By: Alicia Tolbert There is a boy in his class who had better be someone's pride and joy because he is two handfuls. He is a bucketful. He requires back flips and cakewalks before he will even consider doing what the other kids will do with just a smile or one sharp tone from the teacher. The boy must be tone deaf, he thought with a smile. It was the same smile the teacher used on the naïve and curious kids in his kindergarten class who wanted to get ahead of themselves and ask about the sorts of biological or scatological things that required a signed note from home and delicate answers from the teacher. 'I couldn't say' was a wonderful euphemism for, 'later you will know all too well'. As a teacher it was his eighteenth year. His first class would have already graduated college. His wife once asked him if he ever wanted to do something else. "I am made for this." The boy in his class acts like a four year old. The difference between four and five is like the difference between thirty and forty. Somewhere in between you accept your lot and live in it. Before then you might be caught still swimming upstream, struggling against fate and lady luck. But after forty, people snicker if they catch you going at it still. The gap between four and five is like that. Once or twice parents had pulled a forgery and snuck a four year old onto his roll sheet, but those "false" five year olds were easy to spot. They were wilder but shyer, less confident, less knowledgeable. Any child knows the color blue, but a five year old knows navy and sky and maybe even aqua, whereas a four year old might be duped into confusing "Am I blue?" with the color blue. And so it is with the boy in his current class. Undoubtedly he is four. After another afternoon of calming him into his nap, the teacher decided that a trip to the administrative office was in order, to check the boy's file. Files revealed things to the eagle-eyed that others might overlook. A string of absences here, a custody battle there. They could utter volumes quietly. Or at least that was the type of self-hype the teacher gave himself, perhaps to keep his ego propped up. After all, being a kindergarten teacher at forty was pedestrian to some, pedophilic to others. It was bewildering to him how something once deemed honorable, even lofty, was now greeted with suspicious whispers. "You teach? Children?" Nevertheless, as he had told his wife, he was made to teach the young, the brand new. He didn't take the calling lightly, however much the tides and times had altered the status of his profession. The world still needs children. Children still need kindergarten. "Oh? The S- boy? The one whose father died?" said the office assistant with unblinking wide eyes. "I don't think we can mean the same child." "Yes, he came late in the year. Here it is." He quickly skimmed the paperwork. The boy had moved into Santa Barbara in October, from Vancouver, B.C. His mother's name was obscured, a bad photocopy. At least they had released the staff from the archaic nature of the ditto machine. "It doesn't say anything here about his father." "No, but it's a fact." He phoned the mother, not out of curiosity but to put her on alert. The child was in danger of failing. One of the benefits of teaching kindergarten was the early departure time. Other teachers, the secondary bunch especially, said kindergarten wasn't real teaching, but that was their envy unveiling itself. Of course kindergarten was real teaching. Students learned more in their first year than in all of the rest combined. Kindergarten was the foundation on which calculus, creative writing, and political dissension all rested. How could one be a communist without knowing what 'red' was? By two p.m. everyday he had corrected homework, executed the next day's lesson plan, and was on his way either to volunteer at the public library or to windsurf. And to secure his emotional hatches lest something inside him explode. Volunteering, even playing on the ocean were innocuous not eyebrow-raising pursuits, not even molehills really. But somehow they gave rise to jagged mountains. Mountains he scaled while tethered to his wife. They had met hiking out of the Grand Canyon. He had saved her from her pride by handing her and her hiking companion an extra canteen. "You should rest before heading out," the teacher had warned. "Why?" she asked breezily. "We practically skipped up the last 15 miles. We've only 4 left, how bad can it be?" "Oh, bad." She and her friend had laughed. But something in the teacher's gruffness caught their attention. "Eat all of your snacks now. Drink everything you have now. Eat all your candy, too. It will take your body 90 minutes to digest it and kick you some energy." "Ninety minutes! Won't we be in our tent, toasting the sunset by then?" "Doubtful. Oh, and take baby steps; like a baby, tiny, tiny steps." He forgot all about them until he received a note in the mail, along with his canteen. "It took four hours to hike out the last four miles. I had no idea it was a 45-degree angle. I nearly crawled the last of it. How can I ever thank you?" The return address said Los Angeles. W.C. Fields often said that candy's