We traveled a little—our honeymoon was in London, plays at the Royal Shakespeare Company and concerts at Albert Hall—but mostly stayed home. Bill had a cabin that had belonged to his parents in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a rustic area surrounded by pine trees that we would visit sometimes over long weekends—the kind of place where in warm weather we could walk around in the woods wearing nothing but sandals. There was electricity in the cabin, and a modern bathroom, laundry facilities, but otherwise it was fairly primitive—no TV, no telephone, no air conditioning, the only source of warmth a fireplace in the main room. In winter we would sleep there, in front of the flames; no space heater could keep the bedroom from chilliness. It was a nice place that we often visited when we were first together. Not so much later.
Marriage made me less drab, gave me some level of confidence and a feeling of being connected with other people in a way I never had while sitting in the semi-darkened living room of the family home, Mom and Dad quietly getting sloshed with Starsky and Hutch or Barney Miller playing on the TV. Soon enough I graduated—“Mona Straw” it read on the diploma; I’d kept my name at Bill’s strong feminist insistence—and eventually got a teaching certificate, just in time for Bill to cut his hair and beard and take a job with a left-wing lobbying firm in Washington. He wore a suit and tie to work, something it took me years to adjust to; the beads and Birkenstocks vanished, never to be seen again. “It’s time to put away the hippie stuff,” he would tell his old teacher friends when they visited. “That failed. We have to work for change from within the system, not outside it.” His voice would hold an aching sadness in it when he said such things.
Since my parents’ property in Adams Morgan had long been sold, we bought a house in Silver Spring, just north of the city, in a nice middle-class neighborhood of bungalows built in the 1920s. Big beech trees and black maples lined the streets and filled the nearby park with its playground and little ribbon of river. The streets were safe. I found a job teaching English at the Cutts School. Soon enough there was Gracie.
It was my life. There was nothing wrong with it. Nothing at all.
5
It happened slowly, but it seemed to happen quickly. One Tuesday after Labor Day Connor Blue appeared in my fourth period English class along with twenty or so other newly-minted sixth graders. I took no special notice. Why would I? There was nothing unusual about him. A bit shorter and slighter than most of the other boys, but a good-looking kid, fresh-faced, blonde hair a bit wild and prone to cowlicks, green eyes, a spattering of cinnamon freckles over his cheeks. Bright, quick to smile. Cute. At first he hung around a group of boys he’d been friends with the previous year, just average boys who ran around the playground at recess or played touch football on the grassy fields. But that didn’t last long. Connor seemed to pull away from them in the first weeks of school, to no longer engage with them much during class, to keep to himself during recess and lunch. It was during a lunch period I had my first real conversation with him. He was sitting under a tree reading a paperback book, an unusual thing for a boy to do. Since being on duty during lunch can be quite dull for a teacher—little ever happens, one simply stands there watching—I walked up to him.
“Hi, Connor.”
He looked up and grinned, one eye squinting shut. “Hi, Ms. Straw.”
“Whatcha readin’?”
He held it up for me to see. An old paperback: Alfred Hitchcock’s Stories to Be Read with the Lights On. I recognized it as being from the informal honor-system lending library in my classroom.
“Do you like spooky stories?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” he shrugged, looking back at the book again. “I like Alfred Hitchcock.”
“Really? I’m surprised you even know who he was.”
“I’ve seen lots of his movies. Lifeboat. Rear Window. The Birds. Psycho.”
“Wow. I’m impressed,” I said, sincerely. “Which is your favorite?”
He considered. “I think Psycho.”
I smiled. “That’s mine too. Do your parents have them on video? Is that how you see them?”
“Nah. My dad doesn’t care about old movies. I watch ’em on TV. Sometimes I go to the video rental store and get one. When I have money. I like Humphrey Bogart, too. He was cool.”
“He sure was. Have you seen High Sierra?”
He shook his head. “I saw The Big Sleep.”
“Ooh, that’s a great one.”
We were silent for a moment. I looked across to the playing fields, watched Connor’s former friends running around with a football. “You don’t hang out with them anymore, huh?”
“Nah.”
“Why not?”
Another shrug.
I crouched down near him. He fidgeted, as kids often do when the teacher is giving them individual attention. “So how do you like sixth grade so far?”
“It’s okay, I guess. Pretty easy.”
I smiled. “Is my class easy?”
He smiled, looked at me again. “Pretty.”
“You’re a good English student, Connor,” I said truthfully.
“Well, you’re a good English teacher,” he said.
I stood again, a slight sensation of oddness coursing through me. Sixth-grade boys weren’t in the habit of complimenting my teaching skills, or those of any other staff member. It felt strange to hear him say it.
“Well, thank you,” I said, starting to move off again. “Enjoy your book.”
“Thanks, Ms. Straw!”
That was the entire conversation. Other than calling on him when he raised his hand in class, other than the occasional Good morning or How are you, Connor? spoken in exactly the same way to him as to all my other students, it was the first time I’d ever talked to him, really talked to him personally. In those moments he became an individual, a person, as opposed to the others. Just as they no doubt found it difficult to imagine me outside the setting of the classroom—couldn’t picture me shopping for groceries or helping Gracie into her pajamas or making love to my husband—I couldn’t really imagine them, either. What did boys that age do when they weren’t at school, when they were home alone in their rooms with their thoughts and dreams? What was it like for a boy to grow up in the 1990s? What did a boy like Danny Morehouse, one of Connor’s former pals, do at home? All I could picture was a young kid sprawled in front of a TV or playing a video game on his computer—cliché images, but maybe true.
I found myself wondering a little about Connor Blue, but he didn’t preoccupy my thoughts overmuch—no more so than a number of other students that year who seemed a bit different, quiet or sullen or angry. It was the usual mix. I tried to help them as I could, but the truth is that teaching a group of twenty or twenty-five kids English once a day isn’t a good environment for being especially helpful. It’s all one can do to keep order, to remember what points to cover that day, to hand back yesterday’s homework and give out today’s, to try to come across as reasonably cheerful and engaging. There isn’t a great deal of time for one-on-one counseling sessions or personalized discussions. And so a girl like Lauren Holloway, who almost never spoke or made eye contact? I could try to draw her out in stray moments, but for the most part, since she did her homework and didn’t actively misbehave, she was on her own. A boy like Richard Broad, always talking out of turn, squirming, getting out of his seat? I could send him to the office occasionally, perhaps at parent-teacher conferences gently suggest that he be screened for attention-deficit disorder. And someone like Kylie McCloud, who the other girls made fun of, always in her own world—tiny Kylie, with her asthma inhaler and eyeglasses that would slip down her nose, that same nose she kept buried in some big fantasy novel every period, every day? What could I do for her? Not much. Teachers are surprisingly helpless, really.