Friday morning, Brooke Amari shuffled into Henry Stirling’s sophomore English class wearing jeans so low-waisted that a spray of wild pubic hair curled over her sparkling, sequined belt. It was dark hair, unlike the hair on her head, which was the color of hay and pulled into a tight, shellacked bun.
Seven months previously, when Henry had called her name from the roster for the first time, and she had giggled instead of saying anything, he pegged her as just another of the many sad, dumb girls he’d seen pass through Mineola High over the last ten years. She had surpassed his initial assessment before Thanksgiving, twice sent home for wearing a t-shirt cut just below her pert nipples that read, “Got Milk?” In a few years, he’d undoubtedly see her on the Long Island Railroad, half-heartedly marshaling her dirty-faced bastard kids, each eating something sticky and insalubrious, smearing the seats with their germs.
Henry didn’t say anything about her pubic hair. He didn’t want the class to get riled up that early in the morning, and he didn’t want to deal with the inane paperwork involved in writing a disciplinary referral report — or admit that he had noticed.
Then Jason Nguyen raised his hand in the middle of a vaguely fruitful discussion of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to say, “Brooke’s bush is hanging out the top of her pants.”
“Damn,” Henry muttered.
The class laughed, rubbernecked in unison to get a look at Brooke, who stood up from her desk, perhaps to save her classmates the trouble of having to stand themselves. “What?” she said in her baby voice, her fingers in her mouth like they often were. Chips of blood-red nail polish flecked her teeth and lips.
“Your pussy hair is sticking out,” Mario Cruz said. “It’s fucking disgusting.”
“What?” she protested feebly, her fingers resting on her tongue.
“Brooke,” Henry said, “please go to the restroom and take care of the problem.”
“Bring some garden shears, Sasquatch,” Mario said.
Henry fought a smile, and said, “Mario, would you like a disciplinary referral?”
“I know Sasquatch is Big Foot and I know my feet are small,” Brooke said, as she sauntered out. “Size three!” she yelled from the hallway. Henry had noticed her tiny feet before. When she wore sandals — often when soiled patches of snow still lined the streets — her grubby toes looked like newborn mice, pink and huddled for warmth.
Brooke didn’t return to class, and Henry didn’t care.
Later that day, Henry sat alone in the teachers’ lounge, and read an HIV-prevention pamphlet entitled To Suck or Not to Suck? He laughed when he realized the title could be interpreted both literally and figuratively. Its intended audience was young gay men, and it featured a photograph of a sheepish looking Latino kid with four things floating over his head: a lollipop, a slice of pizza, a martini and a disembodied erect penis. Only You Can Decide What You Put in Your Mouth. In public school. Henry’s hard-earned tax dollars had paid for the pamphlet.
Today, Henry clearly sucked, he knew, and he didn’t fight it. When he had first started teaching, in the Bronx, fresh out of college and bursting with Teach-for-America ideals, he had never sucked. Not the day he was mugged a block from the school, not the day only three students out of twenty-seven bothered to show up for his sixth-period class, not the day he saw Jessica Jenkins, his favorite senior, on the news, handcuffed and under arrest for stabbing her sister. He would have stayed in the Bronx, too, if his wife hadn’t insisted he move on after his Teach for America gig had expired. Mineola was okay, a town where the city and suburbia overlapped, not as cushy as he had imagined Long Island to be. And for a few years at Mineola, he had actually been an enthusiastic, thoughtful teacher. “Not anymore,” he said aloud to no one, as he changed the channels on the television with a set of pliers tethered to the stand by a length of orange yarn. He squandered the rest of his free period on an old sitcom, ignoring a stack of ungraded quizzes until the lunch bell rang.
In the cafeteria, Henry was cornered by Phoebe Thompson, a woman who taught several sections of a class called “Your Life,” which, as far as Henry could discern, was nothing more than a bunch of teenagers sitting on lumpy pillows, talking about sex and crying about their parents. Phoebe was a bloated, mustachioed woman with only one leg, the other lost in a motorcycle accident. She hugged a lot, pressing the kids’ faces into her bosom, which Henry found surprisingly small given her heft. Among teachers, Phoebe often spoke of sexual conquests, most initiated at a midtown Brazilian disco. Years ago, when Henry had first started at Mineola High, Phoebe convinced him and his wife Ada to join her at the poorly ventilated club. The people dancing there didn’t look Brazilian; they looked like engineering graduate students — outdated eyeglasses and ugly sweaters. The drinks were sugary, and after a few minutes, Ada insisted they leave so she could breathe again. On their way, Henry had told Ada, “Never again. I promise.”
