“What happened?”
“Half the faculty quit. Then the Board fired Todd. Then half the parents withdrew their kids. The school lost its niche in the ecology, to adopt Chandler’s point of view; all the normal kids went off to a rival school and liked it fine, and now Todd’s school is running with about a fifth of the enrollment they had had, as a school for children with learning disabilities.”
“I bet Chandler’s father brought him up to be a real Man, don’t you? I wonder if he was breast-fed. I bet he wasn’t; I think I’ll ask him.”
“Please do,” said Rue. “I think it’s important for Men to be close to each other.”
“Me too,” said Henry.
At the November Parents’ Council meeting, Emily Goldsborough brought up the subject of the Annual Giving campaign. There was hot debate. Some parents felt embarrassed by it because they couldn’t afford to give. Some of the long-term parents were still smarting because once Rue had addressed a financial appeal to the grandparents who had attended Grandpersons’ Day. This had unexpectedly turned up the fact that some of the medical or real estate or software millionaires who sent their children to Country had parents of their own who lived in trailers. The grandparents would have liked to give to the school, but they couldn’t, and they didn’t for a minute enjoy having this brought home to them.
Rue was pointedly given to understand that it was confusing enough, in this land of opportunity, to encourage and enable your children to succeed, only to see them succeed so far as to be virtually living on a different planet from you, not to mention making you and your own experience incomprehensible to your Gold Coast grandchildren. The whole mess was thoroughly aired again at the November Parents’ Council meeting, and Rue apologized again.
The parents, mostly moms, then got into a long discussion of the value of scholarships, and found that they were good. Rue ventured to mention the importance of trying to raise faculty salaries. Most, though not all, came to agree that it was wrong for your child’s teacher to be paid an annual wage that was less than the cost of your car. So, in the end, a fairly strong consensus was reached that Annual Giving should continue and discussion moved on to the subject of the auction. Its theme: the Merry Nineties.
Chandler was thoroughly put out when he heard about the meeting. He did not for a moment believe that it was not Rue who had opened the Annual Giving discussion to the parents. He felt undercut, he said, completely unsupported by her, taking a complex issue of Board business and airing it in public. Furthermore, he was turning the pressure up again about Catherine Trainer. At this year’s Indian Overnight, two children were almost hurt when Nicolette Wren’s father, helping Catherine with the Sweat Lodge, chose the wrong kind of rocks to heat and one of them exploded.
“It was Catherine who nearly lost an eye,” Rue pointed out.
“That’s her problem. What I’m concerned about is her judgment.”
“It was Buster Wren’s poor judgment. Catherine told him what kind of rocks to get, and he didn’t admit he couldn’t tell the difference.”
“She was in charge. It was her fault.”
“I am in charge, so it’s my fault,” said Rue. “As it happens, no one was hurt, though I agree, somebody could have been. We go through our Doomsday Preparedness drill before every outing, and now we will add this to the list. What do we do if war breaks out? What do we do if someone gets appendicitis? And what do we do if the rocks blow up?”
“Do you think you’re being funny?”
“Not at all. I assure you. Last year, the upper school science trip was unable to get back from Santa Catalina because there were riots in Los Angeles and no one could get to the airport. We were prepared. Blair Kunzelman rerouted the whole trip through the Ontario Airport in Orange County because in our Doomsday List, we asked, “What if we can’t use the LA Airport?”
“Do you know,” said Chandler, “that three different times this year, when I’ve approached people about joining the Board, I was asked if I know why we don’t fire Mrs. Trainer?” Rue felt cold. She had not known this, and unfortunately, she could believe it. Silence seemed like the only safe response.
After a moment Chandler added, “If you’re going to insist on the Annual Giving thing, you’re going to have to give in somewhere else.”
“I will when I can, Chandler. There are times I can’t.”
“You work for me, you know.”
“All too well.”
“Well…think about it.” He brushed the crumbs of his tuna fish sandwich from his knees, rose from the couch in Rue’s office, where they had been closeted for lunch, and walked out. Rue could have told him before he left that he had a piece of lettuce between his teeth, but she was too annoyed.
As Rue’s birthday approached, her first in nineteen years without Georgia in the house, she began to suspect that Henry was up to something.
“If you give me a surprise party, I’ll file for divorce,” she said one morning at breakfast.
Henry looked distressed. “But you loved the party Janet TerWilliams gave Carl.”
“Carl likes surprises. I don’t. I have enough of them all day long.”
Henry looked sad, and when he trudged off to work, she had a feeling he had a few phone calls to make.
For her part, she arrived at school that day to discover that a school parent, Jerry Lozatto, the local BMW dealer, whose daughter had complained that Bobbie Regan teased her too much, had concealed himself in some bushes on campus, waited for eleven-year-old Bobbie to come along, leaped out, and attempted to beat him to death. You could hear the yelling halfway to town.
Fortunately, the PE teacher jumped in and wrestled Mr. Lozatto to the ground. Rue arrived just in time to see this edifying sight, a member of her faculty rolling around in the dirt outside the science lab, trying to get a hammerlock on the father of the Pink Fairy of last week’s middle-school pageant. The fifth- and sixth-grade boys were entranced, especially at discovering that Mr. Kunzelman was so inept at wrestling. The girls were stealing fascinated looks at the expression of horror on poor Patsy Lozatto’s face.
