TWO

Dore was thirty miles away from Nick’s apartment, in the New Jersey high school where she taught. She had a headache so blinding she could hardly move. It was G block, her last class to teach, and her least favorite. It was an odd assortment of kids, the ones bounced from class to class because they still couldn’t read, still couldn’t write a sentence that made one whit of sense. She would write “food on the table” across the dusty blackboard, and half her class would stubbornly assure her that it was a perfectly good sentence, and that the only thing wrong with it was the messy slant of Dore’s handwriting.

Debby Brown in the first row told Dore that food was the subject, table the verb, because verbs showed action, right? Wasn’t that what Dore had told them? You ate at a table, and anyone who said eating wasn’t action was just plain dumb.

Dore was stupefied.

Donald Steiner stood up and scornfully told Debby she was a moron. “Where are you from, outer space?” he said. He said table was the adjective because adjectives described, and he himself could rattle off five different kinds right now: pine, maple, cherry, oak, and Formica.

Worse though, and more chilling, was Timmy Mathews, who cleared his throat and then told her that really he couldn’t give a flying hoot what a verb was, because he was going to hire himself a pretty secretary to take care of all that gunk for him. He’d pay her plenty to know that kind of thing, because he was going to be an executive, he was going to attend to the really important junk.

Dore got more and more tired, but she tried. She never used the textbooks, hating them even more than the kids did. She made up her own sentences, trying to shock them into a little attention, putting up their names, the names of the rock stars she thought they liked. “Elvis Presley took his guitar to the store.” Find the verb. Find the subject. She got startled looks, but only a moment or two of attention. “You look more like the Wayne Newton type to me,” Debby said, squinting.

Dore made them write, calling it “senior essay” to give it some importance. She scribbled “hunger” across the board and gave them the whole period to write about it, anything they wanted—a story, a description. She loved senior essay. It gave her a whole forty minutes to relax her headache away, and she felt she deserved such breaks. Look at her class.

Ronnie Dazen. Big and dirty blond, hulking over his front-row seat and mooning at her so she wanted to smack the expression right off his face. His eyes followed her. When she went to the board, she felt uneasy. She kept touching the hem of her skirt to make sure it wasn’t riding up. She fingered her buttons to make sure they were fastened good and tight.

Ronnie had called her at her apartment once. He was very polite. He told her he had forgotten what the homework was, and could she please refresh his memory? She told him to call a friend. “But I am,” he said. He breathed in the silence. He wouldn’t hang up, so she had to do it. One time, he even walked his dog on her block, a whole two miles away from where he lived. He must have packed the dog in the car and driven it over. He teased and tormented the dog until it whined and carried on so much that she came to her window to see what the commotion was. He was soothing the dog down, blinking up at her, innocent. She hadn’t been able to concentrate, knowing he was out there with his dog, knowing he knew just where she lived.

In the back was Ricky Hall, the boy the others dubbed the Quaalude Kid. He shimmied in his seat; he talked and laughed to himself. He was skinny and small, swimming out of the T-shirts he marked up with Magic Marker, “Eat me” bleeding in a murky black drool across his chest. He strode past her, defiant, turning a little so she could see, but she just told him how pleased she was to see his spelling improve, and that she expected a passing grade from him on his next word test. His grin deflated.

Ricky was smart enough never to carry any drugs on his person, and the one time she had sent him home on suspicion, his father had called up, threatening her, threatening the school, demanding proof that his boy wasn’t as clean and innocent as a fresh sheet of paper. The principal had taken the boy’s side; she had been reprimanded, reminded what a lawsuit might cost, and she had walked back into her classroom, defeated.

Beside him now, two boys were surreptitiously chewing tobacco, spitting it into a blue Dixie cup. It was forbidden, and at least once a month Dore had to collect the cups, sickened. When the boys saw her coming, one of them handed the cup to Rick. “Pepsi,” he whispered. Rick was tilting the cup to his mouth when Dore said sharply, “That’s enough,” startling him, making him drop the cup, creating a slide of brown stain across the pale wood floor.

She sent a boy off to get a wet paper towel, half expecting him not to return. She went back to her desk, removing her glasses, rubbing her eyes. Someone wolf-whistled and she looked up, trying to look menacing. Without her glasses, she couldn’t see six inches past her face, but she didn’t think her students knew that. She hadn’t thought it was such a good thing for them to know, a weapon they might use against her. She sometimes took off her glasses at her desk, looking out across them, just so they’d think she could do without them.

