Nobody made a sound, and Karen continued: “Then one day I lifted a watch. I was standing at the counter looking at jewelry, and when the clerk looked away for a moment, I just slipped the watch in my purse. I moved slowly away, from counter to counter, and finally stepped out the door. I was real surprised when a man took me by the arm and said, ‘Security officer, Miss. I’ll have to ask you to come to the office, please.’ Part of me was saying, ‘This can’t be happening,’ and the other part was saying to the man, ‘What took you so long?’”
Karen went on to tell about the shoplifting charges on her record, and how she was fired from her part-time job when her boss found out about it.
“Excellent job!” said Mr. Everett. “You covered all bases, Karen. That’s what I want to see, class, a lot of ‘what ifs.’ These can help you imagine the future.”
We talked some more about what charges on your record could mean, and then Mr. Everett turned to Jill, just as the session was ending: “Jill, how is your assignment coming? Haven’t heard from you for a while.”
“It’s not,” Jill said sullenly.
“Why is that?”
“I told you, Mr. Everett. It stinks! It’s so boring!”
The smile on Mr. Everett’s face disappeared. Usually he’s genial and soft spoken, but this time all the humor was gone.
“Your assignment is due next week,” he said. “And I expect you to have it done. As I explained before, we don’t always get a choice as to things that happen to us, but we can choose what we do about them.”
“I want another assignment,” Jill said. “I’ll do anything but this one.”
“It’s the only assignment you’ll get,” Mr. Everett said, “and I expect it on my desk a week from today.”
Most of the girls had stopped hanging around Mr. Everett as much as they had the first weeks of school, because it was obvious he had a lot more between the ears than his Robert Redford looks, not to mention the wedding band on his finger.
The incident with Jill only made Elizabeth like him more. He was strong, he was fair, he was gentle, he was firm, and he was hers—her teacher, anyway. I even began to wonder if you could love a person with your eyes alone. Elizabeth certainly made it seem easy.
9
INTO THE LION’S DEN
Patrick and I shopped for furniture after school. We chose the cheapest store we could find. We were learning.
It felt really, really weird to be walking through a department store talking about mattresses and stuff.
“King-sized, definitely,” said Patrick. “My folks have a king-sized bed. When I was little, I used to crawl in with them in the mornings and they didn’t even know I was there.”
I tried to imagine Patrick in his pajamas at age three.
“What are you smiling about?” he asked me, and flicked my arm.
“You in your jammies,” I said. “I’ll bet they were Bambi jammies, with little pictures of Bambi all over them.”
“Nope,” he said. “Pirates. Though I did have one pair of Winnie the Pooh.” We laughed.
“What kind of furniture do you like, Patrick?”
“Chrome and glass. Heavy looking. Modern. What about you?
“The only thing I ever really wanted was a four-poster bed.”
“Oh, no! Not that! I’d always be banging my feet on the end board.”
“Well, you choose the bed then. But I want a big dining room table. I like to think of my dining room after I’m married as full of people, all laughing and talking.”
Patrick glanced over at me. “Kids?”
“Well, some of them, maybe. Relatives, I guess.”
We were sauntering along, eating a sack of bridge mix that Patrick had bought, and he had one arm around me. I began to wonder if Mr. Everett knew what he was doing when he assigned us to be married. Then I remembered he had handpicked the assignments for the class after he’d known us for a week, and he’d probably figured that Patrick and I could handle it. It felt good to think that the teacher trusted us.
“How many children do you want?” I heard Patrick saying.
“We have to decide that, too? Right now?”
“No, I’m just curious.”
I thought about it. “How about two boys and two girls?” “Could end up with four girls or four boys, you know.” “That wouldn’t be so awful.”
“I’d say no more than two. You really shouldn’t, you know, because of the population explosion.”
“Four is an explosion?”
“Figure it out. Start with the two of us: We have four kids, each of them has four kids, each of them has four kids. If we lived long enough to see our great-grandchildren, we would have produced sixty-four people in just our lifetime.”
“So?”
“So if everybody had four kids, where would you get the water for all those people? And food and oil? And what do you do with all the stuff they throw away?”
We were definitely going for an A+ on our report. Patrick had thought of everything.
We stopped to look at a bedroom set. “How much do we have left to spend on furniture?” I asked.
Patrick looked at our figures on the assignment sheet.
“Five hundred dollars,” he said. “That’s it.”
I sucked in my breath.
It was hard to explain to the salesman about the assignment. First of all, he didn’t believe us. I think he thought we were really getting married and trying to pretend we weren’t.
“I don’t know,” Patrick said as he looked over the bedroom sets. “That mattress looks pretty flimsy to me.”
“Try it!” the salesman said. “The only way to try a mattress is to lie down on it.”
So Patrick stretched out on the bed.
“You’ve got to sleep there, too, little lady, so you’d better try it, too,” the salesman said, winking at Patrick.
“Come on,” said Patrick.
People were starting to look our way, and I knew Patrick would just keep coaxing me, so I lay down on the mattress, too, about three feet away from Patrick. Would we be doing this someday for real? I wondered. Lying down on a mattress in a furniture store while people looked at us and smiled? I stayed about three seconds and got up.