dandy but liquor's quicker. The teacher altered the line a little by saying that Santa Barbara's randy but LA's slicker. He wrote her back a single line: "You're welcome. What's your phone number?" After two weeks of late night calls - she was a gallery owner who often worked evenings - he asked her out. She asked him what he wanted to do. "Not hike," he said. She invited him down to visit her gallery. He said he'd prefer for her to come to him. "Why?" "Because we should start slow and speed up. We can't go any faster than L.A." So up she had come. He took her to an elegant dinner and afterwards, leisurely window-shopping. He watched, amused, as she blazed a deal on an antique shawl from a wily-looking boutique owner who was clearly no match for her. "For your gallery?" The teacher asked. "For me. I would like to wrap you and me in it." He liked her calm boldness. He liked her everything. She was fit and stunning with mixed layers of mystery to her. Her legs were long and steeped in a dancer's grace. During dinner, they discussed politics the way two lawyers might hammer out a settlement. He asked her if she was testing him. She nodded. "Everything is a test," she confessed. "You should know, aren't you a teacher?" She called him admirable, his line of work anyway. He asked her which hotel she was staying in. She said, "Yours." She reminded him of a gin drink. Strong, with a sudden punt to it. Burned all the way down as it took fragments of his ego on a joyride. Sometimes she gave the pieces back. Sometimes she even helped put them back together, better than before. * He dialed the mother's number. He never knew what to expect on the other end of a call to someone who would start his or her four year old off in life lying about his age. "I'm your son's teacher." "No, you're not." "Oh …?" "Yeah, I don't have a son. Maybe someday, but not yet." She said she had received the note, yes, sorry; she was also overwhelmed and under helmed. "I'm too young to have to worry about back-to-school night and lunchboxes." "Are you his sister?" "No." "Aunt?" "No, godmother. He was willed to me and the gun did the rest." "The gun?" "Oh never mind, I'll be by tomorrow. What time are your office hours?" "This isn't college. I'll be here." "You're right then, it's definitely not college." When she showed up he could see what she meant. She was too young to worry about lunchboxes. "He's about to FAIL? Kindergarten? Isn't that a little fucking draconian?" "I don't know about fucking draconian, but unfortunate, yep." "Sorry. Everyday I swear I'll stop cursing and then everyday brings a new reason to carry on the vice." He asked her about her godson's parents. She told him they were dead. Murdered in a failed robbery. Well, not failed if you count fifty bucks and a television. "How is he at home?" "Withdrawn." "Have you tried to bring him out?" "No, I like him withdrawn. Once he starts opening up, he'll probably tell me to quit smoking." "This is surreal." "Try studying pre-Columbian slides while he plays with his X-Box. I can't focus on anything but beeps and hiccups. THAT's surreal." As she spoke, she kept peering out the window. He didn't ask her why because he didn't care. "Do you have a ball?" She asked finally. I have two, he nearly said. Just to get down to her nitty-gritty level. "For what?" he asked. "For that," she said pointing to the playground outside. "For sliceys," he said for her. "Wow you know what a slicey is?" "You think I'm too old?" "Too mean! How can you fail a five year old?" "Is he really five?" She blinked. He waited for her to devise a response and wondered whether she would try to pull wool out of her dusty pocket and cover his eyes with it. But the wool stayed put. "Umm…how did you know?" She asked. "I've been teaching a long time. Long enough to know what a slicey is." "Are you going to kick us out?" He wondered if her use of the word 'us' was genuine or to elicit pangs of sympathy. "He isn't ready for school yet. But I'll let him finish this year if you want. Then he can do it all again next year." "Phew. Thanks. I thought you'd rat me. You look the type." He didn't tell her she looked the type to forge a birth certificate. The Grand Canyon dame fell in love with parts of Santa Barbara. The parts she disliked, she refused to acknowledge. Like the tar on the beach and the drunk college kids stumbling across the cobblestones on State Street. He promised her that were she to marry him, he would sweep her away slightly north and east to Montecito, a town too rich to be called sleepy and too sleepy to be called rich. He promised her more than that. He trotted out his pottery and told her of his plans to exhibit it. She was impressed. He intended to establish his own school, for the inner city gifted. She dryly pointed out that finding an inner city in or around Santa Barbara would be like finding a Castro supporter in Miami. But it did not dint her race to love him. Not that he revealed how many other girls were in competition, but the way he had of sharing his canteen with strangers, she couldn't be sure. When she asked him if he meant what he said about marriage, he was game. "Just like that?" she