Ms. Duffy had risen up onto the very tips of her clogs, as if they were toe shoes and she a young dancer. Her belly didn’t throw off her balance at all. Up, up, her puffy fingers reached, quivering with purpose. “Got it,” she gasped. Down came Leda. Down, too, came Hera and the peacock, Echo and a weedy-looking Narcissus, Danae dripping wet in her shower of gold. Down came the Minotaur and Medusa, Hermes, Neptune, Athena leaping bloodily from her father’s splitting head. Neptune? Wasn’t that the name the Romans used?
Exactly, said Ms. Duffy’s scrabbling hands.
She thrust the rustling pile at Ms. Hempel. “Can you hold this for me?” she asked, out of breath, then rose up again on her toes.
Ms. Hempel gazed at the pillaged display, felt afraid, and looked frankly down the hallway, in the direction of help. But it didn’t appear as if the authorities would be arriving anytime soon. She wondered briefly why she, of all the young teachers who drank too much at Mooney’s, had been chosen by Ms. Duffy for this particular mission. Perhaps it was simply chance. The end of the day, an empty vestibule, a surge of nameless emotion — and then someone emerges, making you not alone anymore. So it had happened, a year ago, with Mr. Polidori. “Out of the blue?” Ms. Hempel had asked Ms. Duffy. “The two of you just—” She could not believe it then; she had wanted more — but now, holding the plundered goods against her chest, it made a sort of sense to her. It was possible to find oneself, without warning or prelude, involved. So she crouched down and tapped the papers against the floor, neatening the pile, making a crisp little sound, wanting above all to avoid the appearance of untowardness, wanting the whole operation to feel as tidy, as considered, as possible.
THEY AGREED, FINALLY, that the best thing to do would be to return the projects to Mr. Chapman’s classroom, with a carefully worded note attached. My room was how Ms. Duffy referred to it, and then she alarmed Ms. Hempel by asking, “You’re going to sign it, too?” No, she was not; but she didn’t have the heart to say so yet, especially now that Ms. Duffy had been seized by some fresh distress. As the fluorescent lights flickered on in the classroom, she looked about her wildly. Things were not as she had left them.
There were still the purple beanbags in the reading corner, and the jade plants were thriving, having been faithfully watered by Ms. Cruz. The record player was still there, too, although buried under stacks of handouts, and the Calder mobile still dangled from the ceiling. But the Indonesian shadow puppets were gone, and so were the poems.
“He took down my poems?” Ms. Duffy’s voice was small. She had gone to great lengths to procure them, risking arrest. A few years earlier, the poems began appearing on subways and buses, in the place where advertisements for credit repair and dermatologists had once hung. And as soon as a new poem was posted, Ms. Duffy would devise a plan for obtaining it: scouting out empty subway cars, climbing up onto the scarred seats, easing the poem from its curved plastic sheath, secreting it away beneath her long winter coat. All for the sake of her fifth graders! Every day they could gaze up and contemplate the words. Or not, and therein lay the beauty of osmosis. They passed the year in the company of Whitman and Dickinson, Mark Strand and May Swenson; some of it would penetrate even the most obdurate souls.
Which was probably the thinking of the transit authorities, as well; but the fact that her fifth grade’s edification came at the expense of the citizenry did not seem to give Ms. Duffy pause. And then it became possible to acquire the poems lawfully by sending off a simple request on school letterhead — but Ms. Duffy, like all true teachers, had a renegade spirit, and continued to haunt the buses late at night.
Now, in the place of her stolen poems were boldly colored posters urging the class to read! Also pointing out that reading is fun! That people everywhere should celebrate reading! Additionally, there was a poster commemorating the Super Bowl win of the Green Bay Packers. All of which, it was obvious, had been obtained through official channels.
Ms. Duffy sank down onto one of the many little tables arranged throughout the room. The fifth graders didn’t yet know the isolation of desk-chairs; they still worked companionably at these low shiny tables. She covered her face with her hands and sighed, her elbows digging into the high mound of her stomach.
“I hope he put them somewhere safe,” she said.
“You want me to send them to you?” Ms. Hempel asked.
“No, there’s no room. I just meant in case he changes his mind.”
She glanced over at what had once been her desk, at the piles she was no longer accountable for.
“He has them doing those dumb workbooks?” she asked, but all of her fire from the vestibule was now extinguished.
“It’s his first year,” Ms. Hempel said, and laid the ransacked myths on Mr. Chapman’s desk. “He should take whatever shortcuts he can find.”
Ms. Duffy didn’t answer. She was still looking around the classroom, at the small ways it was now strange, at the names taped onto the backs of the chairs, names that had no meaning to her.
She said, “I lost Theo McKibben at the Metropolitan Museum. My first year.”
“Theo?” Ms. Hempel laughed. “That’s easy to do.”
“It was a nightmare. My first waking nightmare.”
“The first of many,” said Ms. Hempel. “But just think: You’ll never have to go on a field trip again.”
Ms. Duffy smiled slightly. “Never again.”
And then Ms. Hempel realized with a sickened feeling that she had forgotten to distribute the permission slips for next week’s outing to the planetarium. Only three days left: not a problem for the organized ones, but it didn’t allow much leeway with the children you always had to hound for everything. She would have to resort to an incentive plan: Early dismissal? Ice cream?
She paced around the desk mindlessly and saw it as both hopeful and doomed: the careful stacks beginning to slip, colored pens littered everywhere, memos from Mr. Mumford protruding at odd angles, the plastic in-box taken over by trading cards, half-eaten candy bars, extra-credit assignments on the verge of being lost.
“You’re brilliant.” She turned to Ms. Duffy. “You are. Because we can’t leave to make more money; that’s despicable. And we can’t leave to do something easier, some nice quiet job in an office; that would be so embarrassing! Am I supposed to tell my kids, ‘Okay, I’m off to answer phones at an insurance company’? It’s impossible. So what can we do? We can always…” Ms. Hempel gestured helplessly at Ms. Duffy’s belly. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
She had imagined a body cast instead.
Again Ms. Duffy gave a thin smile. It wasn’t clear whether she took Ms. Hempel’s compliment as such.
“So what’s stopping you?” she asked idly. She plucked a long, loose hair from the sleeve of her sweater and dropped it onto Mr. Chapman’s floor. Then suddenly she seemed to remember that she was herself pregnant, and undergoing a remarkable experience. She lit up. “You should do it!” she said with abrupt conviction. “You’ll love it. You will.” She pushed herself off the little table and moved warmly toward Ms. Hempel. “We think we have all the time in the world, but in reality we don’t. And when you find the right person, you just have to go for it. There’s never a good time; it’s never convenient; don’t fool yourself into waiting for the perfect time—”
She stopped. Her hands flew up to her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”