Unlovely (22 page)

The next two years were spent studying,
researching, writing papers and memorizing etymologies. It was solitary work,
and during those two years of graduate school Claudia had even less of a social
life than she'd had as an undergrad. She was working in the department as a
teaching assistant, which paid for her tuition as well as providing a salary
sufficient to move from the dormitory into a tiny apartment off-campus. This
meant she no longer even had the desultory conversations at the bathroom sink
that had been a substitute for real social interaction. The only people she
spoke to regularly were her teachers, her students and her office-mates.

The solitude didn't bother Claudia, she
was used to it. But she was worn out. Between completing her master's thesis
and preparing for her PhD qualifiers, she was exhausted with all of the
studying. Her years in graduate school weren't total misery, to be sure:
Claudia was an intellectual and liked to be challenged. She was just tired of
the whole routine.

In the course of these last two years,
she was surprised to discover that she derived much pleasure from her time
behind the podium, teaching first year German. She ran a tight ship in her
classroom and many students dropped out after the first two weeks under her
tutelage (good riddance!), but those who remained were the best and the
brightest. She'd always thought she would pursue a career in academia, but
she'd imagined herself as a college professor. Now Claudia began to wonder if
it wasn't time to bid adieu to the ivy-covered walls. She might better serve
the world by forming young minds. So in her fourth semester of graduate school,
she started sending out her curriculum vitae to private academies in search of
a teaching position.

She received card after card from the
schools she'd contacted, informing her they weren't looking for a German
instructor. May arrived, her thesis was defended and her PhD qualifiers were
passed without Claudia being asked to sit for a single job interview. It was
all very discouraging. Finally, at the very end of June, she received a nibble
of interest from a boarding school for girls in grades seven to twelve.

Claudia drove the four hours for the
interview in an old beater her father had helped her purchase, and she won the
job. Claudia's hadn't been an especially winsome interview, but her transcripts
were excellent and her recommendations stellar. Plus, the headmistress was
under some pressure to have the teaching position filled before the board met;
there had been problems with the previous German instructor, who had been seen
inebriated a number of times in a local tavern and about whom rumors of general
immorality swarmed. Claudia Milford seemed to be the polar opposite of that
teacher both in appearance and demeanor; moreover, she was capable, she was
available, and she was willing to teach in exchange for room and board and a
rather low wage. After a handshake, the shooting of a photo I.D. picture and
the processing of fingerprints, Claudia was a teacher at the Jameson School.

"What was going on last night?" Claudia asked
as she stepped bleary-eyed into the common area with a cup of tea. She'd been
awakened by shouting and bothered for some time after that by the sound of
people scurrying up and down the halls. It had made the seven o'clock wake-up
even more unpleasant than usual.

Bonnie, a broad-bottomed woman in tight
jeans, flopped on the couch across from Claudia and tossed her hair back from
her eyes so she could flash them meaningfully. She spoke in conspiratorial
tones, just loud enough to carry.

"They brought a new guy in."

"In the middle of the night?"

Bonnie shrugged.

"Why all the noise?"

"He didn't want to be here and he
resisted. He might have been strung out or something. That can make you
strong."

Claudia nodded as if she were aware of
such things and cool with it, but the idea of some violent drug addict moving
among them struck her as menacing. This wasn't that kind of facility, was it?

"Where's he staying? Which room is
his?"

"They put him in the room near the
back exit. The one with the restraints."

Restraints? Claudia mulled this over.
She hadn't even known there was a room with restraints. It only made sense, of
course. Still it was unpleasant to contemplate. Did her room have some sort of
restraint hidden in it, too? Maybe there were straitjackets tucked away in a
closet somewhere.

"Is he still back there?"

"Probably," Bonnie said.
"I'm sure they gave him a little something to mellow him out. He could
sleep for hours." She smirked. "I wouldn't mind some of that
myself."

Claudia grinned back. Residents –
particularly the ones who didn't want to be here, who didn't believe they
needed help – frequently wished aloud that they could get drunk or high.
Claudia thought it such a foolish thing to do. Didn't they realize that the
counselors listened and marked it down? No surer way to extend your stay than
to wax rhapsodic on psychoactive drugs. Actually, doing violence was probably
worse, but announcing drug lust was still a bad idea.

The new resident appeared for public
viewing at breakfast the next day, sitting alone in the cafeteria with his back
to the other diners. When he turned around once to scan the room, Claudia
noticed he had a black eye. He appeared to be a teenager: short, blond and
slightly built. He didn't seem so scary. He looked like a beaten puppy dog.

Halfway through the meal, Lee got up the
nerve to bring him a glass of juice and take a seat across from him. Claudia
and the other patients were all very curious. What had this man done to be put
here, in the middle of the night, against his will? Was he going to disrupt the
quiet lifestyle they'd established?

Twenty-five minutes later Claudia,
Maggie and Bonnie huddled around Lee in the parking lot, shivering in the
chilly air, waiting for morning recreation to begin.

"His name is Billy."

"He looks young. Is he young? How
old is he?"

"He's nineteen."

"Why's he here?"

"He got into a fight at the
community pool. I guess his parents had had enough and found a way to get him
admitted."

"Hmm," Maggie said. "I
wonder if he goes to our pool. I'll have to ask him."

Bonnie chimed in, "Is that where he
got the black eye or did Louis give it to him?"

"I didn't ask, but I think Louis
could restrain him without punching him in the face, don't you? Louis could
break the guy in half." Everyone nodded agreement. Louis could indeed
crush a person if he wished.

