way to explain herself. Wondered if he shouldn't be the one to explain himself, if he knew what she was doing and hadn't intervened.

“Just make it to the end of the semester, Ms. Larcom. That's all any of us are expecting. Just make it to June.”

 

Binx made it to April 21st. Eril found him dead that morning and emptied the pencils out of a rectangular box in the supply cupboard. She lifted the bulging rat into the box and covered him with a tissue. She closed the lid, Scotch-taped it shut, and wrote “Binx” across the top. Then the students began arriving
and there was no time to bury him. Before Eril could hide the box, they saw it and demanded to bury the rat themselves. Eril assigned them into groups to handle formalities like “Eulogy,” “Gravesite Selection,” “Hole Digging.” They scheduled the funeral for after lunch. But when Eril went to pick up the coffin from the windowsill, it was gone. The children denied knowing anything. She made them drag their chairs against the wall and sit still while she searched. The box was in Donald's desk, the cardboard top open, the rat nestled inside.

“You stole my rat,” Eril said, holding the box in front of Donald's face.

“The class's rat.”

“Whatever. You've got a dead rat in your desk.”

“I wanted to tell Binx goodbye.”

“You have to ask the teacher if you can do something like that. Maybe Binx died of something catching.”

There was a general shifting of bodies and thunking of chairs as the students moved away from Donald and Binx and Eril.

“The word is
contagious,
” Donald said.

“You're staying inside for the funeral. Then you're staying after. We'll sit here until the snails come out.”

“Fine,” Donald said. Eril felt victorious, that the boy with the enormous vocabulary was reduced to “fine” in the face of her authority. Her discipline was flailing but final.

After Binx had been eulogized and buried, Donald's face at the classroom window, after a multiplication quiz and a map review, the other children packed their backpacks and went home. Eril turned off the lights and closed the shades. Donald's face was lit by the lights inside the aquarium, shining through the algae-clouded water. They sat together, close to the tank, and Eril knew she must look the same way, green and unearthly. They waited for what felt like a very long time and Eril looked behind her, realized she couldn't make out the face of the wall clock. She wondered how Donald got home, who picked him up, if there was a bus he caught, if he walked.

Hating children left her breathless. It made her feel powerless, to hate someone so small, thin, fragile people who could not even tie shoes correctly, who ate pudding snacks and played
kickball and whose handwriting was clumsy, unpracticed. Who fumbled with their snow pants and seemed unable to navigate even the most basic challenges life would provide. Who, even so, would not respect her and would not listen. It took her outside of herself. Ms. Larcom was someone helpless, petty, venal. She was cruel and incompetent. She was not Eril, could not be.
Could not
: modal verb, negative certainty.

“Donald, if you need to get home—” she said, splitting the silence, the soft gurgle of the water filters. “If there's a bus you need to catch—”

“Shhhh...,” Donald said, and put his index finger to his lips. It was like all his gestures, studied, precise, like human behavior learned from pictures instead of from actual humans. It made her want to hit him.

“I'm not saying I don't think you need punishment. I'm just saying—”

“Shhhh, please.”

“Donald, I'm saying you can go.”

“The snails won't come out unless you're quiet.”

“I don't care if the snails come out.”

“If the snails don't come out, we can't leave.” He looked at her, stricken but instructional, explaining a truth that she'd conveniently forgotten. He put one hand on his hip and the other he used to scold her, wagging his finger in the air in front of her face. In the green light he looked underwater, the pale hand floating in front of her.

“Donald, I'm sorry. Forget about the snails. You can go.”

“Be quiet, please.”

“I'm trying to apologize.”

“Please, Ms. Larcom.”

“I'm sorry about Binx. I'm sorry about everything.”

“Shush, Ms. Larcom.”

“Is there something I can do for you, Donald? Do you need a ride home? Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Be quiet, please,” Donald said, almost moaning. “Just please be quiet, or we'll never get to leave.”