Now Phoebe sat down next to Henry and began speaking in her therapy voice — calm and deliberate, with very little inflection. “Henry, I need you to tell me if you were aware that Brooke Amari was not in your class second period.”
“That’s a confusing question,” Henry said. He bit into a tater tot. “Or is it a command?”
“We were making self collages today, and somehow Brooke managed to be in my classroom. I caught her and Jesus Stamos with their hands in each other’s pants behind the beanbag chairs.”
“Did you give her a blowjob pamphlet?” Henry said. “There’s a box of them in the teachers’ lounge. Only you can decide what you put in your mouth, you know.”
Phoebe sighed, like she was writing an ‘F’ on a quiz Henry had just failed. “How’s Ada?” she asked him.
“Great,” he lied, not wanting to detail the latest in his wife’s bout with cancer. She was losing the fight, according to her oncologist, Dr. Hair, whose name’s irony was not lost on Henry, especially after Ada’s curls began to fall out in clumps and she took to wearing Henry’s old ball caps. The cancer had bloomed from her right breast to her spine and infiltrated bones all over her body in tumors shaped like popcorn.
“I’ll make sure Brooke doesn’t escape from now on,” Henry said.
“Thanks,” Phoebe said, grinning. She stood in her lopsided way, and added, “Students’ sexuality is on the list of topics for tomorrow.”
Twice a year, the faculty was required to attend a day of insipid seminars and team-building exercises. Henry dreaded it with the same fervency that Phoebe seemed to anticipate it. In the fall, Henry had endured a two-hour workshop about child-parent relationships overseen by Phoebe herself. Phoebe had asked the faculty to break into groups of three and role-play as parents and teenagers. Henry’s group consisted of only men, so Henry and another man pretended to be gay fathers, while the third acted like a teenager upset with his curfew. “When you start dating cuter boys, we’ll let you stay out as late as you want,” Henry had lisped during his group’s presentation. “As long as you bring them home to meet your daddies.” He licked his chops. At that point, Phoebe quickly tottered over to their table and asked Henry to leave. A note, an official reprimand from Dr. Bridges, the principal, was in Henry’s box on Monday morning, along with a workbook called “Tolerance in the Workplace.”
Part Two
Henry saw Ada through the opened window as she danced to “Come on Eileen” in the brightly lit living room. She moved her arms up and down to the beat and twirled in a way that made Henry nervous that she might topple from the second story of their brownstone. She was stoned, he knew. He wished he were.
Henry had begun buying marijuana for her back in September before she started her third round of chemotherapy. Henry only had to make a phone call and wait an hour for the guy, a good-natured college student, to show up. The dealer’s hair was clipped short, and he sported preppy country club clothes, colors and fabrics Henry had worn in the ’80s, like the ones Henry’s father still wore.
Ada was now a full-on stoner who owned a bong and several ceramic pipes, one of which rested on top of a magazine, leaking a tiny twist of smoke as Henry walked into the living room. Before he greeted her, he hurried over to the tall windows and pulled them shut. He turned down the stereo, and grabbed the pipe.
“May I have some?” he asked her, unwinding his scarf with his free hand. “You mind if I just finish out the bowl?”
She smiled warmly, walked over and hugged him. “Your neck is sweaty,” she said. “Is it hot out?” It was March, still quite cold. It had snowed a little in the afternoon.
When Ada stepped back from the embrace, Henry saw for a moment the old Ada work her way through her prolapsed, ashen face. Her lopsided smile. Easy to read as sheepish from the first time he saw it. He recalled one instant, when they had just begun to date in college. He was returning from hours sequestered at a library carrel, where he had pumped out a paper on Locke and Hume, a paper he had thought at the time was groundbreaking. She had been waiting outside his dorm, talking with a few friends, and he walked right by her, lost in the smug satisfaction that he was a sophomore living an important scholarly life, not just another privileged kid from Boston who had gone to Choate. She threw a pen at him, and it nailed him in the temple. When he turned to see who had nearly blinded him, there was Ada’s guilty half-smile hooking up the left side of her face, dark curls hiding her eyes. “Ouch,” he had said.
