On his forearm, I notice, is an oval bruise, not too big, but impossible not to see. “What happened here?” I ask, pointing at it, my finger moving very close to his skin.
“That?” He looks at it as if he’s never seen it before. “I don’t know. I think I bumped into a door.”
His mustached, bartending father crosses my mind. I let it go.
“Have you seen The Lady Vanishes?” he asks, turning the page and breaking the odd spell. I slip my hand off his desk and onto my lap.
“Yes, I have. You’re right, it’s very funny.” Ladies, vanishing—vanishing into what? In the movie, into thin air. Here, in this classroom? Into… the words child abuse erupt suddenly in my mind. A sense of panic stings me and I stand, knocking my chair back awkwardly. Connor looks up at me, his expression slightly puzzled. Looking down at his sweet sinless face, I mutter, “I—” but can’t manage to continue what I was going to say, if I was going to say anything at all. Sweat suddenly pours from me. My fingers and feet tingle. I back away from Connor, from the vision of the handcuffs and the bed and the bathroom, back away slowly as if he were some wild animal primed to attack and I his hapless victim.
“Ms. Straw? Are you okay?”
We’re in the same room together but we’re not, not really. We’re not in the same world. I walk carefully back to my desk, drop down in my chair, try to breathe. How ridiculous I must look to him, I think. How strange.
I swallow and will myself to speak my words evenly. “I’m fine, Connor. I’m glad you’re enjoying the book.” Then, unable to stop myself: “I’d love to watch one of those movies with you someday.”
I hurl myself into my work, spending extra hours on lesson plans and highly detailed grading and reading up in the kinds of educational journals that are always around in the faculty room but which I never bother to look at. I clean out my faculty box, glancing cursorily at the endless educational catalogs and offers and invitations from groups with names like Kidsplay and Mid-Level Readers’ Club and Youth Leadership for America before tossing them in the garbage. I focus on Lauren Holloway and Richard Broad and Kylie McCloud, I counsel them after school, I call home concernedly, I care as only the best teachers do. I focus on Gracie too, playing jacks and hopscotch with her, helping her make clothes for her dolls, watching cartoons with her, reading with her, fun-splashing her in the bathtub to make her laugh and squeal. She’s a wonderful child, actually. Very smart, very neat, pretty, mild-tempered. A mother could hardly ask for more. And I focus on Bill, I ask him how his work day has gone, make him his favorite dinners, rent movies I know he’ll like—recent special-effects blockbusters, he’s bored by old classics—and initiate activities in bed we’ve not done in years, or sometimes ever. He’s flattered by all the attention but clearly a bit mystified by it as well. “Is everything all right, Mona?” Of course, everything is fine, how could it not be, what could possibly be wrong?
But none of this activity pushes Connor Blue from my mind for more than a few minutes at a time. When I dress for school in the morning I find myself wondering, even as Bill kisses me goodbye, even as Gracie runs around, what Connor will think of this pink top, how many buttons I can get away with leaving undone, whether he likes me better in pants or skirt, if I can wear the black heels or if they’re too close to fuck-me pumps and then I shake my head violently and clear my mind of all such thoughts, toss what I’d begun to put on to the closet floor and go with the simplest, plainest professional clothes I have: long-sleeved white blouse buttoned high, tan skirt reaching almost to my ankles, plain brown flats. The woman staring back at me in the mirror looks like exactly what she is: a schoolteacher. Neither attractive nor unattractive. One of the invisible people of the world.
At school I find myself sometimes growing short with Connor, deliberately not calling on him when he raises his hand in class, dismissing his answers brusquely when I do. I abruptly cancel some of our lunch hours, claiming I have meetings. I all but ignore him in the after-hours tutoring sessions with the other students. He begins to look at me in a hurt way, his eyes darkening, his face tense with unhappiness. Or so I imagine. It’s possible he doesn’t care at all. But I think he does. I think it when his hand is up enthusiastically in class and we make eye contact and I turn away and call on another student, watch him in the corner of my vision and see his perplexed expression. He cares. I know he does. I think I know.
But I can’t keep it up, any more than I can keep up my new enhanced perfect-mother perfect-wife perfect-teacher routine. One by one my new resolutions to do better fall away. I return to passiveness regarding Lauren and Richard and Kylie. I stop spending so much time with Gracie. At night I turn away from Bill, plead headache, tiredness, cramps. I return to myself. But I’m not there, not anymore.
10
When winter comes it comes ferociously, an early December storm hurling down a foot and a half of snow with near-blizzard winds blowing it around into whiteout conditions. School closes for days. Bill still goes to work, so I’m left alone in the house with Gracie watching videocassettes of Pocahontas and The Lion King and Babe, each for what feels like the twentieth time. Our power flickers, goes black now and then, lurches on again. The cable TV turns to static. I’m overcome with a sense of dread, a sensation that I’m entering a darkness from which I’ll never rise again. I play with Gracie, let her “help” me make cookies and dinner, but I find a strange lassitude in myself regarding her. It’s as if she’s someone else’s child, not mine at all. I’m soaking in the bathtub one afternoon, sweat pouring from me, my skin red and tender, when there is some kind of explosion that seems to rock the house. Gracie runs in panicked, I wrap a towel around myself, hold her hand as we look out the front window and see that a huge snow-heavy branch from the neighbor’s white oak tree has crashed down on my car, crumpling the hood, cracking the windshield. Immediately it feels like judgment, a judgment on me, a sentence carried out on the guilty. Or at least a warning. I stare at the snow falling for a long time, stare at my broken car. Finally Gracie pushes something soft and warm into my hand, saying, “Mommy? Your towel fell off, Mommy. You shouldn’t be naked in the window.”
The storm finally passes, school reopens, life resumes. The car gets fixed. But when I arrive in my classroom that first day back it feels as if something has changed in me, some inner lens has undergone a permanent and profound refocusing. I realize that I’ve been lonely over this past week of snow days. I’ve felt adrift, lost. And yet when I look at Connor Blue come into the room for fourth period, enthusing to one of the other boys about the fun he’d had sledding yesterday, I know I’ve found myself again. I watch him make his way to his desk, drop himself down. His hair is askew, his cheeks flushed. He’s talking about going sledding with another boy, Douglas Peterson, a good development—he needs to socialize more with boys his age, I know. But then I realize that what they’re talking about is checking out a couple of the school sleds and doing it during lunch period today. My heart seems to drop into my stomach. I’ve not seen Connor in over a week and he wants to go sledding with his new friend rather than spend the time in this room with me? Suddenly everything seems to go gray in my vision, I feel my knees buckle. But I don’t faint. I shake my head, right myself, welcome the students—“Hi Lauren, Hi Richard, Hi Kylie, Hi Douglas, Hi Connor”—and ask them about their snow day adventures before beginning the lesson. Stories of snowmen, snowball fights. Connor raises his hand and talks about sledding down the big hill near his house, his eyes bright and excited in meeting mine. Does he know how this hurts me? Is that why he’s doing it? I don’t want to believe it of him. But part of me suspects.