Chapter 20

 

Zoe sat naked in the middle of the room. She held the shirt that Ron had worn yesterday up to her face and inhaled the traces of his scent. With her other hand, she worked the hard plastic buttons on the cuff of the shirt back and forth over her clitoris. Her eyes were closed. She imagined herself flying through the air and he was flying with her, his head between her legs, his tongue snapping the way that it did across her clit. Her mouth opened and she rocked back and forth and then, in the dream, he opened his mouth and began to devour her. He took large bites out of her vagina, chewing and swallowing her. She tried to fly faster, tried to get away from his mouth but he was devouring her from between her legs. Her hips bucked faster over the buttons, the hard buttons that could have been teeth. She was sweating and smiling at the same time. He was eating away all of her fat. She would be thin if he kept eating at her. The waves of the orgasm rushed over her and she bucked her hips faster. Then he was spitting her out. Parts of her dropping down from the sky and wherever they dropped, flowers sprang up and tried to ensnare her. It was the fat trying to get back into her. He was spitting her out. He was just like she was. She raised her fingers from between her legs and stuck them down into her throat and then began to gag into his shirt and then the burn of the vomit, the harsh gritty feel of the vomit in her mouth, making her pay for what she had eaten. Her body wretched and shook and still she was cumming. Then she got up and ran into the bath room, frightened as a little girl. She scrubbed the shirt clean of what had come out of her, her entire body shaking. Now she could draw. She sketched the likeness of a fat hippo sucking on a straw that was stuck into an ice cream sundae.

When Ron came home, he found her curled up in his aunt’s wingback chair. She had been crying.  Her hands were in front of her mouth. She watched him walk in and drop his book bag down and take off his jacket and then walk towards her. She held up a hand for him to stop before he reached her.

“Why do you want to live with me?

“What?”

“I’m a pig. Why do you want to live with a pig?”

“You aren’t a pig.”

“I’m a fat, filthy, disgusting pig and I don’t want to be with someone who could stand to live with a fat, filthy, disgusting pig.”

“You aren’t fat. You aren’t a pig. You aren’t disgusting.”

He stood in front of her an expression of complete confusion on his face. “Did you have a bad day?”

She screamed and ran passed him into the bathroom and locked the door. Ron stood there feeling helpless. What was he supposed to do now? What was wrong with her? What did he have to do to fix it? He paced through the apartment rooms. His stomach growled at him, a reminder that he hadn’t eaten all day, nothing except coffee. He picked up the mail that he had gathered from his parents’ house the day before and sorted through it. The envelope in Robin’s handwriting made him drop the stack of mail like he had been given an electric shock. Was this it? Had she seen the letter? It was still sealed. Had she found a way to open it or read it through the envelope? The door opened and she walked out fast, her face angry. “I’m going to take the train back to my father’s house.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t stand to be cooped up in this ugly apartment all day long. I want to run. I want to swim. I want to ride my bike.”

“I’ll drive you, if you really want to go, Zoe.”

“There’s no place for me to be free here,” she screamed. “I’m dying here.”

Ron felt like he had been slapped. He felt as if he took a step off the curb and that some bus had whacked him in the side of the head. “Wait,” he said.

She dropped her bag to the floor and he moved to her and gathered her into his arms. She was crying and shaking and he body trembled like a leaf in a stiff breeze. She reached her arms up and held onto him, like he was the branch that was keeping her from being torn off. “I’m so fucked up,” she whispered, “and I don’t want you to see me like this.”

Ron patted her ass and said “Go clean yourself up and get dressed.”

 

She went back into the bathroom and Ron picked up the envelope and opened it.  “I’ll be arriving on Wednesday on Flight 148 on American Airlines. It gets in at 8 pm. See you then. Love, Robin.” Wednesday, today was Tuesday. Ron walked to the bathroom door and said, “Maybe a few days up at your parents’ house will help you to clear your head.”

She opened the door. She looked like the angelic child again. “You won’t mind?”

“If it’s what you need, it’s what we should do,” said Ron.

Her face brightened.  I just want to run and swim and get my head in a better place so that I can come back to you healthy,” she said.

Ron nodded. “It’s ok. I trust you.”

