THE CHILDREN RUSTLED AND murmured in their seats; Ms. Hempel and Ms. Burnes had repossessed all of the muskets, which, as it turned out, fired rubber bands; the bus hummed along the highway. Ms. Hempel dozed against the window, and thought of Plimoth. But the more clearly she imagined herself there, the more she longed to be somewhere else. Somewhere the flies didn’t cluster above the food, somewhere the dresses didn’t itch. Somewhere she didn’t have to spend all Sunday upon an uncomfortable bench, listening to sermons. She wanted to be somewhere clean, and civilized, and sweet-smelling, where everything she touched pleased her fingertips. She wanted to be… in China!
If, in Plimoth, she rises before the dawn, and lugs water from the icy stream, the bucket bumping against her, then, in China, she wakes to the sound of bells tinkling in a breeze, and the patter of tiny footsteps racing across the courtyard, the plash of a fountain, and a merry child laughing. The floor is cool beneath her feet; the robe slides over her, like liquid. She has slept for many hours, and dreamt of landscapes, of journeys, of an old man living on the very top of a mountain. She will go out into the garden and her father will interpret her dreams.
If, in Plimoth, her garden is wild with tansy and mugwort and raggedy spearmint, then, in China, her garden is one of peonies, and tea roses, and lychee trees, and chrysanthemums. It is a garden of craggy rock and still water; in the pool grows a forest of lotus blossoms. Her father sits beneath the pavilion, his eyes closed lightly in thought. Sunlight stipples his lap; a butterfly alights there; a cicada chirrs by the still waters of the pool. “Father,” she calls to him, “tell me the meaning of my dream.”
“You must write a poem,” he says, and he summons the ink boy. A rosy child appears, round and soft as a peach, bearing the bamboo brushes, and the inkstone, and a scroll of strong, translucent paper. He lays the inkstone upon the ground; it is smooth and dark, coolness rising from its surface like a mist, and with quick, sure strokes, the ink boy grinds the cake. Upon the inkstone there appears another pool, black and still, a perfect miniature of the pool beside which the ink boy sits and grinds. He will continue grinding as she writes, so that the pool will never shrink, so that the flow will not be interrupted once inspiration takes hold of her.
Her father is pleased with the poem. “You found the meaning of your dream,” he tells her, and he reaches inside his robe. When his hand reappears, it is holding a peach. She takes it from him, and sees that it is not a peach, that though it is round and pleasing as the boy, it is smooth and hard as an inkstone. It is ivory, carved in the likeness of a peach. Upon looking very closely, she sees that tiny ivory monkeys are clambering up its cheek. One balances precariously atop the stem, its monkey arm outstretched in invitation. Upon looking even more closely, she sees that the top of the peach can be removed, like the lid of a teapot, and that the monkey is inviting her to open it. Off comes the top of the peach, and she is delighted to discover that attached to its underside is a delicate ivory chain, and that attached to the chain are more monkeys, hanging off wildly, in attitudes of rascality and abandon. It is as if, inside the peach, every kind of mischief is occurring, unseen. But there are not only monkeys dangling off the delicate chain, there are also treasure boxes, and pods. The treasure boxes are carved shut, but the pods, she finds, can be opened with the help of a thumbnail. Inside the pods? Tiny monkey babies, curled up in sleep. Each successive pod is tinier than the last; each monkey baby more perilously small. She eases the chain, the monkeys, the pods, back inside the peach. She replaces the top. She is filled with the delicious, dangerous sense that if she were to continue extracting the chain, the pods would grow even smaller, as would the monkeys and the treasure boxes and the very links of the chain itself, smaller and smaller, until they all but disappeared. “Thank you, Father,” she says, and slips the peach deep inside her robes, where it will be safe.
Above her rises a face, smooth and round like a moon, or a peach, or the seed of a lychee nut. Two eyes gaze at her, black and still like a pool.
“Ms. Hempel.” It is Jonah. His chin is resting atop a high, plush seat. His dark eyes shine in the light from a streetlamp outside the bus. “We’re home,” he says. “Wake up.”
Ms. Hempel stirs. “I’m awake,” she says. And she is; her eyes are open.
“I thought that place was fun,” Jonah says.
“So did I,” she says, and suddenly wants to reach up, to touch him on his cheek.
MS. HEMPEL HAD TOLD HER CLASS about the Indians’ admirable habits. “Even the hooves,” she said, “would be used as ceremonial rattles.” She drew a circle on the chalkboard to illustrate the wholeness of their lives, and inside of this she wrote the words harmony and balance. When she described the Europeans’ profligacy, and their brutal massacres, her students became enraged, and when she described the shrinking of the Indian population, they looked bereft. “But there’s a silver lining,” Ms. Hempel said. “I guess you could call it that.” Then she told them about the casino she had visited the previous summer: the great glittering elevators, the famous comedian, the tables thronged with customers, all losing money. “The Pequots are very rich and powerful now,” she said, and the class grinned with relief.
Having spoken of the Indians so approvingly, Ms. Hempel was dismayed to find, during a Sunday afternoon in the bookstore, a new publication dedicated to contradicting her. She stood in the aisle and frowned. According to the latest anthropological discoveries, Indians were not good friends to Nature; they clear-cut forests, hunted game to near extinction, savored delicacies such as the buffalo fetus while leaving the mother to slowly decompose in the sun.
The book was displayed on a shelf that held a variety of other books all with apparently the same bent. Ms. Hempel realized that a small industry had sprung up, whose sole purpose was to reveal the lies and hoaxes of American history. Paul Revere did not shout “The British are coming!” Thomas Jefferson did seduce and impregnate Sally Hemings, his slave. The founding fathers were not in the least bit interested in equality for all. And mad John Brown was perfectly sane. Even the land bridge theory was under attack. It looked like the first Americans didn’t wander over the Bering Strait, after all.
Ms. Hempel felt irritated and betrayed. It had taken her a long time to finish reading America! America! and now here was a whole shelf of scholarship casting doubt on everything that she was about to teach.
But — she admitted it — these books did seem necessary; their existence made sense to her. History was so difficult to tell truthfully. A person could not be relied upon to faithfully recount her own past, much less the story of an entire country.
Before she discovered the history section, she had sat in a very comfortable chair, looking at a book of stories. The story she happened to read concerned a girl visiting boarding schools with her parents. At one of the schools, the campus is divided in half by a public street, and students must cross the street between classes. That night, the girl tells her parents that she likes this school best; she is impressed by how the students saunter across the street without even checking to see if there is traffic coming.
As she read the passage, Ms. Hempel trembled with recognition. It was her school! Not the school she taught at, but her school, the one she had gone to as a student. It had to be — the ancient campus, the street, the students ambling across. And, as whenever she thought of her school, Ms. Hempel was overcome by affection and wistfulness. What a magical time that was, how wonderful! She had spent four years there, in all seasons, but whenever she pictured her school, it was always late afternoon, and the light was always golden, the treetops always red; a boy sat cross-legged on the quad, and a guitar was in his lap. Somewhere, a pile of leaves was burning.