The Uncoupling (6 page)

“Is he nice?” Dory asked.

“I don’t know,” Willa said, shrugging, peevish. She gooped a slug of green gel into the detergent maw of the dishwasher, then closed the door, letting the handle slap shut, which triggered the slow revving-up from inside. Two plates seemed to knock against each other in there, and would continue to do so for the next hour.

“He seems like an interesting kid,” Robby said, and he happily picked at the edges of the half-eaten apple cake.

“Actually, I still have work to do,” said Willa, wanting to leave this conversation immediately and forever—probably also wanting to leave the static comfort of the kitchen, in which a dishwasher churned and moaned, as if expressing all the effort it took to sustain family life. She would be leaving home in a couple of years. It was possible that her strongest desire to do so occurred in the kitchen that night.

4
.

O
ver the following weeks, Willa and Eli seemed nearly bored around each other, barely looking up when the other spoke. In the evenings sometimes, Eli wandered down Tam o’ Shanter, appearing on the Langs’ doorstep, hoping to have a conversation with Robby about a novel he had just read, asking Robby questions about theme, character, motivation.

Willa, named for a writer, wasn’t a big reader; her parents had long known this about her. She had loved
The Thunder of Hoofbeats
during her middle school unicorn phase
,
and then she’d loved Jane Austen, or more accurately Mr. Darcy, like many girls who imagined clinging to his mutton-chop sideburns the same way that they would have clung to the unicorn’s mane. But then Darcy was replaced by the effeminate zombie love interest in a series of frankly stupid novels that Willa and her friends Marissa Clayborn and Carrie Petito and the two Lucys had read compulsively in seventh grade. The zombie had “glazed, oaken eyes and a mouth that was forever slightly open in want,” and Dory remembered practically shouting at this prose when she read it. “Oaken!” she and Robby had cried, though much later Dory would recall the line and think that, to some extent, it was an accurate description of teenaged desire.

Robby and Dory didn’t know then that this would be the height of Willa’s pleasure reading. Had they known, they would have kept her supplied with books about alluring, oaken-eyed zombies. Instead they harangued her, and little by little she stopped reading altogether, except for what she’d been assigned at school. When Eli Heller came over to discuss novels with Robby, the two of them sat in the den for long stretches. Then finally Eli would stand and walk out into the front hallway, where Willa might be, and they would hardly acknowledge each other, and he would go home.

Eli could be seen in the school cafeteria most weekdays eating the high school’s crude version of panini, his fingertips practically polished with oil. He was just one of many students Dory would smile at, say hello to, ask a bland question of about his classes. She almost never thought about him, and she had no idea she would ever need to. During a fire drill in the middle of November, all was revealed. Dory had been standing at the SMART Board talking about Stephen Crane, and her students were desperate in their boredom. She made a note to herself that she should lobby to remove Crane from the curriculum for next year; the kids could no longer read
The Red Badge of Courage.
It was an easy book—it used to be taught to seventh-graders, and she herself had read it when she was eleven—but as far as she could see, the students’ brains had changed. Whether they’d evolved or devolved wasn’t clear to her, for they also possessed that astonishing capacity for technology. They were distracted, their neurons pulled apart, and now their brains somehow magnetically repelled Stephen Crane. Though maybe this wasn’t the worst thing in the world (after all, if she had to read Stephen Crane now, for the first time, would she actually find it exciting? She had a feeling she knew the answer), their distractedness still bothered her.

“You guys,” Dory said in class on this day, “are keeping yourselves from a powerful reading experience. You have very little to say about the book we just read by Stephen Crane, who was so talented and died tragically young of tuberculosis. That alone should interest you. Yet I am certain you will have
tons
to say to one another tonight when you get home.”

“That’s not fair, Ms. L,” Jeremy Stegner said, and Dory thought that he was right; it wasn’t fair, she knew that, and she’d been speaking in a hectoring voice. But before she could say anything more, the fire alarm rang, and they all headed outside into the frozen morning, coatless. Dory saw Leanne usher a group of kids to their assigned part of the athletic field. The kids were lively, playful, taking this opportunity to stretch and preen and get a little exercise, forming packs and then breaking off into little clusters. Anything was possible for them; you could see this even at a casual glance during a fire drill. Leanne looked young and exotic, wrapped in some gold-threaded blouse that only she could “get away with,” as people said. The principal, Dory saw, kept glancing in her direction.