Someplace inside a voice told him that he should be feeling very guilty, but he wasn’t. He would tell Robin that he was staying with his folks until he figured out what to do about an apartment. She definitely would not want to go to his mother’s house.  Funny, he thought, she calls it her father’s house and I call it my mother’s house. Is it a gender thing?

That night after he drove Zoe, and picked up a pizza, he sat at his desk and called Robin. She answered on the first ring.

“Where are you?” she said. “The phone is disconnected and I really didn’t want to be calling Rahway again so I wrote in care of your parents’ house.”

“That’s where I’m staying, just until I get things sorted out. I didn’t want to stay at Rahway. I’m sure you can understand why.”

She laughed. “No, actually I thought that any excuse that got you back into Rahway would be the one that you would take.”

Ron flushed. “Contrary to popular opinion, I do have some integrity, Robin.”

“Anyway,” she said, “Can you pick me up?”

“Absolutely.”

“How’s the teaching going?”

“It’s incredible. It’s where I want to be. It’s who I am. It may be the best thing that I’ve ever done in my life.”

“That’s good, Ron. Just remember that you aren’t Warren.”

Ron’s hand clenched on the receiver. Why did she have to say shit like that?  His voice was small. “I don’t drawl,” he said with fake drawl.

She giggled. “I’m really looking forward to seeing you and everyone else.”

Ron felt panicked. Who was everyone else? “How long are you staying?”

“Let’s see how it goes.  Ron, I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to be staying in Minneapolis. Things have gotten complicated here and I am thinking of coming back home.”

Ron felt his pulse quicken. Zoe cleared from his mind like she was a hallucination.  “There is nothing that I would like more than that.”

And then they hung up.

A minute later the phone rang. Zoe’s voice said, “I miss you so much. I don’t want to sleep without you next to me.”

Chapter 19

 

“What is a pilgrimage and why did people go on them?” Ron was pacing. The chalk rolling between his fingers while his students watched him like they were at a tennis match. It was a very warm day for early November and the windows were cranked wide open.  The students seemed fidgety because of the change in temperature and the excess of clothing. He had them trained to have their notebooks open at the start of each class. He kept a supply of pens and pencils in a canister on his desk and anyone who had forgotten to bring one could just walk up and take one. If you hadn’t brought your book, you had to sit with someone else, but then you knew his eyes were going to be on you and that you were sure to get called on at least a couple of times. Their initial testing period of him was over. He could be flustered by them but it was much more likely that they were gonna wind up blushing on account of the way that he turned things and his class was fun. They wanted to read for it.

 

Andrea said,” It’s like a journey or a vacation.”

Ron smiled, “You mean like going down the shore?”

Andrea felt herself redden. “No, not like that. They didn’t have boardwalks or anything like that.”

Ron paced and ran his fingers through his hair. “Well, they did in a way. They had this shrine for this guy Tom who was a patron saint of the Saxons, who were kinda like the poor. Everybody felt good about Tom now that he was dead, and people would take trips to the place that was dedicated to him.”

 

Andrea sat back in her desk and spread her legs wide open under her desk, the short skirt hiking up along her thighs. Ron pacing saw her white patch of panties and turned his head to keep his mind focused.

 

“But the trip could be dangerous, like going out for a walk by yourself in the middle of the night around here. And so people traveled in groups and as they went, they made up stories to tell to entertain each other.”

 

Now her legs were opening and shutting like a bird that was flapping its wings, only slower. Ron was hoping that she needed to go to the bathroom or that she would stop because he was finding it more and more difficult not to look. He took off his jacket and noticed that his shirt was wet from the perspiration that had gathered underneath.

 

“So these stories were things that they made up as part of a contest to see who could tell the best story.”

“You shoulda been there, Mr. Tuck. You woulda kicked butt.”

Ron laughed and the grin spread across his face and showed his dimples and the girls smiled and one with bleached bright blonde hair who had a case of acne that would not quit said, “But they were all religious stories right?”

“Some of them were, Joyce, but some of them were pretty raunchy.”

There was a giggle and then one of his seniors who liked to look confused because she thought that it was attractive said, “What’s raunchy?”

“Off- color stories,” said Ron.

The blonde grinned at him and said, “You mean dirty stories?”

There was that nervous laughter that bounced through the room like a crazy ball that was careening off the walls. The blonde wiggled herself back and forth on her seat and made a show of renewed interest in her book and then said, “Ok let’s read those and skip the others.”

