“You haven’t heard the end of this,” Jerry had snarled, looking directly at her, as they stood at the bank of elevators after the hearing. When an elevator arrived, Jerry Lozatto had refused to ride down with her and Ann Rosen, who had defended the school.
“What more can he do?” Rue asked Ann.
“Nothing. Forget it,” said Ann. “He’s a macho asshole.”
The phone rang again. Henry rose to answer it for her, but Rue had already picked it up, and this time it was Georgia.
I don’t understand you,” said Henry. They were staring at each other over the coffee cups. They did not yet know—although they would by two in the morning—that Rue was so upset she had accidentally made caffeinated coffee. “She’s joined a band called Stool Sample and you think it’s great?”
You’re right, you didn’t understand me.”
“I heard you say, ‘That’s great, dearie.’” He imitated her phrasing, deadly accurate.
“She has not joined the band, she’s singing back-up vocals for them in the studio. She’s being paid a hundred and twenty dollars an hour, that’s what I said was great.”
“Why didn’t you say this whole thing is infantile, which is the truth?”
“Because it’s not what I think.”
“Stool Sample? You think that’s funny?”
“I think it’s a little funny…”
Henry picked up a magazine that was lying beside his place, rolled it into a cylinder, and hit the table with it. Wham! The coffee cups jumped, and Rue flinched.
“She could have sung at the Met! She could have sung Tosca, if she just had the…the…character, the maturity…you think you put enough sugar in that?” he asked suddenly.
Rue stopped what she was doing and was surprised to find a spoon in her hand, halfway between the cup and the sugar bowl. How much had she put in? Her hand didn’t seem connected to her brain.
She put the spoon down. “You have a mean streak, you know it? It’s not as wide as your father’s, but it’s plenty bitter to the person who bites into it.”
Henry got up and began clearing the table. After a while he said, “You didn’t know my father. When you met him, he was dead.”
“I know what you’ve described.”
“Maybe I lied. Maybe he was an old sweetheart, and I was just a whiny little wuss, complaining.”
“I doubt it.”
“Why am I the only one who has to apologize for his parents? What about your mother, with her cooking sherry bottles full of vodka, too hung over to be polite half the time and everyone pretending she has the flu?”
“Be careful, Henry. There are things that shouldn’t be said.”
“Like what? Like I’m lucky it’s sugar with you and not vodka?”
She looked at him steadily for a long beat. He held her gaze. “Yes,” she said. “Like that.”
“She tells you she’s singing for a group called Stool Sample, and you…what is that? What is that, Rue, except saying ‘Up yours’ to you, and to me, and to everything we’ve tried to do for her?”
“It’s life! It’s an adventure! She’s full of hope, and full of a sense of the ridiculous, and I’m glad she’s finding work doing what she wants to do. I’m grateful she’s being paid so well. If I got a hundred and twenty dollars an hour I’d be a billionaire.”
“You’re grateful that you don’t have to decide whether or not to send her money, because that’s the deal breaker.”
“I didn’t realize it was a deal breaker, Henry. But now that I know it, I’m very grateful. Yes.”
“You know what’s wrong with illegal drugs? You know what the real hidden cost is? Twelve-year-olds…ten-year-olds can make a living on the street, dealing drugs, working for drug dealers. If you have a kid in trouble who can say, ‘Fuck you, I’m gone, I’ll make my own living,’ you can’t help them! You have no control, you can’t keep them home until they can grow up enough to make decent decisions….”
“Henry, I love you,” said Rue wearily. Though there was not much love in her voice.
“I know you do. So what?”
“I think you’re having some kind of midlife crisis, and I don’t know why. Georgia is not ten, she is not dealing drugs, she is just making decisions for herself that you wouldn’t make for her. But it’s her life.”
“Don’t tell me one more time whose life it is. It’s our life. All three of us. I’m tired of being talked to as if I’m out of it. I feel as if I have two teenaged assholes in this family instead of one.”
