“Is she a good teacher?” I said.
“She’s sure into it anyway.”
“Into it how?” you said.
“She’s always trying to get us to stay after school and practice our scenes with her. Most teachers just want to go home, you know? Not Pagorski. She can’t get enough.”
“Some teachers,” I said sharply, “are very passionate about their work.”
“That’s what she is,” said Kevin. “Real, real
passionate
.”
“Sounds like she’s a little bohemian,” you said, “or a bit of a loon. That’s all right. But other things aren’t all right. So we need to know. Has she ever touched you. In a flirtatious way. Or—below the waist. In any way that made you uncomfortable.”
The squirming became extravagant, and he scratched his bare midriff as if it didn’t really itch. “Depends on what you mean by
uncomfortable
, I guess.”
You looked alarmed. “Son, it’s just us here. But this is a big deal, all right? We have to know if anything—happened.”
“Look,” he said bashfully. “No offense, Mumsey, but would you mind? I’d rather talk to Dad in private.”
Frankly, I minded very much. If I was going to be asked to trust this story, I wanted to hear it myself. But there was nothing for it but to excuse myself to the kitchen and fret.
Fifteen minutes later, you were steamed. I poured you a glass of wine, but you couldn’t sit down. “Tell you what, Eva, this woman went beyond the pale,” you murmured urgently, and gave me the lowdown.
“Are you going to report this?”
“Bet your life I’m going to report this. That teacher should be fired. Hell, she should be arrested. He’s underage.”
“Do you—do you want to go in together?” I’d been about to ask instead,
Do you believe him?
but I didn’t bother.
I left turning state’s evidence to you, while I volunteered to meet Dana Rocco, Kevin’s English teacher, for a routine parent-teacher conference.
Whisking out of Ms. Rocco’s classroom at 4 P.M., Mary Woolford passed me in the hallway with barely a nod; her daughter was no academic bright spark, and she looked, if this was not merely a permanent condition, put out. When I entered, Ms. Rocco had that having-just-taken-a-deep-breath expression, as if drawing on inner resources. But she recovered readily enough, and her handclasp was warm.
“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,” she said, firm rather than gushy. “Your son’s quite an enigma to me, and I’ve been hoping you could help me crack the code.”
“I’m afraid I rely on his teachers to explain the mystery to
me
,” I said with a wan smile, assuming the hot seat by her desk.
“Though I doubt they’ve been enlightening.”
“Kevin turns in his homework. He isn’t a truant. He doesn’t, as far as anyone knows, take knives to school. That’s all his teachers have ever cared to know.”
“I’m afraid that most teachers here have nearly 100 students—”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be critical. You’re spread so thin that I’m impressed you’ve even learned his name.”
“Oh, I noticed Kevin right away—.” She seemed about to say more, and stopped. She placed a pencil eraser on her bottom lip. A slim, attractive woman in her mid-forties, she had decisive features that tended to set in an implacable expression, her mouth faintly pressed. Yet if she exuded an air of restraint, her reserve did not seem natural but learned, perhaps by expensive trial and error.
It wasn’t an easy time to be a schoolteacher, if it ever had been. Squeezed by the state for higher standards and by parents for higher grades, under the magnifying glass for any ethnic insensitivity or sexual impropriety, torn by the rote demands of proliferating standardized tests and student cries for creative expression, teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic, but even Jesus was probably paid better.
“What’s his game?” Ms. Rocco resumed, bouncing the eraser on her desk.
“Pardon?”
“What do you think that boy’s up to? He tries to hide it, but he’s smart. Quite the savage social satirist, too. Has he always done these tongue-in-cheek papers, or are these deadpan parodies something new?”
“He’s had a keen sense of the absurd since he was a toddler.”
“Those three-letter-word essays are tours de force. Tell me, is there anything he doesn’t find ridiculous?”
“Archery,” I said miserably. “I have no idea why he doesn’t get tired of it.”
