“I didn’t know you were supposed to shave collies,” the headmaster said while he patted the dog’s long thin snout and took a seat in Esme’s living room. “I mean, I’ve just never seen it.”
“I don’t think it’s recommended but imagine living with him! It’s like having a Russian in your living room who refuses to take off his fur coat and hat in the middle of the summer. Like Dostoevsky himself, brooding away.” Littering a conversation with literary and pop-culture references had become an anxious habit for Esme, maybe the result of the stiflingly crowded overeducated population that made up faculty housing at a boarding school. On campus, all of the dogs and cats—and many of the faculty children themselves—were named with some clever allusion in mind. Atty, Esme’s daughter now fifteen and sitting beside her on the sofa, was named after Atticus Finch, a man’s name, yes, but Esme didn’t want to saddle Atty with the name Scout and she was set on which book she wanted to allude to. Ingmar, the collie, was often mistaken for a Bergman reference but actually it was a more obscure reference to the lead character in a Swedish film that Esme and her husband, Doug, saw when they were dating.
“But it’s October,” the headmaster said. “Shouldn’t he be bulking up his winter coat?”
“Still, the metaphor stands even if it’s cold out. I mean, hey, take off your coat, fella, and stay awhile! Am I right?” Esme said, trying to lighten the mood. She’d actually shaved the dog specifically for this meeting. Ingmar’s coat had become matted from muddy romps out by the pond, and dogs weren’t supposed to be off their leashes. She looked at her daughter for a little help.
Atty—a budding social media guru—looked up from her iPhone, leaned forward, and said, “This dog’s no Dostoevsky. Don’t you worry.” As if the burden of being in the same room with a dog capable of literary genius would be too much for the headmaster to bear. “A corgi on human growth hormones, maybe, but that’s about it. He couldn’t get a kid out of a well if his doggy life depended on it.” She then tweeted both sentences with the hashtag #lifewithcollie.
“There are no wells on campus,” the headmaster said, defensively.
Atty looked at Esme in a challenging way. Neither of them was a great fan of the headmaster. Behind his back, they both referred to him as Big-Head Todd. He had a very big head and the history teacher, also a Todd, had a very little head so they called him Little-Head Todd. Atty’s look was meant as a reminder to her mother that she’d promised to call the headmaster Big-Head Todd to his face, one fine day, before she graduated.
Esme understood the look immediately and shot her a look that meant, Not now. Then she smiled at Todd. “Listen. What do you need to tell us? You’re here, making a house call on a Sunday with a huge storm moving up the coast.”
“A Frankenstorm,” Atty added. She’d been following video clips on weather.com, the growing buzz of online hysteria, mandatory evacuations on the coast—even in Ocean City, New Jersey, where her grandmother lived. Did her mother really care about this storm? Was she too busy bracing for this meeting, which was clearly going to be about Atty’s shit midterm grades and her diminishing prospects for a good college education? Atty could almost hear the headmaster saying, We’re talking fourth tier at best, now. Fourth tier.
“And you didn’t cancel because of the storm, which would have been fine.” Esme knew this visit might have something to do with Doug. He had led a group of sophomores on a study abroad program in Europe. Atty was a sophomore but her grades had been too low to make the cut, which meant that Esme had to stay behind with her. Esme had asked if Doug was dead as soon as Mrs. Prinknell had called to make the appointment. “No, no,” Mrs. Prinknell had assured her, “for deaths, he calls people in pronto.”
But that was Friday evening and this was Sunday morning, and Doug had missed their Skype session, which had made Esme anxious. He was the type to prioritize one of the student’s emergency issues over his own life and so she’d decided this was an issue with one of the kids on the trip.
The headmaster was still balking. “It’s just, maybe Atty has some studying to do and we can talk privately.”
“I believe in honesty,” Esme said. “Not just, you know, expressing one’s feelings, and listing your grievances and airing out emotions, but the truth, the facts. I have nothing to hide from Atty.” The dog looked at her sharply with his very small eyes. It was a genetic problem; his eyes were literally too small for his head, but these looks—little admonishments—always reminded Esme of her mother. The collie looked like pictures of her mother from the late 1950s—skinny arms and legs and a boxy middle, wearing woolen skirts with formfitting pleats tight through her ample hips. Why had she gotten a dog who reminded her of her mother? Maybe she’d done it subconsciously.
