With Friends Like These... (23 page)

Did that mean that under Janine’s borscht dye job there was authentic, if faded, red hair? Would mysteries and surprises never cease?

“Wanted to adopt her. She…it wasn’t her fault. Babies don’t know about guns. Couldn’t…” His voice and attention both drifted away.

Couldn’t know what a gun was or couldn’t adopt? He meant both, most likely. In either case, he didn’t seem likely to elaborate.

So Cindy died, Wiley and Janine couldn’t adopt Betsy, and the friendship ended. Odd timing. Odder still how, no matter to whom I spoke, everything seemed to have happened at the same time. The career break with Ace of Hearts, the end of the partnership with Richard Quinn, the accidental shooting of Cindy, the split with the Wileys—too much converged at the same historical moment to be simple random coincidence.

I felt as if the present were the loose ends of a skein that had been knotted together two decades earlier.

How had things really worked? Had Lyle known that his buddy was in love with his wife? Had, perhaps, their break come before Cindy died? Had she loved Wiley back?

Obviously, Terry Wiley, still staring into private space, considered the issue closed. After all, he had carried his secrets for two decades, and there was no reason to suddenly spill them in the middle of a journalism conference. Besides, it was time to go to our meeting. We bussed our empty coffee cups to the trash can.

Terry Wiley looked more like a man carrying a corpse than one holding a used plastic cup. And maybe he was.

* * *

I ducked into the ladies’ room before I went into the meeting, and was shocked to see who was washing her hands one sink over.

“I’m here with my husband.” Janine made her words sound like a dare. “Didn’t he tell you? I know you had coffee with him. My stomach’s a mess. Can’t handle the acid in coffee. You look surprised to see me.”

“I—Yes. I am. You aren’t a newspaper advisor, are you?”

Her nasty laugh was more like a bark. “Nope. But I’m not stupid, either.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

“I’m here to protect my interests. Do you follow now? I told him I wanted to know what he did. He thinks I meant what he does with the paper, but I didn’t. I meant with you. Keep your hands off my husband.”

“Me? My what? Your what?”

She carefully dried her own hands. Her nails were an iridescent purple. “I saw the way he looked at you Sunday night. And I heard you coming on to him about when you’d see him again. Don’t think my poor health keeps me from seeing what’s going on in front of me.”

Now I understood Terry Wiley’s repeated glances at the doorway, his acute nervousness upon seeing me. I was mildly entranced by her honest belief that I coveted her husband. Terry Wiley, of all people. “I can assure you—” I stopped myself. How do you tell a possessive wife that even if you were stupid enough to mess with married men, her husband would be close to the last possibility on the list? I stopped trying to assure her of anything.

“It’s not my fault that your biological clock is running down!” Veins on the side of her neck looked in danger of rupturing.

I couldn’t believe I was standing in a bathroom being verbally abused by a woman with beet soup hair and a chartreuse pants suit, and being too polite to tell her that I didn’t, no matter how desperate my biological clock, want her husband to reset it.

“And it’s not my problem that your chance of getting a man at your age is practically nil! I read that stuff about how you’re more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married.”

“How about if I marry the terrorist?” She was not amused. “Then how about if I tell you that it’s been proven that was an inaccurate statistic?” She really had very little intellectual curiosity. “Then how about if I leave?” But she blocked my exit with one screaming green polyester arm.

“I don’t care what you do or how desperate you are!” she screeched. “You can’t take advantage of a man’s mid-life—any middle-aged man would be flattered by a young woman’s advances, but that doesn’t make it right!”

Okay, it was time to be honest, no matter how insulting it might be. “Listen up,” I said, “even if your husband were the last man on earth, I wouldn’t want him.”

“You chose a career, not marriage—now live with that choice! You women think you can have it all, but that doesn’t include
my
husband!”

I stood there, flabbergasted, and she took the opportunity to open the restroom door and hold it for her exit line. She took a deep breath. When she spoke, it was in a deliberate, patronizing voice, as if she had to teach me something I should already know.

“He has a certain weakness,” she said. “For redheads.” She patted her purple hair. “Redheads. Plural. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I’m not even—it’s chestnut. Brown, actually. With highlights.”