“Thanks, Dad,” said Rue.
It was the second night in a month that they slept in separate bedrooms.
Margee Malko, usually so little and trim and perky, was weeping in Rue’s office. She had come in to school in an old turquoise jogging suit, as if she hadn’t the energy to get dressed. Her face bare of makeup, Margee looked older than usual, with crow’s feet and laugh lines and a little sag along the jawline all on view. Rue, feeling a hundred years old herself and as if her insides were made of lead, waited for Margee to stop crying. Rue had slept a total of five minutes the whole night, after the fight with Henry. She didn’t know if Henry had slept; he had dressed and left the house before she came downstairs.
Glenn Malko, age thirteen, was being suspended from eighth grade for the afternoon. He was sitting in the outer office now with Emily, reading a back copy of the yearbook and fooling with his shoelaces. He had drawn an obscene cartoon in the lab book of a new girl, Louise Chang. Louise had complained to Rosemary Fitch, the science teacher, that she was being sexually harassed, and rather than give him a lecture or detention, which would have made him more glamorous to his peers, Miss Fitch had made Glenn clean out the guinea pig’s cage. This greatly amused Kenny Lowen and Glenn’s other pals. At recess, passing Louise and Leila Bathhurst near the volleyball court, he reportedly had said, “It’s just like you bitches to get me in trouble.”
Margee, far from defending or justifying Glenn, as Rue half expected her to do, had more or less imploded.
“I don’t know why I can’t seem to keep a grip on myself these days,” she said, shaking her head, blowing her nose, and making an unsuccessful attempt at a girlish laugh. “I’m the proverbial Water Works.”
Rue, feeling like an assassin, finally managed to ask what she always did in such situations: “Is there something going on at home I should know about?”
Margee shook her head no. “I just can’t cope with Glenn.” And she wept again.
“Is he difficult with you?”
“Awful. It must be my fault…he says terrible things about women. He teases Chelsea all the time. He goes into her room and hides her stuff, just to upset her. He took twenty dollars from my purse last week.”
“How do you know?”
“The maid saw him do it. When I confronted him, he said he hadn’t and that Gladys probably did it herself. I tried to tell him this is a woman who’s supporting four children, I tried to tell him that it was cruel to blame her for something that could cost her her job.”
“Did he understand?”
“No. At least, if he did he didn’t let me in on it. I wish you’d expelled that damn Kenny Lowen, Rue…we all do. There’s a petition going around.”
Rue sat silent. “How is Glenn getting along with Terry?”
“He’s better with Terry. He doesn’t dare be rude to his face, anyway.”
Rue wished she could think faster. She knew she should be making an articulate speech at this point about actions and consequences. She couldn’t comfort Margee, she couldn’t even offer the sop of suggesting family therapy. Terry would refuse…what could he do? Go into therapy and lie to the therapist about having an affair, with his wife and children looking on? That would help a lot.
Finally, she said, “When Glenn gets home, he is going to spend the afternoon writing me a letter, describing what he must do—and not do—to make it through the rest of the year. With the understanding that if he can’t live up to the standards he
describes, he will be expelled.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” said Margee.
Oh no you don’t, Rue thought. Or at least, you won’t once you’ve thought about it. And even if you do, Terry won’t. You’ll be back here within the week feeling that I’ve betrayed you. One way or another, this will end up being my fault, because I didn’t expel Kenny Lowen, because Ann Rosen is a friend of mine and I suggested her for the Board….
“I’m glad you do,” said Rue. “Margee—if I could suggest, no television this afternoon or tonight?”
“Oh right,” said Margee. “Of course.” She got up and went out to collect her criminal.
Reluctantly, Rue put in a call to Chandler to explain why Glenn was on probation, and ask for his support, especially important since the child was the son of a Board member.
Rue had been working on the budget for the upcoming year all through the long weekend of Martin Luther King’s birthday. She had to present it on Thursday at the January Board meeting, and she was trying desperately to arrange enough of a surplus to give the teachers a six-percent raise.
