After all, I have always been very capable when it comes to ending a relationship, or asking someone who loves me to go. Just ask my ex-husband. There are at least three--maybe more--men in this world who believe that I am at once among the crueler women who walk on this planet and the quickest to throw what they deemed as happiness aside.
The Rich Lessards and Glenn Fraziers of the community did challenge me, however, and I have never been good at acquiescence. I have never, ever done something simply because somebody wanted me to, or because it was the easy way out. And because they couldn't tolerate Dana's presence in my life, I decided that she was more than welcome to be a part of it. No matter what.
Despite the reality that she lacked a penis.
Despite my belief that I wasn't gay, and that somehow that mattered.
Despite the fact that I was coming in the night with an apparently endless assortment of sex toys.
The paper was a single sheet in the midst of a stack of stapled exams, the conclusion of our small unit about the Canadian maritime provinces, and on it was a four-color image printed from the Internet and a pair of words scribbled in red crayon: Fucking perverts. The image was a photograph of a naked transsexual--pre-operative, in that the person had a penis and breasts--standing before a dated couch and the sort of home entertainment center you buy at a big discount department store. It looked like a photo from an Internet personals ad. Or, perhaps, from the transsexual's home page.
The words had been scrawled over the picture, in letters that were thick and bold. It wouldn't have taken a handwriting expert to conclude that they had been written in anger--each letter looked like an obscenity--but I know I couldn't decide whether they had been written by one of my eleven-year-olds or by someone considerably older. Someone who was trying to disguise his age.
The fact that the final word was plural made it seem particularly odious and hurtful, acknowledging, as it did, the notion of Dana's and my consensual involvement. The missing words? You're. Both.
The full insinuation? You're both fucking perverts.
Yet the worst part wasn't the accusation. It was the primitive, childlike drawings that had been added to the photograph with that very same crayon: A dagger poised at the transsexual's penis, with the sort of dashes and chit marks surrounding the blade that a child might use to convey sharpness. A second knife aimed at the transsexual's breasts--or, perhaps, at her heart. I couldn't decide.
I stared at the words and the pictures for a long time, numbed, sometimes only dimly aware of the photograph that shared the page with them. When I heard the sounds of people in the hall, I slipped the paper under my desk blotter and sat back in my chair and tried to think.
I remembered my students had placed their tests in a small in-box at the front of my desk as they filed past it on their way to my classroom door just before noon. Together, we had then filed down the long corridor to the cafeteria for lunch. That meant the exams had been in the tray for close to three and a half hours before I picked them up and thumbed through them at the end of the day. Moreover, they'd been alone in my classroom for almost an hour during lunch.
And so I decided it was possible that the paper hadn't even been left there by one of my students. Clearly it hadn't been placed in my in-box by either the student whose exam was below the slur or above it. That would have been much too obvious. And when I thought about the two students whose work surrounded the paper, I concluded that neither could have been responsible in any event. Neither was the type to surf the Internet in search of this sort of smut, or the kind of person who would--who could--call someone a pervert. Neither was the type to use the word fucking.
Certainly there were other students in my class who had that capability. But not those two.
Nevertheless, I thought back to the moment the kids had filed past my desk with their tests: I'd been standing by my door at the time, I'd been a good fifteen feet away. I certainly hadn't been watching them carefully as they shuffled past it, dropping their tests in the tray that I kept at the front for this purpose. And so while I was sure it hadn't been either of the students whose exams were nearest the image, it was clear that virtually any other student could have slipped the paper in the pile at almost any point. I wasn't paying close attention. I really wasn't paying any attention at all.
But then once more I would convince myself that it couldn't possibly have been one of my kids in the first place. It just couldn't. Someone else had to have wandered into my classroom during lunch and placed the paper there. A teenager, maybe. Perhaps even a grown-up. It was, in fact, probably left there by someone who barely knew me. Maybe someone who'd never even met me: The parent of a student in another grade or the other sixth-grade class, perhaps. Someone who had just seen me in the hallways. Or in the auditorium. Or walking to and from school.
I wanted to throw the paper away, simply excise it from my life, but I didn't dare. It seemed important to keep it. If I thought I would have had any support at all from Glenn Frazier, I would have shown it to him that very moment. He was, after all, my administrator. My principal. But I didn't have his support, and I had a sense that sharing it with him that afternoon would only make things worse.
Of course, I also didn't want to defile my house by bringing the picture home. And so once the people in the hallway had long passed--once the world had grown so quiet that I heard only a distant ringing somewhere in my ears--I pulled the image from beneath my desk blotter and placed it in one of my lower desk drawers. Then, for the first time in my entire career, I locked my desk.
I knew eleven-year-old Jeremy Roscoe had a crush on eleven-year-old Renee Wood, and I knew Renee and her friends would talk about nothing but kissing when they had lunch in the cafeteria.