“Stay away from him!” she snapped, her patience and her little lesson both over. “Stay away—or so help me, I’ll kill you.” I believed her.

We won a prize. Actually, a single twelfth grader won it for headline writing, but we generalized it into a group triumph. Next morning, Maurice Havermeyer, my principal, carried on as if it had been the Pulitzer. The headline-writer was congratulated in assembly and named the Philly Prep Student of the Week, and our staff was repeatedly referred to as award-winning journalists. Nobody, not even the staff, sniggered.

Dr. Havermeyer, never one to miss a trend, has become high on self-esteem—ours, because his is already up to maximum capacity. It appears that self-esteem, its name notwithstanding, requires enormous outside-of-self esteem. Hence, Philly Prep’s RAA! Team, as Havermeyer has clumsily dubbed it. RAA! as in Respect, Appreciation, Acknowledgment!

Respect, appreciation, and acknowledgment, hokey or not, felt good, particularly while sitting in assembly, wondering which of the adolescent souls in the room wished me ill. I scanned the auditorium to see if somebody was directing a less than respectful or appreciative eye in my direction. The sort of eye that imagines gravestones with teachers’ names on them.

Eyes—and a few hands—were directed many ways, but not mine, except for some blank stares and another goofy smile from Raffi Trulock many seats to my left.

He saw me see him and ducked his head. His buddy punched his shoulder playfully, then leaned forward and looked over at me.

And I got it. A bit belatedly. Raffi’s slightly dazed grins and overcasual greetings. My cheeks heated up, an annoying trait I can’t seem to outgrow. I had become a love object. An awkward but not unusual adolescent rite of passage, and not dangerous when kept in check, just always surprising—and discreetly flattering.

How odd, I thought. I am simultaneously adored and loathed by students. Given my druthers, I would have chosen to keep the fond one anonymous and to have known the face of the latter.

But perhaps he who had me targeted as the next abused teacher had changed his mind. Maybe, influenced by Dr. Havermeyer, he, too, now esteemed me.

More likely, though, he was cutting assembly, lurking somewhere, readying a push or a jab or a poke that would make me a statistic.

I was dismayed that my thoughts had so swiftly reverted to the lurker, the threatener. My pulse was elevated and my hackles up. Raffi had been an ego-boosting intermission in a dark play, that was all. Whatever ultimate act the letter-writer had in mind, he—or she—had already killed any easy pleasure I might enjoy during the workday.

The assembly was the highlight of the academic day. From then on it was all downhill. My ninth graders continued play practice, but Lord Henry had the hiccups straight through rehearsal. We tried every known cure: breath-holding and sugar-eating and paper-bag-breathing and scaring him and whistling. But when the bell rang, Lord Henry was telling Dorian that, “The only way to get rid of a hic!—temptation—hic!—is to yield to it.”

The tenth graders had a mini-lesson on punctuation. This, along with most of the teaching of grammar, is part of the HSE Curriculum, as in hope springs eternal. One more go-round, one more gimmick, one more clever presentation and they’ll get it, teachers whisper to themselves like a mantra. And then we whisper it again, the next time we have to teach the same lesson to the same people.

“Punctuation matters,” I said.

The tenth graders’ eyeballs rolled up into their skulls. The morning of the living dead.

It’s not flattering to know your audience is counting the nanoseconds until they can escape. Bravely, stupidly, in need of a paycheck, I plowed on and tried to win them over by writing two sentences on the board.

We’re hungry. Let’s eat children.

I waited for a response. The journal article from which I’d cribbed it (“A Dozen Ways to Liven Up Mechanics”) had promised outrage, shock, delight. At least a pulse.

“Yes?” I said. “Anybody?” My class looked suspicious, but mostly of me, of my expectant air. A waiting teacher is an anxiety-provoking thing. And, ultimately, an anxious thing. “Any ideas?” I asked with some desperation. “Do you see anything that needs changing?”

It was as if they were all on the wrong side of one-way glass. I could see them, but they could only see a reflection of their own bored selves.

“Clue,” I said. “The change has something to do with punctuation.”

“Wow,” several of them muttered.

Finally. A timid hand, half raised, pulled itself down, then fluttered uncertainly in front of a blue and white sweater. I smiled encouragingly. “I think it should have a question mark at the end?” That particular girl thought every sentence had a question mark at its end, but she was so timorous, I kept my response as gentle as possible.

