Hummingbirds (20 page)

I
t is said now among the girls of Carmine-Casey that Ms. Lockhart, the English teacher who always seemed to resent her students for not being boys, is not long for this job. Her divorce has wrecked her, they say. She has turned into an unhappy old spinster. And strange. In the past few days she has been seen by the senior girls (the ones who have permission to leave the building during their free periods) standing outside smoking cigarettes, one after another.

And when one of the girls inquired about it, saying, “I didn’t know you smoked, Ms. Lockhart,” the woman’s response was taut and sneering: “Don’t you have anything better to do? Shoo.”

She actually said “Shoo”—it has been confirmed.

In addition to the sudden smoking, Ms. Lockhart has also taken to making snide and groundless remarks in class about other faculty members—mostly the men, which further supports the speculation that she is an embittered divorcée whose only option now may be to become a lesbian and live communally with other lesbian man-haters.

On a recent day, when she overheard some of the girls talking in animated tones about Mr. Binhammer, she called across the classroom, “All I hear about is Mr. Binhammer. He must be some teacher. The great educator of his time. And when was the last time he handed back a paper to you?”

On another occasion, the girls were reading
The Great Gatsby
and trying to decide, between Mr. Binhammer and Mr. Hughes, which was Jay Gatsby and which was Nick Carraway.

“You know,” Ms. Lockhart interjected, “most critics see something deeply homoerotic in the relationship between Gatsby and Nick. Did you know that? You better reread that book.”

She pretended not to have heard the context of the girls’ conversation, but the Higgins sisters, Sally and Patty, both of whom were there, agreed that there was something nasty in the way she said it. And after she said it there was no more fun in imagining their two teachers as Gatsby and Nick anymore—which the girls blamed and resented Ms. Lockhart for.

“She’s become
objectionable,”
says Samantha Cowley, who is known for her Victorian way of speaking.

And some of the girls now tell of a rumor that Ms. Lockhart was spotted walking by herself in the park at four in the morning. But, as a rumor, that one is quickly put aside by other buzzing inquiries that strike closer to home: What girls were in the park to see her? What were they doing there at that time of night? Were there boys involved?

For her part, Liz Warren does not take any pleasure in the circulating gossip. She was taught by Ms. Lockhart only as a freshman and has always resented the woman’s drama-tinged personality as a subtle way to derail the class from actually learning anything. In fact, the problem seems to be common to the English teachers. If it weren’t for Mr. Hughes, Liz Warren may have left the school convinced that the entire department was narcissistic and dilettantish. But the girl’s dislike of this particular teacher goes beyond her general impatience for the department: the woman is a panderer. She panders to men. Liz has seen her in the halls flirting with the male faculty, using the same pathetic ploys that the girls use except with a shinier veneer of authenticity—and she suspects that Ms. Lockhart, who has so little patience for the girls in her class, would do anything in her power to gain the attention of a man.

It’s not that Liz Warren considers herself a feminist, loyal to the sisterhood of woman, or anything so papier-mâché idealistic as that—it’s just that she can’t bear to look on the
weakness
of the woman, that embarrassing fawning that Liz tries so hard to drive
out of her own eyes every night in the bathroom mirror. It’s a puppy-dog femininity: panting and yelping and eager. It makes her want to slink away unnoticed. The mothers of our race. The pretty pretty dresses. The eyes like drops of moisture on a varnished surface, failing to sink in.

She would much rather read Ernest Hemingway. At least in literature the pathetic are rendered beautiful; you can imagine them as cracked sculptures, or portraits effaced by time and mishandling.

Magnificent blemishes.

On the other hand there is something about Ms. Lockhart, when Liz comes out of the building after school one day and finds her smoking against the black wrought iron fencing at the edge of the sidewalk, that makes the girl stop and look more closely.

She looks defeated. Wrecked. But also
advanced,
as though she has come through the other side of a long tunnel.

Liz watches her for a while, unseen, watches the thin specter of a woman gazing upon the girls walking by without noticing her. And she feels bad. It’s that sickly, gnawing self-swallowing feeling that you get when you wait for your adversaries to fall and they do and you want to feel triumphant but you don’t.

