Excerpt: The English Teacher by Lily King

On his rug in the corner Walt twitched and whimpered. Did he picture her in his dreams? How would she appear to him—in fragments? A pair of legs, a long hand, a soothing voice? Did he have nightmares about her, in which she transformed into a hollering, dog-kicking old crone? The thought of nightmares did not scare her right now. She could even think of her own without panic. The checked shirt, the mustard breath, and her chasing him down the hallway with only a book for a weapon. Every time she lunged for him he got smaller until, when she reached the room he’d veered into, Peter’s room, he was gone. Only Peter was there, in his crib—he was always only a few months old in the dream—but when she drew close to check on him he leapt to his feet, agile, angry, no longer a baby at all despite the body, and grabbed her. She raised her book and smacked him off. She beat him and beat him until he was finally still.

Vida felt pain in her hands and looked down to see her fingernails cutting into her palms.

She made the next drink stronger, then stirred the sauce with a fork. She wondered if the clock had stopped; it wasn’t even quarter of seven yet. She thought of Fran on her sleepover in some bedroom right now with her girlfriends talking about their hair. She had had enough experience with teenage girls like Fran to know what little went on in their heads. She didn’t understand it. The girl wasn’t stupid by any means, but she’d never read more than a few pages of any of the books she’d loaned her. When she was Fran’s age she devoured books. There had been no better feeling on earth than being under her pink blanket on a Saturday afternoon with a new book in her hands. No reality competed with the reality of those books. If her mother’s hounding grew too persistent she took the book and the blanket to the car and locked herself in. She would spend days—a whole weekend and then Monday and Tuesday if she could convince her mother of a stomach bug—prone, engulfed, gone. She didn’t understand a girl like Fran who found this thin life enough, especially after losing her mother. Why wouldn’t she want to enter a better world every now and then, a world with a little more sense to it, where even tragedy had luster and resonance to it?

Her sister Gena had been like Fran, probably still was. California attracted that kind of person, social, unreflective. Gena had never spent a minute more in the house than necessary, always off with some pack of girls, or, later, boys. Their mother had despaired. She’d wanted good girls who would marry early and well, like Jane and Elizabeth Bennett. Instead she got one who never came home at night and another who never left the house. One of us finally got married, Mother, Vida said to the ceiling. Was it possible she hadn’t even thought of her mother since before her engagement? Her mother knew everything, now that she was dead. It probably didn’t feel so good to know everything.

She heard the thuds of car doors. She put the bourbon back in the closet. She didn’t remember making a third drink but there it was and she polished it off. She put her glass in the dishwasher, and the spaghetti in the water. Half of the water had boiled off, but she pressed the stiff noodles into it with a spoon, cracking most of them. After they sank, the water became a white fizz. Vida leaned her face into the steam. It felt old and dry. Tom’s voice rang through the house, calling her. There was no apology in it.

He and Peter came into the kitchen carrying big brown bags.

“Chinese takeout!” Peter said, as if he and Vida didn’t used to pick up a meal from the Lucky Star on occasion, as if Tom himself had invented Chinese food.

“I made spaghetti,” Vida said.

“Oh, no.” Tom frowned, and she heard in his tone some facile expression like A little trust goes a long way. He’d said that one before. He slid his bag onto the counter, brushed the steamed hair from her forehead, and asked how it went with the computers. He was using a gentle, patient voice, the one he used with Fran or Caleb when they were on the brink of unruliness.

“Awful. They raised five hundred thousand dollars and hired that troll to burn it.” Gone was the fellow feeling for Mark and his divorce. “It was a complete waste of my unpaid time.” She felt her rage rising, with its insatiable appetite. She wished he’d stop touching her head.

“I’m sorry.” But despite the soft voice and caress, he was quite unsorry. He seemed quietly accusatory.

“I wish you’d called,” she said.

“I left this.” He held up a piece of paper next to the flour canister. How was she supposed to have seen that? “Always check there first.” Why was he speaking to her like this?

He bent over the stove. “Mmmm,” he said to the sauce, and then, in one dramatic gesture, flipped the whole pan over.