She had a $90,000 budget allotment for capital improvements that she couldn’t seem to whittle down. Late last year a leak was discovered from the underground gasoline storage tank that had been used for thirty years for fuel for the school’s ancient buses, the truck, and the maintenance equipment. What at first had seemed an annoying unexpected $10,000 expenditure for testing and patching had ballooned to $50,000, mandated by the county water district to have the tank removed, followed by inspections of the water table to be made by an expensive engineering firm but paid for by the school, for the next three years, at $10,000 a pop. Worse, during the digging to remove the tank, which had completely destroyed the brand-new parking lot, it was discovered that the pipe system that carried water to Home and out to the bus barn was not only not copper, it wasn’t even plumbing pipe. It was electrical conduit, apparently installed in the years of shortage immediately after World War II. Rue was extremely afraid that the whole plumbing system, absent the pipe that served the new gym, would prove to be conduit and have to be replaced.
It was frustrating to be spending such huge sums on buried pipe when the sixth-grade teacher couldn’t afford the subscription to National Geographic that her son wanted for his birthday. On the other hand, Rue was glad of an excuse to stay closeted with the computer through the long weekend. She and Henry were treating each other with elaborate consideration, hoping that through good manners and ordinary kindness they would gradually return to the sense of affection and safety they had always provided for each other. She was afraid to ask Henry how it was feeling to him; for her, it wasn’t working. She felt far from him, and wary.
She was in the business manager’s office going over the capital expenses when Emily appeared at the door.
“Rue…there are three fifth-grade moms here to see you…they say it will just take a minute.”
She looked at her watch. “Who are they?”
“Barbara Wren, Inez Cort, and Corinne Lowen.”
“Do you know what it’s about?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Emily. “I had lunch with Malone.”
“Mrs. Trainer,” said Rue.
Emily nodded, trying to look grave.
Barbara Wren, who was immense, took up most of the couch in Rue’s office. Corinne and Inez perched on straight-back chairs. Inez Cort, who had an amazing cantilevered bosom, always seemed to Rue to have to fight gravity to remain upright. She and Corinne Lowen were unlikely allies of Barbara Wren, given that, along with Lyndie Sale and Malone Dahl, their daughters had done their best to make Nicolette Wren’s life a hell the entire year. But Rue could tell from the body language that allies they were. This was not a dispute coming to her for mediation, this was an offensive line.
Barbara Wren began. “I’m an atheist,” she said. “My father was a Communist.”
“Religion is a matter of family values,” added Inez. “It’s fine to be a Christian or a Jew or an atheist, I don’t care, but it’s our choice what we teach our children about religion.”
Corinne Lowen nodded vigorously.
“I’m with you so far,” said Rue.
“There was a short, or something, in the heater in the fish tank in Mrs. Trainer’s room,” said Barbara Wren.
“Over the weekend. It might have been during the wind storm Sunday night.”
“Or not, it doesn’t matter,” said Corinne.
“When the children came in this morning all the little fishes were cooked,” said Barbara.
“They were floating on top, we don’t know if they cooked or died of cold.”
“Cooked,” said Barbara Wren. “It wasn’t that cold in the room. If the heater had just gone off the guppies at least would have lived.”
“But they all died,” said Rue, seeking clarification.
“Nicolette said she offered to scoop them up with the net and flush them down the toilet, but Mrs. Trainer made a fuss, embarrassed her, and said they should think of their poor little souls.”
“I’m sorry, fish do not have souls,” said Inez Cort. “It’s like…come on.”
Barbara laughed a big, gritty, contemptuous laugh. “She’s some kind of animist? Their Little Souls?”
Rue was beginning to hope that this one idiotic remark was all there was to the incident.
“She made them all go outside and stand in a circle, while one of the boys dug a burial pit.”
“Why a burial pit?” asked Inez scornfully. “Why not individual graves?”
