The Crazy School (6 page)

I hit the brakes and pulled over.

“. . . what experts believe is the second biggest earthquake ever to hit the United States . . .”

Dean looked at me. “Bunny?”

I held up a hand for quiet.

“. . . have reported unbelievable damage to infrastructure, with collapsed bridges and freeways, fi res, shattered buildings, gaping cracks in roads, and landslides . . .”

Dean’s guy at the Southern Pacifi c called the next morning.

Damage reports were still coming in, but word was there’d be no budget for any new purchase orders.

“A year, at least,” he’d said, “maybe two. Awful damn sorry to leave you swinging.”

Dean was stoic about it. “I can always work construction.”

The next week General Electric shut down their Pittsfi eld transformer plant, cutting loose some nine thousand factory workers who all decided to work construction.

4 6

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 46

28/5/08 2:44:12 PM

Dean looked for work every day, telling me each night how many hundreds of people had showed up for the same jobs he’d circled in the want ads: welder, mechanic, Sheetrock hanger.

He’d graduated summa cum laude from Syracuse and had experience as a stockbroker, too, but the competition for white-collar work was even fi ercer. The other guys were local, he wasn’t.

“Look,” I said, “we’re okay. Our rent’s not much. I’m making decent money at the school.”

But I’d married a man who started working twelve-hour shifts the summer he was fi ve years old. He could build or fi x just about anything, from cars to train engines to houses. Now Dean was stuck pacing around our apartment while I freaked out at Santangelo. He’d rebuilt the vacuum cleaner three times already. The suction was fantastic.

A month into his search for work, stoic was giving way to cranky, with scattered showers of bitter. He’d start rattling the
Berkshire Eagle
’s employment pages every day at dawn. “Bunch of listings for goddamn
boutiques
. . . part-time goddamn
real
estate . . .”

I kept waiting for the ax-fall moment when he’d fi nally come right out and say it was all my fault for dragging him to the Berkshires, that we had to go back to Syracuse.

But so far he’d just look up from the paper and apologize for being whiny. “I go nuts with nothing to do, Bunny. I’m not wired for leisure.”

“Maybe a temp agency,” I’d said last week. “Get your foot in the door somewhere?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll start making calls.”

Please God, let his interview today have garnered something. I can’t
go back to that place, to freezing in the dark.

4 7

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 47

28/5/08 2:44:13 PM

The ground was cold under the grapevines. I shivered and turned toward Lulu.

She took another deep drag off her Camel. Blew it out slowly.

“So. Any idea what all that was about with Mooney and the window?”

“Actually, yeah. But we can’t tell anyone for a few days. They made me promise.”

“I give you my word of honor,” she said. “Spill.”

“Fay’s knocked up.”

“Oh, those poor kids. Jesus
Christ
,” said Lulu, stubbing out her smoke and burying it next to an arbor post.

I did the same, then lit us two more.

The faculty meeting was in Dhumavati’s apartment, long after dark.

Lots of decaf. A platter of carob brownies.

We’d been there two hours already, what with everyone feeling compelled to weigh in on Mooney before we could get to the business part.

Thursday-night summary: how classes had gone this week, which kids were struggling, which kids each of us wanted to give a gold-star commendation in the next morning’s announcements.

When it came around the circle to me, I said Wiesner was really pulling his weight.

“I’m very encouraged,” I said. “He’s polite, he’s on time, he’s pitching in after class.”

I left out the part about his comments on the view of my ass.

Mindy giggled, her hand up coyly to her mouth.

“
What?
” I said.

4 8

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 48

28/5/08 2:44:13 PM

She glanced across the circle to Gerald.

There was an air of prissiness about the guy. But he seemed smart and he’d toughed it out at least a couple of years here.

I wondered why. Did it help, all this wallowing, or did he just have nowhere else to go?

Gerald sighed.

“Go on,
tell
her,” said Mindy.