said. "Should it be harder than just like that?" Whenever he thought about those days, his old days, he wondered when that guy had succumbed and been given over to the one who was taking up space in his skin now; the one who was more rote and less rhythm. "Did you go volunteer today?" his wife asked smiling, disguising her wariness as genuine interest. "No, not today." "I thought that was your only excuse for staying away from home." "Let's not and say we did." "An allusion to…?" He decided to offer an olive branch before the fight could get wound into either of them. Did she want to take a class together, at the University? "I think maybe we've had our fill of classes, don't you?" He knew she wasn't taunting him, but it felt like blood in his ears nonetheless, even if she didn't mean Lamaze. The early years for them had been dreamy, like getting the last berth on the ferry to Vancouver Island or winning enough at craps to buy everyone dinner. But the stakes were lower then. She moved her gallery to Montecito where the community of wealthy but clueless welcomed her with open arms. They were not discerning. So long as the price tag sang up to 4 or 5 digits, they would buy it. Although she frequently encouraged him to show his sculptures and pottery, he declined shyly at first, then proudly. Wasn't he better than her clients? "They aren't wicked just because they're wealthy," she said. He thought that's just what they were. Rich therefore wrong. But she was very good about humoring him and coaxing art from him though he found he threw better pots and carved less simple structures when he was tight inside and a little angry with her. She had a saying for it: getting caught in her hair. But he could never stay tight with her because she was everything he wanted to be: motivated, witty, easy-going and kind. When they were apart, she always missed him, even when he didn't deserve it. On their fifth anniversary they decided they were both finally who they were going to be, for better and for worse. The moment was ripe for producing an heir. Though she was graying, she looked young and he noticed that men watched her whenever they took a stroll on the beach. Her long legs looked like they might be striding forward, even if they were running away. Her wavy hair seemed to roll on and on, straight into the sea. Somewhere between then and later they realized that the baby was only growing in their thoughts, not in her belly. For two years they tried and failed. Out of deference, he assured her that it was his problem and got checked. He was 100% stud, said his doctor with a laugh. It was not as funny when he took that line home. "Then I must be the sterile jackass," she said with a smile that felt like a scolding. They took a Cordon Bleu chef's class together; their first time. It took his mind off of their silence-inducing late nights. He had once adored every inch of her, her curious smirks, her peach-fuzz covered thighs; the way she vamped through a striptease before diving onto him without decorum. But then he suggested going the next step, in vitro. Soon, between sips of beer, then gulps of vodka, she began to refer to it as in loco. During those prickly months, they had to look the other way as their bank account emptied into a doctor's pocket. He then had to pump a syringe-full of hormones into her ass while she cried in pain. Everyday. He had to make love to her artfully and at odd hours. It was joy killing because the focus was on the maybes and might-come-to-be rather than the what-already-was. And then the day of the test; the hold your breath, yes you're pregnant, then days after they had congratulated each other and tossed around baby names, the blood dribbling out of her as if to say, who are you kidding? They went two rounds of three tries each before he said uncle. Literally. His brother had two kids, her sisters one each. "Why can't we enjoy our uncle and aunt status? Maybe we're too old now." They had a beam-splintering row then. How could he be so heartless? Hadn't they been through too much to concede failure? Wasn't he the one who wanted a baby? "I want a baby, not a test-tube made, hormone-induced, marital glue stick." As soon as the words were floating to her ears, he wanted to snatch them back, like sheets fluttering on a clothesline in a downpour. "Skip that, I didn't mean it. I'm just tired and frustrated. And I feel guilty for putting you through hell." As expected, her tender face softened. Caressing the back of his neck she wordlessly handed him a syringe. He knew she was afraid, of being weak and broken. When he once used the word "infertile", she had slapped him full across the face. Then she'd wept. But she wouldn't talk about it. Not that he wanted to hear it. There is an annual birthday party in June for all the students with summer birthdays. The teacher had initiated the celebration, because he had a summer birthday and always lamented not getting the cake and cards the other kids got. |
