The reaction in the ranks was equal parts embarrassment and amazement. You'd think I'd suggested orgies in study hall. There was some hysteria when I got to the visual aids. "Look, there's nothing funny about a condom," I said, pretending to be puzzled by their laughter. "It's a piece of equipment with a practical purpose, like a..." Only the most unfortunate analogies came to mind. Shower cap. Tea cozy. "Like a glove," I said, settling for the cliche. I turned from the blackboard and narrowed my eyes. "If you think this thing is funny, you should see the ridiculous-looking piece of equipment it fits over." The guys widened their eyes at each other but shut up. I was getting the hang of this.
"Miss," said Raymo. They'd never learned to call me Codi.
"What is it?"
"You're gonna get busted for this."
I finished my diagram, which looked somewhat more obscene than I would have liked. I brushed my chalk-dusty hands on my jeans and hopped up to sit on the tall lab bench that served as my desk. "I know some of your parents might not be too thrilled about this field of study," I said, thinking it over. "I didn't get permission from the school board. But I think we'd better take a chance. It's important."
"Okay then, tell us something we don't know," said Connie Munoz, who had even more holes punched in her left ear than Rita. I wondered if this was some kind of secret promiscuity index.
"Shut up, Connie!" said Marta. (Pearl studs, one per earlobe.) "My dad would kill me if he thought I knew this stuff."
"What you do is between you and your dad," I said. "Or not. Whatever. But what you know is my business. Obviously you don't need to put everything you know into practice, just like you don't have to go spraying the fire extinguisher around because you know how to use it. But if your house is already on fire, kiddos, I don't want you burning down with it just because nobody ever taught you what was what."
Raymo shook his head slowly and said again, "Busted." He drew the laugh he wanted.
"You know what, Raymo?" I asked, tapping a pencil thoughtfully against my teeth.
"What?"
"It doesn't matter a whole lot what the school board thinks." This dawned on me forcefully as I said it. I understood this power: telling off my boss at the 7-Eleven, for example, two days before I left Tucson. The invulnerability of the transient. "There's nobody else to teach this course," I said. "And I only have a one-year contract, which I wasn't planning on renewing anyway. I'm not even a real teacher. I've just got this provisional certification deal. So that's the way it is. We're studying the reproductive system of higher mammals. If I'm offending anybody's religion or moral turpitude here, I apologize, but please take notes anyway because you never know."
They were completely quiet, but toward the end of the day you really can't tell what that means. It could be awe or brain death, the symptoms are identical.
"Miss?" It was Barbara, a tall, thin, shy student (ears unpierced), whose posture tried always to atone for her height. She'd latched onto me early in the semester, as if she'd immediately sniffed out my own high-school persona. "You aren't coming back next year?"
"Nope," I said. "I'm outta here, just like a senior. Only difference between you and me is I don't get a diploma." I gave them an apologetic smile, meant for Barbara especially. "It's nothing personal. That's just my modus operandi."
The kids blinked at this, no doubt wondering if it was a Latin name they needed to write down.
"Your modus operandi is the way you work," I said. "It's what you leave behind when you split the scene of a crime."
At Grace High I taught Biology I, Biology II, two study halls, and I also pinch-hit an algebra class for a fellow teacher who was frequently absent on account of a tricky pregnancy. My favorite class was Biology II, my seniors--Raymo and Marta and Connie Munoz and Barbara--but on that day I had a mission and didn't discriminate among souls. I gave everybody the lecture on baby prevention. Barbara, who was in my study hall and also in the algebra class, got to hear it three times, poor child, and I imagine she was the least in need.
It surprised me as much as the kids, this crusade, and I suspected my motives; what did I care if the whole class had twins? More likely I wanted to be sure of a terminal contract. After the last bell rang I erased the blackboard and stood for a minute sharing the quiet with the bones of my Illinois compatriot, Mrs. Josephine Nash. Our day was over. She gave me her silent, wide-jawed smile. Here was a resident of Grace who had never hurt me in childhood, didn't make me rack my memory for her name (she wore it on her pelvis), had thrown no spitballs at me nor asked for extra credit, and didn't suggest that I belonged in Paris, France, or a rock 'n' roll band.