“Say Uncle!” Blair Kunzelman was yelling, though it was by no means clear that he was winning.
“Get off me, you asshole!” was Mr. Lozatto’s considered response.
“Would you both get up, please?” said Rue.
After some more shoving and grunting, they did. They were both red in the face and covered with twigs and dirt and stains from dried chokecherries.
“I was just trying to teach this kid some manners when this asshole…” Mr. Lozatto suddenly uncoiled and gave Blair a shove as Blair began to yell, “You were killing him! He’s eleven!”
Rue put her hand on Mr. Lozatto’s arm and drew him away from Blair, who continued to glare and stand poised, fists clenched.
“When this asshole jumped me,” Jerry Lozatto went on.
“Mr. Lozatto…I think we should talk about this in my office….”
Mr. Lozatto made one more halfhearted lunge at Blair, who jumped backward. “I don’t want to talk, there’s nothing to talk about!” Rue was walking him away from the children. Mike Dianda, who was standing behind her to be sure she didn’t get hurt, began to herd the children off to class.
Rue walked Jerry Lozatto to the parking lot, talking reasonably about making an appointment to talk everything out, but he was still blustering and quacking and erupting in cries of how he was just teaching some manners to that little Mick from Hell.
Rue then spent the morning on the phone with the boy’s parents, trying to reassure them.
“He has guns, you know,” cried Angela Regan. “He’s insane. He wears a handgun strapped to his leg. Ann Rosen went in to buy a car from him, and he showed it to her.”
Rue thought she wouldn’t be surprised if the Regans took Bobbie out of school, but instead, just after lunch, she received word that it was Patsy Lozatto who was being withdrawn and, furthermore, that the Lozattos were suing the school for “failing to pro
vide a safe environment for their daughter.”
Since the conversation about surprises, Henry had made no more mention of her birthday, and Rue began to think he might really have forgotten it, which would be another kind of surprise and not a good one. On the morning of the day, he failed to wish her happy birthday when he kissed her good morning. He had gone off to work whistling.
When Rue arrived at school feeling rather sad, and missing Georgia keenly, there were flowers on her desk from Mike. Cards and cookies and grubby little pieces of candy were handed to her all morning by various preschoolers, which raised her spirits. Then she went out to collect attendance, and Janet TerWilliams’s second grade presented her with a book they had been working on for a week. It was dedicated to Mrs. Shaw on her Birthday, and was a book of proverbs. Janet had given each child the first half of a maxim, asked each one to complete it, and to draw an illustration to go with it. Rue sat down in the class and examined each page while the author of it squirmed and beamed. The children all crowded up to her when she had finished, wanting to know which one she had liked the absolute best.
“I can’t choose at all, I have so many favorites,” said Rue. This was a lie, however. She had two clear favorites. Ashby McCann advised, “Don’t cut off your nose…to see what’s inside,” and Chelsea Malko wrote, “You can lead a horse to water…but you can’t make him walk backwards, unless you pull the heels just right.” “Thoughts to live by,” she told the children.
Back in her office, she studied the day’s agenda that Emily clipped to her door each morning. Then she went out to the front office.
“Didn’t I have a meeting with Kenny Lowen’s parents at two o’clock?”
“Mr. Lowen couldn’t make it. They’re coming in Monday.”
“Oh. Well, what about the TGIF?” Every so often the faculty had a potluck Thank God It’s Friday party, to which Helen Yeats brought sweet-and-sour meatballs, Catherine Trainer brought Jell-O mold with marshmallows, Blair brought beer and wine, and others brought brownies and cakes and spicy chicken wings and fruit plates and cheese. Sometimes there was a special occasion, sometimes it was just to gather together and howl. Today, Rue had rather thought it might be at least a little bit in honor of her birthday.
“Oh, we’re going to do it in two weeks,” said Emily, who was rooting around in her drawer with a look of annoyance. “Somebody took my staple remover!”
“Ah,” said Rue.
Emily began searching another drawer while explaining, “Pat Moredock has a root canal at four, Cynda is gone for the weekend, and Rosemary Fitch has to take her dogs to the vet.”
“I see,” said Rue. She went back to her office and sat down. She almost never had an afternoon with a clear calendar, and today of all days, she didn’t really want one.
The back door of her office opened, and Henry stepped in.
“Hello, dearie,” she said, feeling silly, because she was suddenly struck by how handsome he was. “Who let you out of your cage?”
“I’ve cured everybody. There are no more sick people in California. I came to see if you were free for lunch.”
“I was just going to go down to the kitchen. Do you want to come? I think there are tacos.”
“Sure. Or, no…why don’t you come with me? We could try something new.”
“Something that will only take forty minutes?”
“Sure. Maybe we’ll eat hot persimmons off the sidewalk.”
Rue located her purse and left a note on her door saying she’d be back at quarter of one.
