Getting Warmer (2 page)

Here are some of the things I don’t do: I don’t shoplift, cheat on my taxes or sleep with married men. I don’t pirate software or run red lights. I don’t sneak thirteen items into the express lane at the grocery store.

So I lie a little. It’s not like anyone gets hurt.

Besides, I don’t lie during the day. During the day, I am a model of virtue. I watch my language. I wear knee-length skirts and high-necked shirts. I stick to my allotted thirty-five minutes for lunch (assuming I am not on lunch duty; on those days, I don’t even get thirty-five minutes).

The day after the incident in the bar (just one of many incidents I’ve had in bars with “Jo” in the last six months or so; Jo’s real name is Jill, by the way), I greeted the morning the way I always do: by hitting the snooze button three times more than is prudent. School starts at 7:30 A.M., even though every study that’s ever been done says that teenagers need to sleep later than such a schedule allows. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most adults need more sleep, too, especially if they’ve been flitting around bars pretending to dispense hormones the night before.

I gave myself a quick, cool rinse in the double-headed marble shower before yanking on a simple blue skirt and a simple blue shirt that would look better if I ironed them but would have to do. I accessorized with a new pair of dangly silver earrings and a luxurious silk scarf. These touches were unusual for me; I had a blind date after work, and while my hopes were low, I hadn’t given up on miracles.

I waited till the last minute to put on my sandals. The house’s Saltillo tiles felt cool and soothing on my feet. The effect was temporary. I’d start sweating during the drive to work; my Civic’s AC just couldn’t compete with Arizona in August, even this early in the morning. Downstairs in the kitchen, I opened the stainless steel refrigerator and grabbed a yogurt, an apple and a bottled Starbuck’s frapuccino to drink in the car. I gazed out longingly at the boulder-rimmed Pebble Tec pool and spa in the backyard. If my date ended early enough, I’d take a dip, I silently vowed.

Oh, yeah, in case you haven’t already concluded that I’m a total loser, here’s another nugget: I live with my parents.

I got to my classroom at 7:31, a minute after the first bell had rung. It’s a good thing the school custodians unlocked the classrooms at 7:15; otherwise I’d have had packs of students conspicuously waiting in the hallway at least once a week. Today the students were variously slumped in their seats or leaning on their friends’ desks. “Seats, please,” I said, clearing my throat. I did a quick scan of the room, praying that they were all on time, that I wouldn’t have to choose between rule-bending and hypocrisy.

Rule-bending won. Robert Baumgartner strolled in four minutes after the bell. The yellow late slips sat prominently on my enormous brown laminate desk. It had been a mere two days since Agave High’s faculty meeting had focused on the problem of tardiness and consistency. “We must declare our solidarity in this issue,” intoned the principal, Dr. Florenzia White. “If a portion of the faculty looks the other way when students are tardy, the entire school suffers.” She was right, of course. Dr. White was always right. “Final warning, Robert,” I said with as much authority as I could muster. “Next time you get a slip.”

“Sorry, Mrs. Quackenbush,” he said, batting absurdly long eyelashes. “I had car trouble. It won’t happen again, I swear.” He settled his long, languid body in his chair. The girls in the class shot him worshipful looks.

“Mrs. Quackenbush is my mother,” I said. “But let’s move on. How many of you did the homework last night?” A scattering of hands rose in the air. I heard one voice say, “We had homework?”

Mistake number two: I had asked about the homework as if doing it had been an option. I should have said, “I assume you did the homework last night.” Or, better yet, “Please pull out your homework.” But this was twelfth grade “Adventures in English,” otherwise known as, “The Slow Class.” The first time I heard the “Adventures” moniker, I envisioned a bunch of cape-clad adolescents soaring over the desert, Superman-style. A week and a half into the school year, I could tell that there would be very little soaring going on in this group. I had worried about behavior problems, but the fact was, there was almost no behavior at all.

Most of the kids weren’t even slow. Some, like Robert, were of average or superior intelligence but afflicted with learning disabilities. Others spoke English as a second language (the first being Spanish, mostly). Still others just didn’t give a damn. I mean a darn.

The one thing they had in common seemed to be a complete inability to grasp anything I taught them. When the bell rang, forty-three minutes later, it was clear that not one of the eighteen students knew how to use quotation marks.