“What are you—” Nothing spilled out. She’d forgotten to turn down the heat and it had caked on the bottom. The pasta, however, bubbled in happy ignorance behind it.

The food was, though she wouldn’t say it, delicious. Chicken with cashews, shrimp lo mein, fried rice, beef and broccoli. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Stuart was at the table, though when he’d come in she couldn’t say.

“Earth to Ma.” Peter never used to be so rude. “The rice?”

“How about an old-fashioned ‘please’?” She never used to be so clichéd.

Tom and Stuart were already arguing.

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“Tell me our military couldn’t figure out a way to go in and get them if they wanted.” Stuart spoke with his mouth full, his fork in his fist.

“They couldn’t. They’d be bringing those people home in body bags if they tried.”

“That is so naive, Dad. If we wanted them out we’d get them out. This is all about oil.”

“Oil?”

“Yes. Don’t you even read the paper? We need that oil. We don’t want to jeopardize the sweet oil deal we have with them. That’s why we’ve supported the Shah and his brutal regime for so many years. That’s why we had to take him in last month.”

“We took in the Shah because he needed medical treatment.”

“Spare me the sob story. A lot of people say he’s faking it. And would we take in Pol Pot or Idi Amin if they needed treatment? No. We only take in the mass murderers who are selling us oil at a good price.”

Say you were head of the U.S. military, Stuart. How would you rescue those hostages? How would you go into the center of the capital and get inside that building without being seen? Because once you are seen, everybody’s dead. What would you do, take an invisibility pill?” He was angry now.

They went on and on. Eventually Stuart put up two hands in mock surrender.

“Speech which enables argument is not worthy,” he said.

“What?”

“These aren’t the important things.”

“What are the important things?” Vida heard herself ask. He was such a coward, the way he ducked at the last minute behind his mystic baloney.

Stuart put his hands in his lap. “The true self, the inner life, a harmony between heaven and earth.”

This last surprised her. “Do you believe in heaven?”

“In a metaphorical sense.”

“How is heaven metaphorical? Either it exists or it doesn’t.” He was like one of her weakest students, tossing up a big word and hoping it landed in the right place.

“Its existence is not the point.”

“What is the point?”

“The point is”—he paused to look at each of them in turn, and it angered her to see how worshipfully Peter looked back—“not to care about the point.”

“Spoken by a true Sophist.”

“Sticks and stones, Vida.”

“I’m not trying to insult you. I just think it’s too easy to believe in nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. It’s the opposite of nothing.”

“But every time I try to coax a declarative sentence out of you, you twist away in a puff of smoke.”

She saw how calmly he sifted through the words in his head. “To you it appears as smoke.”

“But to you it’s the truth?” She was aware of the absence of sifting in hers.

He nodded.

“Describe what it is you believe. In your words.”

“That which is nameable is not the Tao.”

“Those are not your words. But let me name it for you. Crock of Crap.”

Tom was hushing her but she didn’t care. Someone had to stand up to this Buddhist bully.

“What do you believe in, Vida? In your words.”

So he could get angry. She was glad to see she’d cracked the surface. She felt her own creed assemble easily. “I am a humanist. I believe in man’s creative—”

“And woman’s?”

“That’s a semantic argument for another day.”

“Are we having an argument?”

“Are you interested in my answer?”

Stuart bowed his head.

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“I believe in the imagination and its striving toward truth and beauty, toward the ideal, through accurate and penetrating representations of our world.”

“Our world? What is our world? We’re here for two seconds. Blip. Blip. Then we’re gone forever.”

“I believe”—she was surprised by the pleasure she took from saying those two words—“there is a transcendence through acts of creation.”

“You mean writers and artists can achieve immortality if they’re good enough?”

“Not just them. When I pick up Tolstoy, for example, I am instantly connected with his world, his mind, and therefore both of us have transcended. And my world has become richer for the new layer his perceptions have added to it.”

“The goal of the Tao is to detach from this world.”

“Why on earth would you want to do that?”

“Because our attachments to it prevent us from seeing beyond it.”

