Ms. Straw is not okay. Ms. Straw gets over her bout of what she has decided to call the flu and returns to her routines, to her existence as wife and mother and teacher, but something seems wrong now, some aspect of the perspective she has on life has inexplicably shifted, tilted, changed. When she talks to her husband or daughter it’s as if she is a clever impostor, someone with Mona Straw’s exact face and body and voice but somehow not her. Some kind of unreality seems to come between Mona Straw and what other people think of as the world. Even at school, during class, she has this odd sense of otherness, a notion that she isn’t herself anymore, that something has happened.
I try to talk to another teacher about it, an older woman named Estelle Higgins. We’ve always had friendly relations and I think she might be willing to listen. But as I try to talk about it I see the expression on Estelle’s pudgy face begin to alter. I’m unaware of what I’ve said to her, actually. I’d begun with Estelle, I have such strange feelings lately, I’m not sure what’s going on with me but then must have gone somewhere very different because she’s scowling in a perplexed way, a confused way, she’s murmuring about how she has to get to class and how she hopes I feel better. Was I raving? I don’t know what I was doing. Someone else seems to have been doing it. I wonder if the other, darker Mona, the one hidden away inside me, has come out, has climbed up through my throat and pulled her way into my mouth and opened my jaws and slipped out into the world, my world.
I find myself thinking less and less of Bill or Gracie. One afternoon I forget to pick my daughter up at school and I’ve been home half an hour when the phone rings, Ms. Straw, where are you? Is everything okay? I curse myself, rush out the door, make it back to the pre-school quickly enough. No harm done. Anyone can forget something. But there are other things. One afternoon when I pick her up she’s crying. What happened? When she’d opened her Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lunchbox at noon today she’d discovered only the detritus from yesterday in it, a sandwich wrapper, an empty plastic bag containing Oreo crumbs, a crumpled juice box leaking drops of orange all over everything. I’ve completely forgotten to pack a lunch for her, simply handed her the lunchbox as she’d brought it home yesterday. A trip to McDonald’s assuages her, and things are all right again, aren’t they? Aren’t they really? As I sit there with my coffee in front of me watching Gracie consume her Happy Meal I suddenly realize that I’m crying. I have no idea why.
“Mommy, what’s the matter?”
Something has gone wrong somewhere, something’s frayed and snapped, something’s broken but I don’t know what. I’m as absent-minded with Bill as I am with Gracie. I don’t remember to buy dinner, or if I buy it I lose myself watching TV and forget to cook it. Bill tries to be good-natured, sensing something amiss, trying to jostle me out of it: “C’mon, Mona, where are you? I know you’re in there somewhere.” But I’m not sure that I am. I’m not sure what I know and what I don’t know anymore. I know that I have trouble focusing at school, forget to grade assignments, leave the educational video at home that had been my lesson plan, neglect to make up the regular Friday quiz. My faculty room box overflows with unread catalogs, unopened circulars. But I never forget the books I promise Connor, or the old movies. I never forget that we have a lunch meeting each day.
None of this is really too bad—not yet. The efficient and high-functioning Mona Straw has become somewhat scatterbrained, that’s all. Her behavior is well within the range of normality for any person. People forget things. It’s true that she rarely forgot anything before, but she’s under a lot of stress. Having a husband and four-year-old daughter while holding down a full-time teaching job isn’t easy. Everyone understands that, everyone backs off, gives Ms. Straw, Mona, some slack. But Estelle rarely talks to me anymore, rarely makes eye contact.
The truth is that there are times I can hardly take my eyes off Connor Blue. I realize this about myself and try to make sure no one notices. There’s no one to see other than a bunch of middle-schoolers anyway, but they would if I weren’t careful. What would they think if they realized? They’re too young to imagine anything like, “Ms. Straw is in love with Connor!” The other way around, yes, but not that way, not at their age. And most certainly I am not in love with Connor. But at the same time I have trouble not staring at him, at his clear green eyes, his freckles, his small but muscular arm and graceful fingers as he moves a yellow pencil across a sheet of white lined paper. Yet he’s no different from any boy in my classes, any boy anywhere. I know that. Every period my room is filled with young boys with clear eyes and muscular arms and high young voices. Connor’s no different from the rest, I tell myself. Growing up with no mother and a cold, unsympathetic father? Let him join half the human race. Connor’s no different. He is not.
But I can’t convince myself of it, not during those private lunchtime sessions when he sits munching his daily apple and I watch him while trying to make sure it’s not obvious I’m watching him. I watch his Adam’s apple rise and then drop again as he swallows. I watch his eyes move across the pages of the movie book on the desk in front of him. I watch his left leg vibrating up and down and the slight movement of his foot within his sneaker.
“I want to see The Thirty-Nine Steps,” he says, looking up at me brightly.
“That’s a really old one,” I say, careful to hold my voice steady. “Hitchcock made that in the 1930s.”
“I know. I’d like to see all those early ones. The only one I’ve seen is The Lady Vanishes. They run that on TV.”
“Did you like it?”
“It was funny. Sometimes I can barely get what they’re saying, though. Like, the accent.”
“The English accent?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you saying that the English don’t speak good English?”
“Yeah! The English don’t speak good English!”
We both laugh. The sound he makes is very high, girlish. His face is luminous. Hardly aware of what I’m doing, I stand and move to his desk, sit down at the one next to him.
“See?” he says, pointing at a photo of Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. They are out on some studio-created moor, handcuffed together. “The Thirty-Nine Steps. Looks good.”
“It is good,” I say, leaning toward the book, toward him. “I saw it years ago.” I rest my hand on the corner of his desk, studying the photo. I’m aware that our fingers—mine are much bigger and longer than his—are inches apart. I wonder if he’s aware of it too. I look at the handcuffed couple in the photo, and a picture flashes in my mind of handcuffs around Connor’s thin wrist with an unbreakable silver chain leading to another cuff around my own. The movie, I remember, raised all sorts of implicit questions about how a man and a woman who hardly know each other would behave when handcuffed together. How would they manage the toilet, or their sleeping arrangements? What possible modesty could they maintain? Such questions obviously delighted Hitchcock. I find my heart racing as I study the photo, our hands, Connor’s face in profile.