"What's he like?"

"He seems like a good kid. Knows he
screwed up."

"Is he an addict?" Claudia
asked.

"How would I know?"

"He looks like an addict,"
Bonnie said knowledgeably. "Glassy eyes."

"When did you get a look at his
eyes?" Claudia wondered.

"I got a look."

"Want to hear something
terrible?" Lee interjected, certain that they would, and loathe to lose
center stage to Bonnie, "His parents dumped him here with nothing. No
toiletries, no change of clothes, nothing. And he says they're not coming back
with the stuff, either. They've done it before. Assholes. Worse than my
wife."

"What? He's been in here
before?" Claudia asked.

"Not here, I don't think. Other
places. When he was a minor. That's not so unusual."

Maggie shook her head. "No way.
When I'm out of here I'm never coming back."

Bonnie turned to her. "Never say
never. I've been through once before. I hope I don't come back, but who
knows?"

Claudia remained silent. She wanted to
finish her time here and get out, just like everyone else, but it wasn't so bad
in the residence. It was a safe place. She was taken care of. Life outside was
full of stresses, and she had crushing responsibilities and business that had
to be finished. She wasn't ready to leave yet.

"He needs people to be nice to
him," Lee said. "He's not a bad kid. Considering how he came in, he's
adjusting pretty well."

"So he's not too scary?"
Claudia asked, just to be sure.

"Not in here, he isn't," Lee
said, then lowered his voice. "Who knows what he's like back home?"

Claudia settled into life at the school and found it
satisfactory. As a single woman she chose to live in residence on campus and
earn a little extra in her paycheck by acting as a floor warden in the
dormitory. Her suite was small but comfortable, and the food was generally
quite good in the dining hall; when it wasn't, she could prepare something in
her tiny efficiency kitchen.

In addition to duties in the classroom,
Claudia and her fellow teachers were expected to participate in campus life.
Claudia was, naturally, the adviser for the German Club, and after her first
year she founded a Russian Club as well, teaching elementary Russian to
motivated language students after regular school hours. She enjoyed the
language club activities since the active participants were her more
intelligent students. Most of the other girls in the school left her cold, and
the feeling was mutual. Claudia was by no means the most popular teacher at
Jameson.

After her third year of teaching,
Claudia went abroad again, this time to chaperone a group of her students on a
ten day trip to Germany at the urging of the headmistress and the chairman of
the foreign language department. It was a thoroughly miserable experience, just
as Claudia had anticipated it would be, exhausting and chaotic. It was
impossible to keep adequate control of all the girls, even with the help of
additional chaperones. A number of students were determined to get drunk and
had to be watched at all times, another girl refused to eat anything but bread
and relentlessly complained of hunger, and still another believed the hotel
rooms were unclean and just knew she was going to return home with some
pestilence.

After the fifth night's three a.m. room
check, Claudia resolved that she would never attempt to make such a journey
again, and she shared this decision with the administration shortly after her
return. The headmistress informed Claudia that it was part of her job to make
these sojourns. Claudia offered to coordinate programs with another school, but
said would not go again herself, no matter what. They could just fire her if
need be. The headmistress backed down. Claudia was a good teacher and she kept
order in the dorm and in her personal life. It would have been hard to replace
her.

As most of Claudia's day was spent
satisfying the needs of the students and administration of Jameson, she didn't
cultivate many personal relationships. She did find a useful friend of sorts in
the Latin instructor. Linda Bauer, an older widow with a surprisingly full
social calendar, believed it was her duty to incorporate all the new faculty
into the life of the community. She encouraged Claudia to join the Latin
Reader's Theater, and then introduced her to the local Presbyterian Church,
where she soon became a member and the nodding acquaintance of many in the
congregation.

Such was Claudia's life for several years: church,
school, meetings – a routine punctuated only by occasional visits home. She
spent the holidays with her parents, as well as a full week in the summer, and
she paid weekend visits every couple of months during the school term.

After each visit, having seen her
daughter off with bags of cookies, cans of soup and admonitions to have the car
properly serviced, Sylvia would pull out her wool and start in with the
knitting needles, worrying the yarn into a sock while she bewailed Claudia's
fate.

"How on earth is Claudia going to
meet a nice man when she's cloistered at that school, surrounded by women and
girls? She doesn't even have her own apartment. She never goes anywhere but
church on Sunday mornings. How did she become a bluestocking, Tony? She's going
to be an old maid."

"You have to let Claudia live her
life. Stop nagging her. It won't do any good; it never has. She's been keeping
her own counsel since she was small, and that's not going to change any time
soon."

"But she's miserable, Tony. I can
see it in her eyes."

"Claudia says she's perfectly
happy. The least we can do is believe her and respect her choices."

This conversation, or some variant of
it, would occur regularly in the Milford home. Once Tony had his final say,
there was no point in pursuing it further. Sylvia would glare at her husband in
exasperation, and then channel her frustration into the sock on her needles.
The handiwork gave her little comfort. She would much rather have been knitting
a tiny bonnet.

Tony was perfectly correct when he said that his
daughter wouldn't discuss her personal life with her parents and that it wasn't
any use to push her, but he was in error if he believed Claudia's repeated
protestations of happiness. Claudia had never been one to share the joy when
everything was coming up roses, and she certainly wasn't one to seek a
sympathetic ear when she was choked by weeds. So despite living a life of deep
dissatisfaction, she kept her miseries private.