Saying Grace (38 page)

“The men wore their hair long, but the women cropped theirs short,” Rue announced. “Then they spun the hair along with other fibers and used the yarn to weave or braid with. Do you suppose that was a fashion statement? Or political?” Rue asked Henry. “One sex cutting the hair short? Like women’s dresses, cut off at the knee.

Don’t you look at pictures of Hillary Clinton or Janet Reno, these national leaders with giant brains, with their bare legs sticking out of the bottom of their clothes, and wonder
what
they are thinking of?”

Henry laughed, so that the spritely Germans turned to look at him.

“Well I mean it. Can you imagine Richard Nixon greeting Khrushchev with his legs sticking out of his trousers? What
is
that?”

Henry smiled happily and touched her shoulder. She knew he was saying she delighted him. It had been quite a while since she felt she delighted him.

Saying Grace / 281

They ate lunch at a Burger King in Chinle.

“It might be a Samson and Delilah thing, the women cropping their hair,” said Henry.

“I doubt it. With Navajo and Hopi, the women own the property and the men move from the house of the mother to the house of the wife.”

“What makes us think their social structure was the same?”

“The kivas.”

Henry helped himself to Rue’s french fries. “Don’t forget eighteenth-century Europe,” said Henry. “Look at Louis XIV. All the men wore wigs and breeches that stopped at the knee. To show off their calves.” He pulled up his pant leg a little and showed her his calf.

“That’s true,” said Rue, happily. “What does it mean?” And in-wardly she thought, I need you, Henry. I miss my husband, and I need my friend. Please let this mood last.

But it didn’t. After lunch, they started north to Monument Valley.

But in the car they had the same problem with the map as they had at first, and Georgia was with them again. To avoid talk, they tried to listen to the radio. The rental car got poor reception and only very local stations; they looked for a National Public Radio station and found hard rock. Even turned low, the screech of heavy metal was like a gun going off in the car, reminding them both of the tape Georgia had sent, which was the last message they had from her, if you didn’t count the broken clock. They turned the radio off.

Rue began to think about school. She couldn’t go on much longer in a limbo between death and life. She had stopped floating. As scrub and sage and buttes rolled by outside, she began to think about Mike, and to worry about leaving him with things at such a flash-point. In two days, she’d be back. She was hoping against hope that it would be a comfort to be at work. If she could be buoyed up by playing with three-year-olds, by seeing the new chicks born in the incubator in the kindergarten, by seeing a tiny eighth-grade girl in high heels doing Ethel Merman in
Call Me Madam
for the spring musical, she would be saved. And maybe if she were saved she could stay steady and in place long enough for Henry to come back to her.

She looked at Henry and saw he was a million miles away.

282 / Beth Gutcheon

She’d seen that look so often in the last few weeks. But feeling her looking at him, he turned to her and met her eyes for a long few seconds. She felt he was studying her as if she were a rock he’d run over in the road. He’d stopped to get a better look because he’d never seen this object before.

He turned away again and said, “I have to tell you something.”

The tone was not casual; he did not mean he had to tell her he’d never liked Brussels sprouts. He wanted to tell her something that was going to make her sick. His eyes were fixed on the preposterous red buttes ahead of them. She looked at his profile and suddenly knew exactly what it was that was between them like a third passenger in the car, and it had nothing to do with Georgia.

“I need to tell you,” he said.

“I need you not to,” she answered.

It seemed to her he stepped on the gas, and she thought, Oh, this will be solved in a few seconds. We’re going to flip and go up in flames together in a place with no name in northern Arizona. She hoped they would.

She looked at Henry briefly and she could see his face was hard, as if he’d offered her his heart and she’d stuffed it back into his pocket. Maybe that’s what he thought he’d done.

“We’ve shared so much,” he said.

“Please—don’t say any more.” She wondered what she would do if he ignored her. Climb into the back seat? Throw herself out of the car? He could tell her whatever he wanted to.

Finally, he said, with an acid edge to his voice, “Isn’t the truth supposed to make us free?”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Nothing will make us free.”

