I don’t think about the boys on the soccer field again, not for many years. But from that afternoon I have it in my mind that I will be a teacher, that it’s my fate. My destiny.
But I was still half a person then, not a whole person. Since the age of twelve I’d been half a person, as lost and as clumsy and as despondent as any half-person would be. There was no whole me, no Mona Straw, only a crude, partial simulacrum, a shattered shipwreck, a body torn asunder. Sometimes I would look in the mirror and literally imagine myself without one-half of my body, stand there naked after a bath and see myself balanced on one leg, with only a single arm and half a head—one eye, one ear, a half-mouth. At twelve, at thirteen I wanted it to be true. I wanted someone to slice me from the top of my skull right down through my face and chest and belly and twat, tear away the other half which had no right to be there and discard it on some fly-strewn rubbish pit. I am not Mona Straw, I would think. I am not the real Mona Straw. There is no Mona Straw anymore.
3
Was there a Connor Blue, then? Yes, there was. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
I knew Connor Blue for years before he showed up in my fourth period class—“knew” in the sense that I’d seen him on the playground while I was on duty, perhaps said good morning to him occasionally. Once I broke up a fight that was threatening to begin between him and another, much bigger boy. Connor had gone to the Cutts School since first grade. There was nothing especially notable about him then: just another little blonde boy, spirited, a bit silly. Back then I rarely saw him, since the very young children were kept separate from the older boys and girls—they had different recess times, different lunch hours, different ends-of-day. I thought no more about Connor Blue than I did about any other child five years too young for me to have in my classes, which is to say hardly at all.
Later I imagined—convinced myself—that I’d known from the beginning that he would be special to me. Lying with our hair together on a single pillow, staring up at the ceiling and feeling the slow fan waft air over our skins, he’d say, “When did you first notice me, Mona?—really notice me?” and I’d say, “From the first, sweetheart. From the first moment I saw you.”
It wasn’t true, but he believed me. He always believed me, then.
At night, after Gracie was in bed and I was exhausted beyond reckoning, Bill would turn to me in the bed and begin touching me, first gently, then more insistently. Years before I’d welcomed such attentions, when we were younger and thinner and we had all the energy in the world for carnal fun. But after I went through having Gracie, my body softened and spread. (So did Bill’s, and he was already twenty years my senior.) By the time I was thirty I’d begun to feel old, old and tired. I would look in the mirror the way I did when I was a girl, remembering the fantasy of having half my body hacked away, and wonder what had happened to that child. My hair, a lifeless silver-blonde, hung limply to my shoulders. There were charcoal-colored smears under my eyes. My shoulders slumped, my breasts sagged. Oh, not terribly. Not humiliatingly. The objective part of my mind recognized that I was fairly well-preserved for a thirty-year-old woman with a child. Men might even find me desirable, if moderately.
Some years previously, just before Gracie, I’d had a momentary affair with a teacher at the schooclass="underline" George Cooper. He was flabby, middle-aged—my husband was older than George but much better-looking, and in better shape. But George and I had gone to an educational conference together—not together, no, but we were there at the same time, the only two representatives from the Cutts School. Our rooms at the hotel weren’t far apart. He was married, had kids. It lasted all of two minutes, the actual thing, the act. Him grunting and slobbering, me just lying there and feeling him shoving at me, wondering what had possessed me to come to this pathetic man’s room. I felt sick immediately afterward, rushed into my clothes, said nothing to him. He sat in the bed, the bed on which we’d just disgraced ourselves, and smiled, all soft hairy fish-belly nakedness, his dick wet-shining and flaccid in the hard hotel room light. I could smell that he’d farted. He laughed as if what we’d just done together had been the most fabulous and joyous thing that anyone had ever done in the world. For God’s sake, George, I wanted to say, put your clothes on, you’re disgusting! But no, he wanted to do it again, started tugging at himself and asking me to come back to the bed. Aghast, I ran from the room in horror, spent the night shivering in my own hotel bed with the sheets pulled up to my eyes while George tapped at my door for hours, or what felt like hours. Mona, honey, Mona, come on, we already did it once, one more time won’t matter, please open the door, Mona, baby, sweetheart, Mona. I pictured him out there in the hall naked. He wasn’t, of course, but that’s how I pictured him, his clumpy flesh jiggling as he knocked, fart stink clouding around him, tears running down his puffy cheeks, dick in his hand oozing fluid in a sticky string down to the floor. After some time he gave up and I heard his melancholy padding back to his own room, the door closing.
We never spoke of it. A year later he had a massive coronary. It felled him like a tree.
For years after the initial passion had faded Bill and I were still companionable in bed. There was rarely much spark or excitement, but how much can there be after more than a decade, a child, after the weight of years began to pile up not just on him, but on me as well? It was more a friendly and mutually supportive act than anything genuinely passionate or even, really, in a sense, sexual. But at some point I grew weary of it, of the fuss, of the first touching and eventual realization of what was to come, the tiresome slow build for him (slower and slower as time passed), the even slower one for me, all the preparation, the mounting, the jostling and stabbing, the final mess. Perhaps he felt the same way. We never talked about it. But over time those initial touchings became less frequent, until we were something like roommates, warm and friendly to each other but only occasionally intimate. We concentrated on being parents. Most of our talk—really, all of it—was centered around Gracie. She became our lives, our lives entire.
There had been times that I’d noticed the boys in my classes. I’d noticed how cute they looked in their basketball or softball uniforms, how funny they could be when they were trying to impress me with their athletic prowess—for they were trying to impress me. At the time the Cutts School had a curious lack of attractive young female teachers. There were young women, yes, but very plain ones. One or two struggled with obesity issues. It dawned on me one day, looking at my drab hair and face and body in the mirror, that to the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy I might be considered pretty. I might even be the prettiest teacher in the school. The thought was a revelation to me after years of desultory sex with Bill, after the disaster of George Cooper. I never felt desired, but I suddenly realized that I was, at least to young, uncritical eyes. I realized it in the looks of the eyes of many of my boys, the boys in my classes: half adoration, half something else, something that maybe even they, at their age, couldn’t define.