“Try noticing me next time,” she said, “and you won’t get a pen in the face.” She stood in front of him with her arms folded across her chest. “You’re taking me to Indian food in North Adams tonight,” she said. “And I’m staying over. We might have sex. I don’t have to be back at Bennington until tomorrow afternoon.”
“Bennington?” he said.
“I don’t go to Williams,” she said. “I thought you knew that.”
“I didn’t,” Henry said. He was surprised, but it made sense. She liked punk rock and often spoke of revolutionary modern dancers and video artists.
He had first met Ada at a small deli in Williamstown. He was interested to see a barefoot woman in a flowing hippie skirt order a pastrami sandwich with “double meat.” She had smiled at him and said, “I’m a vegetarian except for pastrami, veal and suckling pig.”
He didn’t get it.
“It’s a joke,” she said. “It’s a joke about those people who say they’re vegetarians except for chicken and fish. I mean, I’m not a vegetarian, but if I were one, I’d be a real one and not eat chicken and fish.”
Now he dropped his bag on the sofa and asked, “Just a few hits?” He kicked off his shoes and asked again: “Please? I need to relax. I have to go to that bullshit retreat tomorrow.”
“There’s not that much left,” she said. “And I didn’t walk over to the bodega today, so we don’t really have any food. I’m sorry.” She turned up the stereo and resumed her dance, this time to “Our House.” He should have never bought the ’80s CD at the stoop sale. He was enabling her weirdness and he was sick of all eleven songs. He had known she wouldn’t part with any marijuana — she rarely did — and it was difficult to justify complaining, even to himself. He’d smoke some later, after she fell asleep in front of the television, which was her habit these days.
* * *
Henry’s pot-scorched throat was sore the next morning as he walked along 254th Street. It had taken him over an hour by subway to reach the Riverdale stop and hike up to Wave Hill, the Bronx mansion where the teachers’ retreat was to be held. The subway ride was much better than taking a shuttle from the high school in Mineola. He knew that an hour and a half stuck in a van with any number of bland faculty members with halitosis was more than he could abide.
Wave Hill was pleasant enough, though. It was built in the nineteenth century and modeled after English country homes, with large meeting rooms that overlooked expansive gardens and offered views of the Hudson and the Palisades. Even on this cold, gray morning, with most of the trees black and naked, and the river a deathly brown, he found it beautiful, nearly resigned himself to the fact that Phoebe Thompson had chosen the location well.
Henry chewed through a dry cake donut and sipped metallic tasting coffee as Phoebe began her welcoming process. She spoke through a wireless headset like an employee at a fast food restaurant. The elaborate microphone was just another way for Phoebe to feel powerful and important, he thought. She wore her black blouse unbuttoned low enough to showcase her meager cleavage, and jeans so tight that Henry could see where her prosthetic leg joined the stump above her right knee. Phoebe dramatically set a placard on an easel, and stepped back to reveal the title of the day’s retreat: Loving to Learn and Learning to Love. Henry mumbled, “Give me a fucking break,” loudly enough that a woman seated in front of him turned around and raised her lip in disgust.
Soon Henry was sitting at a wooden table with three other faculty members he barely recognized, drawing a tree on a large sheet of butcher paper with pungent marking pens. The teachers were supposed to write adjectives to describe their students on each of the tree’s branches.
Billy, a short man with uneven bangs and boyish dimples said, “How about ‘books’?’”
“And ‘backpacks,’” Lynn Daubs offered. Henry had never spoken to Lynn Daubs, but he used to teach after her in room G-3. He’d often find the chalkboard covered in barely legible notes, scrawls that curved upward at the end of sentences. But he was unsure of what she taught. For a while, he was convinced it was civics, then biology, but towards the end of the year, there were notes about circuits, and a recipe for onion dip.
“Neither ‘books’ nor ‘backpacks’ is an adjective,” Henry said. His mind raced with adjectives that applied to his students: lazy, bored, boring, uninspired, delinquent, ugly, flatulent, stupid, retarded, ignorant, slutty, pregnant…
“Adjectives?” Lynn Daubs said. “I didn’t know we were supposed to come up with adjectives.”