The car flew past the turnoff to Monument Valley. They were averaging eighty mph, sometimes faster. When they hit Route 98 north, Henry turned onto it; Rue had no idea where they were going and realized Henry had studied the map. When, exactly? When they got into the car this morning? After lunch? They sped through the cool alien landscape in silence. There were moments in which Rue felt a plea rising like a prayer, to whom she couldn’t imagine. Stop, let’s start over again, there was a way this day might have come out all right. But there wasn’t. It had only felt like it, because for one day they had been in a world like an alternate universe.

Saying Grace / 283

When they hit the town of Page, it didn’t take long to find the airport. It was small and clean, like Flagstaff’s. Henry pulled up to the curb and got out, taking the keys with him to unlock the trunk.

He got out his suitcase and set it on the sidewalk, along with the raincoat she’d brought for him for some idiotic reason, even though he pointed out that Canyon de Chelly was in a desert. He walked back to her window on the passenger side.

“I can’t stand to be with you but apart from you,” he said.

“I can’t stand it either,” she said, looking up at him. His thick blond hair had gone mostly gray, a dense ash color. His eyes, blue and pale behind his glasses, were red-rimmed. She wondered if he had slept the night before.

“Then we agree,” he said, and dropped the car keys into her lap.

She watched him walk into the airport without looking back at her.

She sat for a while at the curb, feeling how sore her body was. She wondered briefly if she should have let him confess, and then dismissed it. If she had ever believed that allowing someone to cause you that kind of pain would make you closer in the end, she didn’t anymore. It would cost too much. The tears, the learning of dates and times and images she would then have to learn to forget. It might have helped him, it might not. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t afford it.

She got out and walked around to the driver’s side, got in, and started the car.

T
he hardest thing about walking into the office on Monday morning was wondering how she could look at Emily. The anger and pain this thought caused her was so great she was almost grateful for it. The phrase “economy of pain” had occurred to her; why not take all the horror life had in store for you in one crushing dose, and if at the end you could still get up off the floor, maybe you’d be allowed some decades of happiness.

One day at a time, she said to herself. One day at a time. If you can keep waking up in the morning, if you can keep going through the motions, maybe one day the excruciating tide will recede and you will find you are alive again, walking on dry land in the sun.

Some years from now. The thing to do now is prove to yourself that you cannot be crushed.

Emily was at her desk. She looked neat and pretty. Her blond hair was held by a velvet band and she was wearing a flowered shirtwaist dress. She had that friendly confidence that made her so good at this job, that had made her such a pleasure to have around. She did not seem to be working at anything; she seemed to be waiting for Rue.

As Rue came through the door, their eyes met. Steady on both sides.

“How was it?” Emily asked, her voice quiet.

“Beautiful.”

“Where did you go?”

“Canyon de Chelly. Monument Valley. Lake Powell.”

“I’ve always wanted to see Lake Powell,” Emily said.

“You must,” said Rue. She wondered if Emily knew where Henry was now.

She walked to her office, pausing for a hug from Mike. On her desk she found messages literally stacked. She had been on leave for two weeks, which was a week longer, Chandler pointed out to the Executive Committee, than was industry standard for bereave-ment.

Saying Grace / 285

As she looked through the pink heap of messages, she blessed Mike for keeping the peace as long as he had. On the stroke of nine, she carried her mug of coffee into his office, and closed the door.

“Let’s get into it,” she said. “It looks as if expelling Glenn Malko hasn’t solved our problems.”

“Expelling him was all right. But unexpelling him was a disaster,”

said Mike. “That walk of triumph of his did more damage than Kenny Lowen caused in a year. The whole grade is running wild because we cut down their homeboy hero. And they learned there’s safety in numbers too: we can’t expell the whole grade.”

