A day in the life of a boarding school teacher is race to breakfast, one set of clothes, race to class, another set of clothes, race to practice, another, shower, race to dinner, another set, back to the dorm, relax, grade, check the dorm, relax, grade, bed, another set of clothes. My bedroom is piles everywhere. My living-room-part-kitchen is books and papers and folders and dishes. My TV is rarely on, except to catch the news with Dan Rather. Tonight I’m not assigned dorm duty, and masses of sophomoric examinations of revenge versus justice weigh down my knees. Pen in one hand, a cold beer in the other, and the local news get me focused.
Channel 6 Action News anchormen come on too loud with their exaggerated voices, statements sliding up to questions. The field reporter is interviewing someone familiar, a couple, one man gnarled and old, the woman with scars on her face. She looks through a drooping eye at her husband, both surrounded by reporters.
She says, “We are confident that he was in no way responsible.”
Channel 6 Action News reporter says, “Mrs. Harney, how do you know?”
“My son would have told me.”
“Did he say he was harmed in any way?”
“Yes, he did.” She turns to look at Mr. Harney. He straightens to meet her look. At the same time without saying anything, they break their gaze at each other and look down. The reporters push their microphones toward her.
“Kyle told us about other boys pinning him down, punching him, playing tricks.” The reporters interrupt, jabbing their questions. Mr. Harney turns to shield his wife from the reporters.
She says, “Boys are not kind. He wrote us about that. He wrote us about Mr. Song teaching him good things. The day he died he wrote us.” Her voice a whisper and the reporters a mob.
“What did he say?”
“Did he say who did it?”
“The school did nothing?”
“He said he was better off, that Mr. Song tried. We know that Mr. Song had nothing to do with our son’s death. There will be no investigation. And that’s all I will say.” She backed away, held up her hand as if her hand could ward off judgment, could mete out justice. Mr. Harney stepped toward her, took her hand, put his arm around her. They turned away from the reporters.
Pushing off from my chair with the papers pressed to my thighs, the beer still in hand, like a hunchback, I cross the living room and reach for the knob to click off the TV. Still hunched, I backed to the chair with my papers pressed to my thighs. My living room was books and folders and the refrigerator kicking on. My left hand was wet with the warming beer. In three gulps it was gone.
I was rock on the lakeshore. I was rock under ripple. I was ripple.
All these papers about Hamlet and Claudius and Sir Francis Bacon, and I saw how much Donny Zurkus learned about power. His father, Union Textile, and his words about Song brought the country to St. Timothy’s. Donny, his lanky limbs, locked in desks built for Second Formers, walked into that dining room last night with Carla like he was Claudius, the sweet taste of revenge on his lips, his own form of justice, at once private and public, to repay the injustice he believed Song caused him for his suspension and sure rejection from the most elite colleges.
Now, justice played in someone whose wounds were not green. Kyle’s mom did not seek revenge. She sought to clear Song’s name and Kyle’s name. She didn’t even want to blame the boys who picked on Kyle.
Mrs. Harney is river. Mrs. Harney is tide. The ocean is as big as her grace.
After Channel 6 Action News at 5 p.m. and the same news at 11 p.m., I was reading Sir Francis Bacon and Freud and Shakespeare quoted and regurgitated in some Fourth Form jumble like the BeeGees playing Mozart. The spring in the screen door stretched before there was a loud knock on my door. Papers fell from my lap and fanned out. After 11 p.m. meant lights out and locked dorms, and Carla couldn’t possibly be standing there.
And Carla wasn’t there. The white print on the black label spelled “Jack Daniel’s” through the windowpane of my door. Alex Jeffers was pointing his big, rower finger at the bottle and grinning into the door. The whiskey splashed in the bottle that Alex held. He had started a while ago.
“Jack for Jack,” he said. He walked in when I opened the door.
“Come right in.” He brushed by me.
“Can you believe it? You saw the news, right?” My sweats and socks and unwashed hair, my eyes blurry from reading papers, I blinked at his ebullience.
“Sure.”
“We should celebrate.” He looked at the kitchen side of my living room. “Glasses?” he said.
The way he talked, the words had more Ss than they needed. “At it awhile?”
“A bit.” He spun toward me. “Caught the early news.” Over six feet tall, the muscle-bound man shrugged, looked six years old. Spinning toward me was a movement too quick, and he kept spinning, leaning on one leg.
“Easy, big guy.” I stepped toward him. And the momentum he had when he spun kept him moving, and his arm wrapped around me. He folded me into his chest. My face slammed into his pecs, and I breathed in the smell of cake frosting from the whiskey seeping out his pores.
“Mmm,” he said. My head turned to the side so I could breathe. My arms dropped. I had papers to grade, and the questions he might ask about how I kept my hand on his leg during the drive to and from town, why I scrambled out of his car, and who the woman was on my doorstep the other evening were pieces of debris floating in the wreck of the last few weeks.
“Alex,” I said, “you have to go.” When I leaned back, he didn’t let go.
“But this feels so good.” His chin sank farther down my neck.
“It’s late.” His hug felt good the way sun feels good in winter. He was the big man who tried to save a Second Form boy and the boy died. He was that kind of guy, the one who rushes toward a fire when other people run away. There were lots of reasons to want his arms around me.