His wife came with the cupcakes and the party hats. So did many of the parents and some other kindergarten teachers (cake lovers). While watching over the giddy 5 year olds, he saw his wife gesture toward the little girl who swung her braids at people when she was angry. "I sometimes wish I had such braids," his wife remarked. One of the kids shrieked how much he loved the cake. "Your mother makes it good!" the child said loudly, pointing to his wife. The teacher looked from the child, innocent in his praise, to his wife, smiling sadly at the injury. "She must seem like my mother because she bakes such a good cake," he said to save the moment. But his colleagues were silently staring at their plates as parents smothered their titters. The four-year-old's godmother said, "I think you children think gray hair means old, but it doesn't. The Cat in the Hat has gray hair." This led to a huge debate. COULD that be true they wondered? Mommy is that right? The hot spotlight swung immediately off of his wife and onto The Cat in the Hat. Thankfully. His wife asked her what happened to her godson's parents. "Killed in a home invasion." "What on earth is that?" "It's guns, robbery, and murder all in one night." His wife left early to tend to some business at the gallery. A few parents walked him to his car to help re-load the trunk. They handed him parcels, baskets, and bags in a bucket brigade that ended with the Godmother who then got a glimpse into his trunk. "Oh don't tell me you made that?" she said dropping her bag of cups and candy to snatch up one of his porcelain goblets. "I did." "This is nice; more than nice. Why's it in your trunk?" He shrugged. He didn't say that he was retiring it from tempting himself towards a cognac high between 8 and 11 every night. "Do you have more stuff?" she asked peering up at him with one hand over her forehead to block the sun. I have a whole lifetime worth of stuff, he thought, disliking her more than a little for the heartless inquiry, so casually tossed at him the way someone might ask "Do you have a light?" "You should have a show or something," she said. "Do you ever think about showing?" "You must be pretty young to be so idealistic." "I'm 29 and a little salt," she said. "Young enough to not hide stuff in my trunk." Before the baby problems, his wife was his biggest cheerleader, sure that his inability to achieve with a capital letter was just a phase, a tough groove in a battle of wills between fear of failure and fear of success. As he became less sure that such a battle was being pitched on the terrain of his soul (maybe he was just gaspingly average), he began to become that other man; the one with more rote and less rhythm. "Let's go to bed." "And do what?" "And do something without a shot or a pregnancy test. Let's just do it for us." Sometimes he would throw on a CD and take her in his arms to dance slowly while she gazed at the lights on the harbor. They had a great view. So great that he wanted to block it and say in her ear, "Look at me the way you look at those lights. Like I might still have it in me." He believed in keeping one's word above all else. He hated dancing off beat; it was less than enjoyable, it was dangerous. He always suspected that if he didn't ignore that particular tune, he might slip, fall off the earth and not even be missed. Is that why he wanted a child? His wife took that moment to ask her unfulfilled husband if their childlessness was representative to him of his failure as a…man. "No." "Then why is this baby ruining everything we love about each other?" She reminded him of all the arguments he'd once foisted upon her about what having a child would mean to him. Love, nurture, inspire. He pointed out to her that she never once mentions him in her reasons. She does not need him to make any of those things come true; she already has them in spades. And since he can't motivate himself, can he really be someone's shining example of fatherhood? He retreated. She followed. "You didn't answer my question." "Sometimes that's an answer. And let's just fucking leave it at that." He wondered if they didn't have fertility to mock them, what would. He had learned the fine art of meandering in his car while he dripped pieces of his guilt along the highway. Sometimes he was so numb he prayed to be able to feel. But when the feeling came it was 3 parts devastation to 1 part extreme annoyance, so he receded back into a numbness so deep it bordered on autism. There were two ways out of it. Death or… he stumped himself, death or self-sacrifice? He wanted to make his wife happy because she was always savvy in her attempts to eke happiness out of him. And he had been doing nothing much but denying her satisfaction for ten years. It was the last day of school. 