“I think you’re pretty gold, too.”
She begins braiding my hair back into place, but I can tell by the halfhearted tugs she’s not doing a very good job. The strands will be loose and fall out. Normally, this would make me twitch. I’d pull her hands away and do it myself. But tonight her hands feel like they are doing more than braiding my hair imperfectly. Tonight they feel like she is putting me back together.
A little less perfect than I was before.
IT HAS BEEN A LONG DAY.
Ms. Lindsay undresses in her tiny apartment and slips on her extra-fluffy pink terry-cloth bathrobe. It smells like Downy fabric softener with lavender infusion. She bought it on sale at Target. She read somewhere that the scent of lavender is supposed to relieve stress. She lifts the sleeve to her nose and takes a deep breath, then waits.
Nothing happens.
She’s not surprised. It never does.
The day started like any other. After her shower, Ms. Lindsay dressed in her usual pencil-cut skirt (a gray pinstripe), a silk blouse (violet), and her new black shoes (from the clearance shelf at the Bloomingdale’s outlet store). She ate her usual breakfast of a scrambled egg, a slice of toast with apricot jam, and a cup of tea with milk. She flossed and brushed her teeth, inspecting her gums carefully for any overlooked bits. She locked the door and double-checked the handle to make sure all was secure. Then she got in her car and drove to work.
The nausea she always felt as she neared the school welcomed her on Fourth Street and grew in strength when she reached the school parking lot. She cut the engine and sat, breathing slowly and deliberately until her stomach calmed.
“Today will be better,” she whispered to herself as she did every morning. “Today will be better,” she lied.
It hadn’t been better.
The entire day was a struggle all the way up to her very late lunch period, which she spent alone in the quiet teachers’ lounge reading a book so she didn’t have to talk to anyone.
It didn’t help. She did not want to go back into her classroom even after a break from it. She stood outside the door clutching the handle, talking herself into entering.
She breathed in slowly and deeply, like always.
Just one more class to go, Lynnie.
You can do this.
She squeezed the handle more tightly. Her heart was racing. Sixth period: the worst class by far. The worst. She had thought the creative writing class would attract the brightest students, but instead it was mostly filled with the ones trying to meet their writing requirement. The ones who assumed creative writing would be the easiest way to do that.
She closed her eyes. No amount of positive self-talk seemed to help. She must go back in. She must. But opening the door was always so hard.
She knew she should be grateful to have a job at all. It took her two years of subbing before she finally landed this one. She couldn’t risk losing it. She turned the handle slowly, pushed the door forward as if it was a giant boulder blocking the opening to a dark cave. She felt, for a moment, like Polyphemus returning to a cave of sheep. It wasn’t the first time she felt like a monster.
The smell always hit first. The staleness of the room. Perfume, stinky shoes, gum breath. She always choked on it just a little. She always almost cried. In fact, today she did cry. Just a few tears. She quickly wiped them away and hurried to her desk, where, thankfully, she had a lavender-scented candle she could inhale the smell of — though, like the fabric softener, it never really seemed to help. It only masked the other nasty smells about to engulf the room, and only barely.
She had ten minutes before class started. Ten minutes to get herself together.
She skimmed through the graded papers on her desk with her green pen, making final notes and grammatical corrections. She always uses a green pen instead of red. She hates red. It’s as if the teacher is trying to draw blood on the page. Ms. Lindsay believes green represents growth and possibility.
Not all of the students are terrible writers. Some even have promise. It’s their behavior that drives Ms. Lindsay crazy. Their disrespect. Their insistence that she is trying to replace their old teacher, even though they couldn’t be more wrong.
When she interviewed with the principal and he told her about the situation, it’s true that she began to have second thoughts. The teacher who preceded her had not only died, as she’d first been told, but had committed suicide. This added a whole new layer to the horror of it all, as she’d heard he was fairly young. The principal used the words tragic and mystery quite a lot to describe what had happened. He had been in his thirties, much older than young Ms. Lindsay, but still too young to die. A well-loved teacher. No one could understand what happened. No one could understand why. Such a tragedy. Such a mystery.