He rubbed his palms down his thighs, and said “I thought Wiesner was doing really well in my class last spring. For a few weeks there, he was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed—asking if he could do extra reading, swinging by my classroom so he could walk me to lunch. Gold stars every Friday, let me tell you.”

Dhumavati and Mindy nodded.

“And?” I said.

“And this,” he said, reaching up to pop his four front teeth free, holding the plate out toward me, pink and white plastic bits glistening at the center of his palm.

“Wiesner walked right over and sat down on my desk one morning, happy as could be. I looked up, and he slammed a fi st into me with all his weight behind it. No warning, no reason.

He gave me a big grin the whole time, like he’d asked if he could help bang chalk dust out of the erasers.”

Gerald looked twenty years older without his teeth. Lisped a little, too.

“Gerald,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

He dropped his eyes and gentled his false teeth back into place. Looking back at me he said, “I don’t want to see you lose your faith in anyone, but please be careful, Madeline.”

There was a needlepoint pillow next to him on Dhumavati’s sofa, the words those who do not remember the past are 4 9

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 49

28/5/08 2:44:13 PM

condemned to repeat it picked out in white on a dark red ground.

Gerald fussed with it, giving the thing little pats on either end to plump up the down.

“Let’s end here,” said Dhumavati. “We’ll have our fi rst meeting tomorrow at six-thirty sharp.”

I looked at the clock on her mantel and bolted for the door.

Quarter after ten, with a good twenty miles of mountain road between here and Dean.

On the bright side, I had recently inherited a Porsche.

I drove to the edge of campus, impatient with the school’s fi ve-mile-an-hour speed limit and egged on by the Violent Femmes in my tape deck, bass and volume turned way the hell up.

My headlights fl ashed across the school gate’s stone pillars, the arc of rusted butterfl ies above them, the Santangelo motto: free to be!

Cha. More like
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
.

The second I’d passed beneath this odious load of hooey, I stomped on the gas and redlined toward Dean.

The Porsche shifted hard and steered harder.

I loved the damn thing, and I made it blister through every last turn.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

When I fi nally burst into our apartment, Dean was crashed out asleep on our sofa.

He’d set the table with fl owers and candles—now wilted and guttering, respectively.

Linen napkins. Polished silver. A bottle of wine. The fancy yellow-rimmed dinner plates we’d received from Aunt Julie for 5 0

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 50

28/5/08 2:44:13 PM

our fi rst anniversary—French ones with old fox-hunting scenes in the middle.

Had he meant all this for a celebration? Maybe the interview had gone well?

He opened his eyes and looked up at me. From the expression on his face, the answer was a resounding no—more like this fi nery was an effort to cushion the blow of bad news.

“I am so sorry to be this late,” I said. “So so so so sorry.”

“I got worried when you didn’t call.”

“They had to take that kid Mooney to the hospital,” I said.

“He punched out a window outside my classroom and cut himself all to shit, and then the faculty meeting got postponed.”

“It’s okay.” He got up and started bringing food out from the kitchen.

I poured us each a glass of wine. “How was your interview?”

“Thought I had it in the bag until the very last part,” he said, putting down a platter of roasted chicken and carrots.

I took a sip of wine, then started arranging food on our plates while he went back for the salad.

“They said they were ready to sign me up,” said Dean, taking his seat. “Everybody was slapping me on the back and all enthused to have me aboard, then they handed me a little container for the drug test.”

“Um,” I said. “So then—”

“So then I told them I took that as a goddamn affront to the deeply ingrained American tradition of guaranteeing personal liberty, not to mention my rights as a citizen of this great nation. Asked ’em how the hell they got off thinking the Constitution gave
anyone
the go-ahead for requiring me to whip it out on command and fi ll some plastic Dixie cup with my Purity of Essence. That’s not why our boys died in Iwo Jima.”

5 1

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 51

28/5/08 2:44:14 PM

“
Please
tell me you didn’t actually bring up Iwo Jima.”

Now he was grinning at me. “Goddamn right I brought up Iwo Jima. Guadalcanal . . . Flanders Field . . .”