From the back of the room I could hear the frogs clicking against the sides of their terrarium, constant as a clock: up and down, up and down, exposing soft white bellies. This time next year there would not even be fish or frogs in the river; these particular representatives of the animal kingdom were headed for extinction. Whoever taught this class would have to write Carolina Biological Supply and order those stiff preserved frogs that smell of formaldehyde, their little feet splayed like hands and their hearts exposed.
I stood over the terrarium and peered down into it from above, like a god. The fish hung motionless in its small lake. Droplets of condensation were forming on the underside of the glass top. Getting ready to rain in there. I'd grown fond of this miniature world, along with the kids, and had added my own touches: a clump of bright red toadstools that popped up in Emelina's courtyard, and a resurrection fern from the cliff behind my house. The terrarium was like a time capsule. I think everybody was trying to save little bits of Grace.
I slid the glass to one side, hating to disrupt the ecosystem but needing to feed the fish. The humid smells of mud and moss came up to meet my nose, and I thought of Hallie in the tropics. What would she do about these troubles if she were here? Well, stay, for one thing, whereas I wouldn't. I had come here with some sense of its being the end of the line, maybe in a positive way, but I found I had no claim on Grace. Seeing it as "home" was a hopeful construction, fake, like the terrarium. I'd deal with Doc Homer insofar as that was possible in one year, and then I'd rejoin Carlo, or think about another research job; I had no specifics in mind. My future was mapped in negatives. Next year I could be anywhere but here.
I'd told Hallie about my bold, ridiculous little deposition on the pH of the river, and a few days later I'd had to follow up with the news of the river's getting dammed--questions of pH being entirely academic. I felt humiliated. Eventually she wrote back to say: "Think of how we grew up. You can't live through something like that, and not take risks now. There's no getting around it." She was admonishing me, I guess. I should have more loyalty to my hometown. I wasn't brave; I was still trying to get around it. A good citizen of the nation in love with forgetting. I pelleted the surface of the water with goldfish flakes. In nature there are animals that fight and those that flee; I was a flighty beast. Hallie seemed to think I'd crossed over--she claimed I was the one who'd once wanted to dig in and fight to save the coyote pups. Emelina thought I'd been ringleader in campaigns to save stewing hens. In my years of clear recall there was no such picture. When Hallie and I lived in Tucson, in the time of the refugees, she would stay up all night rubbing the backs of people's hands and holding their shell-shocked babies. I couldn't.I would cross my arms over my chest and go to bed. Later, after my second year of med school, I'd been able to address their external wounds but no more than that.
The people of Grace would soon be refugees too, turned out from here like pennies from a pocket. Their history would dissolve as families made their separate ways to Tucson or Phoenix, where there were jobs. I tried to imagine Emelina's bunch in a tract house, her neighbors all keeping a nervous eye on the color coordination of her flowerbeds. And my wonderfully overconfident high-school kids being swallowed alive by city schools where they'd all learn to walk like Barbara, suffering for their small-town accents and inadequate toughness. It was easy to be tough enough in Grace
.
Well, at least they'd know how to use condoms. I could give them that to carry through life. I settled the glass lid back over the terrarium and turned out the lights. I would be long gone before the ruination of Grace; I had a one-year contract. Now I'd made sure of it.
Rita Cardenal called me up on the phone. She hesitated for a second before speaking. "I don't think your old man has all his tires on the road."
"It's possible." I sat down in my living-room chair and waited for her to go on.
"Did you tell him about me? About dropping out?"
"Rita, no. I wouldn't do that."
Silence. She didn't believe me. To Rita we were both authority figures--but at least she'd called. "My father and I aren't real close," I said. "I go up to see him every week, but we don't exactly talk." A pregnant teen could surely buy that.
"Well, then, he's got a slightly major problem."
"What did he do?"
