I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia (18 page)

“My cup.” The words were not said, but delivered by Potter Standish,
Doctor
Potter Standish as he often reminds us, who leaned back on his heels, studying the pegboard where we put our cups. His hands were behind his back in a scholarly stance, and his lips scrunched as if sipping something bitter. Finally, he put out his right hand and retrieved his somber black mug from the bottom left side. “Who moved my cup?” It was a rhetorical question, as he didn’t look toward us or seem to care, and certainly nobody else gave a damn. “Shouldn’t have.” His words always seemed flat and printed in caps, like moving headlines that electronically revolve around buildings.

Potter taught chemistry poorly and by rote during the day and drank enthusiastically by night. There were rumors that he had something on Havermeyer and was blackmailing him. I couldn’t imagine what my principal could have done that would be that juicy and worrisome, but I also couldn’t figure out why else a school with no tenure would keep this man.

Potter downed his coffee while we watched. He then squared his shoulders, rinsed his cup, and hung it up again, but on
his
peg, near the top right. “Shouldn’t touch a personal possession.” And he left the room.

“What about last night?” Neil asked as soon as the door closed behind Potter. He sat in one of the degenerate armchairs, but so tensely, he seemed to levitate an inch above its cushions. “Is coming back for a roll book a federal offense?”

I backed off a pace and bumped into the refrigerator handle. “I was talking about Teller, not…us. Did you hear?”

He squinted, lifted his chin almost pugnaciously. “What now? What was I supposed to hear?” He stood up, thrumming with tension. “I didn’t have time to hear, even to think about him. Angela went into a false labor that lasted all night. Why?” His eyes squinched into fleshy slits. He was obviously, and with cause, exhausted.

“When—when did that happen? The false labor, I mean.”

“When?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. After dinner. Why?”

Because he hadn’t mentioned it when we bumped into each other last night, and it would have made sense to, wouldn’t it? “Just wondering if she’s okay,” I said.

He nodded impatiently. “What was I supposed to hear about Teller, Amanda?” He leaned against an archaic mimeograph. Helga thought we should use it instead of the copy machine. Its dust filmed Neil’s blue blazer, but he had more on his mind than good grooming.

“Teller’s dead.”

Neil paled. Pulled away from the machine, opened his mouth and made a breathy sound, then closed his lips again.

It was, I felt, overdone. A bad actor’s concept of how to simulate shock.

The bell rang—shrilled, really. Voices and calls flooded the hallway outside. I gathered my coat and briefcase. “I know it’s a shock. Even for me, I—”

“The bastard’s dead,” he said.

We left the lounge and joined the student crush. He hadn’t even asked what had ended Teller’s life. “He was murdered,” I said, out in the hall. “Somebody killed him last night.”

Neil navigated through the students. We climbed the stairs toward our rooms and reached a little island of clear floor. Only then did he stop and study me. The tic near his eye pulsed the seconds away. “You think I did it, don’t you?” he said.

“Of course not! Why on earth would I?”

His sad eyes looked at me levelly. “Because you’re intelligent. He did me harm and meant to do more. He was killing me. That’s why people kill other people. It’s all about self-defense.” And, looking weary, he lifted his hand in a sad farewell and crossed the wide hallway to his room, there to transmit the lessons of history.

Not Neil, I told the gods. Not Lydia. But who, then?

The students seemed unnaturally, disgustingly rowdy for the early hour, and I made my way through them as invisibly as possible. This is no big feat, as there is nothing they enjoy more than ignoring faculty. Still, there seemed an inordinate amount of hilarity, but then, they were teens.

I was involved with a graphic designer my first, shell-shocked year of teaching, during which my every educational illusion detonated, along with the relationship. I take full blame. I was obsessed with my professional loss of innocence, the fear that I didn’t have a calling, but a sentence.

The graphic designer had style. As a parting gift, he created what looked like an illuminated manuscript page, but what really was a quote from Shakespeare’s
Richard III.
“Each hour’s joy wracked with a week of teen” it said. Act IV, Scene 1. It was comforting—cold comfort is better than none at all—to discover that
teen
meant annoying and vexful even before the idea of adolescence was invented. The poster hung in my classroom, as ignored as anything else Shakespeare ever said, until m’lord Havermeyer, checking his fiefdom before Parent’s Night, actually read it.

