Getting Warmer (28 page)

“Was it because of his age that he was unhappy?” I asked indelicately. “Maybe he didn’t want to be starting over when he already had a grown son.”

“Oh, no—actually, I think he would have been happy to start over if it meant spreading his seed and buying a kind of genetic immortality. The thing was”—here she lowered her voice—“we had to use a donor.”

“A donor?”

“Jack’s boys don’t swim the way they used to. The fertility specialist tried a few things, but I didn’t want to waste any more time. I’m not getting any younger, you know. So I made a trip to the sperm bank, felt an immediate connection with donor one seventy three, and spent a romantic evening with a turkey baster.”

“Did Jonathan know?”

“I don’t think so. I certainly didn’t tell him anything.”

I plucked my own Evian bottle from the counter and twisted off the cap with a satisfying hiss. A turkey baster, I thought. “It’s probably just as well you have your Thanksgivings catered,” I said.

I didn’t have to go in early to help Robert anymore because he had hired a tutor named Ladd. Ladd was twenty-two, one of Suzette’s regular bartenders and, according to Robert, “one smart dude.”

“I’d do it for free,” I said.

“Yeah, but sometimes you get what you pay for,” he said casually. I tried to take it as a joke, but it stung.

“Ladd knows everything about everything,” Robert said. “History, philosophy, Scientology . . .”

“You mean science?”

He considered for a moment. “Yeah, maybe.”

Maybe it was just the time of year, with everyone counting the days until Christmas vacation, but my students were uniformly apathetic and unreliable. I began to give my college prep kids five minutes at the end of every class to begin their homework because it seemed to increase the odds that they’d finish it later at home—or at the mall or at Starbucks or wherever they went after school. (Dogs no longer ate homework; now students showed up empty-handed because “my frappuccino spilled.”) My honors students weren’t much better. Even Claudia missed an assignment—though she did make it up a day later, employing an especially lovely font and attaching a note that said, “Sorry this is late! ☺ It won’t happen again! ☺ Please don’t mark me down!!! ☺ ☺ ☺”

Cody seemed to ignore his homework more often than not. “Is the work too hard for you?” I asked him after class one day, though he’d always been a capable student.

“Nuh-oh,” he said in that way that teenagers do, as if “no” were a multi-syllabic word and you were a complete moron for asking a question in the first place.

Jared remained his usual disturbing, distracting, sociopathic self.

“Did you do your homework?”

“I don’t know.”

“You
don’t know
?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Okay, then, you get a zero for the day.” I leaned over my grade book and wrote a zero in the appropriate column.

“Oh, wait—now I remember. I did it.” He smiled slowly, meanly—one of those mouth-only smiles that doesn’t affect the eyes.

“Show me.”

He opened up his blue binder, flipped to a tabbed section and pointed to his completed work. We held each other’s gaze. He didn’t blink. Around us, several students covered their mouths in a vain attempt to suppress laughter.

“Okay, then.” Ballpoint pen in my sweaty hand, I wrote a check over the zero. I smiled at Jared (mouth only; no eyes). “Keep it up.” Jared was the only kid I knew who could piss me off by doing his homework.

Home was no refuge. In the garage was an enormous white real estate sign: MARJORIE WAMSLEY, FRYE REALTORS, WE WORK FOR YOU! The sign sported an enormous picture of Marjorie that had to be fifteen years old. She still wore her hair in the same lacquered blond pageboy, but her mouth had begun to droop around the corners, and her eye shadow lodged in the creases on her eyelids. She possessed a seemingly endless wardrobe of black blazers in various lengths, all intended to cover her late middle-aged spread. Marjorie had helped my parents buy this house. Now she would help them sell it. From a real estate agent’s standpoint, my parents’ geographic indecision was a dream come true.

The house wouldn’t go on the market until January. Marjorie said nobody buys houses during the holidays. She also said that homes sell best when they exhibit a “neutral yet inviting décor.” In other words, Boston-meets-
Bonanza
had to go.

