The five board members were all men in the prime of their lives. One was a sod farmer with fingers like rolls of quarters, one a dentist, one did something obscure with imports, one designed watering systems for lab animals, and the last sold security systems. They looked strong. They could very well hoist me up to the street light, tie me there and leave me hanging until morning.
Maybe Howard was right, and therapy would help me. Maybe I could get some medication that would make me sing Tra-la-la from morning to
evening. The board members were shuffling through their papers and whispering to one another as I took my seat in the cafeteria. There were other teachers in the next aisle, including Luther Tritz, the band director. Perhaps something had come up in his contract too; perhaps there were parents who wanted to conduct or teach the youngsters tonette fingering. Luke was a short, stocky, orange-haired man who looked as if he bathed compulsively in carrot juice. I had not gotten around to telling Theresa about my recent enthusiasm for old Luther Tritz. As far as I knew he was not capable of laughter. Once, at a staff appreciation dinner, I had seen a ripple appear on his orange forehead when the assistant principal made a tasteless joke. I used to walk slowly past the music room in the morning so that I could watch him taking the red music folders from his uncluttered metal cabinet, and then put two at each stand. I had not yet explained to Theresa that the fascination I had with Mr. Luther Tritz, all the way down to his pure Episcopalian heart, was nothing more than an intellectual exercise. It posed the problem of the upstanding community leader with a wife, five children, and a recreational vehicle feeling something only natural for the blond-haired grade-school nurse. There was something so fetching about him when he played the tuba in the marching band and conducted simultaneously. And a man who had a job that started at 8:30 in the morning and ended promptly at 3:15 couldn’t help but be irresistible.
Catherine Trumper, from the local newspaper, was sitting next to him. She had supposedly had an affair with the high-school football coach during a season when she filled in for the sportswriter. She had flowered in her extreme youth and then gotten fat, apparently without realizing. She had on black high heels and a tight blue and purple striped dress made from oil by-products. Her partially exposed freckled bosom, confined in its push-up bra, was barking and whining to get out. Surely he had sense enough not to be attracted to someone as blatantly lascivious as Catherine Trumper. There was so much of her she was lapping over into Luke himself. He looked straight ahead, as if she could press against him all day, all night, and he wouldn’t notice and wouldn’t care.
The august board members were discussing asbestos removal. The schools in the district were riddled with asbestos and the water had sulfur in it and smelled like rotten eggs. Luther Tritz was watching me; I could
feel his washed-out blue eyes on my face. When I turned to meet him straight on, presto he swung around to look behind himself at absolutely nothing. He knew why they had summoned me—he was in on it, too! Catherine Trumper didn’t even have to lean over to talk into his orange ear; she was telling him that I had meant to drown Lizzy, that she had heard from a reliable source, a woman with heavy shoes and crusted pancake makeup, that I had locked Lizzy out of the house, that I had screamed at her to go to the pond, that I had tied a brick to her ankle and then pushed her in. I looked like I was doing artificial respiration at the side of the pond, but I was really untying the brick, trying to undo the knot in the string, trying to cover it up.
Luther Tritz was nodding his head. He guessed he knew right along that I was unbalanced because I used to stand in the doorway and gawk at the boys screwing their woodwinds together.
“Mr. Chairman,” Catherine Trumper called out, “can you dollarize that asbestos removal for me? I didn’t catch those figures you were quoting.”
“Well, Cathy,” Mr. Chairman began. They would dollarize indefinitely while I undressed Luke from top to bottom. I wondered if he was fuzzy from head to foot. I could see him so clearly in the shower, his orange hair slicked down with water. “Oh Luke,” I would say to him. “Luke, Luke, Luke, you dear sweet wet Luke. Can you smile for me, Luke?” It would be a lifetime job, trying to get one little grin out of the band director.