“What do you think he likes about it?”
I frowned. “Something about that arrow—the focus—its purposiveness, or sense of direction. Maybe he envies it. There’s a ferocity about Kevin at target practice. Otherwise, he can seem rather aimless.”
“Ms. Khatchadourian, I don’t want to put you on the spot. But has anything happened in your family that I should know about? I was hoping you could help explain why your son seems so
angry
.”
“That’s odd. Most of his teachers have described Kevin as placid, even lethargic.”
“It’s a front,” she said confidently.
“I do think of him as a little rebellious—”
“And he rebels by doing everything he’s supposed to. It’s very clever. But I look in his eyes, and he’s raging. Why?”
“Well, he wasn’t too happy when his sister was born ... But that was over seven years ago, and he wasn’t too happy before she was born, either.” My delivery had grown morose. “We’re pretty well off—you know, we have a big house . . . ” I introduced an air of embarrassment. “We try not to spoil him, but he lacks for nothing. Kevin’s father adores him, almost—too much. His sister did have an—accident last winter in which Kevin was—involved, but he didn’t seem very bothered by it. Not bothered enough, in fact. Otherwise, I can’t tell you any terrible trauma he’s been through or deprivation he’s suffered. We lead the good life, don’t we?”
“Maybe that’s what he’s angry about.”
“Why would affluence make him mad?”
“Maybe he’s mad that this is as good as it gets. Your big house. His good school. I think it’s very difficult for kids these days, in a way. The country’s very prosperity has become a burden, a dead end. Everything works, doesn’t it? At least if you’re white and middle class. So it must often seem to young people that they’re not needed. In a sense, it’s as if there’s nothing more to do.”
“Except tear it apart.”
“Yes. And you see the same cycles in history. It’s not only children.”
“You know, I’ve tried to tell my kids about the hardships of life in countries like Bangladesh or Sierra Leone. But it’s not their hardship, and I can’t exactly tuck them in on a bed of nails every night so they’ll appreciate the miracle of comfort.”
“You said your husband ‘adores’ Kevin. How do you get along with him?”
I folded my arms. “He’s a teenager.”
Wisely, she dropped the subject. “Your son is anything but a hopeless case. That’s what I most wanted to tell you. He’s sharp as a tack. Some of his papers—did you read the one on the SUV? It was worthy of Swift. And I’ve noticed that he asks challenging questions merely to catch me out—to humiliate me in front of the class. In fact, he knows the answer beforehand. So I’ve been playing along. I call on him, and he asks what
logomachy
means. I gladly admit I don’t know, and bingo, he’s learned a new word—because he had to find it in the dictionary to ask the question. It’s a game we play. He spurns learning through regular channels. But if you get at him through the back door, your young man has spark.”
I was jealous. “Generally when I knock at the door, it’s locked.”
“Please don’t despair. I assume that with you, just as in school, he’s inaccessible and sarcastic. As you said, he’s a teenager. But he’s also inhaling information at a ferocious rate, if only because he’s determined that nobody get the better of him.”
I glanced at my watch; I’d run overtime. “These high school massacres,” I said offhandedly, collecting my purse. “Do you worry that something like that could happen here?”
“Of course it could happen here. Among a big enough group of people, of any age, somebody’s going to have a screw loose. But honestly, my turning violent poetry into the office only makes my students mad. In fact, it should make them mad. Madder, even. So many kids take all this censorship, these locker searches—”
“Flagrantly illegal,” I noted.
“—Flagrantly illegal searches.” She nodded. “Well, so many of them take it lying down like sheep. They’re told it’s for ‘their own protection,’ and for the most part they just—buy it. When I was their age we’d have staged sit-ins and marched around with placards—.” She stopped herself again. “
I
think it’s good for them to get their hostilities out on paper. It’s harmless, and a release valve. But that’s become a minority view. At least these horrible incidents are still very rare. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”
“And, uh—,” I stood, “the rumors about Vicki Pagorski. Think there’s anything to them?”