“Okay, okay.” Todd pulled back his suit jacket and looked at a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. “If the squawk box goes off, I’ll have to take it. Sorry about that.”
“That’s okay. I’ve got a call in to my mother, who’s being evacuated on the Jersey shore.” Her mother was the stubborn type who refused to leave during storms. Esme was prepared to try to talk her into leaving, knowing she’d fail.
“Yep, yep. Hurricane Sandy has us on a twenty-four-seven alert. All-in, you know.”
“All-in,” Esme said, “of course.” She had no idea what all-in meant, and she hadn’t been paying attention to the storm. If storms defined people—those who love storms, those who fear them, and those who love them because they fear them—Esme was the type to try to ignore them because you can’t control them. She preferred limiting her life to things she could more easily control. It’s why she’d fallen for Doug. He was so practical, so tractable and reliable. And Esme had thought motherhood would be an experience of ultimate control—shaping a child, molding and nurturing them into adulthood. Raising Atty had proven her wrong.
Todd smiled sadly, and then he actually swept his hand over the wisps of hair on his big head and bent forward, leaning his elbows on his knees. It was the least robotic thing Esme had ever seen him do. In fact, it was so deeply human, she was worried. The news was bound to be very, very bad. “Doug’s left the study abroad program.”
“Left?” Esme said.
“It seems he’s run off with his dentist.”
“My dad’s gay?” Atty said. This wasn’t about her shit grades? She didn’t have to give her speech on the psychological effects of being a faculty brat? She immediately thought: My father has always kept a very tidy closet, but really gay?
Todd shook his head. “His female dentist.”
For a second, Atty felt guilty for assuming that the dentist was male. “Sorry,” she said, apologizing for her sexism.
“It’s not your fault!” Esme said quickly. She knew kids would blame themselves for marital issues. She herself had wondered if she’d been to blame for her absentee father. For years, she’d wondered if there’d been some good fatherly type that she’d driven away—so early in her life she couldn’t remember him.
Atty assumed her mother was taking blame for having raised Atty in a sexist culture, but didn’t dwell on it. She pulled out her iPhone and tweeted, I feel weirdly abandoned. Her tweets were usually so sarcastic that her followers weren’t sure what to make of the vague emotional baldness. If Atty’s grandmother were a follower—she didn’t have a Twitter account—she would have recognized it as a Statement of Personal Honesty, the factless variety, which she preferred.
It was a true Statement. Atty did feel unmoored—that disorienting moment in childhood when you realize that you’ve reached up and grabbed the wrong father’s hand and a stranger looks down at you and says, “Are you lost?” When this happened to Atty once at a Memorial Day parade, she’d gotten so embarrassed she turned it on the man. “I’m not lost! Let go of me, creeper!” And then she’d walked off and started crying. Doug found her in seconds.
Esme barely registered her daughter typing away with her thumbs. She irrationally assumed that Atty was going to look up the headmaster’s story on the Internet—as if she could find out if it was a hoax or an overseas scam—I’m stuck in Paris. A female dentist stole all of my credit cards and identification. Can you please wire money?
Part of Esme knew the story was possibly true. One of Doug’s molars had been killing him. She’d encouraged him to get it checked out. They were in Paris. Socialized medicine and all…
Esme stood up. Her arms hung at her sides. They felt loose, almost unattached from her body. She felt armless. She walked to the bay window. It was dark and rainy. The storm was coming.
“He’s no longer an employee of the school,” Todd went on.
“You fired him?” Esme asked.
“He quit.”
This was a very bad sign. “He quit? But he doesn’t have another job…” She shook her head. “He’s not the kind to run off. He has a really strong TIAA-CREF account. He’s not like this.”
“He told me that he has a plan.”
“You talked to him?”
“Well, yes. It’s how I knew he quit.”