David Henskin, the principal, was eyeing me, trying to gauge if the rumors he’d heard were true. He was at the end of his career, and yet he was still a formidable man, with steel-colored hair; the small black-framed glasses that were known, when I was small, as “retard glasses”; and the fresh, smooth, smelly skin of a man who has to shave more than once a day. He looked in my direction and then he snapped to attention because they were moving down the agenda to the issue of the boiler. He was in his element when it came to the boiler. It was old. He loved the apparatus, but the new models were also beautiful as well as efficient. Everyone on the board was knowledgeable about heating and cooling systems. The men were warming up on the ruined and dangerous mechanicals so that when the time came to deal with the school nurse who
couldn’t do CPR they would be prepared. If Luke could just give me a sign, a small flicker of recognition; then I would know he didn’t think I had meant to drown Lizzy.
He was looking right over the top of my head at the chalkboard. I remember how sick that made me feel, as if I was in a boxcar that suddenly lurched to a stop. I covered my face with my hands to try to steady myself. I couldn’t bear the smell of school lunches, years and years of school lunches, and floor wax, new basal readers, workbooks, gym classes, bad boys, obedient girls. This was the world that, with a great deal of luck, my children would inherit. They were aching to grow up. They would think, as they got older, that their adulthood was going to be filled with an embarrassment of riches: ice cream after every meal; sexual intercourse, mystical in nature, morning and evening; happy hour with wine coolers, all with no repercussions. In fact, the grown-up world was sitting at school-board meetings while the men ordered the boiler of their dreams, and Catherine Trumper wrote down everything they said. The adult world was fabricating lust for the likes of Luther Tritz, who was probably extravagant only in his organizational skills. Emma and Claire would no doubt live in a society where it was no longer possible to turn away from the daunting problems many of us had ignored and insisted were none of our business. The garbage and disease would come crashing into my girls’ yard like waves coming to shore, along with the lost and broken and heartless people, shouldering their semiautomatic weapons. Instead of guiding our children in their interests, instead of sharing with them the fascination of history and music, we should prepare them for the cruelties, for coping with famine and menacing gangs.
I looked up then, out the far window, and there, just within sight, the sun was going down across the river. It was dull red, no longer shining over the land, its rays brought home to roost, contained within its sphere. The sky was streaked with lavender, a pulsing pale blue, purple and smudged pink and orange melding into one another all the way to the horizon. How I longed to rush away from that cafeteria, into the cool of the dusk, into the color, the color—after weeks and weeks of blasting heat and sunlight that had bleached the landscape to a lusterless gold.
Luther Tritz was staring blankly at nothing, when he could have been enjoying the scene out the window. He had probably become deaf after
his years listening to junior-high students channeling their pent-up energy into the slender mouthpiece of a brass instrument. He probably didn’t laugh anymore because he couldn’t hear what was being said. There was not much pleasure left for him because his senses were shot. I used to imagine that he looked at me across the parking lot in the mornings with a gleam in his orange-lidded eyes. Now he believed that I had been about to take Audrey to the pond to give her the same treatment, but that Mrs. Glevitch came to the door and within minutes had her Mary Kay samples spread out at our kitchen table. Mrs. Glevitch—and it wasn’t the first time—had saved the life of an innocent victim. He believed the postmortem had revealed bruises all over Lizzy’s body, that I had taken a large stick and—NO! I wasn’t going to lose my grip, I wasn’t! I wasn’t! I would leave the people in the cafeteria, Luke, Catherine, David Henskin, leave them, never think of them again, leave them to their distasteful thoughts about me, their thoughts about their cars, their games, their lawns, their vacations. I wasn’t going to think about awful, ugly things, was going to dive nose first into something exquisite!—Thirst after beauty, seek it out while everything crass and rude and demeaning and dark falls dead like flies in beauty’s wake. I was going to think of Lizzy as the lovely child who babbled and fluttered, made of flesh instead of rotting away—
Look at the sunset! I heard myself cry out.
The board members, the administration, the honest and responsible teachers and citizens in the audience, and the members of the press, continued to listen to a consultant talk about how difficult it was going to be to remove the oil tank that was buried under the school yard. They hadn’t heard me. I was having that same problem I’d had at the hospital, speaking under a curse so that no one heard me. I didn’t know if I had shouted or not. I wanted so much to tell them to look out the window, at the sunset. We had all forgotten color. Violet. Pink. Purple. They were displayed in front of us now, like a primer, to teach us what we had forgotten. I pushed my chair from the table and headed past the front row, in front of the table where the Powers sat, the board and administration, in front of the man who was trying to continue his presentation. I had both hands over my nose and mouth as if I might be going to vomit. Everyone was staring at me with their jaws unhinged. To leave in the middle of a discussion about the boiler was unthinkable. It was suddenly
so funny, the boiler, the oil tank, Luke and Catherine, the seriousness of the evening and the splendor of the sky. I clutched my rib cage and went laughing out the door, and laughing down the hall, and into the girl’s room, and against the bathroom stall door, and laughing sitting on the toilet, and laughing into the sink, and laughing until I felt as if I’d been socked. Stars bloomed over my head like fireworks.