 

It gave Ron an idea. He was learning that if he threw things out to them and listened to how they reacted that something would be revealed to him, a way into the piece and there it was. “What we are gonna do is divide up the stories and tell them to each other like we are on the journey together. Each of you is gonna pick one and read it and put it into your own words and then we are gonna tell the stories to each other. Now there are some that we have to tell and I will handle those if you don’t pick them first but for the rest of them, you need to look the book over, skim the characters and decide whose story that you want to tell. Some of them are long, some are really short and some are really exciting and some are really boring. I’ll try to keep you away from the boring junk.”

Andrea was flapping faster Ron was wondering if he should ask her if she needed to use the bathroom and then the absurdity of asking a 17 year old girl is she needed to pee struck him and he dismissed  that idea.

There was a knock at his door a light tapping, but Ron didn’t hear it. He was at the board and writing down names of the pilgrims for the kids to choose from. He rattled off the first dozen or so from memory and then he was looking in the prologue to find the others. The girls heard the tapping immediately. Their heads all turning towards the door and then their eyes going straight down to their books and their hands making sure that they were copying what he was writing on the board. The was a second set of taps and this time Ron looked up to see the face of Sister Irene Emanuel standing in his doorway with a crooked finger that was beckoning him. He walked quickly to the door as she opened it and backed up and asked him to step into the hallway.

“Yes Sister?”

“Mr. Tuck, you have your jacket off.”

“Yes Sister, it’s really warm today.”

“But Mr. Tuck, your bare arms are dangling out.”

Ron blushed and looked at his arms and then back into her face. She turned him into a child almost instantly but he liked her. He trusted her and above all else he wanted to please her and have her think well of him. “Yes Sister, I’ll put the jacket back on right away.”

She nodded with a serene kind of admonishment and said, “That’s an excellent idea,” and walked back down the hall towards her office, the black habit floating along just above her feet.

Ron walked back into the room and as his students watched put his jacket back on immediately.

Joyce said, “Busted.” And the girls giggled.

Ron smiled and said, “Yes the sight of my arms in apparently an unnecessary distraction.” and went back to writing at the board.

Andrea said to Joyce, “Wasn’t his arms that I was staring it.”

 

Ron noticed that he lit up in a gleeful way when he taught his younger students. It wasn’t that the lessons were easier to do or that he liked the literature more, it was them. They rushed into the room eager to be there, to be in contact with him and he brightened so visibly at the sight of them that it was almost as if he became someone else. It was their writing that he pondered over. It was their questions that reappeared in his mind on his drives or when he was in the shower, never when he was with Zoe.  He wanted to keep them to himself, to mold them. At the end of the day it was they who flew passed his room and stuck their heads in and wished him good night.

That afternoon Ron left his class room early to attend a faculty meeting. Sister Irene Emanuel presided over these meetings with a look that commanded respect. She could use her facial expressions to convey her thoughts, particularly to accent what she wasn’t saying. Looking freshly laundered and finely scrubbed, she smiled at the gathering of her teachers and said. “Well it seems that we have settled in nicely and started the year off well and gotten through the foolishness of Halloween. Our enrollment is up by 30 and so we now have 485 students, which, all things considered, must be thought of as successful. Now, paper is not free and I have been finding too much of it wasted and discarded into the trash. Please remember that the girls do have notebooks and that it isn’t necessary to give them our paper for every little thing that they do. Also, please remember that we are not a provider of pens and pencils. The girls know that they need to come prepared and it would be wrong of us to spoil them.”

 

Ron felt heat come to his cheeks. He wondered if this was directed at him. Maybe he was being foolish and spoiling them but wasn’t it more important for them to learn. He almost raised a hand to ask this but then thought better of it.

Sister Irene Emanuel continued after a pause and a scan of her eyes and a pursing of her lips that communicated that she was not talking about the sisters who knew better. The nuns smiled and looked down. This had been a topic of discussion at the convent. They knew it was coming and she had delivered the line expertly, although one or two would not have minded if she had singled out the prime offenders. “Now the subject of discipline needs to be discussed. We are instituting a system of demerits.” She passed out a stack of freshly copied pages that were passed up the aisles. “I’m not going to read to you. Take a moment and look over the page.”