She had been just about legally blind since birth, although to this day her mother insisted it wasn’t so much physical as plain old stubbornness on Dore’s part. A lack of vision. A refusal to see things the way they really were.

Her mother could point back through time, pulling out Dore’s baby pictures. Oh, such a sweet baby face; such frilly dresses that Dore consistently muddied up in the backyard; the smooth, buttery hair that had to be clipped short so it would curl, that wouldn’t stay in place no matter how much sugar water was drenched into it. And the glasses. Oh, Lord, the glasses. Candy-striped frames, tipped at the corners like a smile and tied in back with a blue ribbon, because where could you get glasses small enough to stay on a baby?

No one in her family had bad eyes. But there was Dore, creeping into walls, grabbing for her mush and missing. Her father had bundled her up and taken her to the doctor, had bought her her first pair of glasses.

Dore had hated them at first. She wouldn’t wear them unless she was watched. She lost them in the grass and insisted she could see perfectly fine. It gave her mother a perfect reason to blame: Dore’s poor vision and her refusal to correct it were clearly why she wore too much makeup at fifteen, why she couldn’t dress with a little ladylike reserve. And of course there was the time when Dore was seventeen, when she had fallen in love with the neighborhood butcher.

His name was Franky Hart. He was a high-school dropout who had inherited his father’s business, and he was twenty-five when Dore knew him. He knew absolutely everything there was to know about tenderloin and rib roast. He could tell you how to bring out the flavor in chicken, how to dress up liver so that even the kids would be clamoring for seconds. He charmed women. He noticed their dresses, their hair, and ignored their protests that they were certainly too old to be called “pretty.” He kept the air sweetly sugared, and even Dore’s mother fell under his spell. She took special pains with what she wore when she went in there, but really, no more than the other women—and anyway, having a harmless crush yourself was a hell of a lot different from having a daughter actually go out with the object of your affections.

Dore started going out with Franky the first and only time she ever stopped at the store, to pick up some hamburger meat for her mother, who was shivering out a summer cold, bundled up in bed. Franky hooked Dore with his smile, and persuaded her to let him drive her home on his motorcycle. When he showed up one Friday to take Dore to the movies, his hair slicked back, his jacket pressed, Dore’s mother was livid. She felt betrayed. She stood watch at the window; she saw how Dore hitched up her skirts to get on his motorcycle, how she looped her arms about his waist, pressing herself in close.

“I don’t care for that class of boy,” she sniped to Dore when Dore came home, out of breath, rumpled, her glasses stashed in her purse or lost. “Don’t you see what you’re doing?”

“I see just fine,” Dore said.

She sneaked around seeing Franky for over a year. Her mother began going to a different butcher, and the family sat at dinner after dinner picking at fatty roasts, pushing away stringy gray lamb. Dore never wore her glasses when she was with Franky. He didn’t like them. He’d take them off if she didn’t, stashing them in his own shirt pocket so that she sometimes forgot to get them before she went back into the house. She got used to seeing her world in a blur, got used to the headaches that sent her to her room nights with the lights off, a towel stuffed under her door to muffle sound.

In the end, she had gone off to college. She had seen him for a while. He had come to visit, but he was ill at ease and out of place. He stayed overnight with her in her dorm room, chipping in ten dollars to get her roommate to stay someplace else, but the lovemak-ing wasn’t what Dore had expected. He was impatient. He preened and he said he’d known it would be this good. He tried to joke. “It takes a sexual man to make a chicken sensual,” he said. But she didn’t laugh; she sat up in bed, reaching for her glasses, and when he tried to stay her hand, she brushed it away.

He took up with another girl, a tall redhead with big green eyes and perfect vision. It had mattered once, but it didn’t anymore. Dore was through with him, suddenly through with school and Chicago, and she graduated and moved out to her new job in New Jersey. She thought about getting contact lenses, but her eyes wouldn’t adjust, and now she just wore her glasses all the time.

“Jeepers creepers, look at teach’s gorgeous peepers,” Ronnie sang. “You ought to ditch those dumbo glasses for good.”

“Finished your essay, have you?” she said, and he took up his pen again. She twisted round to the file cabinet, just for a second, to get a Kleenex to clean her glasses, and when she turned back around, her glasses were gone.