“Don’t you like this?” His arms moved in circular motions on my back, the bottle somehow landing upright on a table. Last week this hug might have been a door, a place to enter the St. Timothy’s world and prove I belonged. Last week I wanted his hand on me.
“Yes, but,” I said.
“But what?” His head left my neck, and his hands took my shoulders, and his eyes in my eyes were too close. “What?”
“Nothing.” Going farther with Alex might have made the dress code, the drinking, the implicit agreements of boarding school make sense, but in this past week, every code broke.
“You don’t like me?”
“It’s not that.” My head bowed to keep my eyes from him, and his hands squeezed harder to keep me from backing away. “You’re, this, great,” I said. The six-year-old in him, blond and pink cheeks and dizzy.
“You’re special, too,” he said with way too many Ss.
“Thanks.”
We stood there in my living room, and he folded me inside his arms. And when he swayed, I held him in case he leaned too far, and the two of us were warm in my living room with papers and books, an old TV, and my empty beer bottle. Outside it was December cold, the branches of the maples clicking. For a moment the last twelve weeks stopped splitting apart the crack in my chest. For a moment the cold stayed on the outside and didn’t make a draft inside me. I wanted to stay in this moment of someone taller and stronger and acceptable wrapping around me.
His hand was big on my back, his enormous hand, moving slowly, pressing my sweatshirt, my sweatshirt turning circles. When his hand moved under my sweatshirt, under my shirt, I reached around and pressed his palm flat to my back. “Not a good idea,” I said.
“What?”
“This,” I said. I pressed his hand for emphasis.
“What?” He pulled his hand away from my hand. “What?” he said and reached farther up my shirt. The smile on his face was in his words, his head higher than my head. Alex, as strong as he is, could take what he wanted if he wanted, could turn my apartment into a desert with the two of us the only people for miles. Lucky for me, Alex was more boy and more drunk.
Stepping away from him, I pulled his hand from behind my back and brought it between us. With my hand I held up his hand, as if it were a rabbit from a hat, and with my other hand, I pointed to it. “This,” I said.
“Oh, that little thing,” he said. “If I’ve told it once, I’ve told it twice.”
“You’ve told it a thousand times,” I said, and the old line became trick and charm and truce.
“Hands have a mind of their own,” he said. “The little buggers.”
With my hand on his wrist, Alex started to fall. I grabbed his hand with both of mine, and leaned away to slow his descent to the couch. “Sorry,” he said, “guess I needed to sit down.”
“Guess so,” I said and knelt down on the carpet in front of the big man leaning back in the too-soft couch, the couch where Terence had slept the night when Kyle died, the couch where Carla insisted she killed Kyle. “You okay?
“Fine, thank you, and you?” Alex said in a perky St. Tim’s voice. His head rested on the wall behind the couch, and his eyes were closed. He rolled his head back and forth.
“Can I tell you something?” I said. On my knees I wanted to apologize for the signals I sent.
“Anything,” he said, “as long as you don’t expect me to remember it.” His big hand covered his mouth as he yawned.
“About the other night.”
“After the diner when you ditched me?”
“I wanted to,” I said.
“You wanted to ditch me? That’s not what your hand was saying.” A big smile followed the Ss in what he said. “Little buggers.”
“About that.” I tried to say more, but he kept going.
“All I can say is you sure know how to confuse a guy.” He swept his hand over his forehead and combed his fingers through his hair.
“I’m really sorry, Alex,” I said.
“Forget about it.” His big hand waved the air, pushed the thought aside.
“No, I can’t.”
“You can’t what?”
“I can’t, I can’t . . .” I said. Now I was the one shaking my head back and forth. The reasons for wanting him and not wanting him, the reasons I couldn’t tell him about Crisco and who I was, the fears and apologies and admissions all stalled inside me.
“Be with me,” he said. He brought his head forward, off the wall, but his eyes were half closed.
“Yes.”
“You can’t be with me because there’s somebody else?”
An easy way out was something I hadn’t imagined. Here was an apology without vulnerability. Here was open water, no boats challenging, fans cheering.
“Yes,” I said.
“That somebody the other night?”
“Yes.”
“Lucky girl.”
Did he mean me? Did he see Crisco in the half-light of the parking lot, Crisco with her big muscles and boy-shape? The taste of beets, the way students would look at me, the way I’d be fired filled my throat. My hand reached for his knee.
“I am,” I said.
“You are,” he said. And his head swung back against the wall.
For a while there was nothing in the living room but the sound of the refrigerator turning on, the maples clicking outside in the cold. The wind had picked up, and it swept the cold from the lake against the stone buildings.
Without telling Alex how much I wanted to want him, how my hand on his leg in the car had been a way to keep hold of the living, how those smiles at school dinners and passing in the halls were like buoys along a racecourse. They kept me on a course, a course for which everything in my life had trained me. Tonight I wanted to apologize for the flirting, the start flag of a race, for the stops I made.
In this moment, Alex falling asleep on my couch, the wind and cold in a Delaware December, the buoys fell away. I had no cox’n to steer me, no boats in lanes on either side. The course was no longer what I tried to want. It was gone.