Ron read quickly. It was a system of offenses and the number of demerits that each carried with it.

Late:  1 demerit

Uniform violation: 1 demerit (first offense) 3 demerits (second offense and a call home) 5 demerits (for each additional offense and a parent conference) Excessive makeup is a uniform violation.

No homework: I demerit and an academic penalty

Failure to be respectful:  3 demerits

Unprepared for class: 1 demerit (this includes lack of book covers, or coming to class without the necessary tools for that day)

Fighting: 10 demerits (a parent conference in the principal’s office)

Inappropriate Behavior: the number of demerits assigned for this is at the discretion of the teacher. (Whatever she thinks is appropriate.)

Conduct unbecoming a lady: 2 demerits but perhaps more depending on the severity of the offense.

Inwardly, Ron groaned as he read the list. It was all about class control.  He had no problems with class control. Why should anyone have a problem with it? Ron knew enough to not say any of these things. He sat and listened.

“Today we are going to form a faculty council that will meet with girls who have exceeded the ten demerit limit. I know that any of you that are chosen will take this responsibility seriously.  There will be five members of the council, two lay teachers, two sisters and myself.”

Ron nodded and looked around wondering who he would think was best. Sister Juliana Marie was quickly nominated as was Sister Bernadette. Ron knew both. Juliana taught math in the classroom above his and Sister Bernadette taught religion and led the choir. Marsha was nominated and quickly confirmed by the staff as one of the senior lay teachers. Then Irene Emanuel said, “I think the addition of a male presence would help us in our cause and without asking for a vote looked over at Ron and said, “Would you be kind enough to join our effort Mr. Tuck?”

Ron almost gasped. Then he said as obediently as he was able, “Yes Sister”

 

Chapter 18

 

Chris read but the words blurred and made him look away. He slipped his glasses over his nose and tried again. He tried to concentrate on his belief that the law was the rules through which people organized their principles. His reporting parts provided a series of responses that that drove him toward reverie but then he tried to rally himself with thoughts of getting dressed. He was too easily defeated with an opening of windows and a needle on a track and a song that could put him right.

He sat in the open window with the law book on the sill and his head and knee bouncing to a beat. He could do this, it wasn’t that hard. It required more time than deep thought. Reporting parts quieted and listened to the song and inside of it all he was able to think with just a few minutes of clarity that came and went.  Mose Allison cooed, “Everybody’s crying mercy but nobody knows the meaning of the word.”

Chris didn’t think about the list of callbacks that he could make. If he wanted to hear a voice. He would call and if he wanted a presence, he could make it appear. For now, there was the book and the music and the street sounds and the promise of a walk. Reporting parts had different volumes and illuminations. Anything might be turned down or faded to black. It was right to wait for what the tide brought in, inspect what it carried, sort through and move on. Dancing like figurines in compartments, reporting parts had occasional convulsive rhythms that crested and subsided.

Warren and Laureen were perfect together, particularly since he had managed to avoid the entangling loops of both of their snares. He looked back into the book and brought the print into focus. Reading and taking notes while the light faded and the street music rose in back of it.

Later he did yoga, turning the stereo off and listening to his heartbeat and the continual hum that ebbed and flowed outside of his windows. He longed for the place of silence, not the silence that he had learned to use as a weapon, not the cold and predatory place where emotions waited and sharpened, not the resistant silence, but the honey hued invitation of his breathing and the steady strong beat of his heart.

It made him light headed and that told him that he was hyperventilating and that he must slow it down even further if he was ever to develop a means of travel to reach this new and quiet place. He read and took notes and tried not to think about the lures that would cause him to wander. He picked up his guitar and began to play and for the first time ever, it was one of Ron’s songs that he heard in his heart and played through his fingers. Chris fought the nets of incompetence and felt well rendered. He breathed in New York City and thought of Laureen: slinky, smart and able to make him cry. Then he played the blues song and tried to remember the words. There were other rhythms in it and he searched for them. Just as it was feeling right, it would make him stumble, like she tried to do. It was almost uncanny.

