The Tiger's Child (16 page)

“That’s it? You’ll feel sad?”

“That’s all I can do,” I said.

Folding her arms across her chest, she turned her head away from me. “You’re shitholes,” she muttered. “You and your kind. You really are fucking shitholes.”

M
y personal life was in a state of flux that summer. I tended toward a pattern of exclusive, long-term relationships that often lasted several years, and was, at the time, “between men,” as one close girlfriend so succinctly put it. I had actually been “between” for several months by that point and getting fairly fed up with it.

Synchronizing my life at work with my personal life had always been difficult for me. Although I’d mellowed from earlier years, when the intensity with which I’d thrown myself into classroom life left little room for other activities, I still loved my work profoundly. I still felt a thrill of anticipation on Sunday for the approaching Monday and I still found it nearly impossible to exclude the kids I was working with entirely from my thoughts. I didn’t dwell on them, but they were simply there, turning
over in the back of my mind. This made me a challenging companion, I knew, and it took a secure, tolerant man to cope. At the time, such men seemed rather thin on the ground.

To complicate matters, I preferred men from outside my profession. It kept me from talking shop twenty-four hours a day, as I was inclined to do with colleagues. And it kept rivalry at bay. I had a fiercely competitive streak, which served me well with the children, because it kept me determined to win even when the odds were not at all in my favor; however, it was lethal to personal relationships. I also enjoyed the slightly schizophrenic experience of maintaining separate lives because it allowed me to develop interests and talents that might otherwise seem mutually exclusive.

The newest contender was Allan. The downtown area of the city had been subjected to redevelopment a few years earlier and many of the old buildings had been rescued from decay and now formed part of a rather elite shopping district. Allan owned a small bookstore tucked into a tiny side street in the midst of this redeveloped area.

I had first met him when I was pursuing an obscure book of Greek plays. Intrigued, he had invited me into the back room to show me his classical collection, which was one of the better come-on lines I had heard. From there we went on to a series of rather nice dinners in restaurants quite unlike the greasy spoons I usually patronized.

Allan was, in a word, civilized. He enjoyed the opera, discussed literary novels in the enthusiastically
casual way of one who had not only read them, but actually enjoyed them, and he could pick amazingly good red wines. His apartment was in an old, restored town house not far from the city center, and it was immaculately furnished with Indian rugs and antique furniture. He even had a tablecloth on his table, which indicated real class to someone like me, who seldom had enough of the clutter off the table to find the surface.

I knew right from the beginning that Allan and I were not soul mates, the way Chad and I had been. Allan was finicky, which got on my nerves. I was unpredictable or, as he termed it, “uneven,” and that got on his. But there was still much to be said for the relationship, not the least the fact that I had met no one else.

Certainly Allan met the qualifications as far as being outside my profession went. Deep quests into the nether regions of human behavior might as well have been space probes into other galaxies from his point of view. Trying to talk with him about my kids was impossible. But this was all right. I had Jeff to talk to if I wanted to mull something over about work, and when I was outside it, I was perfectly happy discussing Greek poets or Australian Shiraz.

That Friday night, Allan and I had a picnic planned. This was no rude affair with Allan. He had European-style picnics, complete with wicker picnic basket, red-checked cloth to lay on the ground and real plates and glassware. This called
for something rather grander than Kentucky Fried Chicken and barbecue beans, so I had spent Thursday roasting eggplants and fiddling with pâtés, while Allan sought out French baguettes and the right wine.

Friday night after work, I came home to put the final touches on the food. We were going to a local beauty spot on the lake that bordered the eastern side of the city. This required serious mosquito protection, so Allan was in the back room trying to get my insect lamp to work.

A knock at the door. Thinking it was the paper boy coming to collect his money, I slipped the check between my teeth and wiped my greasy hands before pulling open the door.

Sheila.

“Hi,” she said cheerfully.

“Hi. What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I tried to look your address up in the phone book, but you aren’t listed yet, so I called for Directory Inquiries,” she replied. “Can I come in?”

“They’re not supposed to give out addresses,” I replied.

“No, I know it, but if you act like you already got the address, say, like, ‘Is that the Hayden on Maple Avenue?’ they always say, no, and give you the right address. Or at least part of it. Then you hang up, try again to get someone else and then use that part to get the rest. It always works.” She looked past me. “Can I come in?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, but came on in anyway. Smiling, she looked around at the walls of
my apartment. “Wow, this is neat. I like the way you’ve done this.” She flopped down in a chair. “I came over ’cause I thought maybe we could talk.”

I didn’t want to make her feel unwelcome, but her visit was totally unexpected. It left me momentarily floundering.

“You’re always trying to talk to me in the car when you take me down to Fenton Boulevard and I hate that,” Sheila said. “It’s too short. I know the ride’s going to end and I never can get my thoughts organized fast enough. I didn’t have anything to do tonight, so I thought I’d come over here and we can talk.”

Was this manipulative? I wondered. Did she know that I would normally give over what I was doing to allow her to talk?

Just then, Allan appeared from the back. “Torey? Oh …” he said, seeing Sheila.

“Oh,” said Sheila in return.

“I had plans tonight,” I said gently.

“Oh. I see.” A long pause followed as she regarded Allan. “Is he the one you’re fucking now?” She said it casually, as if she expected it to be normal conversation.

“Sheila, I think you’ll need to go,” I said. “I’m sorry you came all this way. I wish you’d let me know first.”

Her expression hardened.
I know that look
, I thought. Flashing back across the years came the face of six-year-old Sheila, thwarted, angry, bent on revenge. So much about her had changed, but with that expression she became instantly recognizable.