“How about ‘cell phones?’” Billy asked. “All my students have cell phones.”
Part Three
During the lunch break, Henry walked through the misty, winter-ravaged gardens, his worn wingtips darkening in the wet grass. He felt he should call Ada, but he was sure nothing had changed since this morning. She had woken him with her moans of pain. Ada’s medications brought on killer headaches that she described as “beyond belief, beyond the limits of human comprehension.” If today’s headache were anything like Wednesday’s, it wouldn’t subside until this evening, leaving Ada too exhausted for anything other than sleep.
Henry drew a deep breath of cold, moist air, thought maybe it would push any remaining marijuana from his lungs, leave them pink and clean.
A break in the bare shrubbery at the eastern edge of the garden allowed him to peer over a paling fence at the Hudson. He barely glimpsed the river, though. Instead, he saw Phoebe and Billy, the man who didn’t know what an adjective was, going at it against a tree. Phoebe’s shirt was unbuttoned, her black bra hanging next to her purple overcoat on a low branch. Her tiny nipples pointed downward, and her pants were bunched just above her stump. Billy pumped away, his white ass cheeks jiggling with each thrust. Henry watched for an instant and processed the scene that lay before him. He didn’t know whether it was funny, disgusting, or reprehensible. He decided it was okay. Phoebe was getting some. Good for her. Maybe now she’d stop hugging the students so much.
Just as Henry was about to turn and quietly walk away, Phoebe looked over at him and their eyes met. “Shit,” Henry whispered, quickly stepping back, tripping on a sprinkler head, landing ass-first on the wet ground. Phoebe’s facial expression was like a doe’s that Henry had once stumbled upon while hiking in the Berkshires. The deer had been shitting, crouched and balancing on its delicate, skinny legs. Its face conveyed utter shame and defeat, which Henry initially found funny, but later thought was pitiful.
Before the afternoon session started, Phoebe cornered Henry by the drinking fountain.
“I didn’t see anything,” he immediately said.
“Pervert,” she whispered loudly.
“Excuse me,” Henry said. “I wasn’t the one fucking Billy in the woods.”
“Is that how you get off? By spying on people?” She pushed her hair from her face, held it back with one hand. Henry noticed her mustache had been bleached, now only barely visible.
“I was hoping to get a look at the river,” Henry said.
“Give me a break.”
“Don’t flatter yourself into believing that I’d have any interest in watching Billy pork you,” Henry said.
“I don’t know what to say,” Phoebe said. “You seem more immature every time I talk to you.”
“You seem more cuntish every time I talk to you,” he said, immediately wishing he hadn’t. From where did he conjure the word ‘cuntish’ anyway?
Phoebe’s face fell, and as she glared at Henry, her eyes pooled with tears. She hobbled away.
He imagined the conversation he’d have with the principal, Dr. Bridges, on Monday. “But she called me immature, she called me a pervert…” Would Phoebe be so stupid as to file a complaint with Dr. Bridges? She’d have to tell the whole story, what she and Billy had been doing. She’d argue that she had every right to engage in sexual activities during lunch break. Yes, they were fucking on public property, but it’s not as if they were exhibitionists. They were behind a fence, in the woods, hundreds of yards from the Wave Hill mansion. She is a woman, a sexual being, after all. He imagined her playing the stump card: “I didn’t lose my sexuality when I lost my leg.”
Part Four
As he waited for the subway, Henry figured the worst thing that could happen was that he’d get fired for calling Phoebe cuntish. Big deal. He and Ada had bought their brownstone in 1994, long before the sushi restaurant opened and hordes of urban homesteaders moved into the neighborhood. Henry had spent nearly all of his trust fund on the house — much to his father’s dismay. “You and Eva are stupid, buying that dumpy house in the ghetto slums,” his grouchy father had yelled through the phone from Connecticut. “Her name’s Ada,” Henry had said. Henry could sell the brownstone today for three and a half times what he had paid for it. He planned on doing just that when Ada died. He’d not work, just live off the brownstone profit, maybe move to Connecticut for a year and help his loser sister get her life together while he mourned the loss of Ada.