When I got home from work that day, Marjorie was in the living room, sitting on the couch with a scrawny blond woman in tight white pants and a white turtleneck. “Natalie, I’d like you to meet Kim Standish. Kim is our stager.”

Kim stood up and held out a hand. She looked like an egret. “Your parents have some lovely antiques.”

“We’re going to have to put them in storage,” Marjorie said.

“The couches can stay,” Kim assured me. “And all of the kitchen furniture. But the log bed in the guest room . . .” Here she paused, trying to find just the right word.

I shrugged off my jacket. “I think it’s hideous.”

Kim brightened. “So we’re on the same page.”

Not really. My page was entitled “Ditch the Kitsch,” while Kim’s read, “Remove Half the Furniture and Put the Other Stuff at Weird Angles.” That was after packing away all of the family pictures and my mother’s Hummels.

At my request, Kim didn’t take any furniture out of my room, though I obligingly stashed my hairbrush, cosmetics and papers out of sight. There wasn’t a lot to remove, anyway, just the matching blond wood bed, nightstand and dresser that I’d had since high school. In the sixteen months that I’d lived here, I had neglected to hang a single picture. Doing so would have seemed too permanent, somehow, like living with my parents wasn’t just a pit stop on the way to my own life but rather a declaration of permanent dependence.

Kim changed all that. First she moved my bed to the corner, so it stuck out diagonally into the room. Then she transformed the space into a child’s room. A boy child. She covered my bed with a stiff black-and-white spread that looked like cowhide. She stuck a black cowboy hat on the back of my bedroom door and plastered the walls with framed movie posters of cowboys and Indians atop speeding horses. A lasso affixed to one of the diagonal walls near the headboard struck me as unforgivably kinky.

Worst of all were the “special touches” Kim scattered throughout the house. In the master bath, perched next to the Jacuzzi tub, sat a champagne bottle, two flutes and a selection of bubble bath. An enormous bowl of oranges—propped next to a retro juicer and an empty glass pitcher—dominated the kitchen counter, while a half-completed game of backgammon sat on the coffee table. I felt like ghosts inhabited the house—clean, citrusy, game-playing ghosts.

 

* * *

Since I had no weekend plans, I ended the school week by assigning a rash of in-class essays. I would spend Saturday and Sunday thoughtfully critiquing the load, perhaps while soaking in a bubbly tub. The college prep kids had to compare and contrast any two characters from
Great Expectations
. The Adventures students were to write a persuasive essay on one of the following topics: 1. Why books are better than television; 2. Why chocolate is better than vanilla (or vice versa); or 3. Why the dress code should (or shouldn’t) be abolished. I was reasonably certain they’d all choose the third topic (once I explained the meaning of the word “abolished”), but I threw in the others for good measure.

As for Freshman Honors, the in-class essay served as a final test for their
Lord of the Flies
unit. With a flash of unoriginality, I instructed the students to choose one character and explain how he dealt with the Three Big Conflicts: man versus man, man versus nature, and the crowd favorite, man versus himself. I was free during the period before honors. I spent it on a couch in the English office, attacking the Adventures essays.

 

I got to my classroom a few minutes before the bell rang and began sticking the blue essay books on each of the students’ desks. I was about halfway through when my in-class phone rang.

I hate the in-class phone. No one ever just calls to say hello. Dawna calls to remind me about lunchroom duty. Dr. White calls when she wants me to fill out a report about an underperforming student. Or—

“Mrs. Quackenbush? This is Lynette Pimpernel. Claudia’s mother.” As if I didn’t know. As if I didn’t remember her endless e-mails, not to mention the
Romeo and Jules
protest meeting.

“Yes, Mrs. Pimpernel.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. One minute till the bell.

“I wanted to talk to you about Claudia’s recent assignment. The vocabulary words? Claudia tells me you marked her down a grade because she handed it in a day late.”

I rolled my eyes but kept my sigh inaudible. “Yes, that’s my policy, as Claudia knows. Students lose a full grade for every day an assignment is late.”

