Saying Grace (39 page)

“Good. Do you have a copy of the Handbook?”

“Somewhere.”

“Why don’t you ask Emily to get you another one?”

Emily was at the door. Rue’s meetings were scheduled every fifteen minutes. Some were going to have to be cut to ten, or she wouldn’t have a chance to go to the bathroom.

“Mrs. Bramlett is here.”

Karen Bramlett came in loaded for bear. “Here are Melanie’s ERB

scores from last year. Look at this…a twenty-percentile drop in math from last year. Rue, she’s saying she hates math, that
girls
can’t do math. Last year it was her favorite subject!” Rue studied the two sets of scores.

“I tried to explain to Mrs. Trainer how important it is to praise Melanie when she gets something right. She needs a grade, or a star, 288 / Beth Gutcheon

or
something
.” Karen was near tears. “She did
fine
last year with Mr.

Merton. But when she hits a snag and nobody helps her, she feels like a moron, and when she’s depressed she can’t learn. Nobody can!”

“What did Mrs. Trainer say?”

“She said that Melanie hadn’t been turning in her homework.

Then Melanie told me that she
did
hand in the homework, but Mrs.

Trainer never graded it. Or else she handed it back so late that Melanie never knew what she needed help with before they moved on. Now she’s at the point she can’t do
any
of it because she didn’t understand what came before! And when I came back to explain that to Mrs. Trainer, she
refused
to talk to me.”

Rue felt utterly overwhelmed. It was nine-fifty in the morning, there were three-alarm fires all over campus, and she wanted to tell everyone to take their miserable problems and their spoiled living kids who had futures, and shove them. She wanted to get into bed with a bottle of scotch and cry.

Her next appointment was with Catherine Trainer.

Catherine came in in a swivet. Nobody appreciated her, the parents were out of control, Cora Alba-Fish in Primary was putting out food for feral cats, and the cats lurked around the campus and murdered her birdies.

“Catherine,” said Rue, “Did you tell Mrs. Bramlett that Melanie doesn’t do her homework?”

“No! I said she doesn’t apply herself.”

“Does she do her homework?”

Catherine blustered. “There are many blanks in the grade book for Melanie. I believe that when I have the children grade their own homework, she fails to enter the grade because she’s done poorly.”

“You believe that.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t know for sure. It may be she hasn’t done the homework at all, it may be you returned it ungraded.”

Catherine flared. “I am sure I have never returned a paper ungraded.”

“Do you remember I warned you that you were to grade all papers yourself and return them within the week at the very latest? That I preferred them graded overnight?”

Saying Grace / 289

“No.”

“Do you remember that I told you absolutely that you were to observe
all
guidelines in the Faculty Handbook, and that includes grading tests yourself? No self-grading, except for a sound pedagogical reason?”

“I had a good reason.”

“What was it?”

“I showed that I trusted them.”

“Mrs. Trainer, did you refuse to have a meeting with Mrs. Bramlett when she asked for it?”

“I had met with her for over an hour the very day before! She…”

“So the answer is ‘yes’? You refused?”

“Yes, but…”

“Catherine, I’m sorry. You’ve been a valuable part of the school for many years, and I think of you as a friend. But you have been warned repeatedly, you’ve been given clear guidelines for improvement, and if anything, things keep getting worse. I am sorry. But you are fired.”

Catherine was stunned. As she stared at Rue, the color drained from her face, like a person going into physical shock.

T
he faculty reacted to Catherine’s firing as if it were one maddened animal. They were already feeling taunted and jeered, but this was a frontal assault. Rue had broken a cardinal rule; she had listened to an unreasonable parent and acted without hearing the teacher’s side. In one swipe Rue had sliced herself out of the net of support and comfort that had been her hope for safety.

If anyone, including Rue, thought any allowance would be made for her emotional state, they got over it fast. Things piled up too quickly in a school; people’s children, their jobs, their dignity were at stake. Everyone had problems. It seemed that once they started piling faggots onto this fire, no one could stop. Rue was biased, out of touch, old-fashioned. Rue thought that conventional spelling was important. She thought children should memorize poetry and do math worksheets. (“Drill and kill, drill and kill” was the name of that pedagogical antique.) She had told the third-grade teacher that the singular of dice was not dice, and turned out to be right. She had pointed out that kudos was not plural and turned out to be right.