There is very little left of her, Liz thinks. She is rebuilding from scratch.

So when Ms. Lockhart looks up and sees her standing on the steps above her, Liz feels her features dissolve into a perceptible half smile.

And in response the woman gives a pinched, self-deprecating smile of her own—and a nod.

“This is it, girl,” the nod says. “This is where all the pretty fluttering gets you.”

And Liz nods back, because she knows this to be true. Even though this doesn’t mean she and the teacher are now fast friends. And even though whatever truths Liz knows are derived from fictions and realities much reduced—like Jeremy Notion, with whom she has her third date tonight.

That nod stays with her as she walks home, and stays with
her through the rest of the afternoon and on into the evening while her mother is warning her that she better get ready for her date. She doesn’t want that nice Jeremy boy to think she’s uneager, does she? Leaning wearily over the top of her bureau and gazing into the mirror, Liz tries to replicate that Lockhart smile and nod. She thinks she would like to see it in a movie—and then she wonders if she already has. It reminds her of a Fellini film (she has been renting Italian films since Mr. Hughes mentioned in class that they were “devastatingly gorgeous,” watching them secretively after her parents go to bed, illicit intellect), Ms. Lockhart with the silent nod, wearied experienced laid bare and tacit, like a housewife snapping up a sheet and letting it billow softly down onto the mattress, that sigh of wrinkled fabric.

Later, when she sees Jeremy Notion waiting for her on the street corner outside the movie theater, trying to brood as he leans against a signpost, she has even less patience for him than usual.

“I just got here,” is the first thing he says.

She looks at her watch. She’s fifteen minutes late. “Sorry I’m late.”

“No problem,” he says. “Because, you know, I just got here too.”

He leans over and plants a kiss on the side of her mouth, which leaves a little trail of wetness. She thinks of snails. She has to wait for him to look at the show times above the ticket booth before she can reach up quickly and wipe it off.

“So what’s the movie we’re seeing again?” he asks. “How come they don’t have regular movies here? I’ve never heard of these.
Sister Moon,
is that the one?”

She nods. “It’s French.”

“Oh,” he says. “Do you take French? I take Spanish. Señor Lopez kicks ass.”

The theater is only half full, and for the first part of the movie she has to contend with Jeremy tossing popcorn into his mouth and, every now and then, brushing the kernels off his lap when he realizes how much he has dropped. Once the popcorn
is gone, she can see him out of the corner of her eye checking the time on the glowing face of his digital watch.

Then, suddenly, he lunges at her, his lips like two thick rubber bands on her neck.

“What are you doing?” she says, recoiling from him. In any other situation she might try to hide her revulsion more carefully, but she has discovered that Jeremy’s perceptiveness is not so finely tuned. She can be broad as a television sitcom in her responses, and still he looks at her through squinted eyes, trying to read the subtlety in her expressions.

“I’m kissing you,” he says.

“Now?”

“What’s the matter?”

She points to the screen as though it should be obvious to him. But he just stares back at her mutely, so she has to articulate it. “This is a movie about
incest.
”

He looks back at the screen like a moping child. “Okay, okay.”

After the movie, they walk together on the sidewalk, the hardened chips of ice crunching beneath their shoes.

“That was a good movie,” he says unconvincingly. “If my sister were that hot, I think maybe I would—”

“Oh my god.”

“Come on. Lighten up. It was just a joke. Jeez. How come you’re always so serious all the time?”

She looks at him suspiciously. “I’m not serious all the time.”

“Okay. It’s no big deal. Let’s forget about it.”

They walk the next block in silence.

“Listen,” he says at the next corner. “My parents are out of town. Do you want to come up and see my room?”

She knows what this means, and the prospect is not appealing to her, but she is also chafing under the accusation of being too serious. She’s not too serious. She knows how to have fun when she wants to. Maybe even more than other girls, since she doesn’t suffer the limitations of nonsensical convention. She is liberated. She is progressive.

“Okay,” she says. “But just for a little while. I have to get home.”

