Near where I grew up, there are beaches like these, shallow waters and sheltered expanses. Destruction of rocks and continents, sediment washed out by streams, carried to shore by littoral drift, the long parallel current caused by waves crashing at angles, and then the packing of sand by oscillating waves moving perpendicular to shore. Rehoboth Beach, playground of the elite, and their teachers.
No lab books to grade, no students to tuck in. Young men of distant parents, we teachers in loco parentis. But not any more.
Little notes on index cards everywhere in the house: Please take garbage with you, and Jiggle handle if toilet runs. Loopy handwriting, most polite. A woman’s writing.
A shoal, a sandbar. My mother for me. In Korea sons are shoals for their parents. My parents in San Diego now buffeted by the rough media.
I was no shoal for Kyle.
From this bench on the boardwalk, built so long ago, this beach the stomping ground of D.C. dignitaries, not merely the boarding-school set. Low tide, and the beach stretches almost to the horizon. The earth’s curve. Should have brought Second Formers here to learn shoal, tide, refraction, and drag.
Once I met Carla here at a cottage. Similar loopy notes, Please leave shoes outside, with shaky pen drawing of Dutch clogs. As if some candy would magically fill them by morning.
Countries have strange customs.
A woman and a dried fish have to be bitten every three days.
Not some index card. Old Korean saying. Confucian yin-yang mumbo jumbo about forces opposed, the wearing down of resistance. In this case women are food, the stuff to be consumed, swallowed, beaten. Women are rocks; men are waves, pounding. Used to be that Korean girls were raised in the family of the boy with whom they were matched. Boys married at fifteen, girls at twelve.
Carla was seventeen when we met at this beach, eighteen when she sneaked into my apartment.
Confucius taught girls silence, compliance, obedience, and then Catholics taught them to serve. Double trouble. Somehow my mother lived differently, learned to think from Catholic schools, work equally with my father, equal status. Her mother, though, was beaten every day by my grandfather. She said he smiled when he beat her with a walking stick. He liked beating like he liked crispy fish. Good for circulation.
After Kim died, my blood pooled. Bad chi. I needed shelter. When Carla came to Tim-Tim’s, her stiff walk, her curls, her questions and bugs, something felt the same. Carla so different from my sister, but the same. Not trying to love my sister that way, just something familiar, a trace. The habit of sheltering was the only way I knew to love. Shelter for shelter. Caring for others is a good way not to feel for yourself.
The very first day when Tim-Tim parents drive their station wagons around the circle in front of the main building, students pull out backpacks and boxes and pillows and milk crates, little packrats of their teenage years. Arms full, they walk into the stone building, and leave behind their age and grade. They become Formers, not graders. Carla became a Third Former.
Parents in their sports coats and skirts, matching colors, all things J.Crew, packed in with kids carrying pillows and stuffed animals and crates of homemade tapes, the Doobie Brothers, Metallica, and other hideous bands. No one had Grateful Dead.
I was inside the main entrance with a clipboard looking for the boys, the space too little for too many boys, Mr. Maze Director, sending them to their dorms, their new lives in rat living.
But there was this girl, black curls falling in her eyes, no parents around her. She carried a plastic milk crate in front of her. No stuffed animals. No pillow.
“Table for two?” Curly Girl said. She leaned toward my clipboard.
For a second I looked for T for Table. Mr. Gullible.
“Name?” I said.
“Hungry.”
“Well, Miss Hungry,” I said, “Try Miss Check-in, standing over there.” Her arms were hyper-extended from the crate she carried. In it were rows of tapes, Grateful Dead, each tape numbered in thick black marker. All the tapes lined up the same way, numerically ordered. Fastidious. My nod to the other entrance in the dark hall sent Miss Hungry to check in. Carla walked like someone learning to walk, straight lines and pulleys and wheels. She didn’t look back.
Who knew she would row with such power, run such distances, lie with me on a couch.
Last summer, between her Fifth and Sixth Form years, we came to Rehoboth for the weekend. Her father made a deal with a local artist for a show in his gallery in exchange for some weekends at the beach. It had been a long summer, very hot, and the beach is always cool. And months had gone by with letter after letter. Carla can write beautiful things, and my reasons for not going sounded weak. In the end, I was weak and said yes. She drove the red Mustang convertible her father gave her and stepped stiff-legged out of it, Miss Mannequin, with a book bag on her back.
“Traveling light?” I said.
“Clothing optional,” she said.
Her height, my height, almost the same. Raised two cultures apart and similar builds. A decade apart.
Our shoulders touched when we walked to the front door. The pulse of a wave can last until the drag or resistance changes the energy.
Inside the cottage she threw her backpack on the couch and walked back toward me, arms open.
“Alone at last,” she said in a mock movie-actress voice.
“Let’s hit the beach.”
Most of the day I dodged her. Walking on the beach, we bumped each other, barefoot in the light sand. This sand the grinding of shells and granite, washed and washed over the shoals. At one point she played bull, making me the matador.
Bending at the hip in a right angle, she put one finger on either side of her face, extending from her temples, and she pawed the sand before charging me. Ms. Bull charging. Waiting, waiting until she was inches away, I pretend-pulled the cape, stood up on my toes, turned sideways, and let the charging bull pass. Mr. Matador. Her heels dug into the sand. When she stopped so quickly, she fell on her butt. The pretend-cape danced. She looked up. It swung and swirled above her, her head tipped back, the curls off her forehead, those eyes of well water. I drew the cape behind me in a twirl about my waist, around and around, faster and faster until I keeled over beside her, and we laughed. Bulls don’t fall butt-first, and matadors don’t drop beside them. Teachers don’t sleep with students.