"He just sorta went imbalanced. I went in for my five-mouth checkup? And he said the babies were too little, but he was all kind of normal and everything?" She paused. "And then all of a sudden he just loses it and gets all creeped and makes this major scenario. Yelling at me."
"What did he say?"
"Stuff. Like, that I had to eat better and he was going to make sure I did. He said he wasn't going to let me go out of the house till I shaped up. It was like he just totally went mental. He was using that tape measure thing to measure my stomach and then he just puts it down and there's tears in his eyes and he puts his hands on my shoulders and kind of pulls me against his chest. He goes, 'We have to talk about this. Do you have any idea what's inside of you?' I got creeped out."
I felt dizzy. There was a long pause.
"Miss? Codi?"
"Rita, I'm really sorry. What can I tell you? He's losing his mind. He's got a disease that makes him confused. I think he was really just trying to do his job, but he got mixed up about what was the appropriate way to talk to you."
"I heard that. That he had that disease where you go cuckoo and turn back into a baby."
"Well, that's not quite the way I'd put it, but it's true. Occasionally rumors are true."
"Is it true you're really a doctor?"
I looked out my east window at the wall of red rock that rose steeply behind the house. "No," I said. "That isn't true. Did he tell you that?"
"No." She paused. "Well, yeah. He said something a real long time ago, that you were in medical school or something. But not this last time. I heard it from somebody else, that you're a doctor and Doc Homer's dying and you're going to take over."
"Take over?"
"Take over being the doctor for Grace. They said you already saved that baby down at Dona Althea's restaurant."
"Oh, Jesus Christ."
"Look, people say stuff, okay?" Rita said. "This town is full of major mouths. It's just what I heard."
"I'm only here till the end of the school year, so you can tell whoever's spreading that gossip they're full of shit."
"Okay. Sorry."
I regretted snapping at Rita. "It's okay," I said. "It's not your fault. I'm not used to living in a place where everybody's into everybody else's business."
"It's the bottom level, isn't it? My mom found out I was pregnant from a lady that works at the bank. Mom goes, 'What is the date today?' and the lady goes, 'The fourteenth. Your daughter will be due around Valentine's Day, won't she? I had a baby on Valentine's Day.'" Rita paused for my opinion.
"Yeah," I said. "It's the bottom level."
"Uh-huh. Mom told me after that she had to tear up three checks in a row before she could make one out right. Like that was my fault."
I set out to find Doc Homer the minute I hung up the phone, but it took me a long time to track him down, and my energy for drama kind of petered out. First I went to his office in the basement of the old hospital, up on the plateau--it was four o'clock on a Wednesday and he should have been there. But Mrs. Quintana said he'd gone downtown to check on old Mr. Moreno's oxygen machine because it was making a noise, and then he was going to stop at the grocery to pick up some pork chops. It had been half an hour so I figured I'd catch him if I skipped Mr. Moreno and went straight to the grocery, but I got there too late. The grocer, Mrs. Campbell, said he had come there first, having forgotten he needed to go to Mr. Moreno's. He'd stood for six or eight minutes in canned goods, as if lost, and then it came to him. Mrs. Campbell told me this with a sort of indulgent wink, as if he were Einstein or something and you could forgive it. He'd left for the Moreno' house, but first was going next door to the pharmacy to pick up Mr. Moreno's emphysema medication. I skipped the pharmacy and headed for the bright pink Moreno house, thinking I'd catch him as he came out and we could walk together back up the long hill, past the hospital, to his house. So the war on germs in Grace was being waged by a man who got lost in fruit cocktail. There was a clinic in Morse, just across the state line, and according to Mrs. Quintana a lot of people now drove over there. Disloyally, she had implied; she adored my father. She noted primly that they'd have problems with their state insurance forms.
On my way to the Morenos' I stopped at the P.O. There was a letter from Hallie, which I would save for later. I liked reading them alone, with time for filling in whatever she might leave out.
