Ms. Hempel Chronicles (14 page)

there are also treasure boxes, and pods. The treasure b
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are carved shut, but the pods, she finds, can be opened with the help of a thumbnail. Inside the pods? Tiny monkey babies curled up in sleep. Each successive pod is tinier than the 1 each monkey baby more perilously small. She eases the cha' the monkeys, the pods, back inside the peach. She replaces the top. She is filled with the delicious, dangerous sense that if she were to continue extracting the chain, the pods would g
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even smaller, as would the monkeys and the treasure boxes and the very links of the chain itself, smaller and smaller, un til they all but disappeared. “Thank you, Father,” she says, and slips the peach deep inside her robes, where it will be safe.

Above her rises a face, smooth and round like a moon, or
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peach, or the seed of a lychee nut. Two eyes gaze at her, black and still like a pool.

“Ms. Hempel .” It is Jonah. His chin is resting atop a high, plush seat. His dark eyes shine in the light from a streetlamp outside the bus. “We’re home,” he says. “Wake up.”

Ms. Hempel stirs. “I’m awake,” she says. And she is; her eyes are open.

“I thought that place was fun,” Jonah says.

“So did !,” she says, and suddenly wants to reach up, to touch him on his cheek.

Ms. Hempel had told her class about the Indians’ admirable habits. “Even the hooves,” she said, “would be used as ceremonial rattles.” She drew a circle on the chalkboard to illustrate the wholeness of their lives, and inside of this she wrote the words harmony and balance. When she described the Europeans' profligacy, and their brutal massacres, her students became enraged, and when she described the shrinking of the Indian population, they looked bereft. “But there’s a silver lining,” Ms. Hempel said. "I guess you could cull it that.” Then she told them about the casino she had visited the previous summer: the great glittering elevators, the famous comedian, the tables thronged with customers, all losing money. “The Pequots are very rich and powerful now,” she said, and the class grinned with relief.

Having spoken of the Indians so approvingly, Ms. Hempel was dismayed to find, during a Sunday afternoon in the bookstore, a new publication dedicated to contradicting her. She stood in the aisle and frowned. According to the latest anthropological discoveries, Indians were not good friends to Nature; they clear-cut forests, hunted game to near extinction, savored delicacies such as the buffalo fetus while leaving the mother to slowly decompose in the sun.

The book was displayed on a shelf that held a variety of other books all with apparently the same bent. Ms. Hempel realized that a small industry had sprung up, whose sole purpose was to reveal the lies and hoaxes of American history. Paul Revere did not shout “The British are coming!” Thomas Jefferson did seduce and impregnate Sally Hemings, his slave. The founding fathers were not in the least bit interested in equality for all. And mad John Brown was perfectly sane. Even the land bridge theory was under attack. It looked like the first Americans didn’t wander over the Bering Strait, after all.

Ms. Hempel felt irritated and betrayed. It had taken her a long time to finish reading America! America!, and now here was a whole shelf of scholarship casting doubt on everything that she was about to teach.

But—she admitted it—these books did seem necessary; their existence made sense to her. History was so difficult to tell truthfully. A person could not be relied upon to faithfully recount her own past, much less the story of an entire country.

Before she discovered the history section, she had sat in a very comfortable chair, looking at a book of stories. The story she happened to read concerned a girl visiting boarding schools with her parents. At one of the schools, the campus is divided in half by a public street, and students must cross the street between classes. That night, the girl tells her parents that she likes this school best; she is impressed by how the students saunter across the street without even checking to see if there is traffic coming.

As she read the passage, Ms. Hempel trembled with recognition. It was her school! Not the school she taught at, but her school, the one she had gone to as a student. It had to be— the ancient campus, the street, the students ambling across. And, as whenever she thought of her school, Ms. Hempel was overcome by affection and wistfulness. What a magical time that was, how wonderful! She had spent four years there, in all seasons, but whenever she pictured her school, it was always late afternoon, and the light was always golden, the treetops always red; a boy sat cross-legged on the quad, and a guitar was in his lap. Somewhere, a pile of leaves was burning.