Robert smiled at me on the way out. “I’ll do my homework tonight. I promise.”

“I’ll remember you said that.” I tried to sound like I believed him. Robert would probably end up in prison some day, which saddened me because I was already quite fond of him.

“You look nice today, Mrs. Quackenbush,” he said. “I like the scarf.”

“Why, thank you, Robert!”

“It’s a nice change from your usual Secret Service look.” And then he was gone.

 

 

At lunchtime, I went to the front office to find Jill. Jill is the school psychologist, a testament to the widely held belief that all shrinks are crazy. She was leaning over the tall counter that separates the secretaries from the students—ironic, considering that both secretaries had been students at Agave just a few years before. Dawna (“Mrs. Johnson”) was twenty years old, already fat and married to a former Agave student with a baby named Chenille at home.

Nicolette (“Miss Badanski”) was twenty-one and enmeshed in the process of choosing her bridal registry. Right now she was showing Jill a flier from Bed, Bath & Beyond. “I was totally set on that eggplant-colored duvet cover from Linens ’n Things—remember I showed you the picture last week? With the gold trim and the fringed throw pillows? But now I’m looking at this other one, it’s—what do they call it?—claret-colored. Totally classy. But if I go this way, it means I’m going to have to change my towels. Macy’s has me down for eggplant, but I’m thinking beige might be safer. But then I’m all—
beige
? Is that totally boring, or what?”

Jill studied the picture. “I’d stick to the eggplant. This one’s a bit, I don’t know. Too much.”

“Miss Quackenbush? What do you think?” Nicolette asked.

I looked at the picture. Ick. “I’m with Jill. This one’s a little overwhelming.”

“Nicolette wants to go out with us sometime,” Jill said to me. I glared up at her. We had never discussed enlarging our “circle” of two. Besides, Nicolette would get all the attention; she was blessed with the biggest breasts I’d ever seen on a thin person who had never undergone a boob job. (Hers were certified genuine; much of the staff had witnessed her girl-to-woman transformation during the spring of her freshman year. “Like she sprouted pillows overnight,” was how one teacher described it.)

“Yeah,” Nicolette said. “I’ve got to start meeting men. The guys around here are all losers.” For all her registry talk, Nicolette was not only unengaged, she was unattached. She was weirdly rational about her burgeoning registry, which she had started the year before, following Dawna’s marriage to Chad Johnson. Dawna had a brief (nine-day) engagement after discovering that “God had blessed her” with what was to become little Chenille. A scattering of high school friends (she had graduated the year before) and teachers had crowded in her parents’ tiny backyard on a sweltering October day to hear Dawna and Chad pledge eternal devotion.

For all its shaky beginnings, the marriage seemed to be progressing smoothly. Chad took care of Chenille during the day; evenings he worked as a bellhop. Dawna took copious photos of their “family time,” which took place between the hours of 3 and 5 P.M. When Chenille went to bed each evening Dawna posted the photos into scrapbook after scrapbook.

But Nicolette was unimpressed by Dawna’s marriage. She focused exclusively on the wedding and what she considered a paltry take: a handful of gift cards (two for Wal-Mart), three salad bowls, two platters and too many candlesticks and vases to count. As documented in her scrapbooks, Dawna, Chad and little Chenille ate their four o’clock dinners off mismatched thrift store plates and drank their milk from plastic glasses. Their tablecloth was vinyl.

The lesson had not been lost on Nicolette. “I’m going to be ready,” she said. “Even if I elope, I’ll be prepared.” She was currently registered at Linens ’n Things, Macy’s, Robinsons-May, Target and The Great Indoors. She had gone so far as to get the registry form from Bed Bath & Beyond but was concerned that that might be overkill.

I let Jill have it when we sat down at our favorite corner of our favorite table in the teacher’s dining room. “I can’t believe you invited Pamela Anderson out with us.”

“Not fair,” Jill said, popping open her Diet Coke. “Nicolette’s boobs are real.”

“So are Pamela’s. She had the implants removed. I read it in
People
.”

“When do you have time to read
People
? Aren’t you supposed to be reading
The Odyssey
?”