Chapter 17

At Halloween, the students were allowed to dress up. They came dressed as witches and angels and cats. Ron hung a skeleton up over his door but did not dress up himself. The girls giggled as they entered his room, halos tilted, witch hats crumpled and cat tails sticking up and bouncing along behind them. Ron’s first thought was that this was going to be a difficult day. He tried to think of ways that he could have fun and still make it productive. Some of the girls had not dressed up at all and looked embarrassed by their navy blue skirts and white tops. Some just wore silly hats and put on makeup that gave them a clownish appearance.

“Where’s your costume, Mr. Tuck?” said Andrea.

Ron laughed. “I wear a costume every day, Andrea.”

When he was a young boy, his mother would dress him in her clothes because of how much he looked like her. He cringed as the thought sprang into his mind. What was she thinking of, dressing a young boy up like a girl! It had left him never wanting to wear a Halloween costume again.

Ron drew columns that he crossed with lines that made them squares on the board and said, “Do you guys know the game Jeopardy?” Their smiles told him that they did. “Today we are going to play team jeopardy. This side of the room, push your desks together and this side do the same thing. The winners will get 25 points on the next quiz.”

Now Ron had to think about categories that they would know something about. He wrote across the top History, Vocabulary, Music, TV, Movies, and Literature.

Ron figured out some rules and told them that each side would get a chance at the same question until someone got it right. If there was any calling out of answers from the other side it would not count. There was no penalty for wrong answers, just points for right answers. Each girl would get to answer a question for a point value. The questions would be harder depending on the number of points. Only the girl whose turn it was got to answer the question, but she could get help from the others on her team.

The girls were excited and squirmed in their desks. “Where are you gonna get the questions from?” said Maria.

Ron pointed to the side of his head and said, “From here.”

Quickly, he filled in the point values and then he saw Sister Irene Emmanuel opening his door and walking into the back of his classroom. She sat down quietly with a small pad and nodded, smiling to the girls. Ron was stunned. This was the class that she was gonna watch him teach?  After all of the gritty work that he had done with them over the last two months, this was the day that she picked to observe him? Too late to do anything about it now!  Ron looked at the board and at his smiling students and then thought, “Fuck it,” this is what he told them that he was going to do and this is what he was doing.

The first girl, Sadie, chose TV for 20 points. Ron thought for a moment and said. “What is the name of the bald NY Detective who chews lollipops because he has quit smoking cigarettes?”

A girl in back of Sadie whispered into her ear and then Sadie’s face brightened and she said, “Kojak.”

Ron smiled as Sister Irene began to write. “Correct!”

He put the 20 in a column on the side. Then he saw Andrea whispering to her friends and the next girl picked vocabulary for 30.

Ron said, “OK, from the story The Open Window what does the word endeavored mean?”

The team got it right and for the next 30 minutes his students ignored TV and movies and music and asked questions about history and literature and vocabulary. Ron could have kissed each one of them as the class ended. He knew what had happened. They had tried to save him. In the process they had shown Sister Irene what he had taught them about literature and vocabulary and history. Even the nun was smiling by the end of the class. She stopped by Ron’s desk and said that he should come to her office during his free period.

After lunch, Ron waited outside of the principal’s office like a kid in trouble. They had done a great job but was she going to buy his method? Sister Irene came to the door all black and white and starched and scrubbed clean. He followed her into her office and waited to be asked to sit. Never having down this before, he wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen. When the vocabulary and history and literature questions had run out, Ron had put new point values up to keep it going.  His kids had made it seem like it was always that way. “That’s an interesting review technique that you use, Mr. Tuck,” began the principal.

Ron decided to just blurt out the truth. “When I saw the costumes and how they were all wound up, Sister, I made it up so that we could at least get a good review in.”

The nun arched her eyebrow, “You made that up as you went along?”

“Yes, Sister,’ said Ron bowing is head. “ I wanted it to be a fun day but not a wasted day.”

The nun stared at him for a long moment and then said, “We try to keep popular culture out of our studies as much as possible, but given the day and the way that it turned out, there’s not a lot that I can criticize you for today,”  she paused and pursed her lips, “except your handwriting. Mr. Tuck, is it necessary to assault the blackboard the way that you do and press down so firmly on the chalk?”

Ron stammered. “I’m not sure what you mean, Sister.”

“I’ve had complaints that you press so hard on the chalk, Mr. Tuck, that it is necessary to wash your boards every night. Do you think you could write a little more lightly and perhaps even a little less sloppily?”