These feelings were very powerful, and they were also patently untrue. Ms. Hempel understood, quite rationally, that she had spent her four years in a state of fury and bewilderment. She had never understood how a person could be coltish until she saw the girls at her school—awkward, blond, impossibly appealing, chasing after soccer balls and hockey pucks and lacrosse balls with a long, loping stride and furious concentration. She gained weight in protest. She hid out in the costume closet, drinking cough syrup and despising the Grateful Dead. She won the role of a blowsy prostitute in the school play. When her history teacher, Mr. Warren, looked to her hopefully during a discussion of immigration, he scowled. Typical, she thought. She wrote a poem about it.

And if she didn't look when she crossed the street, it was because she was too preoccupied, thinking of ways she might hock or demolish her school.

There had to be a sort of dangerous magic at work—when she was a student, she never felt, for even a day, that the school belonged to her, or she to it; and now here she was, sitting in a bookstore, recognizing herself as one of those blessed, oblivious, coltish people who could cross a public street without looking both ways. She had read the story; she had thought, My school! But it probably wasn't her school; there were probably at least a hundred other schools just like it, schools where students believed that if they sauntered out into the street, traffic would stop for them. Now she was inducted into that awful confederacy.

She had scowled at Mr. Warren, her history teacher, but even if she had decided to join the discussion, she wouldn’t have had much to say. Her mother remembered little about the crossing. She was six years old at the time; all she could distinctly recall were the boys, diving for coins. The boat had anchored in Hawaii, and the passengers had stood along the railing, mesmerized—or so Ms. Hempel imagined—by the harbor and the people and all the activity. For days they had seen nothing but water. The most charming attraction was the boys, balanced along the edge of the pier like birds. If you tossed a coin over the railing, the boys would tip over into the water, easy as you please, as if tumbling into sleep. Straight down they dove, until they disappeared. The passengers would lean over the railing, peering breathlessly below them. And then a sudden rushing, a breaking of the surface and a single arm appears, a beaming face, a hand holding
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p a bright coin for everyone to see. The boys paddle back to the pier, hoist themselves up, resettle; they turn their faces to the boat.

“Your grandmother remembers it all much more clearly than I do,” her mother had said. “You should ask her about it.” And, although she should have known that to suggest the idea would be to instantly sabotage it, she added, “You could interview her, use a tape recorder. You could do an oral history project."

Ms. Hempel had planned to ask her grandmother; in good moods, she had even considered the project her mother suggested. She had also planned to learn Mandarin once she reached college. She did still plan to learn it; she did still mean to ask her mother about the objects illuminated inside the case at the far end of the living room: an inkstone; a brush; a peach, carved with monkeys; a scroll.

A year ago Ms. Duffy had come very close to losing it, with her homeroom right next to the construction site for the new computer lab, and her thwarted attempts to excise the Aztecs from the fifth-grade curriculum, and her ill-fated attraction to Mr. Polidori. But now, upon her return, she looked unrecognizably happy. She held court in the faculty lounge, her hair longer than ever, her big belly sitting staunchly on her lap and demanding rapt attention from everyone but her. Above the belly, Ms. Duffy laughed and swayed and acted careless with her hands, as if to say, Why, this old thing?

Ms. Hempel couldn't take her eyes off it. It looked as tough as a gourd.

“Yemen is magical,” Ms. Duffy was saying. “Just unbelievable. The pictures—the pictures don’t capture it at all.”

A stack of parched-looking photographs circulated around the lounge. After her difficult year, Ms. Duffy had sublet her apartment and struck out for the ancient world. At first, her e-mails had been long and poetical and reasonably free of gloating, though full of figs, marketplaces, bare feet against cool tiles, shuttered naps at noon. In between classes Ms. Hempel would stand in front of the faculty bull tin board and read about Ms. Duffy’s naps, trying to detect in these messages a note of melancholy, of homesickness. Miss you all!! Ms. Duffy would write in closing, but the absence of a subject, as well as the excessive punctuation, made the sentiment seem less heartfelt. And then the e-mails stopp
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arriving altogether.

Ms. Hempel studied the photograph that had been passed to her: a blazingly bright and empty street with the tiny figure of Ms. Duffy standing at its center. Who had taken the picture—a Yemenese friend? A Yemenan? Both sounded lovely, though incorrect. It seemed important to know who had stood in the shade of those massive, intricate buildings and held the camera. Perhaps this was the first of many foreign transactions that would result, so spectacularly, in Ms. Duffy’s new belly.