“It’s okay,” I said. The cheapest mattress and box springs we could find was $267. That left $233 for everything else.
We looked at couches, but the one Patrick liked was $1,250. So for our $500 we ended up with a double-bed mattress and springs, a dinette table and four chairs, and a small chest of drawers. That was it. The salesman must have felt sorry for us because he said he’d throw in a bed frame and a lamp. I think he was really surprised when we thanked him but turned it down.
“You know,” Patrick said as we headed home, “if we had to start out with the kind of wedding we’ve planned, a budget honeymoon to Niagara Falls, and furniture like this, I’d feel dirt-poor.”
“We are dirt-poor, Patrick! I’ve got about thirty dollars to my name. What do you have?”
“Well, more than that.”
We finished the bridge mix.
I could see exactly what Mr. Everett was getting at in his assignments. It wasn’t just the money involved, it was setting priorities, figuring out what was really important and what wasn’t.
“Dad, before you and Mom married, did you save money to buy furniture?”
“We married on a shoestring,” he told me. “On absolutely nothing. I was still in graduate school and all I had was two hundred dollars in the bank. That was it. Your mom got a job at three dollars an hour, and we waited until we had saved two months’ rent. Then we married.”
“What did you do for a wedding?”
“I think we gave both the organist and the preacher a twenty-dollar bill. Your mom did buy a dress, though. That was important to her.”
“What about flowers?”
“Your aunt Sally got them from the neighbors.”
“Cake?”
“Your grandmother baked it.”
>
“Photographer?”
“One of your uncles. Just snapshots, that’s all.”
“Furniture?”
“We spent a hundred dollars at a second-hand store.”
I realized then that Patrick and I no more understood “dirt-poor” than we understood atomic physics. Mr. Everett knew his stuff.
That may have been true, but when I got to school on Thursday, Mr. Everett, wasn’t there. We had a substitute teacher named Miss Larson, who said she would probably be finishing out the unit with us.
“Why?” asked Mark Stedmeister. “Is Mr. Everett sick?”
“No, he’s not sick,” said Miss Larson.
“Did something happen in his family?” asked Pamela.
“Class, all I’m told when they call me is that I’m filling in for a teacher, so you’ll have to direct your questions elsewhere. Now …” She had the lesson plan book in front of her. “I see that four of you have completed your, uh, rather unusual assignments, and the rest of you have a way to go. Alice and Patrick, how are you coming with yours?”
We gave our report on buying furniture.
When the bell rang, everyone was talking about Mr. Everett. Elizabeth seemed devastated.
“What do you suppose happened?” she kept saying anxiously.
“Maybe there was an emergency in his family and he’ll be back in a few weeks,” I suggested.
“I bet he won’t,” said Jill.
There was something about the way she said it.
“Why?” I asked.
“Not after what he did to me.”
Pamela, Elizabeth, Karen, and I all stopped in the hallway.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“You think he’s such a great teacher and all, but actually, he’s a lech.”
“He isn’t!” said Elizabeth.
“Ha! You don’t know him like I know him,” said Jill, and started on down the hall, but we charged after her.
“What do you mean? Did you report him or something?” asked Pamela.
Jill pressed her lips together.
“Did you?” Karen probed. “Come on, Jill, if he did something, we ought to know about it.”
“I felt I had to report it,” said Jill. “I didn’t ask for him to be suspended or anything. I figured he’d just get a warning.”
“He’s suspended?” Elizabeth looked sick.
“What did he do?” Pamela insisted.
“If you promise not to tell anyone,” Jill said secretively.
“Jill, the whole school’s going to hear about it if he’s suspended. Tell us,” said Karen.
“Well, I went up to his desk after class to ask him a question,” Jill’s eyes looked straight ahead, “and he … started talking about my body.”
We were all staring. “You just asked him a question and he mentioned your body?” I said. “What was the question?”
“About our assignments, what else? I can’t remember his exact words, but it was something like, ‘You have the body of a woman and should start thinking about what women do,’ or something. And then he put his arm around me.”
We were all stunned. I heard Elizabeth swallow. “What did he mean, ‘start thinking about what women do’?” she asked.
“Oh, Elizabeth, grow up,” said Pamela. “What do you suppose he meant? What did you do, Jill?”
“I left the room, what else? Do you think I was going to stand there and let him paw me?”
“He seemed so nice,” I said.
“I thought so, too,” said Jill.
Elizabeth went into the rest room and cried.
I couldn’t get it out of my mind. All during study hall, I tried to imagine Mr. Everett saying that to Jill, and suddenly I actually remembered it. I was there! I heard!
I sat with my hand over my mouth, trying to play the conversation back in my head. I had been at the reference table in the back of the room, and Jill had gone up to Mr. Everett to complain for the umpteenth time about having to bury her grandmother.
Look at me! Isn’t that what she had said? And she’d motioned toward her breasts. Something about looking older than she really was and how this was going to … cause her a lot more problems than burying her grandmother.