Having worked here now for almost three months, Ms. Lindsay was starting to understand what might have put him over the edge, and it scared her. She’d already had a taste of hopelessness that comes with not being able to make a difference. The despair, knowing some of your students just won’t go far, if anywhere.
She’d started that summer. This gave her plenty of time to set up her classroom and develop her own curriculum, though Mr. Weidenheff’s was clearly preapproved and she was told she was welcome to use his planners as a base. When she first walked into the classroom, she felt an overwhelming sense of unease. She was sure she could feel Mr. Weidenheff’s spirit there, watching her disapprovingly. Someone had been in the room to remove his personal things from the desk, but so much remained. Too much. The corny posters on the wall trying to convey how cool it is to BE A READER. The neatly arranged bookcase in the back of the room stuffed with books that, what? Weren’t in the school library? Were Mr. Weidenheff’s favorites? She thought morbidly that a dead man had touched them all. His now-dead hands had arranged the desks. Had — she shuddered — written the words that remained on the whiteboard. Someone had forgotten to erase them. Or, perhaps, been unable to bring themselves to do it.
“You can make a stack of all the things you’d like to get rid of,” the principal told her. “And we’ll take care of them.” He said this sadly, and she knew he hoped she wouldn’t get rid of a thing.
She’d spent the next week moving everything to the center of the room and starting fresh. First the bookcases. She was fond of many of the books she found there and took care to rearrange them in alphabetical order by author, not title, as he had done. She wondered for days whether or not to cross out the letters written in black marker across the head of each book, WEIDENHEFF. When she’d suggested the library take them, it turned out they were all duplicates. “No room,” the librarian had said sadly. But Ms. Lindsay got the sense that it had more to do with the morbid name at the top of each book than space.
She wished she had her own books to add to the collection. But the only ones she had were from her adolescence, and they were too precious to share. She couldn’t possibly risk having a student take one home and not return it. She couldn’t. Did that make her worse than Mr. Weidenheff? She hoped not. Someday, when she could afford to buy duplicates, she would. She made a promise to herself at that very moment.
She moved the desk to a different corner and changed where the phone and computer were placed. She scrubbed each drawer and top, even though they were empty and mostly clean. She put the student desks in a new configuration. She took a deep breath and erased the board. She took down all the tacky posters. She swept and mopped the floor herself. And when she was done, she stood in the doorway and imagined how the students would see the room. Would it feel different enough? Had she removed all the traces of Mr. Weidenheff? She glanced at the bookcase again and saw his name all along the tops of the books. Over and over again. A reminder. What could she do about that, though? She couldn’t possibly throw the books away or blacken out his name. No. But . . . what? She had no idea who else to ask. So she left them. Books were the one thing she knew the value of.
She’s calculated that it would be three more ye
ars after this one before the students who knew Mr. Weidenheff would graduate, and then it wouldn’t be so hard to be the “tragically dead teacher’s replacement.” Sure, new students would know of him, through older siblings or school folklore. But none of them would have had him for a teacher. None of them would be able to make the comparisons that all the current students made. None of them would have the same loyalty.
Each month, she slowly replaced a few more Weidenheff books on the bookcase with ones she bought herself. She found most of them used online for fairly cheap, and sometimes she bought three or four at a time to save on postage. It would take time, but someday all the books would say LINDSAY in green marker instead of WEIDENHEFF in black. Already, if you looked across the room at the shelves, you could see pretty green letters mixed between the lines of black, and this made her happy. Hopeful.
She tried to cling to that just before sixth period, as she waited for her class to begin filtering in, but her thoughts drifted to the weekend.
It started with a date on Friday night that she would rather not remember, and dinner at a bar on Saturday night with the one teacher she’s managed to befriend, Betsy Yung. It was Betsy’s idea to go have some fun. Betsy has been teaching computer classes at Irving for over six years. She took Ms. Lindsay under her wing when she’d been hired to take over poor Mr. Weidenheff’s classroom. Both are single and, she knows, the subjects of gossip and speculation about whether or not they’re a “couple.”