Henry stopped at Barney’s on 18th Street before he went home, and he chose a sixty-five dollar jar of hand cream mixed by nuns in Italy. He then asked the clerk, a young man with swooped-up hair, shaped eyebrows, and a ratty T-shirt that read, DIRTY BOY, for a lip balm recommendation. The clerk rolled his eyes and languidly pointed his bejeweled finger to a display. Henry grabbed a tube and walked to the cash register clear across the store next to a wall of folded jeans.
“Did anyone help you with your selection?” the cashier asked.
“Someone actually hindered my selection,” Henry said.
At home, he found Ada asleep on the sofa. Spilled blueberry smoothie bloomed across coffee table, soaking into a stack of furniture catalogs. He cleaned the sticky mess, tossing the catalogs and blotting the rug under the coffee table with wads of wet paper towel. Then he kneeled next to Ada, and rubbed the hand cream on her dry, cracked hands, working the spaces between her knuckles, missing no spot. He applied the lip balm next, feeling her warm, faint breaths on his fingers as he did. Her lips instantly looked healthy again, but when he went to kiss her, he smelled her mouth: like something inside was rotting. He kissed her lightly on the cheek and covered her with an afghan.
Monday morning, Henry was a few minutes late to school, so he was forced to push his way through the throngs of students who gathered on the sidewalks in front. He held his coffee above his head like a torch to avoid spilling it. Nearly every student wore a black parka, and they huddled like crows pecking at carrion, refusing to yield to Henry, who was eager to see if there was a note from Dr. Bridges in his box, an official reprimand for what he had said to Phoebe on the retreat.
But there was no note, only a list of the day’s announcements and a thick packet from his HMO.
Henry leaned against his desk and read the announcements to his homeroom students, none of whom listened. He didn’t care. If they didn’t know about the volleyball team’s loss, or when the next SAT was to be held, to hell with them. To hell with their menacing stares and glazed-over indifference. He stopped reading when Phoebe appeared at his door.
“May I talk to you, please, Mr. Stirling?” she said. A few students laughed for no reason Henry could discern.
“I’m reading the announcements,” Henry said. “My homeroom is dying to know about the new library fine system.”
“Just for a second,” she said. “Out here.”
He took a swig from his coffee, and said to his homeroom, “Stay in your seats.”
Phoebe sighed in a fortifying manner when Henry stepped into the deserted hall. “You hurt me,” she said. “You hurt me on Saturday.”
“I wasn’t spying,” Henry said. “I was hoping to get a look at the river.”
“That’s not the point,” she said, “and you know it.”
“I’m in the middle of reading the announcements.”
She sighed again, reached over her head to adjust her ponytail. “Where are the oral sex pamphlets?”
“’To Suck or not to Suck?’” he said. “They were in the teachers’ lounge.”
She stared at him. He noticed how her heavily beaded earrings tugged on her earlobes, stretched them a good inch. Her skin was flawless. So much fresher than Ada’s. Not a wrinkle, not a line, not a blemish, and a healthy pink glow. “They’re not there,” she said coldly, shifting her hips and leaning more on her good leg.
“And?” he said.
“And I thought you might know where they are,” she said. “You have a documented history of homophobia and you made that sarcastic remark about the pamphlets last week — that’s all.” She walked away, her uneven gait echoing in the hall.
Part Five
Mario Cruz began class by announcing that Ken Kesey was one of the first people to ever drop acid. “Did you ever take LSD?” he asked Henry.
“Of course not,” Henry said.
That was a lie. Henry had dropped acid once before, in college. By the end of his junior year, he was spending more time at Bennington than at Williams. He often drove the thirty minutes on twisted Route 7 to the Bennington campus, peeked into classrooms in the huge maze of an arts complex, played the poorly-tuned piano in the living room of the campus house where Ada lived, or hiked off into the rolling hills, forgetting his classes, the tests, the papers, the possibility of graduate school.
One warm afternoon in May, Henry was met by three guys who were carrying large puppets across the lawn in front of the dining hall. Henry knew one of them from Ada’s house: Stan, tall and thin, with blond dreadlocks and bellbottomed jeans.
“You missed it,” Stan said to Henry. “You missed the best fucking puppet show ever.” Stan carried a squirrel puppet that wore a nicely tailored three-piece suit. The puppet was almost as big as he was. The other guys carried old lady puppets with blue polka-dot dresses and eyeglasses made from bent coat hangers.