29 And A Little Salt sent a note to him in her charge's school box. "I hate men who cheat on their wives, and I equally despise the women who lure them. Am I no better than that? If I could help myself from liking you with a pound of guilt and the revocation of all future glory, I would. I think." He shut his tired eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, the area his wife called "an ethereal wonder" and read it again. In actuality it read, thanks for giving him the pottery lessons and the board games, such a big thank you. It mentioned nothing about luring or glory. Or cheating. He showed up uninvited at her house. "Your godson forgot something in my class." "Oh! He's gone. He's visiting my parents for a while." "To give you a break?" "Yes." "Then I don't have to." He wiped the surprise off her face with his lips. Every millimeter of her was new. He reveled in it like a soldier planting the flag on an unmapped island. They made love after which he apologized. "You're sorry for what we just did?" "No, because I'm not sorry for what we just did. And because you deserve better than a man who leaves you alone in the middle of the night." Her emails to him blinked in fire engine red and were bordered with the same symbols that adorned her tattooed body. He pretended to ignore her messages and called it a slip up that he would take to the pre-purchased grave he was meant to share with his wife. For every message 29 left him, every emailed article on the spirit-stomping ways of kindergarten or the frustrations of her thesis, he threw another pot, gashed out a better sculpture. He overheard her tell another parent about her godson. "Why don't you just call him your son now?" "I prefer to call him my godson because we were sort of chosen for each other by two people who thought we'd be really great together. It's so much more special than just having sex and having a kid." Ah, I don't think my wife would agree, the teacher thought. He told her what they'd been going through, or in and out of for the past five years. She only said, "Five years is a long time to have regret sitting in your living room." Every glance from her was a siren call. He pulled to it like a lemming over a hill. As he skidded downward, forcing open that Pandora's box meant to cradle their one-night stand, he wondered if his injuries would hurt him more for being self-inflicted. "I wish I could make you all better," she said. Over the next few months they saw each other twice weekly with the same glee of a goat between a salt lick and a water trough. They conversed through sex and sighs though they abjectly avoided the subjects of future or his wife. He played tic-tac-toe with her tats. He thought it ridiculous but fun that something as crazy as a tattoo could have a nickname. When she disrobed one day to expose a brightly colored feather tattoo, he asked her what tricks she could do with it. "It's just for looks. Isn't it pretty though?" "Aren't you taking this Indian thing a little too far?" She laughed and said how much she adored him. "Don't," he said. They once tried to sit through an encounter without sexing it up. Twenty minutes into it he was climbing the walls as she laughed and won the bet, shaking the five dollars out of his wallet. "Aren't you ashamed of taking money for sex?" he asked. "Let me show you how ashamed I am." I am enjoying my guilty pleasure, he admitted to himself. The meanders through town ceased. He stopped dripping pieces of his soul. 29 got hired on as a teacher's fellow at the university and co-curator of the California Native American museum on campus. She had an office. It had a lock. The godson had after school play dates. In her office, afternoons, the two of them were silent, the only sound coming from his skin searching out hers, caressing her soft and willing, the things that make all boys men. He preferred the decorated arms around him, the swirling, tilt-a-whirl tattoos that he traced like lines in a maze, toward his treasure. Shushing her questions; shooting down his own. "I adore you," she said peering down at him. He said, "Congratulations." "On adoring you?" He changed the subject, "Congratulations on your doctorate." "If you're so down on yourself why don't you go and do something to get up?" "Is that…a pun?" "I'm serious." "I'm going to be exhibiting." "At your wife's gallery?" "No, at the university. It's a faculty show." "Are you faculty?" "No I guess they grand fathered me in." "You're kind of young to be a grandfather." Still peering, she said, "If I were more mature or less selfish, I would lie, but sorry, there it is. I do love you." He told her that he was always feeling the same thing with her, an agitated awakening. He said he didn't know what to do with the situation he had created. She sensed that he was sad and told him, "You can blindfold yourself and not even know that you've come to a fork in the road." "I find your selflessness endearing to say the least." "Trust me, it's not eternal." When he got into his car he ripped off the leather of the steering wheel, which smelled of his wife's cologne, which he hated. He never told her he hated it, because he was a whimper and not a roar. Then again, she never cared to ask. He thought about one of their large and wide bouts over nothing important. It was the night they saw "The English Patient". He had laughed when the protagonist went back to get his dead lover's corpse because the whole trip was pointless and even foolhardy, proven when his plane was shot down. In his mind, "better late than never" didn't apply when your life was on the line. His wife called him heartless. He called her silly. "Oh, they almost sound like they go together don't they?" she had said. "Silly and heartless? Almost." Now he had to