I knew Audrey LaFontaine wished she were one of Renee's friends, but Renee's family had money and Audrey's did not, and so a friendship between the two had been unlikely since the pair left preschool. But I knew also that Audrey was smart and Audrey was loved, and Audrey would do fine without Renee's friendship, assuming she ever learned not to care.
A tall order, that. But, I hoped, one that was possible.
I knew Schuyler Brown wrote surprisingly lovely poems in the writing journals I had the kids keep, even if they were often about his in-line skates and his snowboard. I knew he wrote one about his grandmother after she'd died that was particularly sweet: She was buried in a plot beside a hydrangea tree, and he likened the blossoms to lawn darts and pink cotton candy.
I knew Ethan LaPree thought he looked fat in the turtleneck shirts his parents made him wear, the sleeves often damp from his nose. For a week in December I'd placed a Kleenex box by his desk--he sat in a row against the wall with a counter--but he clearly preferred the cotton on his cuffs.
"It isn't a cold," his mother insisted. "He's allergic to airborne indoor pollutants."
Oh, but Mike Deering did have a cold. He had had a cold throughout the fall and into the winter, and the fact that his boots had holes didn't help. I pretended I was his Secret Santa and bought him a new pair, but he wore them only one time that I know of.
I knew Sally Warwick was reading and understanding the same sorts of novels that sat on my nightstand and was capable of polishing off the "young adult" books she was expected to read in a day. I recommended at least a dozen books to her that autumn and winter, and took her to the public library in the village three times to show her my favorite authors.
I knew Sam Reynolds was beginning to grasp algebra and starting to solve binomial equations.
I knew no one was able to concoct more rules for Capture the Flag and permutations for Red Rover, Red Rover than Lindsey Lessard. I knew that, in spite of her father, she was a delightful little person with a smile that was infectious. She had, even then, movie-star eyebrows.
I knew Dan Hedderigg didn't like me, in part because his parents didn't like me, but also because I insisted he learn how to spell.
I feared Roberta Beaudet would be pregnant before she could
drive: I knew she was in desperate need of affection, and no teacher alone could fill the giant maw in her heart.
Brian McCurdy, too. I don't mean, of course, that I feared someday soon he'd be pregnant. Rather, I worried that his need for human kindness would simply drive him to extremes. He was one of too many children in a trailer in a five-acre floodplain of decrepit mobile homes some people called the Tin City. There wasn't a father to be found in the bunch. Brian's dad, too, was long gone.
But Brian was what we have come to call a "good kid." He worked hard. He played well with his friends. And when he wasn't paying attention to me, he was at least drawing harmlessly in his salt-and-pepper notebook in the back of the class.
I knew my students well, and I cared about all of them. Some, in a teacher's way, I probably loved.
Not long after Carly had left for Bennington, two days after I found the picture of the transsexual in my in-box, I met with Glenn Frazier and Evelyn Newman over lunch. Evelyn was chairperson of the school board, a group of five adults from the community who worked with school administrators and teachers on a variety of issues: Staffing. Extracurriculars. The budget that would be presented for approval each year at the town meeting in March. The group was paid a modest stipend for their work, but not nearly enough, in my mind, to justify the aggravation that came with the job, or the amount of time it demanded. They were elected officials, which meant they actually ran for their jobs every other year.
We met in Glenn's office, eating egg salad sandwiches that came from the cafeteria. I had taught Evelyn's son, Tim, now a freshman in high school, and there was an even chance that I would teach her daughter, Casey, the following year. I'd liked Tim a lot, despite his mistaken belief that sixth-grade boys looked good with the back of their hair shaped into a rattail, but I could always count on him to stroll to the chalkboard and tackle even the most complex open-ended math problems, and I had always assumed that he'd liked me. I had every reason to believe that his mother was fond of me, too. Consequently, I'd been looking forward to the meeting, because I thought it was possible that Evelyn might be able to rein in board member Al Duncan and convince the rest of the group to take my side in what had the potential to become a particularly nasty clash with disgruntled parents.
I was wrong.
"Isn't my job already thankless enough, Allison?" Evelyn asked early in the meeting, and I heard annoyance in her voice. Evelyn was a Realtor, and usually her people skills were pretty good. She had to be deeply irked to try not to hide it.
"No one ever likes the budgets we present," she went on, "no one's ever pleased with what we spend on special ed. It's either too much or too little. The classroom computers are too expensive for some people, they're too old for others. Every year it's something. Every year."
She paused to nibble her sandwich and took a small, inconsequential mouthful that demanded she barely part her lips--what Carly and I had called a rabbit bite when she was a little girl. She was holding the triangle of half-sandwich with both hands.
"Well, the good news, then, is that this issue doesn't have anything to do with budgets or computers or special ed," I suggested. I hoped I sounded helpful.
"Really, I thought I'd seen everything," she said, ignoring me. "I must admit, I was leaning against running again this spring, but now my mind is made up. Firmly made up. There is no way on God's green earth I want to deal with this lunacy for another term."