It turned out the Moreno visit had been unexpectedly brief, and he'd left already. The oxygen machine had stopped making noises all on its own. I walked back up the hill alone. By the time I finally did get to Doc Homer's kitchen his pork chops were cooked and he was just sitting down.
He looked surprised, almost pleased, his face turning up from the table, and he offered to put something on the stove for me but I told him I wasn't hungry. I sat down at my old place at the table where I'd passively refused food a thousand times before. But tonight it made me sad to watch him eat his solitary supper--he'd cooked one serving of an entire balanced meal, vegetables and everything. This amazed me. When Carlo went on his work binges at the hospital, I skipped meals notoriously; I was lucky if I hit all the food groups in four consecutive days. But I supposed Doc Homer had gotten the knack of solitude. For him it wasn't a waiting period, it was life.
"I hear you were kind of hard on Rita Cardenal," I said.
He flushed slightly. "Do you know her? She's expecting twins. She needs to take better care of herself."
"I know. She was one of my students till day before yesterday. She's a good kid."
"I'm sure she is," he said. "But she is rather hard to talk to. I wrote down a prescribed diet for her, which she wadded up and threw in the wastepaper basket before she left my office. She said she would eat what she pleased, since her life was already a totally creeped scenario. That is a quote."
I smiled. "Kids here have their own minds, I'm finding out. I hadn't really expected that."
"They do."
"My students talk like a cross between Huck Finn and a television set."
He seemed slightly amused. I knew I was avoiding the issue. I took a deep breath. "I think I've let things go too long. I should have talked to you a long time before now. I don't think you're doing too well, and I feel like I should be taking care of you, but I don't know how. We're the blind leading the blind here. All I know is it's up to me to do it."
"There is no problem, Codi. I'm taking an acridine derivative. Tacrine. It keeps the decline of mental functions in check."
"Tacrine slows the decline of mental functions, if you're lucky. And it's experimental. I'm not stupid, I did a lot of reading in the medical library after you told me about this."
"No, you are not stupid. And I am fine."
"You always say you're fine."
"Because I always am."
"Look, I'm only here till next summer. We need to get things squared away. What are you going to do when you can't keep up your practice anymore? Do you think you're being fair?"
He cut up his cauliflower, running the knife between the tines of his fork. He dissected it into neat,
identical-sized cubes, and did not answer me until he was completely finished. "I'll do what I've always planned to do, I'll retire."
"You're sixty-six," I said. "When do you plan to retire?"
"When I can no longer work carefully and capably."
"And who's going to be the judge of that?"
"I am."
I stared at him. "Well, I think there's some evidence that you're slipping in the careful and capable department." My heart was beating hard--I'd never come even close to saying something like that to him. I didn't wait for an answer. I got up and walked into the living room. It was the same, piles of junk everywhere. I was startled by something new: a dozen women's shoes from somewhere, arranged in a neat circle, toes pointed in. Superficial order imposed on chaos. It's exactly how I would have expected Doc Homer to lose his marbles. I felt dizzy and unsupported by my legs or Doc Homer's floor, and I sat down. I couldn't even tell Hallie this. She would come home.
The old red-and-black wool afghan, Hallie's and my comfort blanket in old times, was still folded tidily on the sofa. In the months I'd been here it hadn't been unfolded once, I was sure. I took the thick bundle of it into my arms and walked back into the kitchen and sat down, this time in Hallie's chair, the afghan pressed against my chest like a shield.
"I'm taking this, if you don't mind. I'll need it when it gets cooler."
"That's fine," he said.
I stared at him for another minute. "Do you know what people in Grace are saying?"
"That the moon is made of green cheese, I imagine." He got up and began to wash the dishes from his small meal. A large and a small skillet, a vegetable steamer, a saucepan, plate and glass, spoons and knives of various sizes, and the Piper forceps. Including the pot lids, around twenty separate utensils to cook and consume maybe eight ounces of food. I felt obsessive myself for counting it all up, but it seemed to be a symbol of something. The way he'd lived his life, doing everything in the manner he thought proper, whether it made sense or not.