His parents are in textiles, and the apartment is lushly decorated in deep earth tones with a sort of Arabian feel to the woodwork. But when they turn the corner from the hall into his room, it’s as though they step through a portal into teenage suburbia. There are posters of sports figures tacked to the walls, and the detritus of boyhood—clothes, scratched CDs, magazines creased open to pages with swimsuit models, balls of various sizes and colors—is settled into the corners against the baseboards as though someone had spun the room like a top and let centrifugal force take over.

He makes a big production about sweeping aside some of his dirty clothes from the bed—as though he were dusting off a throne for the arrival of a queen.

One thing she likes about Jeremy Notion: he is almost entirely unselfconscious. Which means that there aren’t any awkward, bungling attempts at conversation or those pitiful little seductions that teenage boys perform as though they were following instructions step by step in a manual. No, Jeremy is a lunger. Which may be bad in the context of a French film about incest, but is rather a relief when it comes to moments such as this one.

He leans over to kiss her, and for a few minutes they are sitting side by side on the edge of the bed, craning their necks to reach each other. He puts an arm around her shoulder, but she doesn’t know what to do with her hands, so she just leaves them in her lap. With his other hand, he reaches across to her arm, as if in embrace, but then draws back slowly until it is on her breast. He leaves it there for a second, as if awaiting reprisal, but when he gets none, the hand begins to squeeze and knead her breast as though it were Play-Doh.

She can feel her left foot falling asleep, so she shifts the angle of her body—an act that he seems to take as an invitation to lean over and leverage her backward onto the bed. Now he’s half on top of her and her left leg is dangling off the edge of the bed, the foot tingling now that the circulation is returning to it.

She tries to comply with his kisses as much as possible, but his lips and tongue are everywhere, and she begins to think it’s like playing tennis with a maniac—you can never tell where the ball is going to go.

Finally she gets the courage to put one of her hands on his back. His hands are all over her, so she figures that’s an appropriate response.

At one point she becomes aware that a hand on her left knee is beginning a slow but resolute ascension up the inside of her thigh.

“Wait,” she says, pressing both palms against his chest and pushing him to the side. “Wait a second.”

“What? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she says, sitting up and straightening her hair. “Nothing’s the matter. I just want to know—”

“What? My parents aren’t going to be home until tomorrow night.”

“It’s not that.” She turns away from him as he sits up next to her. She can feel herself flushed, and she doesn’t want him to see. “I just want to know what all this
means.
”

“Oh, come on. It doesn’t have to be such a big deal.”

“I know that. I know it doesn’t have to be a big deal. But I just want to know
whether
it’s a big deal or not. That’s all.”

He gazes at her, nonplussed. Those poor dewy eyes. He thinks it’s some kind of test—that he has to give her the right answers before she’ll let him touch her—and in the duress of the situation, his mind seems to have shut down altogether.

“I mean,” she continues, “I’m not unwilling. I just want to know what it signifies. You know, where this puts us.”

“Not
unwilling?
What it
signifies?”
he says. She cringes at her own words repeated back to her. There is no more exquisite torture than having to listen to herself. “What’s the matter with you? Why do you have to think about everything so much?”

“I don’t—”

“Why can you just
do
things? Everything has to have subtitles with you.”

That’s a surprisingly elegant way of putting it, and it throws her for a second. She turns to look at him and tries to discern whether or not his artfulness was intentional. But he’s just sitting there with his arms crossed over his chest, huffing and shaking his head.

It’s time for her to go.

“I think I’m going to go,” she says, standing up.

“Good,” he says. “Just go already.”

Good-bye, Jeremy Notion. Good-bye, you poor baby.

She makes her way down the dark hall and trips over a long-legged side table, knocking over some carved ivory figurines on top.

“Don’t break anything on your way out,” his voice calls from behind her.

Then she’s in the elevator of the building, riding down and feeling inexplicably pleased with herself—the strange, half-disappointed lightness of spirit that she experienced last year when the schoolwide poetry reading was canceled and she didn’t have to get up in front of the student body and read her poem about the achingly gaudy brilliance of an abandoned fairground. That airy relief when something is going to happen and you don’t know whether to dread it or be excited about it but then it doesn’t happen and it doesn’t matter and you can just put away all those feelings that you had about it in the first place. Just put them away somewhere and cover them over with a sheet.