“Yes, and I completely support you in this. Students must learn responsibility. And Claudia has always been a diligent student.”

“She certainly is, Mrs. Pimpernel. And I doubt that one B will have much effect on her final grade.”

“Can you guarantee that?”

The bell rang. “No, I can’t guarantee anything. I won’t know the grades until I do my final calculations at the end of the quarter. But a single homework assignment doesn’t have a huge bearing on a student’s final mark.” Sarah Levine entered the class. I caught her eye and handed her the blue books, motioning her to pass them out. “Mrs. Pimpernel, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to go now. Claudia’s class is just beginning.”

“Oh? Claudia told me you were free this period.”

“No, I was free last period. It’s different every day.” The kids were coming in a stream now, shoving their books under their chairs, fishing out pencils and erasers and positioning them on their desks just so. There was an air of tension in the room. These kids took tests seriously.

“Could you call me after school then? I’d really like to talk a little more about how the grades are calculated.”

I closed my eyes briefly, trying to gather strength. I was not going to launch my weekend—my pathetic, work-and-bubble-bath-centered-weekend—with a phone call to Claudia’s mother. “The students are doing an in-class essay today.”

“On
Lord of the Flies
. I know, Claudia told me.” Claudia told her. Yes. At which point Lynette Pimpernel probably began drafting an essay for Claudia to memorize.

“At any rate, I need to get them started. Then I can call you from the department office.”

Three minutes later, after sticking the essay topic on the overhead projector, I trotted down the hall and dialed the Pimpernels’ home number. Using my cell phone was out of the question. The Pimpernels probably had caller ID; no way was I going to end up on their speed dial. As for leaving the kids unattended, it was hard to cheat on an essay test. Besides, with the glaring exception of Jared, these were good kids with a deep fear of getting in trouble.

“I’d like to explain why Claudia’s assignment was late,” Mrs. Pimpernel began, having gotten her second wind. Before I could find a polite way to say I didn’t care, she explained that her husband had received a community award that night, and that it was a very special night for him and a very special night for the whole family. And Claudia is extremely close to her father, he’s her role model, really, which is why she is so intent on attending Harvard in a few years, just like her dad. Has Claudia ever mentioned that her father went to Harvard? And that she hopes to follow in his footsteps? At any rate, after this important, special, role-model-worthy night, the family got home extremely late and Claudia, committed student that she is, was prepared to stay up until the wee hours doing her vocabulary homework, but we all know how important sleep is for growing bodies, and her mother and father agreed that she had to go to bed. Besides, Claudia has an exceptional vocabulary for a fourteen-year-old—she spoke her first words at eight months; the doctor said he’d never seen anything like it—and she probably knew all of the words on the list anyway. In light of all that and in light of Claudia’s exemplary performance, couldn’t I award her full credit for that homework assignment?

“No,” I said.

“But—”

“No.”

When I returned, the room was deathly quiet except for the hum of the heaters (on this December day, it was a brisk sixty-two degrees outside) and the scratch of the pencils. The students barely glanced up when I tiptoed over to my desk. I pulled the chair out as quietly as I could and was about to sit down when I saw something long and thin slip from the chair onto the floor: a snake.

I jumped back and screamed. The students’ heads popped up, eyes wide with shock. A couple of the girls shrieked when they saw the creature. One boy said, “Is it alive?” Another said, “That’s a baby gopher snake. It’s not poisonous.”

It was dead. I registered that information in my brain, but my primal reflexes remained on high alert, my heart pounding, my head buzzing. It was beige with black marks and less than two feet long—smaller than plenty of snakes I’d seen slithering across the street. Its head was rounded, not angular. There was no rattle on its tail.

Jared laughed.

I gawked at him, blood rushing in my ears. His eyes were squeezed almost completely shut. He was that amused.

“
You little shit.
”

He stopped laughing. The other kids stopped looking at the snake and stared at me instead.

“Pick it up,” I commanded.