Too much opportunity with no obstruction. Internal reality obstructing external possibility.
A woman and a dried fish have to be bitten every three days.
Toward evening Carla walked backwards in front of me. We were two blocks from the house, with groceries in our hands. Her curls bouncing around her head each step backwards.
“You’re avoiding me,” she said with a smile.
“Not really.”
“Yes, really.” She kept backing up, synchronized steps with my steps forward. “You’re a wuss.” I hate that word.
She spun her body to walk beside me, her low grocery bags following centripetal force and clipping me at the knees.
“Teachers don’t do this.”
“That old line. Pathetic.”
We piled up trying to get in the door. Enough space but too much emotion. Before I could turn the key, she was pushing the door, grocery bags banging against the wood. In the kitchen, she slammed the cupboards closed, threw containers in the fridge. Ms. Impatient.
“Carla, come here,” I said and took her hand. Her fingers felt like they had an extra joint they were so long. I tugged her to sit down next to me. The couch was too soft, so we fell back against the wall. We laughed, but she wouldn’t look at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and she curled into my chest, her forehead beneath my chin.
With my arms around her, I rocked her, her hair smelling of sun and ocean and, faintly, cotton candy.
“You’re not some weird father-figure thing, you know, for me, anyway,” she said into my chest.
“And you’re no child,” I said, but the way she curled into a part of herself made a part of me wash away. Her hair and her long fingers and her eyes, they were concrete and real. While entropy takes us to decay, her presence was vital, and in her presence, I forgot loss.
But shoals don’t kiss, and beaches don’t lie down.
But we did. It started with the way she folded into me, and her kisses on my neck, and my chin showing more of my neck and my arms loosening and her turning to face me, crawling into me, and my hands moving down her back, and then we were lying on the couch.
If Carla tells the psychiatrist in the psych ward about our weekend at the beach, no matter what we did and didn’t do, what will the Old Boys do?
Option 1: I am prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Option 2: They turn a blind eye since they realize that I did not have relations with a boy.
Option 3: Can’t think of a third option.
The Old Boys would understand that saying: Women are to be eaten, discarded. Old Girls are bitten every day. But I couldn’t do it.
In the middle of her on top of me and her shirt up enough that the skin of our bellies dragged, I stopped, sat up, turned my body sideways on the couch. I didn’t mean to, but I knocked her off. Mr. Coordinated.
“What was that?” she said. Her face was big and smiling, and her curls were everywhere.
“I can’t do it.”
“You’re kidding.” Her eyes held no light, reflecting. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I can’t do this.” It seems I can only go so far. Inside me there’s resistance, matter that obstructs the energy moving in one direction.
“Then what’re we doing here?”
“Good question.”
That night we slept in separate beds in separate rooms. The heat outside was the glass of sand holding energy from the sun; the wind was the moisture from the waves. Inside it was soup. There was a note card near the electric clock by my bed: Please disable the alarm.
The thought occurred to me to leave my own note card: Don’t bring students to bed.
Note to self: Don’t underestimate students.
Muscle-Boy Zurkus is bright for a jock, Mr. English Assignment torturing Kyle on the lab table. Melting wax into the ear. Mr. Hamlet in his revenge play, informing the Carnivores of the media. Old story, though: school master preying on innocent boy. But Carnivores don’t care what they eat so long as it draws other scavengers.
Old Boys won’t like Tim-Tim’s in the spotlight. Though they’ve been the ones to tell me at the reunions and mucky-muck fundraisers: Bad publicity is good for admissions. Name recognition matters most. The Old Boys are like meat-eating media. They don’t care what the cause, so long as Tim-Tim’s is fresh on the mind. At least Sam Omura will speak for me. His outsider-ness like mine, but his mass carries more density, offers more pull than mine. Sam Omura is a prince among men.
So, what bargain will Oral-Fixation White strike with Union Textile, Donny Zurkus’ dad?
Option 1: Donny will get a glowing letter of recommendation to the college of his choice if he retracts his statement.
Option 2: Donny’s dad stands by his son and revels in my demise.
Option 3: Can’t think of Option 3.
The morning after we slept in separate beds, Carla was Ms. Slammer. Every cupboard, every drawer, sent energy through the whole house. Couldn’t have slept if I wanted to.
“Good morning, Ms. Sunshine.” The distance between the breakfast table and me was tiny. The red chair slid out from the table barely enough for me to squeeze in the seat.
In sweats and a T-shirt, she was a girl, but when she turned toward me, her face was the picture of a screaming face painted on a wooden toy.
“Can I help you find something?” The silverware in the slammed drawer sounded like breaking glass.
“No.” She slammed the next drawer.
Option 1: Put my arms around her, which was not the wisest move yesterday.
Option 2: Try to reason with her.
I finally thought of an Option 3: Walk out.
“Carla,” I said, “can we talk?” Option 2.
“All you want to do is talk. We talk about your age, we talk about your responsibilities, and we talk about when I graduate. And after talk, talk, talk, we make out. What am I supposed to do?” Her hands were by her side, palms out.
“If you think of it as a wave, it travels up and down.”
“Shut up,” she said. “Don’t go science on me.” She crossed her muscle arms.
“What I’m saying is that there is nothing constant.” Everything made me sound like a wuss.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” she said.
It didn’t take her long to pack her backpack. In the doorway to the kitchen, she leaned like a pile of sticks and looked at me. Her eyes were miles away, the light taking light years to travel the distance between us.