“Why a boy to dig the pit?” asked Corinne Lowen. “Girls can dig just as well as boys.”
“Then she produces, I swear to god, an Episcopal prayer book, and conducts a mass for the dead,” said Barbara.
“Mass? Isn’t that Catholic?” asked Inez.
“Episcopalians are Catholics who don’t believe in the pope,” said Barbara, the atheist. “Henry the Eighth and all that.” The allusion seemed lost on the other two.
“How do we know it was an Episcopal prayer book?” said Rue, who was wishing she could roll under her desk and howl with laughter.
“Nicolette asked to borrow it,” Barbara explained. Oh good, thought Rue. A little atheist Torquemada. “Then she came down to the lunchroom and told me.” It was probably a 1928 prayer book, thought Rue wildly. I bet that’s what they object to.
Unfortunately, they had a tighter grip on the situation than that. “The woman is a nutcase,” said Barbara Wren.
Rue carried mugs of steaming tea into Mike’s office at the end of the day and closed the door.
“Let’s just stay in here and never come out,” she said. “And don’t answer the phone, I don’t want any more bad news.”
“I have something to tell you,” Mike said.
“I know that tone. Stop, I can’t take it. You’re leaving.”
“No,” said Mike, “Bonnie’s leaving.”
“Bonnie! No!” There was a pause, in which they stared at each other, very unhappy. “Why? I thought she was happy here.”
“She’s very happy, but she doesn’t have a green card. She’s Canadian.”
“But…she’s been here for years. She took her degree here…. Don’t we ask for proof of citizenship? Or work papers? I feel like Zoe Baird.”
“Apparently Bill doesn’t, for part-time employees.”
“But he does get the TB test, the fingerprints, the child abuse statement?”
“Yes.” Rue relaxed a little. But grew unhappier as she began to think about having Bonnie go. They sat in silence, drinking their tea.
“Did you know about this?” Rue asked.
“I’ve known for a while.”
“There’s something about her,” Rue said. “She’s a comforting presence. She gives people the sense that they’re helping her, keeping her company, as they quietly dump out things they wouldn’t tell anyone else on earth. I look out and see her perched on a wall or leaning against a tree, and ther
e’s something about her. Children trust her. Animals trust her. I trust her.”
Mike nodded.
“Oh, hell,” said Rue.
Rue had a talk with Catherine Trainer about the separation of church and state and the unwisdom of sharing her private beliefs, however deeply felt, on a multicultural campus.
“This is a secular school whether we like it or not,” she said. “We teach ethics, and manners, but not religion.”
“There’s no line between them!” Catherine protested. “And a funeral is a cultural experience.”
“It may not be easy to draw the line,” said Rue, “but it is very easy to tell which side of it you were on.”
“When we were studying ancient Egypt and the gerbil died, we prayed to Osiris and buried it like King Tut. You didn’t see anything wrong with that.”
“I’m not going to debate this, Catherine. It’s not that complicated. I want you to review the Faculty Handbook cover to cover, and from now on adhere to it to the letter, or your contract will not be renewed.”
Rue had said the fatal words. It sounded in the room like a thunderclap, and Catherine’s face took on a terrible surprised expression, as if a dear friend had pulled a gun and shot her. She had finally heard the message and the pain in her face was something Rue felt it would take years to forget. She left the office in tears, and left Rue near tears herself.
From that moment on, whenever she left her office Rue kept coming upon members of the faculty in clumps on the campus, talking excitedly. They would break apart or turn away when they saw her. A few of the unflappable ones, like Evelyn Douglas, and Janet TerWilliams, whose husband was rich, maintained their good will toward her. But by and large a climate of fear for their jobs and resentment against Rue settled in with the January rains.
Mike Dianda still had the faculty’s confidence, and he became the conduit for their grievances. They believed they were witnessing a witch-hunt by selfish parents with no concern for Catherine’s length of service and no willingness to see past their spoiled children’s complaints to the many fine and strong qualities that Catherine offered as a teacher.