be a man. He had the choice of pirates. Walk the plank or get shot into the drink. If he stayed, his affair would be a barricade between he and his wife. If he left, he would be a thinner version of the shell he had become. You never know how bad something can get until it gets worse. As the week dragged into the next season, 29 refused to tilt his hand for him. Finally he said it. He told her he was leaving his wife. "Despite everything you believe? For me?" "For me." "Will," she said, saying his name and scratching his cheek playfully. "My Last Will and Testament." "I could live a life on wilted love if I hadn't met you." "I understand. You think if you let her down so hard, won't you do the same to me?" "What do you think?" "I love you right now. I don't care about tomorrow." "That's because you're young. You can't imagine how many tomorrows stretch in front of you." "When will you tell her?" "Soon." "I think I just heard that same line on 'All My Children'. But then, if you're serious, it won't matter that I saw your wife today." "Where's that?" "Your house. I stopped by on the pretext of dropping off some overly taxing kindergarten homework before me and little man go on vacation, but then, I guess I just had to say something to her. About us." "You spoke to my wife?" "Why not if you're leaving her anyway? Did you really think your simultaneous having and eating of cake would continue?" In the movies, when the adulterer is caught, he is relieved. He wants to end the game of pay phone calls, separate checks, holding hands under the red and white checkered tablecloth in the out-of-the-way diner. He was not an actor looking for a film though. So when the words spilled from the lips he'd just been nibbling, his heart jumped like Man Of War. His brain went so far as to think, "What the…?" Before it shut off. He pushed her off his lap to see if she was in fact as serious as she sounded. When her expression didn't change, his did. "You're so altruistic Will. If I'm like that when I get to be your wife's age, will you promise to shoot me?" She laughed then and he felt his mouth go sandpapery. He blinked. He blinked back all 11 years between them and saw reason descending. He saw the way he should stare grief in the face rather than run from it the way he had been, dragging his wife away with him and leaving her lonely at the same time. He stood and said, "If there was no altruism in the world, I wouldn't wait for you to be her age, I'd shoot you right now." On the drive home he unpeeled from his brain every coherent thought about his marriage as the four horsemen of his personal apocalypse rode across the ruined field of his brain. Without considering the consequences, he yanked open his front door. Startled, his wife put her hand to her breast and said, "Jesus Will." "Are you okay?" he asked and was surprised that his voice was shaking. "Be mad," he said. "Take a day and be really, really upset with me. Hit me. Scream." She stared at him. She gave him a look that infuriated him because it was so justified. "What are you talking about? What's the matter?" He had never known any situation on life's wide plain that he could not handle; that he could not face, even if just to push it into the attic for safekeeping until he could summon the strength, or the liquored-resolve to wrestle with it again. But 29 had lied. Had faked him out and forced his hand. He had spent a lifetime on waiting. Others got behind him and pushed him up the Sisyphean hill he called life. He didn't know if he let them because he was lazy or because he was fearful. It didn't really matter. Later that night he sat sober in his studio, looking at his unfinished life-sized ceramic goat, wondering what it symbolized, thankful for a wife shrewd enough to not demand an explanation for his impenetrable behavior. Was this her reward for unconditional love? "The thing with you rich people," he had overheard one of the hipper mothers say to his stuffed shirt school principal, "is that you tend to create problems where there are none." He had done that his whole life, so now he was well prepared to spar with the real thing. When 29 and the boy returned home from vacation he was waiting for them. She invited him in. He declined. "So," she said flippant and defiant like always. "So?" he said the anger piercing his normal veil of civility. "You make me feel like less than I already am. That takes talent." "I thought you knew it was a joke. Come on. No harm, no foul." She was right, at least partially. All the harm and all the fouls were his. She wasn't married to his wife. She wasn't lying and cheating. "Bliss is not just ignorance. It's hard work at a conditional life. And it's tacky to think that by leaving my wife, I somehow get a clean slate." She smirked up at him and said, "Aren't you telling the wrong person?" On his way back to the place he had only ironically called home, he tried to get a mental picture of the last time he and his wife had been truly happy. He wanted to see that picture and live off it until he figured out a way to kick-start the future from that past. But his thoughts kept collapsing into the image of 29's rebellious smirk. |