I tried to just roll my eyes in response, but I had this vision of him standing up on some battle-worn desk in his suit and tie, slamming fi st against palm while ranting about the Halls of Montezuma and the Shores of Tripoli to a bunch of cowering temp-agency staffers, and I couldn’t keep a straight face.

I raised my glass to him. “You are just fucked in the
head,
sweet boy.”

He shrugged.

“Not like you would’ve passed anyway, ya stoner,” I said.

“Like that’s any of their business. Buncha damn commies.”

I started cutting into my chicken. “Enough with the Semper Fi crap, already. Eat your dinner.”

5 2

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 52

28/5/08 2:44:14 PM

8

The clock radio cranked up in the dark, NPR pundits chatting about the Berlin Wall’s remains getting hacked into fi st-sized souvenir chunks.

I hit the snooze button too many times, trying to catch up on all the sleep I’d missed during the night while I’d been rolling around and fretting.

Dean’s side of the bed was empty, already cold. I pushed away the covers and got up myself.

He had the paper spread out across our little table and a tall milky glass of Café Bustelo waiting for me on the kitchen counter, sweetened to syrup just the way I liked it.

I croaked out my thanks before raising the sacred vessel to my lips with both hands and chugging half of it down.

“Want dibs on the shower, Bunny?”

I shook my head. “I’m late for work.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” I lied.

* * *

5 3

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 53

28/5/08 2:44:14 PM

The narrow lane before me whipped and curved through bare black woods framed stark against that just-before-dawn gray light, everything to the east brushed with a faint anticipatory pink.

This early, mine was the sole car on the road, which in my seemingly perpetual lateness was no bad thing. I put another tape in and turned up the volume to the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen.”

Coming out of the last hairpin bend before campus, I had to downshift and brake like crazy to keep from back-ending a rusty old Volvo wagon.

Volvos, Jesus. My nemesis.

I blew by it on the straightaway. Double yellow, but I didn’t want to do a turn-in for showing up after the faculty meeting had gotten under way.

I raced between Santangelo’s stone gateposts at 6:27 a.m., hoping I’d luck out and discover someone had committed a grosser transgression than lateness in the last nine hours.

My right eyelid twitched from lack of sleep. I wasn’t in the goddamn mood to ape contrition, saying that my being late all the time was just totally fueled by passive-aggressive shit and I was so grateful to the community for helping me get committed to tackling my issues around punctuality.

I’d had my fi ll of seventies neuro-hooey from Dad. It wasn’t until I’d washed up at Santangelo that I realized he’d armed me with native-speaker fl uency—like, slap a set of headphones on me and I could’ve snagged a simultaneous-translation gig at the UN, psychobabble to English.

Why didn’t I have the balls to stand up and say that I drove fast because I damn well felt like it,
and so fucking what
?

5 4

CrazySchool_HCtextF1.indd 54

28/5/08 2:44:14 PM

Because part of me still wanted to believe there was some point to this therapy crap.

Wiesner was right, after all. I was here for more than the paycheck. I wanted absolution.

Could be worse.

Could be Syracuse.

I cranked the Porsche’s wheel toward the dining hall and parked in the second-to-last spot.

Opening the faculty-lounge door precipitated an extended hush of annoyance from the forty people already ensconced therein.

I dropped my gaze to the ratty carpet, slinking crouched toward a spot at Lulu’s feet then drew my knees to my chest, penitent and hot-faced under the room’s weight of disapproval.

Someone coughed, and chairs creaked under their occupants’

shifting weight.

There were a dozen kids on the fl oor around me, most of them holding hands with the teachers seated behind them.

These were the responsible students. At another school, they might have been proctors or prefects. Here they were more like prison “trusties.” Future Mindys. Future Geralds.

I didn’t look up until I’d sensed that all eyes had shifted back to the blackboard, just left of the doorway.

Dr. Santangelo glared at me from the center of the board’s dusty expanse, his arms crossed.

His attendance at these meetings was exceedingly rare.

Bad
bad day to be the last vulnerable arrival.