“Damn,” Henry said without a trace of sarcasm. He had spent his morning in two upper division philosophy classes back at Williams, madly scribbling notes, and wishing he were outside in the first bright sun of the spring.
Henry followed the guys back to Stan’s room, which was across the hall from Ada’s. Stan had painted the ceiling electric pink, the walls black. Henry stepped over a stack of books and cassette tapes so he could sit on an uncovered mattress. He breathed in scents of curry and wet wool. They carelessly piled the puppets in the corner.
Under the light from a desk lamp on the floor, Stan plucked at a small slip of paper with tweezers. “I only have eight left,” he said. “Who wants two?”
“Two what?” Henry asked.
“Hits,” Stan said.
Henry took only one: a tiny square of paper printed with a cartoon drawing of a bug-eyed duck. He placed it on his tongue and waited for it to work its magic. He had been a little hesitant until Stan convinced him it was mild acid, like being really stoned, not too trippy. Stan himself took three hits; the other guys took two each and retired to their house to watch schlock horror videos.
Henry and Stan walked across the dark campus to a pond, where they floated on a small white dinghy to the middle. The water was black and heavy. Thick. Henry reached over the edge of the boat and splashed it, felt it between his fingers. “It’s syrup,” Henry said. “How can anything live in here?”
“You’re tripping,” Stan said. “It’s normal pond water. Full of frogs and newts and turtles.”
Henry rolled off the boat, and sunk to the mucky bottom a few feet below. Dark and ice-cold, but essentially beautiful. He grabbed globs of weedy mud and stood in the waist-high water, pressing the mud into the front of his t-shirt. It plopped off. “It’s soft and smooth,” he told Stan. “It smells so green.”
They walked up a gravel path and pushed through an old wooden gate on a thick, crumbling stone wall, and into a small orchard, where they stretched in the tall weeds and looked up at the stars beyond the scribbles of apple tree branches. Henry was cold, shivered in his heavy, wet clothes, but he didn’t care. One of Stan’s dreadlocks rested on Henry’s forehead, and like everything else, Henry thought it was beautiful. “The best thing is the consistency between the stars and us,” Henry said. “You know?”
“No,” Stan said. Then he rolled over and kissed Henry, who kissed him back, amazed at how good Stan’s lips felt against his own: juicy and squishy, an island of softness in the middle of abrasive stubble.
Henry believed as they kissed that he could know everything about Stan, that he could see Stan’s thoughts just as clearly as he could see Stan’s face. It was all so obvious. Their high was a bubble, and they were the only two people in it.
“Ada’s like my sister,” Stan said, as he fumbled with the buttons on Henry’s damp Levi’s. “She’s my best friend, so it’s totally cool if we do this.”
* * *
Looking over his students, only three of whom he was sure read the novel, the rest only vaguely interested in Kesey because of what Mario had said about LSD, Henry told the truth: “Actually,” he said above the din of the noisy class, “I did take acid, and it was fucking magic.” And before the class could respond, Henry asked Brooke, whom he noticed was reading a ‘To Suck or Not to Suck’ pamphlet, “Where’d you get that?”
She giggled.
“Someone dumped a whole box of them outside in the parking lot,” Jason said. “When you took acid, how much did it cost?”
Henry skipped his third period class and instead went outside to collect the oral sex pamphlets in his briefcase. Many were wet from the melting snow, and some had blown onto the track and into the courtyard. He crawled under cars, his palms burning on the cold asphalt, and picked through naked bushes. He walked a few blocks from campus where he retrieved several from an oily puddle in front of a gas station.
With muddied knees and elbows, and freshly scuffed shoes, Henry stepped into Phoebe’s class, where she stood at the chalkboard, soliciting examples of interpersonal conflict from her rapt students who sat on pillows and beanbags on the floor. Henry stood just inside the door and watched as the students offered their ideas, none interrupting another, no need to raise hands. Even Brooke contributed, mentioning a conflict she had with her sister over a sweater. After Phoebe finished writing ten different conflict scenarios, she turned to Henry. “What do you want, Mr. Stirling?” she asked. “You’re filthy.”
Henry walked over to her desk and opened his briefcase. “I gathered these for you,” he said. “Some are muddy, but most are okay.”
“Thanks,” she said, puzzled. “What about your third period class?”
“I no longer teach,” he said, and he walked out.