My first-period ninth graders were midway through a unit on Poe, always a happy time with his grisly, compulsive stories and resonating rhymes. We had fun with “The Cask of Amontillado” today.

Second period was still doing oral book reports, another comfort, for me, if not for them. Oral book reports are required by the curriculum. Ivory-tower educators believe the process teaches communication skills and reduces fear of public speaking. This is a pleasant concept, and completely fallacious. After decades of oral book reports, nationwide polls still show that the majority of the populace would rather face a firing squad than an audience.

Besides being ineffective, oral book reports are excruciatingly boring. One by one, students, eyes riveted to three-by-five prompts, rehash Cliffs Notes or movies, while their classmates listen only to how many
uhs
or
ands
they say. Nonetheless, it was a time during which I could both listen and, I hoped, do some serious thinking.

Nonnie Waters was the fifteenth tenth grader to read Steinbeck’s
The Pearl,
inspired less by its bitter wisdom than by its slenderness. “It’s, um, about these divers, see, for pearls, and they, um, have a baby, and, um, so like they find this pearl and it’s really valuable and I forgot to say they’re like poor, I mean really poor, and they can’t even get medicine for their baby, who has this weird name, which is something I didn’t like about the book, but anyway…”

Eventually Nonnie reached her critical summation.
The Pearl
was kind of boring, but okay, too. Too many
ums,
the class decided.

Next up, Dwight was so surprised that
Shane
was good that he had absolutely nothing else to say about it, including even the barest rudiments of the plot. Allison, bespectacled and shy, broke my heart by compounding her geeky reputation by confessing that she’d read
Jane Eyre
because I’d recommended it. And last for this morning, Didi Donato admitted that an Ursula LeGuin fantasy had been good. “Well,” she said, flinching as if she expected a violent reaction, “actually, I thought it was as good as a movie. No,” she insisted, as if she’d heard a chorus of disbelief. “It actually was.”

A normal morning. I found that awkward. Things were too skewed in the universe for us to be involved in ordinary pursuits. I kept contrasting Lydia Teller’s day with mine and obsessively walking the road to hell I’d paved with good intentions. If Sam got her out on bail, where would she go? To that place that couldn’t feel like home with its ugly memories and a gory kitchen off limits as the scene of a crime? She had no family, and her only child had been driven off by the husband she was now accused of murdering. I sighed so loudly that the class stopped counting how many
ands
Didi used. Instead, they pointed blank faces in my direction.

Who? I repeatedly asked myself. Who had been there last night while Lydia was locked in the bathroom? Who killed Wynn Teller?

My eleventh graders were having a vocabulary quiz, gunning up for next autumn’s SATs. Every word I randomly picked from the list seemed ominously weighted with new meaning. “Fiasco,” I said. Noun. That which my good intentions helped create.

Chicanery. Vindictive. Cadaver.
I scanned the list for less grisly words and found a section based on
mono, bi,
and
tri.

“Monotheism,” I said, breathing more easily. What a nice, respectable, noncriminal word. “Monologue.” A student groaned, as if she’d been dreading the word instead of learning what it meant.

“Bigamy.”

Bigamy!
Of course. How could I have forgotten the woman dressed like an indigestion nightmare who’d insisted she was Wynn Teller’s wife, the mother of his children, the creator of the idea of TLC? Plus those hulking, unhappy children of hers. There were two abused wives, a slew of motives.

“That’s only seven!” a student said. I blinked and looked around.

“Is that all?” the child asked.

“All what?”

She rolled her eyes so far up they were nearly all white and definitely disgusting. “All of the spelling quiz,” a redheaded boy near me said, his voice embarrassed on my behalf. I was grateful for his concern.

I cleared my throat. “Trio,” I said.

Fay and Adam and Eve. One cheated of her idea, income, and husband, the others of their father and perhaps their share of the business. Could they have? Did the police know about them?

“Ahem!” It was a sound out of a comic book. Nobody except my students actually said it, but it did bring my attention back where it belonged, the vocabulary fist.