Bev Cutler, over by the side, so overweight, stood with her hands pushed deep into her skirt pockets, as if about to scatter seed for birds. Though she was an experienced guidance counselor and in charge of helping the kids plan their futures, it seemed, increasingly, as if she was lost inside her swollen self.

Then, up ahead, Dory saw Robby surrounded by kids, as he always was, especially boys. He caught sight of his wife and waved, smiled, then returned to what he’d been saying to them. He liked holding court, making little speeches to small groups of kids, who always liked to listen. By a frozen tree, out of the side of her vision, Dory noticed one of the school’s teenaged couples shivering and taking solace in their own embrace. Without really looking, she assumed it was Chloe Vincent and Max Holleran, eleventh-graders who, as the entire school knew, had been involved for years. The boy wrapped the girl into himself to keep her warm, and her head was ducked against him. Dory saw, from a distance, the way their breath sifted into the air, and also the flowering of the girl’s golden red hair against the dark field of the boy’s maroon sweater.

Immediately she felt multiple, clarifying shocks: first, that it was Willa, then, that it was someone with Willa in a somewhat sexual state. And then, of course, that it was Eli Heller, the boy Willa barely ever seemed to acknowledge.

Dory was now hot-faced in the cold. She turned to motion to Robby, as if to say,
Look.
But he had been spirited away. She stood alone beside the school and the emptying field, until one of her students came over and said, “Ms. L, everyone’s going in.”

Later, still agitated and still not even exactly aware of why, she went downstairs to Leanne’s office, two doors down from the pool. LEANNE BANNERJEE, PH.D., read the metal sign on her door. Chlorine congested the little room; distantly, there were splashes and whistles, as teenagers pushed their seal-selves through water. Leanne had a stack of student folders on her lap with color-coded stickers on them. One folder was peppered with the full spectrum of stickers, foretelling a life of specialists and trouble. Dory Lang sat in the chair where the students usually sat, and Leanne leaned forward in her own chair, beneath a poster of a girl cutting herself.

“What’s the deal?” Leanne asked.

“It’s Willa. I saw her with Eli during the fire drill. They were intertwined, let’s call it.”

“Oh,” said Leanne after a second. “Okay.”

“You don’t seem very surprised.” Then Dory added, “Wait. Leanne, you knew?”

The school psychologist pushed back in her chair, as if wanting to escape from her good friend, but there was nowhere for her to go, and she backed into her desk. “I thought you knew too, Dory,” she said. “I just thought you hadn’t mentioned it to me.”

“Well, no, I didn’t know,” Dory said. “Not at all.”

“I knew pretty much immediately.”

“You did?”

“Sure,” said Leanne. “I spend so much time in here telling kids that I know their attractions are completely thrilling. Then, after we get that out of the way, I remind them that they don’t want to screw up their lives like that teenage couple from Elro did a few years ago—the one everybody talks about, who had that baby named Trivet, right? I’m always sitting here, making these deadpan, supposedly nonjudgmental statements like, ‘Oh yes, Jen, it’s very interesting to me that you think blow jobs don’t count as sex. Now how did you reach that conclusion?’ ”

“Jen?
Heplauer
?” Dory asked.

“I didn’t say that. And they confess things to me that they can barely handle. A ninth-grade girl came into my office the other day and said, ‘I am totally turned on by my best friend, and she’d die if she knew.’ Another kid said he’s been using J Juice every weekend, you know that drug? It’s all over the place. I wouldn’t want to be them for anything. I tell them I understand. That when I was in high school, there were times when I just got so lost in my own problems and couldn’t find anything peaceful to think about. When it all seemed so ugly and hateful and pointless. I tell them how my parents only wanted me to marry a nice Indian boy. At night I’d come home from being with a secret boy who my parents would never have approved of, and I’d be filled with feeling, and I’d go past the living room where they were watching TV and balancing the checkbook. And there would be these atrocities on the news, and I’d feel everything so strongly—the good and the bad—and I was overwhelmed.”