I sighed and pulled out my yogurt and apple. “I bought the
CliffsNotes
. I just couldn’t keep up with those kids.” That would be my ninth-grade honors class, which I’d inherited when the woman who had been teaching it since the seventies had a nervous breakdown on the second day of school.

“Would anyone believe Nicolette is a man?” Jill asked.

“Oh, God, is that what this is all about?” I peeled the foil off my yogurt. Jill unzipped her padded blue cooler and pulled out a hunk of French bread. “What is that?”

“Roast pork loin sandwich with roasted red peppers and goat cheese.”

“Wanna trade? I won’t complain about Nicolette anymore.”

“Not a chance.” She bit into her sandwich, and a look of bliss flickered across her face. “So what do you think? We try the transsexual routine with Nicolette, see if anyone falls for it.”

“You don’t look like a man,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like to have every guy you’ve ever dated beg you to play volleyball for his company team.”

The door to the dining room swung open. “It’s Mr. Handsome,” I whispered. He was carrying a plastic orange tray.

“Gay,” Jill muttered.

“Is not.”

“Just try not to look desperate.”

I caught Lars’s eye and waved. “Desperate,” Jill hissed.

“Ssh.”

Lars said hello to a couple of teachers and strode over to us. “Ms. Quackenbush. Ms. Green.”

“Hello, Lars,” I said in a decidedly casual, un-desperate way. Lars Hansen had flippy blond hair (“Too pretty,” Jill said), a gym rat body (“Too vain”), and an easy sense of humor (“Too smooth”). He was twenty-six years old (“Too young”). Like me, he taught English, though he also had one drama class and responsibility for the school play (“Gay, gay, gay”). Lars was madly in love with me. He just didn’t know it yet.

Lars put his tray on the table. Today’s cafeteria lunch: a hunk of gray-brown meat, canned string beans, glutinous mashed potatoes. I could never be that hungry.

“Natalie has a date tonight,” Jill announced.

“A blind date,” I quickly clarified before wondering if I should have given him an opportunity to be jealous.

“Anyone I know?” Lars asked.

“
She
doesn’t even know him. It’s a blind date,” Jill said in her teacher-talking-to-an-especially-dumb-student voice.

“Oh! Right! Well, good for you. I guess it’s hard to meet men around here.”

Three years ago, I swore off blind dates forever, but it turns out that forever was not as long as I’d expected. I’d been having one of those “crisis years,” when everything in my life changed in rapid succession: my boyfriend, my apartment, my job.

My boyfriend’s name was Ron, and while my mother still thinks I should have married him (her mantra: “Dartmouth undergrad, Harvard Business School, a promising career in investment banking—what more do you want?”), I have never regretted my decision to send him packing (well, to send myself packing; it was his apartment), though I occasionally wish I’d fought harder for the DVD player.

We were living in Boston. We’d been together almost four years, and everyone assumed we’d eventually marry. My parents had just sold their house in Newton and moved to Scottsdale. Their move hit me harder than I had expected. Suddenly, I had nowhere to go for Sunday dinner. Suddenly, Ron was my only “family”—and he didn’t care about me enough to make me mashed potatoes and carrot cake.

It was more than that, though. While Ron obsessed over whether he’d be able to make his first million by the time he hit thirty (he was twenty-eight; I was twenty-six) or whether he had to wait till thirty-five (and if so whether he should adjust for inflation and raise his goal to 1.1 million), I was making my mark on the world by doing production work for a direct mail company, helping to create and distribute flyers for cabinet refacers, Chinese restaurants and cut-rate law firms.

My epiphany didn’t come at once. Rather, it grew in my subconscious, kind of like when you get a glossy ad for a mattress and you throw it out, and then you get another mattress advertisement and you throw it out, and then you get another and you throw it out, and then one day you wake up at three o’clock in the morning, and you can’t get back to sleep, and your spine hurts and your leg twitches, and it hits you like a ton of bricks: you need a new mattress!

But I didn’t need a new mattress (well, not yet, anyway, though I would once I moved out). I needed a new boyfriend—or, failing that, I needed no boyfriend. And I needed a new career, preferably one in which I wouldn’t profit from annoying people.

Teaching seemed perfect. I could indulge my love of literature while fulfilling my sense of service. Plus, I’d get to leave work at three o’clock every day and get summers off.