Ms. Hempel waved the photograph in the air. "Anna where was this one taken?”

But Ms. Duffy wasn’t able to answer as one after another, colleagues came in and embraced her. “You astound me!” Mrs. Willoughby said, pressing her clasped hands to her lips, a gesture she normally bestowed upon seniors who were making their final appearance in the spring choral concert. Ms. Duffy looked easily as triumphant and beautiful as them. Her face shone; her long light hair flared out behind her; gone was the faint grimace that had once been her expression in repose. The change seemed complete and irreversible; this wasn’t like the first week of school, when the teachers wore shorts and sundresses and still had their summer tans. Ms. Hempel remembered the shock of seeing Mr. Polidori’s firm, hairy calves rising up from a pair of glistening orange sneakers— but within days, everyone looked haggard again and it was as if summer had never happened.

"Have you seen your kids?” asked Ms. Cruz, the assistant librarian. “They’ll go crazy.”

"They will freak!” Ms. Mulcahy said. "Suzanne, where’s the sixth grade now? Are they at lunch?”

"Gym. That’s all I’ve heard this year: Ms. Duffy, Ms. Duffy- They can’t write their own names without mentioning

“I missed them,” said Ms. Duffy, vaguely.

"Maybe you'll want to wait until they’ve had a few minutes to cool off You know how sweaty they can get playing basketball. And you won’t believe how big they are. Huge. Amy Weyland is wearing a bra now."

From his cubicle, Mr. Meacham moaned, “Must we?” And Mrs. Willoughby, peering into her coffee, said, “That girl’s going to have a great little figure.”

“Amy Weyland?” Ms. Duffy echoed.

- "Yes! Can you believe it?” Ms. Olin, teacher of sixth-grade humanities, nearly shouted. She appeared slightly feverish; in fact, everyone did, everyone seemed eager and a little overheated. There was so much to tell: Jonathan Hamish got suspended; Travis Bent went on medication; Mr. Peele agreed to turn on the air-conditioning early, even though it was only the beginning of May. And oh—the computer lab was finally done! Ms. Duffy needed to be apprised, and ushered back into the world they all had in common. The merry, frantic din of school rose up around them, louder and louder, as Yemen, fascinating and dusty, drifted farther away.

Ms. Hempel still held the photograph that she wanted to know more about. She would have her chance, eventually; she and Ms. Duffy were friends, school friends, in the sense th they had belonged to the same group of youngish teacher who adjourned to a dark Irish bar as soon as the bell ran on Friday afternoons. Returning the picture to its pil
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^ gathered up her untouched books, wondered if her failure to reread act 2 of Romeo and Juliet would prevent her from spark ing a spirited class discussion (maybe she’d just ask them to act out their favorite scenes instead; the boys could cheerfully spend an entire period bellowing, “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?”), and watched as Ms. Duffy was escorted out of the faculty lounge, in search of her former fifth graders.

“Look who’s here,” cried Ms. Olin, leading the way.

The whole display was affecting, but naive. Ms. Hempel imagined a procession moving in stately fashion down the middle school corridors, cheering administrators, a swaying litter, children tossing flower petals and pencil shavings in its path. Ms. Duffy was back! Once more there would be field trips to Chinatown for soup dumplings, and scavenger hunts in the botanic gardens, and sing-alongs to the Meat Puppets and other college-radio stars of the '80s. Once more the Temple of Dendur would be erected in all its cardboard and tempura glory. The final bittersweet pages of Tuck Everlasting would again be read aloud in Ms. Duffy's husky choked-up voice. Fifth graders of the world, rejoice!

But Ms. Hempel knew better. Ms. Duffy was merely stopping by She knew as soon as she saw her: Anna Duffy wasn’t ever coming back, even after her big hard belly resolved itself into a baby. Most likely necessity prompted this visit; she probably needed to empty her locker, or roll over her retirement plan. Didn’t the others see? She was no longer one of them; at some point during her year, she had turned away. Slipped into her civilian clothes and disappeared. And if she