The rumor also includes a love-triangle conspiracy with Ms. Sawyer, the gym teacher. But Betsy assured Ms. Lindsay that Ms. Sawyer is straighter than a flagpole and it just figures the idiots in this school would assume the female gym teacher must be a “lesbo.” Betsy’s word, not Ms. Lindsay’s.
There’s nothing to the gossip.
Ms. Lindsay finds Betsy dull and crass and not anything like the type of woman she would fall for, if she were to fall for a woman. Which she isn’t likely to do, no matter how repeatedly dull and disappointing her dates with men have been so far.
No. Ms. Lindsay has come to accept that she will most likely always be single, short of some miracle. Let the gossipers gossip.
She and Betsy often sit at lunch in the teachers’ room, sighing frequently and heavily at the thought of going back to the Little Devils, as Betsy calls them. Betsy hates them, clearly. With Ms. Lindsay, it isn’t so much hate as . . . well, what is it, actually? Resentment? Fear? She can’t decide.
Betsy informed her that Mr. Weidenheff wasn’t even all that popular. Especially with the loser-track kids (Betsy’s horrible term for the students no one expects to go to college). But his death has made him a hero somehow. This was all very dangerous territory. A suicide was never to be given too much focus at a school, for fear others would see it as a way of getting attention. Did the administrators really think anyone was dumb enough not to realize that you’d never know about the attention if you were dead? Apparently not. In any case, no one is allowed to discuss “the incident.” If a student brings it up, teachers are not to talk about it in class but must tell the student to go to the school counselor to discuss it in private. As if any student would do that. They want to talk about it together. But rules are rules. Maybe that’s why they hate her. Because Ms. Lindsay, if nothing else, is a rule follower.
So it’s hard. Very hard. To stand in front of a group of teenagers who don’t respect her because she refuses to buck the system by talking about the elephant in the room. Or, more precisely, the ghost.
And it’s not just that. She’s heard the boys whisper about what she’d look like without her pencil skirt and about her just low-enough blouse to give them a sense that there’s something worth seeing underneath. They admire her, but through resentful eyes. This doesn’t help her status with the girls, who certainly know Ms. Lindsay’s body is “hotter” than theirs if only because it’s unattainable, which just makes the boys more interested. Why are adolescent boys so turned on by lesbians? It is a mystery Ms. Lindsay doesn’t care about enough to solve.
Somehow, in the students’ eyes, it seems the only thing Ms. Lindsay has to offer besides inappropriate fantasies and assumptions is a passing grade to help them on to their next miserable year. You don’t have to show much respect to earn that. Which is why she doesn’t get any. Instead, she finds female condoms left in her desk drawer. The occasional DYKE left on the whiteboard when she arrives in the morning. And the nearly impossible task of having a meaningful class discussion about literature or writing. It is torture.
No one likes to be hated.
It isn’t what Ms. Lindsay envisioned when she decided to be a teacher. She thought the experience would be like her favorite old movie, To Sir, with Love. The students would adore her and confide in her. To Miss, with Love. She would inspire them to be more than the nobodies the rest of the world felt sure they’d become.
But no. That’s not how it turned out at all.
She had talked about all of these things over dinner at the bar with Betsy on Saturday night, which surprised her. Normally Betsy did the talking. But the glass of sauvignon blanc had made Ms. Lindsay chatty. And for whatever reason, Betsy, up to that point, sat quietly and listened.
“Do you think things will ever change?” Ms. Lindsay asked her friend.
Betsy shook her head. “They never change. Every year it’s more of the same. Ungrateful little fuckers.”
She hissed the last too loudly, and a couple sitting nearby gave them dirty looks. Betsy glared at them, then laughed. A small speck of lettuce spewed from her mouth and landed on Ms. Lindsay’s unused fork.
Ms. Lindsay turned the fork over.