"Am I the problem, in your opinion? Or is it Al and the parents who've been calling you?"
"Oh, please," she said.
"Really, I don't know."
"My answering machine wouldn't be filled every single night with irate moms and dads if it weren't for you! It's not just Al--come on. I have a petition with over seven hundred names on it in my hands. Seven hundred."
"So you think I'm the problem. Not their intolerance."
"Tolerance is an awfully squishy notion, Allison," Glenn said. "It's meaningless, completely meaningless." He'd finished his sandwich and was wiping his fingers on a brown paper napkin. "I'd wager you couldn't find two people on this planet who are tolerant of the same things. God, my wife thinks I'm way too tolerant of our new puppy. A really delightful black Lab, but dumb as a doorstop. He chewed her slippers to rags yesterday, and I just wasn't that upset. After all, the dog's only three months old."
"This isn't about dog tolerance," I said.
"Of course it isn't. But people tolerate different things. You'd probably be much more tolerant of your daughter if she came home from college with a nose ring than I'd be if mine pulled the same stunt."
"Please, Glenn--"
"Seriously, hear me out. All of those parents who you just called intolerant? If their sons and daughters decided to get married at nineteen, they'd be much more tolerant than you would if your daughter told you tomorrow she was going to get married in the spring. I'm quite sure of that. Tolerance has a tendency to drift, no matter how hard we try and anchor it with political correctness."
"There are some standards. Some basics."
"Gotcha!" he said, sitting forward in his chair and slam-dunking his napkin into his wastepaper basket.
"Gotcha?"
"Yes! There are some standards," he said, "there are some basics. And you've crossed a line! Maybe in a perfect world it wouldn't matter who you lived with. But in this world it does. In this world there are people who don't want their children's teachers living with people like Mr. Stevens. Are they intolerant? Maybe. Unreasonable? Perhaps. But I have to tell you: Most of the world wouldn't think so."
I looked at Evelyn to see how she was reacting to Glenn's little speech. She was nodding her head just the tiniest bit, while continuing to gnaw at the white bread around her egg-yellow mush.
"First of all, I don't live with a mister," I said, and then took a deep breath to try and calm myself. I was growing furious, but I was still just this side of rational behavior. "Secondly, I'm getting really tired of defending my lifestyle."
"This isn't about sexual preference," Evelyn said.
"I didn't say it was," I said.
"You used the word lifestyle. Isn't that one of those euphemisms for gay?"
"No! Since when does gay even need a euphemism?"
"Personally, I think gay itself is a euphemism--and my brother-in-law's gay," Glenn said.
"Look, Allison, I would defend you completely if this were just about being a lesbian. I don't care if you like women or men, really I don't. But it's not about that."
"Though I'm sure for some parents that, too, is a factor," Glenn added.
"What concerns me is that this Dana person is something else. A transvestite, a transsexual, I won't make that distinction--"
"How can you not? It's like not making the distinction between carrots and peas! They're both vegetables, yes, but otherwise they're completely different!"
"They're not that different!"
"But they are different!"
"Look, I really don't care, I simply--"
"You have to care!"
"Allison," Glenn said, and when he first said my name, I assumed he was about to try and calm me down. Looking back, however, it's clear that he saw I was on the edge and with a single thought he could send me over the side. "The man had his penis cut off. You're romantically involved with a human being who voluntarily had his penis cut off."
"That's enough!" I said, and I slammed my hand down hard on his desk--so hard that my palm started to sting and the bones in my fingers started to hurt. Some pencils rolled onto the floor. "How dare you?"
"How dare I what?"
"How dare you suggest that what I do with my life is wrong!"
"I didn't!"
"Right now, locked in a drawer in my desk, is one of the most childish, disgusting, and mean-spirited--really, mean-spirited--things I've ever seen! Someone printed a picture off the Internet, defaced it, and then left it for me in my in-box! And now I have to listen to this? How dare you?"
I was trembling, and both
Evelyn and Glenn grew quiet. Finally Evelyn asked, her voice surprisingly wobbly, "What is it? The thing in your desk?" She ran her hands over her skirt, as if she were flattening the sheets on a bed.
"It's a picture of a naked person," I began, and I realized that my breathing had begun to sound like a whimper: an endless chain of short little pants and gasps, with an occasional, embarrassing wheeze. I sat back in my chair to compose myself, and then I described for them the photo and the drawings and the insult that had been scribbled upon it.
When I was through, Evelyn told me she was sorry that I had had to endure such a thing, and Glenn said no one should ever be treated that way. For an instant, I actually began to believe that the photograph might, in the end, turn out to be a godsend. For whole seconds I imagined the incident was going to rally the school board and my principal and the community behind me. Perhaps, I thought, I had turned some sort of corner. Maybe, I fantasized, by March Dana and I would be playing bridge with the Fraziers, or military whist with the Newmans. Hadn't stranger things happened? Didn't stranger things happen every day?