She had told the Latin teacher that you did not spell it “beyond the pail.” She corrected when teachers used “lay” for “lie” or “hung”

for “hanged,” and people were stung, and they remembered. There was resentment. There was a sense of a pot on the boil, pressing for an outlet.

After a few days of this, Rue went to seek out Bonnie. She found her sitting with Evelyn Douglas at one of the lunch tables under the live oaks. The were both holding empty coffee mugs; Evelyn was talking and Bonnie was listening. Rue hoped she could join them, but as soon as she approached, Evelyn stood up. “To be continued,”

she said to Bonnie, and walked away.

Rue looked after her for a moment, then sat down.

“Can I get you a cup of coffee?” Bonnie asked her.

“Please,” said Rue.

Saying Grace / 291

When Bonnie had returned with two mugs of hot coffee, she settled down across from Rue, watching her with her smokey diamond eyes.

“How are you finding married life?” Rue asked.

Bonnie smiled. “Just as I hoped it would be,” she said. And after a pause, “How are you finding married life?”

“Are you a witch?” Rue asked.

“I had a great-grandmother in Nova Scotia who was supposed to be. I’m sorry to say I never knew her. Who named you ‘Rue’?”

“My mother. ‘With rue my heart is laden.’ One hardly knows how to interpret it. My father preferred the line from Hamlet: ‘O! You must wear your rue with a difference.’”

“Names are important.”

“Yes. We named Georgia after the Ray Charles song.”

Bonnie smiled. Rue smiled too, bitterly, and studied the weathered wood of the tabletop. Her heel tapped, as if she was hearing the song in her head.

“‘No peace I find.’ To answer your question, I think my married life is over.”

Bonnie reached across the table and touched her hand.

“I hope not,” said Bonnie.

“I hope not too. But hoping won’t help.” Rue sat silent for a bit.

“When you marry young, especially if you marry the first person you really love, you imagine that being together gives you some special protection. That just holding on to each other will keep out the dark.”

She took a deep breath, and it was hard to do, since she felt that her body was bound around by constricting bands of pain and pressure. “But now I see that nothing keeps you safe. Not love, not rules, not principles. And yet, you have to behave as if they do. You have to lead a principled life because you have to, but it won’t keep chaos at bay. In fact, it won’t make any difference.”

Bonnie watched her gravely, and mercifully said nothing.

After a pause, Rue said, “I don’t suppose you can tell me what Evelyn Douglas was talking to you about?”

Bonnie shook her head no. But she said, “The faculty seems quite upset.”

“I’ve noticed.”

292 / Beth Gutcheon

“Someone told me that Catherine Trainer is going to sue.”

“Of course she’s going to sue. Everybody’s going to sue everybody.

It’s a brave new world, if actions have consequences you can have them legally removed.”

Bonnie sat quiet until Rue, sounding suddenly exhausted, went on.

“She should sue, because I fired her completely wrong. I had laid all the groundwork to counsel her out, at the end of the year or next year at the latest. At the very least, I should have listened to her side of the story. There are always two sides. There are
always
two sides.

I knew it. I just didn’t care. She whined.”

Bonnie said thoughtfully, “The faculty is behaving like an abused child. Fits of anger. Reckless of feelings of others. Terribly upset by unpredictable behavior.”

“They should grow up,” said Rue.

Bonnie swung her legs out from under the table and turned her body to face the afternoon sun. She tipped her face up and closed her eyes. After a moment she said, “I’m hearing a lot of anger and mistrust. From the faculty and the parents. From the
kids
. A lot of it.”

“I know it,” said Rue. “I know it.” She sat watching Bonnie breathe.

Being near her made her feel calmer. She knew she could be as heartless and childish as she wanted to be, and Bonnie would go on breathing.

“I loved this school,” Rue said. “I thought we were one body and blood. I thought I gave it health and strength. I know it gave that to me.”

“You did,” said Bonnie. “You did all that.”

“Now I’m making it sick. If the head’s sick, the body gets sick.”

“You’re not sick.”

“I’m not well.”