What did he say? My head swam. If you’ve got the body of a woman … Yes, he did say that.
I didn’t see Jill at lunch and kept my thoughts to myself, but in gym that afternoon I confronted her in the locker room.
“Jill, I was there in the room the day you say Mr. Everett made a pass at you. It wasn’t like you said it was.”
“It was!”
“You’re changing it all around, and you know it.”
“I am not! I know what I heard, Alice. But I wouldn’t have told anyone if I’d known he was going to be suspended.”
“Well, I know what I heard, too. And you shouldn’t have said anything at all, because nothing happened. You’ve got to go to Mr. Ormand and tell him.”
“Are you crazy? It was hard enough going to him in the first place.”
“Jill, you have to! How could you do this to Mr. Everett? Everyone loved him!”
“I don’t have to do a thing. I simply reported what happened, and the rest is up to Mr. Ormand.”
I missed my bus after school. I didn’t tell anyone where I was going or what I was going to do. I went right to the office and asked to talk to Mr. Ormand.
“I’m not sure he’s in,” said the secretary. “Let me check.”
“It’s really important,” I told her.
She disappeared down the little hallway where all the offices were, and suddenly she was back with Mr. Sorringer.
“Mr. Ormand has a principals’ meeting this afternoon,” he said. “Is there anything I can do?”
I didn’t want to talk to Mr. Sorringer. I didn’t want to see him, hear him, or even be in his presence.
“Will Mr. Ormand be here tomorrow?” I asked.
“Yes, but he has conferences all day,” the secretary told me.
I imagined Mr. Everett at home, not knowing whether he was going to keep his job. Imagined a committee being formed that would hear his case and decide who was telling the truth, he or Jill. I took a deep breath and followed Mr. Sorringer back to his office.
I didn’t know if he remembered me as the girl who stared straight through him in the halls, the girl who never said “Hi.” He held open the door for me, then closed it after I came in. There were two chairs, so I took one and he sat down at his desk.
“I’m sure I should know your name, but—” he began.
“Alice,” I said.
He lifted his eyebrows slightly, as though to say, “Alice who?” but I didn’t give him a chance.
“It’s about Mr. Everett,” I said.
This time he seemed to freeze. I suppose he was thinking, Oh, no, not another one.
“I hear he was suspended,” I said.
This time Mr. Sorringer folded his hands on his desk blotter and put on his professional face. “Well, I see the rumor mill is alive and functioning,” he said, smiling slightly.
Why did I hate this man so? Because I imagined his arm around Sylvia Summers. Imagined his lips pressed against hers, or his fingers caressing her back. He was like a robber to me, come from California to take her away from Dad, and I just couldn’t stand the thought of his having her.
I tried to focus on why I was there.
“Well, I think I know why he was suspended, if he was. A girl in our class told us she reported him, and she told us why. I realized I was in the room when all this was supposed to have taken place, and it wasn’t like she said at all.”
Now Mr. Sorringer was really interested.
I explained about our unit on Critical Choices, and how upset Jill was because she didn’t get one of the “fun assignments,” as she called them.
“Can you tell me where Mr. Everett was when Jill was talking to him?” Mr. Sorringer asked.
“He was standing behind his desk,
gathering up papers. Jill was standing next to him, maybe two feet away, facing him.”
“Go on.”
“She said, ‘Look at me!’ And she sort of motioned toward her … her chest. She said she looked older than her age, and that she was going to be faced with a lot more problems than burying her grandmother.”
Mr. Sorringer looked confused. “Burying her grandmother?”
“That was her assignment. To find out all she could about burials.”
“Okay.”
“And Mr. Everett said, ‘Well, if you’ve got the body of a woman, then you have to start thinking like a woman, and facing the kinds of problems’—no, maybe he said, ‘making the kinds of decisions … that women have to make.’ Something like that.”
Mr. Sorringer nodded quietly, a little frown on his face, his hands folded under his chin now.
“Would you … would you say he said this in any kind of a suggestive way … as though he were implying more?”
“No!” I said it so loudly I even surprised myself. “She was the one who … who brought the idea of her body into it, not him.”
“All right. Then what?”
I tried to remember. “I guess that’s when he hugged her.”
“Then he did touch her?”
“Mr. Sorringer, it was just a quick hug. He’d turned to leave and she was still standing there pouting. So as he passed her, he gave her a quick hug, just an arm around her shoulder—he had papers in his other hand. And he said something like, ‘Come on, now, Jill, you can do it,’ and left the room.”
“He left the room before she did?”
“Yes. It was a one-second, one-armed hug and he was out of there.”
“I see.” Mr. Sorringer kept bumping his chin against his hands, thinking. “I know these details seem silly to you, Alice, but were their bodies touching? Were they face-to-face when he put his arm around her?”
“They were armpit to shoulder, his armpit, her shoulder. You could hardly call it a hug. It was just a gesture to show her he had confidence that she could do the assignment. I saw the whole thing, and at the time it didn’t even occur to me that she could read anything into it.”
“Then why do you suppose she did?”