Somehow she thought it had been handled by rumors and hearsay, as so many things were handled on campus. But, no. Doug had called the headmaster. And with this small detail, she knew that her marriage was over. She quickly blamed her mother-in-law. That side of the family was so uppity and elitist that there had been marriages between first cousins that had resulted in poor teeth, which meant Doug had to go to a dentist in Paris in the first place.
And then she thought, irrationally, that maybe her marriage was ending to make room for Ru’s. Augusta had told Esme the news one week ago today. What if there was a kind of curse—the family of three daughters and one mother could only contain one real marriage at a time. Esme’s brain used the caveat real because Liv’s marriages—all three of them—had always felt fragile and dubious—mainly because Liv so loudly insisted that these loves were great, sweeping epic loves that none of the other women in the family could really grasp. What was there to grasp? Liv married for money and did it well.
Once Esme had flitted through all the blame she could muster, she wanted to feel something. A deep splitting ache in her chest. But she wasn’t sure she loved Doug. Countless times, she’d imagined him leaving her, her leaving him, his sudden death. Awful things, but in truth she was not sure she’d ever loved him. She knew she’d never loved him the way she did her first love, Darwin Webber, who disappeared from college, not even leaving her a note. (And he was still nowhere to be found. She’d Googled him a bunch of times and he had no Internet footprint—not even a death notice.) She’d met Doug a year later, and having given up on the idea that she could love anyone again, she opted instead for what felt like a good partnership. (Was she just in the earliest stage of grief?)
“Do the kids on the trip know?” Atty asked.
Esme turned and looked at her.
“I mean, Maeve Brown is on that trip, and Piper Weir and George and Kate and Stew,” Atty rattled off. “What about the other chaperones? Jesus!” She rotated the small stud earring on one of her earlobes the way she’d been taught to do in the months that followed getting her ears pierced—when she was eight years old. Esme wondered if she was regressing before her eyes. “Do you know how big this is?” she said to her mother, wide-eyed, cradling her iPhone.
Her daughter had no idea how big this would be—personally. “This isn’t a public phenomenon, Atty. It’s a private matter.”
“What world do you live in? Everything here is public. We aren’t an actual family. We live on campus and represent an actual family so the boarding students can see how they function on a daily basis. We’re like those American towns set up in Russia so Russian kids can grow up to learn to be American spies.”
“No, we’re one big family,” Todd said, but he seemed shaken by the comment, like Atty had just laid something bare. “We’re a real community. We care for one another.”
“Sure. Right,” Atty said. “This is about to blow up.” She wanted to add that this would blow up atomically, and they would end up like the statues of human char she’d read about in oral histories of the bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki assigned by Little-Head Todd.
Esme turned back to the window. She tapped her fingernails against the glass, hoping to remind her body that she wasn’t armless. She wanted to run away. Ru had run away from home when she was a teenager for a total of twenty-one days. For three full days, none of them had noticed, not even Jessamine who assumed that Augusta knew what was what. Ru was so upset by that fact that she refused to tell any of them where she’d gone or what she’d done.
Atty was right. This was about to blow up. What kind of home, if any, would be left after the detonation?
Todd sighed. He knew Atty was right too. “I’ve been in situations like this—well, not quite this exotic—but yes, like this, and it’s not pretty, the deterioration is bad…people take sides—and when one partner is absent, sometimes it’s easier to blame the one who’s here. And some of the students come from divorce themselves. They act out various hostilities. It’s not pretty.”
“It’s not pretty,” Esme repeated.
“It’s actually a time bomb,” the headmaster said. “I mean, Atty’s right. That’s the metaphor I use.”
“A ticking time bomb.” Esme looked at the trees, the pumpkin-lined street. Atty’s bike and helmet were in the yard and she’d told her a million times to put them in the shed. When would she see Doug again?
Would they be divorcing via Skype—all disjointed, their voices not quite synced to the movement of their mouths? Would she divorce her husband of seventeen years like a badly dubbed Asian monster movie?
And then Esme spun around. She finally heard what Todd was trying to tell her. “Oh, we should leave. Move. You want us to move.”