“You know, he isn’t as good-looking as Chad,” she said to me, her voice still pleasantly conversational. She glanced at Allan. “That was her last fuck. Well, probably not her last. I don’t know how many others have been in between.”

“
Sheila.
” I put a hand on her shoulder and turned her toward the door. “I’ll see you on Monday.” I got her through the door and shut it.

“Maybe you will, maybe you won’t,” she muttered.

As I turned from the door, I saw Allan’s face, pasty-white with shock. “Sorry about that,” I said.

“
Who
was she?”

“It’s too difficult to explain.”

Sheila was back on Monday with no indication that anything had happened. She joined in with the children in a helpful manner and chatted pleasantly with Miriam at break time. I was aware of being on my guard with her, expecting I’m not quite sure what from her, but it never materialized. Sheila behaved as any other teenaged helper might be expected to.

In the car down to Fenton Boulevard, I said nothing. If she wasn’t comfortable with this as a time for talking, then I’d abide with that. There could be other times.

Her arms folded across her chest, Sheila sat in silence for a mile or two. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught her glancing at me occasionally. I leaned forward and turned on the radio.

Sheila gave a huge sigh. “Oh, God, now she’s sulking,” she muttered under her breath.

“I’m not sulking,” I said. “The other night you said you didn’t want to talk during this ride, because it was so short.”

“I didn’t mean not talk at all. You practically haven’t said a word since we got in the car.”

I studied the cars on the freeway before me.

Sheila was watching me. When I didn’t respond, she let her shoulders drop. She sighed. “Tor?”

“Yes?”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, I mean when this summer-school thing is over. What will I be? I mean, what am I now? I’m not your student, really, am I? I’m not a client. At least I don’t think I am. But you wouldn’t treat a friend like you treat me.”

That caught my attention. I looked over at her. “How do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, Torey. We’re not friends. I don’t know what you want to call it, but it isn’t friendship.” A pause. “And now this program is just about over. Are you going to leave me again?”

“No. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll still be at the clinic.”

She made a frustrated little clicking noise. “You are, like,
so
dense sometimes,” she muttered. “I don’t care where you’re working, Torey. The thing is,
I’m
not going to be there, am I? What’s going to happen to me?”

“What do you want to happen to you?” I asked.

Arms still folded across her chest, Sheila turned
her head away from me and gazed out the window. Several moments passed in pensive silence. “We’re going to run out of time,” she whispered. “We’re one point eight miles from the bus station. Shit.”

Turning my car into the parking lot of a large discount store, I pulled over to the far side and turned off the engine. “There are other buses. If you miss the usual one, you can get a later one.”

Her eyes had grown huge with the unexpectedness of my action.

“If you’re asking what’s going to happen in regards to our relationship, that’s up to you. I like having you around. I’ve enjoyed this summer. I hope once the summer school is over, we continue to see each other.”

The car quickly grew warm in the summer sun, so I rolled down the window and leaned on it.

“That’s it?” Sheila asked. “We might just get to see each other sometimes?”

“There’s a hidden agenda here,” I answered. “You’re asking me more than I’m hearing.”

She didn’t reply. In the heat, sweat beaded up along her temples and trickled down along the side of her face. Minutes passed. My mind began to wander, and as it so often did when I was with Sheila, it wandered back to the time we were together in the classroom.

Suddenly, I was awash with longing. It had been so much simpler then, when I was the adult and she was the child, when I was convinced my world was right and her world was wrong and it was only a matter of getting her to change sides. Never once
had I questioned then the basic value of what I was doing.

“Do you fuck him?” she asked, her voice soft.

Pulled from my thoughts so abruptly, I looked over in surprise. “Who?”

“That guy who was at your apartment. Do you fuck him?” The question was not saucily put at all, as her references to such activities had been on Saturday night, but with genuine inquiry in her voice.

“That’s a fairly personal question,” I replied.

As if suddenly embarrassed, her head dropped and her cheeks colored. There was a deep intake of air. Then, unexpectedly, it crossed my mind that she was going to cry.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not angry with you for asking it. It’s just that it’s one of those questions that I’m not prepared to answer.”

She was going to cry. I could see her sucking her lower lip between her teeth to keep it from quivering. “You told me before,” she said. Her voice was shaky, but the tears didn’t fall. “When I was little. I asked you if you and Chad fucked and you said you did.”

I wasn’t sure I quite remembered that particular phraseology, so I paused, recalling what she might have said.

“You
did
,” she insisted, reading my silence. “It was that time after my dad’s brother Jerry had … had done what he’d done. You know. And I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I couldn’t understand why he’d done that to me, because I liked
him so much. And you explained all that to me. ’Cause he’d told me it was how you and Chad loved and he was just teaching me, so you’d love me too. And I asked you. And you answered me without even pausing. I know, ’cause I remember you doing it.”

“That was different, kiddo. I was explaining,” I said. “It wasn’t just conversation.”

“Why do you call me that?” Sheila asked abruptly, looking over at me.

“Call you what?”

“Kiddo. When I was little, you called me lovey. And tiger. And sweetheart. What was I then that I’m not now?”

What occurred to me when I was back at the clinic and mulling our conversation over was that Sheila had clearly remembered our talking about the matter when she was six. She made precise reference to that early conversation, using real names and details that indicated a very clear recollection of the event. This stood in stark contrast to her hazy memories earlier or, indeed, to her insistence that she had no recollection of Chad. Were the memories coming back? And if that was so, what had happened to make them fade in the first place? Or was it possible that she had remembered all along and had told me otherwise? If so, why?