“Let’s see. Then it would read: ‘Let’s eat children?’ As if the speaker’s not sure that it’s a good idea. Is that what you mean?” She looked around the room, signaling that it was somebody else’s turn to dare to answer.

I had a sudden flash. Perhaps I’d misread the note-writer’s intention. Maybe all we had was a failure to punctuate. Yes! I looked at my class idling, their brains in neutral, waiting for this nonsense to end. The only person with a smile on his face also had a plug in his ear. I could hear the shhh-shhh of the bass beat all the way across the room.

I couldn’t wait any longer to check my theory, and the students weren’t exactly caught up in the spirit of the quest. “We aren’t cannibals, are we?” I asked.

They looked at me, then at each other, then up to the heavens for help with their incomprehensible teacher.

“Do we eat children, no matter how hungry we are?” I inserted a comma after eat. This was supposed to have been a lot more fun.

They got it. Finally. They even giggled. That didn’t mean they would transfer the concept of the comma to any other sentence, ever, but all the same, I was content. I gave them a punctuation exercise, and while they moaned over it, I pulled out the manila envelope and checked the note.

R.I.P. Teach. Makes you wonder who’s next, doesn’t it?

Exquisitely punctuated, given the message. I couldn’t find a whole lot of interpretational scope in it. No matter where I moved the commas and question marks, the message was the same.

I was being threatened by the one student who understood how to clearly express his or her thoughts.

After lunch my prize-winning journalism team squeezed their newly inflated self-esteem into my classroom. Watching them slap hands and congratulate each other, I had a small epiphany followed by enormous relief. Of course. The clippings I’d received were research for an article, an attempt to upgrade the paper’s general level of content. Why hadn’t I realized the obvious sooner?

“By the way,” I said after we’d had another round of self-congratulations and were getting down to work. “Which one of you is preparing the story on teacher violence?”

“I’m doing the fire,” Raffi said. “At the Cavanaugh. I figure it’s the first time I’m writing, like, actual news. Like a story, you know? A real one.”

“Great,” I said, and he rewarded me with that beatific, weird smile of his. He had too many elbows and knees and Adam’s apples, but you could tell he was evolving into something seriously cute. I did not, however, acknowledge even his potential adorableness in any way. Better to appear chilly than be even an unintentional letch. “But what about the article on teacher violence?”

They glanced at me to verify that I’d asked the question, then swiveled their heads, looking for the answer along with me.

“Nobody’d let us print that,” Hal said.

“Violent teachers?” Kelly Cleary asked. “Wow.” She was a waiflike creature whose fashionably oversized clothing had gulped her down. All that was left were two wide gray eyes and a lot of surplus material.

“Violence against teachers,” Hal corrected her. “But would the school really let us print that kind of a story?”

“Who assigned it, anyway?” the editor-in-chief demanded. “I didn’t.” It was amazing what a title did to a person, even at seventeen. Since being named editor-in-chief, Winkie Mueller had discovered the thrill of power. He had, in fact, dropped his Winkie and was now the more dignified Walter Mueller, Jr. “People can’t simply decide to do any story they choose,” the former Winkie said. “That produces chaos. This paper has a philosophy. An editorial outlook.”

There was much hooting, although less than there’d have been had we not won a prize.

“The point is, nobody’d let us print it, anyway,” Hal insisted.

This led to an encouragingly heated debate about censorship. Normally, such intellectual enthusiasm would cheer me, but not when I’d been hoping for a plain and simple explanation for the threatening note.

Actually, I’d gotten what I’d hoped for. The fact was, nobody was writing an article about violence. My message was from a player, not somebody reporting on the game.

* * *

Carpooling supersedes even murder and death threats. Three days ago, before I’d trundled off to Lyle’s fatal birthday party, I’d promised to be part of my mother’s help-your-sister-Beth program. The surprises and shocks of the intervening days did not cancel out my pledge.

Karen’s class had visited Betsy Ross’s house today. I find it a singularly dull destination for anyone, but particularly an innocent child. You know you’re in trouble, attractions-wise, when one of the advertised specials is a peek at Betsy’s third husband’s family Bible.