“No, no, no,” Todd said. He leaned back, propped one ankle on one knee, and tapped his duck boot. “We have a contract as well. Your husband’s in breach. We’ll deal with that. But you can stay—through the end of the year.”
Doug had been the real hire. She’d been placed in the library as an unnecessary assistant. She was expendable. She hated Big-Head Todd right now. It was strange how she should be furious at her husband for running off with a French female dentist, but maybe being angry at Todd was helping her at least locate her anger.
She heard clicking. She turned and looked at Atty, who was texting madly. “Are you tweeting this?”
“Shiz is going down,” Atty explained.
“Are you on the record with that? Your father’s having an affair and you’re writing Shiz is going down? That’s how you’re going to tell this story one day. And then I tweeted all my followers that shiz was going down?”
It hadn’t dawned on Atty that this was a story she’d be telling for the rest of her life. She was telling it now. “I’m live-tweeting commentary.”
Todd sighed and stood up. He took Esme by the arm. “You’ve got to get a handle on her, Esme. You don’t want this to be a soap opera with a Greek chorus. I know these kids. Their Greek chorus work is dark.”
He walked to the door. It wasn’t their door. It belonged to the school. The house was appointed to them by the headmaster. Everything was a gift, even Atty’s education. It was part of their benefits package. She thought she’d only leave at retirement. But now she saw they were just passing through.
Todd opened the front door, popped open an umbrella decorated with the school’s crest, and looked at the groundskeeper, in a bright-green slicker also emblazoned with the school’s crest, who’d been waiting for him in a truck parked in front of the house. “We’ve really got to get this under control,” he said. “This is going to be one hell of a storm.”
For a second, she wasn’t sure if he was talking about the collapse of her marriage or Hurricane Sandy. She quickly realized that now outside he was talking about the literal storm.
“You can’t control a storm,” she said frankly. She thought of her sisters. She missed them deeply. She hadn’t had a real conversation with either of them in years. “Some people think they can. It’s not possible.”
He looked at her, cocked his head, as if he weren’t sure if she was speaking of the collapse of her marriage or the literal storm, but he didn’t ask. He turned and walked out onto the wet lawn.
Esme thought about her mother and she didn’t want to tell her about Doug’s disappearance. Her mother hadn’t ever been sure that Doug was the right one for her. Plus, her mother didn’t seem to care for the institution of marriage, and Esme feared a too-soon I-told-you-so.
Atty watched at the window, blurred by rain. She wondered where her father was this very moment. She imagined hastily packed foreign valises, and all the bitchy snots on the trip gossiping about her father. She hoped the dentist was pretty. If she wasn’t, it would be really embarrassing. Atty briefly wished the dentist had been a man. It would be really awful to make fun of a girl whose father was suddenly gay. I mean, she’d be further protected by political correctness, and she’d get to become an activist with a personal stake in it all. The LGBTQ kids would welcome her in, and she’d finally have something to write about for her college entrance essay.
Atty felt a surgical sting in her chest, and it was as if the attachment she had to her father were something physical. She could feel sutures being tugged.
No, she told the stinging. Don’t.
The stinging seemed to answer her, It’s not just your dad you’re losing. You’re getting kicked out too. You’ll lose everyone except your mother and the dog.
Ingmar stood beside Atty at the window. He could have been a fur model. He used to look like the collie version of Fabio, and now he was just a crew cut. She tweeted this quickly and then thought, This is my last year. And alongside the pain, she felt a twinge of freedom. She decided to lean away from the pain and into the freedom.
Atty ran to the front door, past her mother under the eave, out into the driving rain, and waved to the headmaster who was sitting in the passenger’s seat of the truck’s cab. “Thank you, Big-Head Todd! Thanks so much for the four-one-one! Talk to you soon! Good luck in the storm!”
Her mother didn’t flinch. Atty had done it. She’d called the headmaster Big-Head Todd to his face.
Esme couldn’t tell if he’d heard her. The windshield wipers beating across the glass, the blur and noise of the rain, his brow knitted, he gave a small salute.
The truck barreled out of the driveway and on down the road, leaving Atty standing in the yard, Esme behind her, the rain ticking all around them like thousands of time bombs.