Henry took her to a new restaurant at the top of the tallest building in Seven Springs, which meant six stories up. It was called the Cafe on the Square. They had a great view of the vistas of malls and parking lots and houses and lawns that stretched out across what had so recently been cattle country. There they ate risotto and drank red wine. Rue kept worrying about the time, but Henry (who was a stickler about punctuality) seemed unconcerned, and Rue had to admit there was nothing specific she had to be back for. One of the art teachers, Pat Moredock, had lately shown signs of hysteria, claiming that Marilyn Schramm had stolen all her rulers and that no one respected her subject, the proof being that even Rue had yanked Lyndie Sale, Jennifer Lowen, and Malone Dahl out of class without asking and never apologized. Rue had planned to meet with her, but it could wait.
After lunch she settled happily into the front seat of Henry’s car and felt so content that it took her a minute or two to realize that he was not driving toward school; they were headed north out of town, toward the freeway.
“Henry…I’m already late!”
“No, you’re fine.”
“Henry!”
Looking pleased with himself, he drove faster, heading north. Rue watched his profile as he studiously avoided looking back.
“Am I in the grip of a wicked conspiracy?” she said at last.
Henry smiled more broadly, though he was trying not to.
“You and Emily have been plotting!”
“You’ve been driving her crazy…every time she got your calendar cleared for the afternoon, you’d schedule something else.”
“And I was feeling so sorry for myself that they postponed the TGIF! Where are we going?”
“Oh, we’re just going to drive until we fall off the edge of the world.”
It took about four hours for them to get to Big Sur.
“Oh, Henry!” Rue said.
The road was densely lined with huge, crooked Monterey Pines. It curved in S-hooks along cliffs above bays cut deeply into the shoreline. The water far below was pale and roaring. Often the beaches were filled with surfers in wet suits, although the air was already quite cool, and the water must have been frigid.
“We’re going to Esalen,” said Henry. “We’re going to sit in a big hot tub with strangers and talk about our sex life. And eat brown rice and gruel and get rolfed, and learn the Primal Scream.”
“We are not.”
“I’ve packed my bell-bottoms. And sandals. I’d have grown back my Fu Manchu mustache, but I thought you might suspect something.”
“You’re lying. We passed Esalen five minutes ago.”
“Did we? Damn.”
Henry had made reservations at a resort his doctor friends had told him about, high in the redwoods overlooking the sea on one side and deep fog-filled ravines on the other. It had a four-star restaurant and miles of paths curving through rock gardens and Japanese tea gardens and drought gardens of cactus and euphorbia, and exotic shrubs and flowering trees. Their bedroom had a fireplace and the biggest bed they had ever slept in together. Henry had packed a suitcase for Rue and had done quite a creditable job. He’d remembered socks and underwear, and she was especially touched that, given a choice of what he most liked to see her wear, he had chosen an old, soft, gray cashmere dress that she’d had as long as she’d known him.
“Is this your favorite?” she asked as she unpacked her suitcase, madly curious to see what he had thought of and what not.
“It is, actually. At first I couldn’t find it.”
She had been worrying lately about the Yummy Mummies in the parking lot in their tiny tennis dresses, their big shirts over leggings, that Oh-I-forgot-to-put-on-my-pants-look, and wondered if Henry wished she were more in vogue.
Over dinner, they didn’t say a lot. Henry had never looked more handsome, Rue thought, carrying twenty more pounds than when they had met, and his blond hair at last beginning to go gray. She was thinking of the year they met, when she was a senior and he was starting med school. He was famous for wild behavior, but with her, he’d been serious and trusting. He talked about joining the Peace Corps. Rue had been with him when he learned that his father had died and had gone with him to the funeral. She had been unprepared for the depth of his grief. They had stood side by side at the graveside on the shores of the Chesapeake…. Rue had been wearing this same gray dress.
Henry’s mother, whom Rue met for the first time that weekend, was very proper, very
ineffectual. She had no reserves of strength to share with her children and had retired, with apologies, halfway through the reception that followed the burial, although the house was full of neighbors and relatives.
Henry’s only sister, Sybil, a freshman at Bennington that year, had come home for the funeral but managed to stay hors de combat in the matter of social responsibility. Henry’s father had been sick for some time, with complications from heavy smoking, and had serious pains from angina, arthritis, and possibly gout. Sybil had borne a lot of the burden of catering to him during her last years of high school. She delighted Henry by coming to the funeral in a black miniskirt and boots with her hair down to her butt and her eyes lined with kohl. During the reception she cleaned out her father’s medicine chest and, over the course of the weekend, took all the pills.
Rue realized she was smiling.
“What are you thinking about?” Henry asked.
“Sybil. Floating around the house the weekend your father died, and your mother sighing over how well Sybil was taking it, and how she’d always had inner resources.”
“I was pissed she even took all the codeine.”
“And now you can write your own prescriptions. Sybil always thought that’s why you went to med school.”
“You were wearing that dress.”
Rue noticed. “We were so young.”
“I always felt my life started when I met you,” said Henry. Rue, surprised by a rush of feeling, reached for his hand.
“And now we’re starting over again,” she said.
“I’m expecting it to be easier this time. I don’t have to get over being such an asshole.”
“It won’t require a whole new wardrobe.”