“Ha-ha,” she said. “Very funny. Okay, Ronnie, let’s have them.”

He looked up. “You said we had until the end of class to finish.”

She told him what she meant, and, insulted, he stood up and emptied his pockets. He dumped out his knapsack on the floor, spilling packs of gum, cigarettes, some stray papers, and a packet of rubbers. Defiantly, he sat down again. She was close enough to make out the objects on the floor, to know her glasses weren’t in that jumble. “A joke is a joke,” she said. “Now let’s have them.”

No one knew a thing. Debby said she hadn’t seen anyone do anything. Rick said he bet the glasses were in Dore’s top drawer. “I want those glasses on my desk by the bell or you all get F’s.” Dore felt like a fool. She couldn’t read what was playing in their faces, but they knew her well enough to know what a softy she was, how unlikely her threat.

“First good grade I’d have all year,” Tim muttered.

The bell rang, and then her class was spilling past her, dusting her desk with papers, calling out hopes that she’d find those glasses, voices friendly, uninvolved. “Ronnie,” she called, thinking he’d surely help her if it meant a little extra flirting time, but he was whisking out the door, waving his blurry hand at her in goodbye.

She patted her way along the corridor to the office. She could see well enough to know where she was going, but she’d never be able to drive home. She trailed her fingers up against a big sticky wad of gum and recoiled. She had this sudden image of all the students she had ever flunked emerging from the corridors, coming in for the kill when they realized how helpless she was. Things like that happened here. Cherry bombs under the French teacher’s skirt. A gym teacher getting knifed because he had made a boy do one too many squat thrusts.

She told herself she was different, she was invincible. Two years of teaching and not one bad thing had happened to her. She had confiscated whiskey bottles and knives, and no one had threatened her, much less retaliated. She’d even had students come back to visit her after they had dropped out of school because she had failed them for yet another term. Students gave her gifts on her birthday. She remembered one boy had written her a poem. She had begged him to try to publish it, and had brought him the addresses of small literary magazines. She couldn’t understand his moody refusal—until a month later, when she had been in the Thrift-T-Mart, buying grapes, and had heard the words of his poem woozily crooned out by Frank Sinatra over the loudspeakers.

She suddenly felt someone in the corridor with her, and she squinted. Up ahead. A muddied image. A man, leaning against the wall, silently watching her. She wasn’t sure what to do. She knew every teacher here by shape as well as sound; she knew the colors and clothing they wore. This man was small and lean and in a suit, something the other men avoided. It could be a parent, she thought, except he didn’t seem lost, and he didn’t seem angry about his kid making him trek all the way out here. He was just leaning, just waiting for her.

She felt foolish trailing her hand along the wall. She took it down and started striding blindly down the hall to the main office. The principal’s secretary lived near Dore; she’d give her a lift. Dore was almost to the man when she stumbled on something, and then she felt his hand on her arm.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes… No,” she said, letting him help her stand, moving a step or two from him. She squinted at him. He didn’t look dangerous.

“Listen,” she said, “a kid took my glasses. I’m afraid I can’t see very well. If you could just help me to the office, I can get a ride home. There,” she said, pointing.

“I can drive you,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know you,” she said. “I can’t take a ride with someone I don’t know.”

“I just sold two dozen books to your school librarian,” he said. “I’ll take you to her and you can ask her—she can identify me. I’ve got a business card, too, if you think you can read it. And a number you can call to check up on me.”

Dore squinted at him.

“Really. I was just leaving anyway,” he said.

He had stepped back from her. He was too far away for her to really make out his features. She was curious about them, though. Curious, too, about why he had been just standing out there in the hall, what he had been waiting for. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll take the ride.”

The whole time he was driving her home, she kept wondering what he might really look like. She wasn’t so blind she couldn’t see his black hair, cut a little wild and funny, a nose a little prominent, a rumpled dark suit that seemed a bit big. The details, though, were missing, and she couldn’t just move up close to stare, to read his face like braille.

She made him wait outside her door; she told him she just had to grab her extra glasses and then she wanted to get a catalog from him—maybe she’d be interested in ordering some of his books for her class.

She went into the bedroom and rummaged around in a drawer for her glasses. They were old frames, out of style, and she didn’t think she looked so good in them. Still, she stopped to fluff up her shortish hair, to smooth her blouse, and then she stepped out into the foyer.