“Misogyny,” I read, and I sighed. All words led to Wynn Teller.

“Frustration.”

All words.

Fifteen

THE FACULTY LOUNGE IS THE ONLY IN-SCHOOL ALTERNATIVE TO THE STUDENT dining room with its chaos, food fights, and, most appalling aspect of all, students. The lounge, ugly and cramped as it is, is therefore popular by default. Its atmosphere is also generally much more pleasant than its decor. But this particular noon, it was nearly as distressing as the other dining option. Not food, but daggers hurtled through the air.

“You could have
asked
,”
Commercial Art snapped at Biology.

“About what? I told you I didn’t take your schnecken.”

“My
mother’s
schnecken. I was going to give you one, anyway. Didn’t I yesterday?”

“I didn’t take your mother’s—”

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Edie.

“She’s sure he swiped the goodies she had stashed on top of the refrigerator. There was a tin—with her name on it, as she keeps reminding us. I said write it off to the Philly Prep Phantom, but she won’t quit.”

“Not one left!” the art teacher keened.

Edie unwrapped a fragrant assemblage of cholesterol and preservatives on rye. “Want some?” she asked. My mouth watered, my heart shouted assent, but I shook my head.

“I brought in tons of yogurt Monday and I’ve been cheating every day since.” I needed a shot of self-righteousness anyway.

However, I wasn’t going to find virtue in yogurt, because I wasn’t able to find yogurt, for starters. My entire supply was gone. I felt my lips pucker with annoyance and I suddenly shared the art teacher’s fury. What were we becoming that we pilfered each other’s lunches?

“My yogurt’s gone,” I answered. “Anybody see it? Blueberry. Not premixed.” Next I’d issue an APB and have its photos put on milk cartons. Three inches high. Blue and white. Have you seen this yogurt?

“Maybe the janitorial service takes things,” someone suggested.

“They’re only here Fridays,” I reminded them.

“We should padlock the refrigerator,” Gladys the computer skills teacher said.

Edie Friedman brushed crumbs off her skirt. “What good would that do? We’d all need separate locks, and then what? Forty keys to use every time we opened it?”

“And that wouldn’t help my schnecken,” the art teacher whined. “Cookies don’t get refrigerated!”

I tried to look sympathetic, but schnecken weren’t going to do it for me on this particular day. Instead, I retrieved my coat and decided to go to the deli around the corner where, I promised myself, I would purchase only leafy green foodstuff.

“By the way,” Edie said with a private wink, “that lamp better work.”

The kids in the classroom had been astoundingly, abnormally normal, but the faculty had obviously been replaced by oddballs from outer space. Neil twitched, the art teacher fumed about schnecken, and Edie shared hopes about a lighting fixture. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m great,” she said. “Except for hockey tryouts. But the lamp—the boudoir lamp, remember? For seductions? I took it home. I
know
I shouldn’t have, but I had to—and I don’t know,
it just makes me believe
things are going
to change for the better.”

How could she actually believe that better automatically included a man? Still, I tried to look pleased and optimistic for her. “And thanks for reminding me. I put things away and forgot to take them.” I just about backed out of the lounge. They were all crazy. Maybe it was something in the school heating system, a psychological Legionnaires’ disease.

It was blustery outside. A great day for catching cinders in one’s eyes. I was grateful for the warmth of my down coat, and for all the shivering geese who had sacrificed their feathers for me. The streets were nearly empty except for a handful of hard-core students braving the out of doors. Anything, even frostbite, for the sake of a few minutes out of school.

It was a day that justified the great indoors. A day for comfort food. I stood at a corner of the square, rethinking the necessity of that leafy and unsatisfying lunch.

My train of thought, idling between thick sandwiches and thicker soups, was suddenly derailed as I felt myself grabbed from both sides and nearly lifted off the ground.

“Hey!” I shouted. “Let go!” They—whoever they were—carried me by my edges, as if I were a large canvas on its way to being hung. I turned my head, but my slouch hat twisted along with me and blocked my vision. “Help!” I screamed.

An incredibly short osteoporosis victim crossing the park looked my way, then hustled in the opposite direction. I really hadn’t expected her to save me.