They met in Bowling 101 and they would take pleasure in this, years later: that they could say they'd met in Bowling. The professor bracketed the students into miniature leagues and Robin Lerman and Charlie Brindell turned out to be the stars of Bowling 101, really quite extraordinary bowlers, the envy of the forward-thinking freshmen and last-minute seniors dispensing with the physical education requirement at Western Michigan University. Robin and Charlie were both the latter, and were already starting to think ahead to May. They resisted what was happening, this falling in love with each other in the spring of their senior year.

During a special weeknight session of Cosmic Bowling, Charlie couldn't help noticing the way Robin's white T-shirt glowed under the black light. Techno music pulsed as the pins shone off in the distance. Robin leaned toward Charlie, her ball a black hole in her hands, her T-shirt haloing around it, and asked if he wanted to go to the Henry Ford Museum with her on Saturday. “For my museum studies capstone. I have to drive to Dearborn. Do you want to come?”

“Yes,” Charlie thought, and said it, “Yes.”

Robin spent the two hours between Kalamazoo and Dearborn talking about a cross-country road trip she'd taken the summer before: the Barbed Wire Museum, the World's Deepest Hand-Dug
Well, the Warren G. Harding Childhood Home, the Winchester Mystery House in San Joaquin. “We stopped everywhere,” she said, and Charlie resisted asking who the other half of the “we” had been.

“In Traverse City,” he said. “We have the International Nun Museum. Two hundred Barbies dressed in all the habits of the world.”

“You're from Traverse City?”

“Near it. Beulah.” Charlie showed her where that was, his right hand spread flat, fingers together, his palm a map of Michigan's lower peninsula. He touched his own hand near the tip of the pinkie.

“Chicago,” Robin said, taking her hand off the wheel to brush the left south shore of his palm, where the state line crawled down the edge of his wrist. “Are you going back, in May?”

Charlie nodded. “My dad has a construction business.”

“A job. That's key, right there.”

“It's paradise, too,” he said. “There's always that.”

At the museum, Charlie followed Robin through the classic cars and the Hall of American Inventions. They talked their way onto the assembly line in the children's area: Robin did axles while Charlie did steering wheels. The kid doing rear tires kept messing up and Charlie almost yelled; he'd wanted their wooden cars to turn out perfectly. He'd wanted to see them parked in the little lot at the end of the line and say, “We made all those.”

They stayed until closing, ate dinner at a shawarma place and then went for a beer. Neither wanted to drive back to Kalamazoo, and so they decided to spend the night at a hotel, buy a six-pack. “Beulah,” Robin sang, sprawling on the bed with her toes against the headboard. Charlie turned on HBO, just to try and get their money's worth out of the room. “It sounds like a country song.
I lost my dog in Beulah,
” Robin yodeled.

“Don't knock it 'til you've seen it,” Charlie said. “We've got the World Champion Cow of the Insane.”

“An insane champion cow?”

“The world champion cow
of
the insane.”

“What the hell is that?”

“I guess you'll have to go up north to find out. You'll just have to come up north with me,” Charlie said, and finally kissed her.

Robin would think, years later, that couples should never honeymoon anywhere they might someday live. The comparison wouldn't do anyone any favors. Don't shit where you eat and don't vacation where it could be you renting out the Ski-Doos next season. She would think that too much happiness, too early, made a person distrustful. She would think that watching too many sunsets over water could spoil a person, that too much summer poisoned the winter after. That summer, though, the summer she and Charlie Brindell were both twenty-two and very much in love, the rule never occurred to her. Charlie was from paradise, he'd grown up in paradise, and he'd brought her there to share in it. They had known each other for sixteen weeks, spent eight of those as no more than bowling rivals. Now they worried that they had fallen blindsidingly, gobsmackingly in love with each other. Charlie had called his mother to tell her about Robin two weeks before graduation, and she had asked if she should make up both bunks in his childhood bedroom when he came home for the summer. Upon being reminded that he was a man who still slept in a bunk bed, Charlie tried to convince himself that he was too young to be in love with anyone. He was much too young to be
sure.