“Well, teacher,” he said, smiling. “Do I pass?”

“Do I?” she said.

They began seeing each other. He lived a half-hour’s drive away and he’d come out to see her or bring her back with him to the city, and when he was on the road, he called her, every night, with stories. She liked him. He was different from the other men she had been with, boyfriends who were always jaunting off mornings to be with their buddies, leaving her with a messy bed, with a breakfast table littered with toast crumbs and cigarettes, with spilled black coffee working its way right into a stain. She had had men who would make love to her, and then, a minute later, would casually wipe off their gummy penises with her lace underwear, would reach for her phone to schedule a tennis game, joking privately to someone whose sex she wasn’t even sure of.

She felt happier with Nick, who wouldn’t leave her alone, who told her that he didn’t know what it was about her, only that there was something that kept drawing him, that wouldn’t let go. He said that when he had first seen her, feeling her way along the wall, he was certain all the time that she was feeling her way toward him, that he had been her destination right from the start, and that all he had to do was wait for her, holding his breath, mesmerized.

There was no one else laying claim to him except her. He didn’t even have any real friends to speak of, let alone family. She had to pull all those orphan stories out of him; he seemed vaguely shamed, reluctant, and when she told him that she loved those stories, that they made him more lovable, more charming, he looked at her stupefied. “You do?” he said. “They do?”

She didn’t tell him that it made him seem more hers, made him seem more vulnerable. She said only that she had never known anyone who had grown up that way, and it made him special. He touched her face when she said that. He couldn’t stop looking at her, almost as if he were searching for something.

He was interested in everything about her. He pored through her yearbooks, her family albums; he held up face after face for her to identify. Her mother. Her father. Herself, a sulky seventeen, perched on Franky’s motorbike. He made her tell her own growing-up stories, over and over, until he said he felt like they were his. He couldn’t understand why she didn’t get back to Chicago more often to see her parents, why she had moved away from them. He offered to go with her on a visit, but she turned him down. “If you had parents, you’d understand,” she said. “It has nothing to do with love.”

He charmed her. He didn’t care about her glasses. When she took them off, he just brought himself in close, so near he could see the gold flecks in her pupils; he swore he could feel the boundaries of their skins.

She felt funny, she felt different with so much attention. She let the kids carry on in class. She ignored it when Ronnie dropped his pen, stooping so he could try to look up her skirt. She daydreamed about Nick while three boys in back threw spitballs, while the girls traded blush and eye shadows, layering it on over their grammar papers, returning the papers to Dore with soft dustings of blue or rose.

She began wearing more interesting clothing. Softer shirts, silkier dresses, earrings made of cut glass that caught and refracted the light into millions of tiny suns across her desk. She grew her bangs and then went into Woolworth’s and sat for four photos, which she shyly gave to Nick.

She told him not to, but Nick always called her at school. Teachers weren’t supposed to get personal calls. There were only two phones in the whole school—the one the secretary used and the one in the principal’s office. If you had anything at all personal to say, the secretary was always right there, leaning toward you, fashioning gossip and juice out of whatever words you let slip. When Nick called, a monitor came into Dore’s room to get her. Her students whistled as she left to take the call. “I missed you,” Nick said. He promised he wouldn’t call again, he said he had just ten minutes, and then two hours later he’d call again.

They ate dinners together. Nick made huge spreads of food for her, so much that she could only stare blankly at it. She never ate a quarter of what he put before her, but Nick kept starting and stopping. He tossed most of the food out, and when she said she’d take some home with her, he laughed. He said he had grown up with leftovers, that he had done more than his fair share of penance and didn’t think either one of them should do more. He was always hungry, always eating, and always lean.

He slept with his arms about her, sometimes one leg trapping her hip so she couldn’t move. If she rolled away, he rolled with her. It used to annoy her a little, but then she noticed how on the nights he was away, she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she had twisted the sheets about her, until she had the pillow pushed up against her, so close she was nearly off the side of the bed.

Nick had her pictures all over his place, in his wallet, in his pockets—once, inside his sneaker. He didn’t mind coming home to an empty apartment, because really, it wasn’t empty anymore. No place was. Everywhere seemed flooded with Dore, with her voice, her face, the heady possibility he felt when he was with her. She was suddenly everyplace he had ever wanted to be, she was the road he felt destined to travel.

Dore was his first love.