“I’m sorry, Leanne,” Dory broke in, “but I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

“I worry about these kids, Dory,” Leanne said. “They are like little baby birds
.
But if I had a daughter like Willa, who was having her first relationship with someone like Eli, I think I’d feel that I’d done something right. I think I would feel happy.” Both women took a moment to note, tacitly, that Dory did not feel happy. “You’ve got Robby,” Leanne said, “and you’ve both figured out how to be. How to be with just one person. So let Willa have someone too, if she wants that. She’s entitled.”

That night, Dory decided to call Fran and tell her the news. As soon as she began to talk, she could hear that her own voice sounded slightly feverish. “Are you alone?” she asked the drama teacher.

“Of course,” Fran said. “Eli is in his room with the door closed. Story of my life.”

“He’s probably talking to Willa. They’re probably on Farrest together. Listen, Fran,” Dory said. “I bring news from the front. Our kids seem to have developed a special thing between them.”

“Excuse me?”

“They’re involved.”

“What are you talking about, Dory?”

“They’re seeing each other. Boyfriend and girlfriend.”

Fran was silent. “Well, I’m surprised,” she finally said. “I’ve been so busy with the new job that I feel kind of blindsided.” Both women agreed that this was definitely a new stage of life, and then they quickly said goodnight.

Dory had always assumed that when her daughter had a boyfriend, she would confide in her about him. After all, teenagers easily told one another everything. They didn’t have to be force-fed truth serum in order to talk. Maybe a mother could be given a little information once in a while. One evening, when Dory and Willa were alone in the den and the TV was on, Dory managed to say, “I know this is awkward. But you and Eli, if this is relevant—and you don’t have to tell me if it is—I just want to say that I hope you’re protecting yourself. There’s nothing more important.”

Their bare feet were up on the coffee table, and Dory noticed that each of Willa’s toes was painted a slightly different shade; she pictured Eli’s big hand holding a miniature brush, dipping and re-dipping in five different bottles. Willa had finished her homework for the night, and Dory had finished all her grading. Robby was already asleep in his
New Deal
T-shirt. It was a school night, and all of them were a little knocked out by life, but there were so few times when Dory was alone with her daughter anymore, and she wanted them to talk.

Willa just kept watching the screen, and then she said, “Oh God, Mom. You are seriously going to make us have this conversation?”

“You know I can’t make you do anything.”

Willa sighed, aggrieved, then seemed to consider her options. “Without getting into details about my own life,” she finally said, “yes, I do know all about how to ‘protect’ myself. Without you,” she added, stingingly. Then the commercial ended and the TV show came back on, and Willa turned her head back into profile on the couch. That face, the expressive mouth with the teeth slightly pushing through, suggesting their presence even when her lips were closed, wasn’t for her mother any longer.

Dory Lang watched Eli and Willa every day from a distance. In the school hallway she would see a mess of long dark boy-hair and slightly shorter red girl-hair, and sometimes it would suddenly split apart as she or Robby or Fran came down the hall.

“Leave them alone,” Leanne advised when Dory came back downstairs to her office a second time. A ninth-grade girl had just left, sniffling into her bare hand. The one attracted to her friend? Dory wondered. The tiny room felt surprisingly enveloping, and the English teacher looked up to the school psychologist soupily, much the way some of the students did, and she felt just as confused and helpless as any of them. “Let them figure it out,” said Leanne. “If Willa needs something, she’ll ask. You and Robby have been good role models when it comes to all of this. But it’s not about you now. It’s about them.”

5
.

T
he spell would eventually claim Willa Lang that winter, though first, late that fall, she was obviously under a very different spell, and so was Eli Heller, who had stopped talking to Robby about books. Instead, now, Eli only wanted to talk to Willa. In the beginning, when the two of them were alone, he kept returning to one particular topic. “Is there any way you would ever consider taking your shirt off for me?” he asked her. “Any way I could see you like that?”