They sat for a while, listening to the sounds of the school. Cars were beginning to arrive in the parking lot, lining up for dismissal.

The parrots yammered high in the live oaks. A dog barked in a yard up the hill, where the nearest newly built “mansions” pressed the edge of the campus.

“Are you saying good-bye?” Bonnie asked.

“Is that what it is? I wasn’t sure.”

“I don’t know, I was just asking,” said Bonnie.

Saying Grace / 293

“It’s like a bad place in a marriage,” Rue said. “You don’t know whether to tough it out or whether to let it go. You can’t tell if courage lies in hanging on or giving up.”

That afternoon before he left, Mike came to the door of Rue’s office.

She was sitting very still, looking at whatever was on the surface before her. There was a picture of Henry. She had put away the ones of Georgia. There was a ceramic ashtray glazed in royal blue, given her in her first year at Country by a little boy who was now a Rhodes scholar. There was a silver pencil cup, and a clock, and her Rolodex.

The telephone was black, and had dust between the buttons. Merilee used to clean it, but of course Emily had never thought of it and Rue would not have thought of asking her to.

The room seemed hermetic. Motes of dust were thick in the sunlight that slanted into the room from the windows over the soccer field.

“Are you all right?” Mike said from the doorway.

Rue nodded. Mike hesitated.

“Good night, then…” he said.

“Good night, Mike.”

T
he phones were ringing, and Mrs. Leavitt had been waiting for her appointment with Rue for twenty minutes. Emily went to Mike’s office.

“Do you know where Rue went?”

“No, isn’t she in her office?”

Emily explained about Mrs. Leavitt. Bill Glarrow came to the door and said, “Do you know where Rue is?”

“Maybe she stopped somewhere when she went out to take attendance. I’ll find her,” said Mike.

He went looking for Rue. Along the way he stopped at Primary, Middle, and at the library. Finally he found Bonnie in the preschool, and together they went back to Home, where Bonnie thought to look in the mailboxes to see if Rue had left anyone a message. In Mike’s box there was a letter on Rue’s personal paper. He opened it and read it. Bill Glarrow, Emily, and Mrs. Leavitt had all drawn near and were watching him.

“She’s resigned,” he said.

When Rue left Chandler’s office the first person she saw was Oliver Sale. He was standing outside the door in his gray suit and white shirt and massive black shoes. They stared at each other for a long moment. She nodded to him, and went past. Outside the office she pressed the button for the elevator, then decided she couldn’t wait. She went out the fire door, marked EXIT, and ran down two flights of cinderblock stairwell. She had a thought that she would be all right if she just got back into her car.

But once in the car, she couldn’t move. Here was the opposite of school. Here in daylight all the life was inside soundproof buildings, and outside nothing moved on the hot concrete. She couldn’t lift her hand to turn the key in the ignition. She had no job, no career, and no place to go. She sat in her car in the parking lot with Saying Grace / 295

her hands folded in her lap, swaddled by a profound silence.

She sat extraordinarily still, taking very shallow breaths, as if she were perched so marginally on the edge of existence that she might slip out of it spontaneously. She kept thinking of an elegy she had read once. She could no longer remember the poem, or the poet, but she kept hearing this line, as if someone somewhere were ringing it like a bell:

But Death, a magician, closed you in his hand and opened it suddenly
empty
.

J
onathan Sale had begun to hear the ghost. He heard it the first time one night after his mother turned off the light, shut his door, and clicked off down the hall in her taptap shoes. His mother was very beautiful with big hair and shiny clothes like a lady on television. She smelled good. But she didn’t smile as much as ladies on television.

Tonight she was mad at him because he patted her with his hand and he forgot he’d just been licking it. He thought his mother might like him to pat her because Lyndie had made her mad and had to be locked in her room. That meant she liked him best, but not the licking. His new teacher told him if he didn’t stop it he’d have to go to the Opportunity Room. He couldn’t stop it though because he didn’t remember doing it. His new teacher wasn’t very nice.

It was very dark at their end of the house. There had been yelling earlier. Now the house was quiet and then he heard the ghost. It was outside his door, crying and crying. He was afraid it would come in and do something to him. He wanted to tell Lyndie he could hear it now, he believed her now, but to do that he’d have to open the door.