She thought of the conference she’d been forced to attend two weekends before in order to earn professional development points. The speech had been about crowd control and getting a handle on your classroom. The talk seemed meant for elementary-school teachers, and Ms. Lindsay’s mind had wandered through most of it, knowing the techniques would just get more laughs from her class. “This is the ‘quiet down’ symbol,” the woman said, looking seriously at the audience. She held up her hand and made what Ms. Lindsay was sure was the Girl Scout pledge sign. “When I do this, the students know it means to be quiet and listen.”
Ms. Lindsay had closed her eyes and pressed her temples with the same three fingers. Her head had started to throb.
“If only they’d listen to me,” Ms. Lindsay confided to Betsy. “But it’s all I can do to keep them quiet, much less absorb anything I have to say.”
“Tell them to shut the fuck up,” Betsy said, sending another speck of green jetting across their tall bar table. Why were tables at bars always so uncomfortable? They were sitting on tall stools, and Ms. Lindsay felt that one more glass of wine and she’d be at a very high risk of toppling to the floor.
“That’s what we should all do,” Betsy continued. “You need to tell them who’s boss, Lynnette.”
Ms. Lindsay cringed. She hated the sound of her full name. No one called her that. They called her Lynne. Lynne Lindsay. It was a ridiculous name, but Lynnette was even worse. Unfortunately, Betsy thought her name was amusing and old-fashioned and couldn’t seem to stop saying it. Now it was her little joke, which Ms. Lindsay never thought was funny.
“I swear one day I will,” Betsy said. “I don’t care if I get fired.”
“Yes, you do,” Ms. Lindsay said, bored of hearing it all again. “We all do. That’s why nothing changes.”
“You’re such a downer,” Betsy said. She pushed the rest of her salad to the middle of her plate with her fork and scooped up the last heaving mouthful.
Ms. Lindsay sipped her expensive glass of wine. It was a label the waiter had suggested. Kim Crawford. He had winked at her when she took her first sip. Ms. Lindsay wondered blankly who Kim Crawford was. She imagined Ms. Crawford’s life was far more interesting than her own.
As soon as he left the table, Betsy said their waiter was gay. Why, Ms. Lindsay wondered, were so many people obsessed with
people’s sexuality?
“By the way,” Betsy said, leaning closer, “you haven’t told me how your date with the janitor was last night.” She made a disapproving face.
When Ms. Lindsay had told her that he’d asked her out, Betsy had roared with laughter. This response alone made Ms. Lindsay tell him yes.
That was a mistake.
Ms. Lindsay shrugged. “I don’t really want to talk about it,” she said. She really did not want to relive that night.
“Oh, come on,” Betsy had pressed. “Did you hook up?”
“No! God, no.”
“Where did you eat?”
“A little Italian place in the city.”
“Well, that sounds romantic.”
Ms. Lindsay had thought so, too. When he told her where to meet, she’d immediately looked up the restaurant’s website and scoured the menu.
They’d sat at a tiny table with a red-and-white-checked tablecloth. Ms. Lindsay thought it mostly was romantic, at least at first. She kept thinking about the scene from a Disney movie she’d loved as a child. What was it? There were dogs, she remembered. And they were eating pasta at a little table, just like this. It had a checkered tablecloth too. But they were eating from the same bowl. Spaghetti. And at one point they were eating from different ends of the same piece, and as they kept slurping the string, their snouts got closer and closer to each other and then they kissed. Or touched noses. Dogs don’t really kiss. Lady and the Tramp. That’s what it was called.
Thinking of the dogs, Ms. Lindsay had looked up at Jared French’s nose and wondered what it would be like to kiss him. His nose wasn’t too bad. Not too big. It probably wouldn’t get in the way. She wasn’t sure about the beard though. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it, even though it was thin and seemed carefully trimmed. It was almost too trimmed. And it was . . . well, it was weird. He had what was sort of a goatee, but he also had a little square patch of hair under his bottom lip. It bothered her.
She recalled the term soul patch and wondered if that’s what it was. She studied him, wondering about his soul. But she was having trouble getting past the beard. She’d never kissed someone with a beard. Actually, she hadn’t had much practice in the kissing department at all lately.