When I came out of the bathroom I nearly walked into the woman who was standing right outside, by the drinking fountain. I shied back into the door.
“Mrs. Goodwin,” she said. After the four years that I’d been working in a school I hadn’t gotten used to the fact that grown people addressed each other as Mrs. and Mr. For me, Mrs. Goodwin would always mean Nellie. “I’m Detective Grogan from the Investigation Unit in Racine, and this,” she said, turning to the policeman who was just coming from the boy’s room, “is Officer Melby.”
I think I nodded, sizing them up, and started to walk away. It didn’t seem to mean anything at the moment, that two police officers were speaking to me, or that an introduction implied a beginning. I was sick and tired, had had enough. She was dressed in street clothes, in beige slacks and a white sleeveless shirt. He, in his black pants, the billy club, the badge, was hard at first to see for himself. As a child I had felt that nuns and policemen did not inhabit their uniforms, that the outfit stood as if on its own power. But Melby was a handsome man inside his suit, big, brown-eyed, very white clear skin, fine front teeth. The woman followed me, falling into step and saying, “We’d like to talk to you for a minute, if you don’t mind.”
“Me?” I said, stopping, leaning against a locker.
“Just for a minute.” She smiled. She was shorter than I was, with curly blond hair, some of it falling into ringlets. She had blue eyes and freckles across her nose and the continuous smile of someone who wants to please. I needed to go home because my head was pounding and everything looked so awfully clear that even the dim hall light was killing me. She kept smiling, winningly, as if she felt we might be friends. “We’re trying to get some information about Robbie Mackessy,” she said.
I remember going limp, almost falling down. They weren’t going to
ask me about Lizzy because I hadn’t meant to let her out the door. They knew she had run down the lane while I was upstairs for hardly any time to speak of. Robbie Mackessy was in trouble, that was all. “Uhhh,” I said, gently banging my head against the locker.
“Not pleasant memories, I take it?” she said.
“I’ve tried to forget,” I said sarcastically, as if it was funny.
“You had difficulties with him?”
I looked up at the ceiling tiles that were decorated with straight rows of black dots. I’d known him too long already. I used to crawl home from school after a hard morning to the dream world of the farm, to the back-breaking work that seemed to me as old as time itself. I’d pull up carrots and it could have been someone’s hair I was yanking on. There was comfort in knowing absolutely what needed to be done.
“Difficulties,” I said. “You could say that.” She was so pretty and petite, and she had a locket around her neck. And my head hurt and the dark was coming on and I wanted to go home more than anything and go to sleep and sleep off days and days and sleep off life.
“How long have you known him?”
I had to think. He had been in the county pre-kindergarten program when he was five, and in kindergarten when he was six. “It must be two years,” I said.
“Uh huh.” She nodded into her pad of paper. The other officers down at headquarters probably called her Grogan with a measured amount of tenderness, and she probably liked that, made her feel at once like one of the men and at the same time like the only girl in the family. They couldn’t abuse her because she was delicate, yes, but strong enough to demand careful handling. “You probably developed quite a relationship with him then?”
I laughed, at the idea of a relationship.
“No?” She put her long red fingernail into her mouth and tilted her head from left to right.
I was about to say that he was afraid of me, but that wasn’t true. Robbie Mackessy had never seemed to be afraid of anyone. I couldn’t very well say that we had never gotten along, that he was a disturbed boy, cruel, hard, who enraged me every time I saw him. Officer Grogan had a Pre-Raphaelite beauty but I conceded that if she was going to be a cop
then the name Grogan suited her. “I guess kids are usually afraid of the school nurse,” I said.