“I can try, Sister or I can just wash them myself at the end of the day.”

The nun was inwardly amused at his response. Of course she had set up him by going in there on Halloween, but he had passed her little test very well. She did need to talk with him about some things though. “There’s another matter, Mr. Tuck. Some of the girls have taken to writing your name over and over on their books like you were a boyfriend.”

“I didn’t know that, Sister,” said Ron, genuinely surprised.

“These are very impressionable minds, Mr. Tuck, and it is important that we don’t overstep our boundaries.”

“I understand, Sister,” said Ron hanging his head again.

“I’m sure that you do. It was a nice review, Ron and I was pleased to see how much vocabulary they’ve learned. That’s what we are going to call your lesson, a literature and vocabulary review. Do you understand?”

Ron wasn’t sure that he did understand but he nodded anyway.

Then the nun said, “And Mr. Tuck, John is spelled J…o…h…n…..not J ….h …o…n.” She enunciated each letter clearly and with what Ron could have sworn was a clicking or her tongue against her teeth.

His felt his face flush hot with embarrassment. Had he really miss-spelled John? “Yes, Sister. I’m sorry about that, Sister”

“Do you realize how much you pace while you are teaching, Ron. It was making me dizzy to watch you.”

“I guess that it’s just nervous energy.”

“Perhaps you can find a way to channel your nervous energy more efficiently, Mr. Tuck.”

 

When Ron got back to his and Zoe’s apartment he saw her naked body running towards the bedroom when he opened the door. The table was set for dinner and across his plate were six willow switches that she had cut from one of the trees. He stared at them with his mouth open. Zoe was kneeling on the bed with her head down on the pillows and her ass raised up towards the door. Without turning around to face him she said into her pillow, “I played with myself today while you were gone. Please don’t hit me too hard.”  Ron laughed and fingered the switches, and then he began to strip off his clothing. The thought crossed his mind that this was one way of channeling his nervous energy.

Slowly, he slid the switches across her raised cheeks. He smiled when he saw that she strained upwards for the contact. He turned them so that the thin, young leaves, spiny and long, slid along her flesh. She whimpered and then he took the end of one of the switches and slid it between her thighs, under her cheeks along her puffed, opening lips. She trembled. He slid them up and down and rotated his wrist so that they would drag along that special place, then he pulled them back and smacked her ass with them. The air hissed as they snapped towards her. Ron felt himself twitch and she moaned. He slapped them across her cheeks fanning them out so that they covered her raised, trembling, slightly reddened flesh. They broke with snaps that surged through him. They fell on the lounge cushions that were their bed and he broke them over her bottom with hissing, plaintiff swats that sent them into pieces.

She turned to him as he dropped down onto his knees. She tugged at the stiffness of his penis. She licked her tongue across the tip of it. Ron was sticking out with his eyes closed, swaying like an inebriated creature. She lay on her belly and thrust up from underneath him with a hope of impalement that slid along his shaft with a wave of intoxicating chills. Then Ron pointed it at her and stuck it right in. Zoe’s arms and legs flung out. She screamed some kind of deep, wordless wish. The liquid releases convulsing through them like a whirling machine that had gone full sprint.

Afterwards they smiled that kind of self satisfied grin that rises from deep inside and holds you like a warm glow of the sun. Zoe stuck her elbow out across the mattress and cradled his head in her hand. She put on her glasses and inspected him.

He was lean, thick-boned with an oval face and spring green eyes that took each signal that she sent and then spun it back to her.  Ron smiled and let his eyes explore her. From time to time, he extended his hand to part a thigh, or lift an arm. The warm glow in her belly heated as she noted his approval.

Ron said, “The girls came dressed in costumes today.”

The idea caused her eyes to shimmer like a long caress and then she gazed at him strong and deep and said, “Do you want me to wear a costume?”

Ron’s eyes let off excited sparks that flew at her and she smiled when they entered her like they were his seed. “Let’s make something,” she said

Ron took a scissors to a pair of her cutoffs. He left the seam that ran between her legs and cut an outline of wings to stretch across her thighs and cheeks. Then he cut away the intruding white of her pockets. Then he cut U shapes for where her pockets had been. He slipped the remains of the cutoff’s up snugly while she put on a sheer blouse that she had decorated to accent her nipples, which it covered in a tight pull that was drawn down by inserted ribbons that gathered the fabric up, so that it seemed she was lifting her shirt from her body but was frozen in that pose. Ron, his hands on her hips, held her at the length of his arms; she swiveled back and forth for him.