Ms. Rocco’s eyes clouded. “I don’t think that’s been established.”
“I mean, off the record. Is it credible. Assuming you know her.”
“Vicki is a friend of mine, so I don’t feel impartial—.” She once more put that eraser on her chin. “This has been a painful time for her.” That was all she would say.
Ms. Rocco saw me to the door. “I want you to give Kevin a message for me,” she said with a smile. “You tell him I’m
onto him
.”
I’d often nursed the same conviction, but I’d never have asserted it in such a cheerful tone of voice.
Anxious to avert legal action, the Nyack School Board held a closed disciplinary hearing at Gladstone High, to which only the parents of four of Vicki Pagorski’s students were invited. Trying to keep the event casual, they put the meeting in a regular classroom. Still the room sizzled with a sense of occasion, and the other three mothers had dressed up. (I realized I’d made terribly classist assumptions about Lenny Pugh’s parents, whom we’d never met, when I found myself scanning for overweight trailer-park trash in loud polyester to no avail. I later discerned that he was the banker-type in chalk-stripe, she the stunning, intelligent-looking redhead in understated gear that was clearly designer label, because it didn’t show any buttons. So we all have our crosses to bear.) The school board and that beefy principal, Donald Bevons, had assumed a set of folding chairs along one wall, and they were all scowling with rectitude, while we parents were stuck in those infantilizing school desks. Four other folding chairs were arranged on one side of the teacher’s desk at the front, where there sat two nervous-looking boys I didn’t know, along with Kevin and Lenny Pugh, who kept leaning over toward Kevin and whispering behind his hand. On the other side of the desk was seated, I could only assume, Vicki Pagorski.
So much for the powers of adolescent description. She was hardly a hag; I doubt she was even thirty. I would never have depicted her breasts as large or her keister as wide, for she had the agreeably solid figure of a woman who ate her Wheaties. Attractive? Hard to say. With that snub nose and freckles, she had a lost, girlish, innocent look that some men like. The drab dun suit was doubtless donned for the event; her friend Dana Rocco would have counseled against tight jeans and a low-cut shirt. But it’s too bad she hadn’t done anything about her hair, which was thick and kinky; it frizzed from her head in all directions and suggested a ditzy, frazzled state of mind. The glasses, too, were unfortunate: The round oversized frames gave her a pop-eyed appearance, inducing the impression of dumb shock. Hands twisting in her lap, knees locked tightly together under the straight wool skirt, she reminded me a bit of let-us-call-her-Alice at that eighth-grade dance immediately after Kevin whispered I-didn’t-want-to-know.
When the chairman of the school board, Alan Strickland, called the little group to order, the room was already unpleasantly quiet. Strickland said that they hoped to clear up these allegations one way or the other without landing this business in court. He talked about how seriously the board took this sort of thing and blathered on about teaching and trust. He emphasized that he didn’t want anything we said that evening leaving this room until the board decided what action to take, if any; the stenographer was taking notes for internal purposes only. Belying the rhetoric of informal chitchat, he explained that Miss Pagorski had declined to ask her attorney to be present. And then he asked Kevin to have a seat in the chair placed in front of the teacher’s desk and to just tell us in his own words what happened that afternoon in October in Miss Pagorski’s classroom.
Kevin, too, recognized the importance of costuming, and for once was wearing plain slacks and a button-down of the customary size. On command, he assumed the shuffling, averted-eye squirm that he’d practiced in the archway of our den. “You mean, like, that time she asked me to stay after school, right?”
“I never asked him to stay after school,” Pagorski blurted. Her voice was shaky but surprisingly forceful.
“You’ll get your chance, Miss Pagorski,” said Strickland. “For now we’re going to hear Kevin’s side of things, all right?” He clearly wanted this hearing to proceed calmly and civilly, and I thought,
good luck
.