Hughie Bache, Robey Hearne, and Jose French were vying to outdo each other in rudeness and intractability. Each had been suspended by Mr. Dianda with a warning of expulsion, and each had laughed it off. The way they saw it, if they got expelled they’d be heroes too, like Glenn. Robert Noonan would no longer allow Hughie in Latin class; he sent him to the library with extra homework during classtime, which made life difficult for Mrs. Nafie. Since Hughie had drunk the slush from Mrs. Moredock’s ice pack, he and Jose had decided to specialize in terrorizing her during art class, which was by no means hard to do. They had frequently provoked her to unprofessional language and behavior. Some of the girls were even in on the uprising, and the upper-school faculty was now so hostile to the class that they were refusing to go along as chaperones on the annual three-day science field trip to Santa Catalina. Without chaperones the trip would be canceled. Every parent in the grade was up in arms about that, since the Santa Catalina trip was a god-given right of eighth-graders, and all had appointments with Rue to demand that she fix it. And the only person, bizarrely, who seemed to have no part in the mess was Kenny Lowen.

The faculty was exhausted because the minute Rue left campus Chandler made his presence felt in a dozen threatening ways. He now not only hated Rue, he saw the whole faculty as his enemy. The teachers felt left without protection or leadership, and on top of it they were frantically trying to write curriculum reports that would satisfy Chandler before their contracts came up for review.

Of course there was another Catherine crisis. One day Mrs.

Bramlett, upset because her daughter had scored poorly on her 286 / Beth Gutcheon

ERBs, demanded a meeting with Mike to denounce Catherine Trainer. Mike told her to go discuss the matter with Mrs. Trainer first. Karen Bramlett marched down to where the faculty was eating lunch, asked Mrs. Trainer for a minute of her time, and then railed at her through the lunch period and right through recess. By the time she was done, Catherine’s food had been cleared away and she had a headache from hunger and a Civil War class to teach. The next day, Catherine had just emerged from the kitchen with a plate of hot lasagna when Karen Bramlett appeared again, demanding to talk to her.

“I am entitled to forty minutes off for lunch, Mrs. Bramlett,”

Catherine had said.

“This is the only time I can talk to you,” Mrs. Bramlett answered angrily. “I have a meeting at the courthouse at one-fifteen.”

“This is the only time I can eat my lunch,” said Catherine, sitting down.

Karen whirled off, furious, to find Mr. Dianda, who was in the development office trying to help the temporary secretary work the mailing list program.

“Mr. Dianda, I have to talk to you right now.”

Mike wheeled on her. “Mrs. Bramlett, you will have to make an appointment.”

“This is urgent. Mrs. Trainer has been outrageously rude.”

“Mrs. Bramlett, it will have to wait! I only have this temp for a day, we have to get out our Annual Report, and this goddamn program has printed a hundred and twenty dollars worth of mailing labels in ASCII!”

Mrs. Bramlett was momentarily halted.

“Where’s the book, the whatchamacallit, the documentation?”

“There isn’t any.”

“What program is it?”

“It’s a homemade thing that some Luddite software genius gave us ten years ago. The only person who can work it is Rue.”

“That’s ridiculous. Why don’t you just go buy a program that you can understand?”

“Because we could buy a new program for thirty-nine-fifty, and then pay two thousand dollars in secretarial costs to reenter the data.

The Board won’t authorize it.”

Saying Grace / 287

By the time Rue had spent a half-hour with Mike, which wasn’t nearly enough, the line of people waiting to see her was out the door.

First was Carson McCann.

It turned out that Ashby had gotten a failing grade on a spelling test and claimed to his mother that Mrs. Percy had made him sit in the corner where he couldn’t hear.

“What did Mrs. Percy say?” Rue asked.

“She said he’s been in the corner before and can hear there fine.

But it’s his word against hers. Chandler said the fairest thing would be to give him the test again.”

“What did Mr. Dianda say?”

“I didn’t ask him. I told Mrs. Percy that I wanted him retested….”

“Carson. For heaven’s sake. Read your Trustee Handbook. Page thirty-one, Board members cannot dictate decisions to staff. You have no right to give a teacher an order. You’re her employer, don’t you understand? You carry a huge sword, and if you can’t see it, she can. You can make your wishes known as a parent, you can discuss it with Mike or me, but I can’t run a school if every member of the Board is running it with me! I can’t run a school if every child who gets a poor grade can get the Board to order a retest!”

Mrs. McCann was slightly abashed. “Oh,” she said. “Well, she refused to do it.”