“You know, Stuart, I’ve heard a lot of stupid theories in my life, but that really takes the cake. If you want to believe that, be my—”

“What’s so special about your world, Vida?” He had a way of saying her name that made it sound like she’d made it up. ”Teaching books your students will never remember? Keeping them pinned to chairs they ache to get out of? Does that have meaning? Driving home. Making lousy dinners.” He pointed to her glass. “Measuring out your precious bourbon. Fucking my father while you’re—”

“Stuart, that’s enough,” Tom barked.

Stuart looked at his father and finished: “shit-faced. Is that the height of existence, of consciousness?”

A teacher needed at all times a face impervious to shock or insult, but twice in her career, a student had done or said something so unexpectedly awful that her skin reddened. Each time was a surprise—the prickling in her cheeks, then the pulsing heat—and she had resented it deeply. She felt it now; within a few seconds her face would be a flaming carnation. Far more than his words, what angered her was that he was going to make her blush.

“You’re not going to find your mother this way, Stuart,” she said.

“True to his convictions, Stuart seemed perfectly detached. “I’m not trying to find her, Vida. I’m trying to let her go.”

She watched Tom close up the white boxes of leftover rice and lo mein and carry them by their perfect wire handles to the fridge. He slid her plate out from beneath her without a word. He was pursing his lips, a sure sign that he was upset. She wondered why he didn’t go have a talk with Stuart. He usually scampered so quickly back to the children’s hallway if there was any tension at dinner. She hoped when he did that he wouldn’t be too hard on the boy. An apology to her would suffice.

He was at the sink now, scraping and rinsing. She heard a huge plop into the garbage disposal. Someone had hardly touched the food. She wondered if it was her. Or Peter. Where had Peter gone? She couldn’t even remember him sitting at the table. She collected what remained on the table and brought it to Tom. He dropped the forks he was rinsing and wheeled around to her.

“Where does all that anger of yours come from?” He grabbed the bottle from the pantry closet. “From inside here?” He shook it at her. She was surprised by how little was left. “Or is it in here”—he poked her in the bone between her breasts—“all the time, crouching, waiting?”

Vida was stunned. The scene was like the nightmare in which one of her best-behaved students hurls obscenities at her. The poke on her chest stung and spread.

“The boy is simply trying to cope.”

“But he’s filling himself with illusions.”

“We’re all filled with illusions.”

“No we’re not.”

“Taoism is one hell of a lot less harmful than practically all the other ways of dealing with grief he could have latched onto.”

“I’m not so sure. Actionless action. Blankety blank. He’s negating himself from his own life. He’s disappearing.”

“Why does it upset you so much? It’s just a way of looking at the world.”

“It’s a way of not looking at the world. You heard him. He wants to detach. You might as well give him a shotgun so he can blow his head off.”

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“Jesus Christ, Vida.”

There it was finally, the glare, the tone of voice he’d been denying himself. He saw her now for what she truly was; he saw the waste within. She needed to get out of the house. She threw on a coat and whistled for Walt.

“I don’t know why you’re trying to push us away. All of us. Ever since you agreed to marry me, you’ve been—”

“Pinched and thin?”

“I don’t understand what happened. I thought you were—”

“Someone else?”

“Stop it. Stop finishing my sentences. Stop looking at me with that smirk like you can see all around me, like I’m a character for you to analyze. You don’t have to be a goddamn English teacher all the time. Just be yourself.”

“And who do you think that is?”

He looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “I don’t know. I think it’s the woman I first saw at a podium, in tears, clutching a little silver cup. It’s the woman, the first woman, who let me talk about Mary without feeling threatened in some way. God, what’s happened to her? You’ve gotten so hard and closed and—”

“Let’s leave our sex life out of it.” She couldn’t resist a little humor. And these memories of his—where did they come from? She certainly wasn’t in tears at the podium.

“I’m not joking, Vida. I don’t give a flying fuck about the sex. It’s our marriage I care about. You have to work at marriage. It doesn’t come easy to anyone. But it’s like you’ve already given up on it. Before you even gave it a chance. You’re like that student of yours who decides he hates the book before he’s opened it.”

“I’m going to take the dog for a walk.”

“I’ll come,” Tom said.

He actually believed they could talk their way through it. “Screw you,” she said, and slammed the door, nearly catching Walt’s tail.

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