Then they heard the first buzzer of the evening go off in the October quest for candy.  Ron gave her two bars and squeezed her mostly naked cheeks as they jutted out with anticipation and the promise of a quick slap that sent her to answer the door. He followed her, wanting to see the reaction and the way that she responded to it. She looked back at him and extended her arms with the candy in her hands, asking him to do it. Ron made her wait and watched her squirm and then took the candy and opened the door. Two little girls dressed up like ducks held their bags open and chorused “Trick or Treat.”

Ron filled their bags and then he shut the door and dropped to his knees and slowly swirled his tongue up her exposed taunt inner thighs. She came for him almost immediately.

They lay with the bag of miniature candy bars between them. Zoe told him that she wanted to go to New York and get a piece of alabaster that weekend. Ron smiled and asked what that was like.

“There are rooms filled with chunks of stone, different sizes.”  She set her hands at shoulder width and navel to nipple height. “I want a piece of white alabaster this big,” she said.

Ron said, “How do you know which piece to take?”

Zoe said, “I embrace it and see if it hugs me back.”

“Can I touch them?” said Ron, eyes like fireworks now.

Her smile spread from her mouth to her ears and she said, “That’s why I want you to come with me.” Then she glanced back and forth quickly and said, “Remember your cat poem?”

Ron nodded, and his mind flashed on Leni in his kitchen, slinky, inquisitive and devoted to him. He recited, “A piece of cheese very small, curled up on its end and stuck to the floor, attracted a black cat with licked white paws.

Raw chopped meat excited her more, and she made sounds for more

I was ecstatic, I wanted her to stay, so I gave her some more cheese

She licked it; she liked it,

Better than the first piece that she’d seen

I had made a friend that I could keep and tell her so out loud

She would agree, nod her head and make such friendly sounds

I dropped some bread, she gave it a clout

Raised her head licked her chin

Turned around and walked out”

“I want to draw it,” said Zoe. “I can see her.” Ron recited the poem again and again as Zoe drew.

 

 

Sitting at a desk that Zoe gave him, a blonde oak blank door frame laid over a set of custom made saw horses, Ron opened the Literature book to Canterbury Tales. Immediately, he was flooded with memories of the stage. He was playing Henry II and his partner for the scene was Thomas Becket, played by Todd Crumbly, who later became known as The Crumb after her flipped subsequent to being caught selling joints out of a rooming house in Elizabeth. He’d flipped on Chris and some other people but this was before that and before he discovered his guitar and heavy dope. Ron circled him hissing and screaming like a predator while Todd stood there looking vulnerable and contrite.

Canterbury Tales was about what happened after Henry had Beckett stabbed to death and he become a martyr. Ron absorbed the pages and the details of the Prologue. He saw how the ways that labor was divided were important things for his students to see. The colors they wore and the imperfections used to describe them gave the characters the substance and humanity that Ron wanted to communicate to his kids.

Naked,   Zoe was drawing with charcoals; pad on her lap knees bent up, hair tangled and an aura to the movements of her arm. Her pink and straw colored body was intent on creation.

Ron stared back to the page and as he read about the Oxford Cleric, and The Squire and The Cook.  He imagined each of them fucking her. He saw her lifting herself up to the pounding thrusts of each of their detailed, clothed bodies and he wanted to be all of them and still be himself. Then he put his book aside and wrote for himself.

 

 

 

Chapter 16

Ron Tuck knelt on the kneeling board with his hands folded and draped across the back of the pew in front of him. He was singing as if an angel were listening. His eyes roamed from the face of Sister Bernadette Catherine up to the old altar that was more there as a storage facility, now that the priests had been turned around and a new altar, more a large stone table, had been installed so that the congregation could see what was once hidden and whispered over in secret. The smell of the church sent him back to childhood and the way that he and his friends had gone to mass and stared at the rear ends of the girls in the rows in front of them while the girls smiled knowingly at each other and shifted on their knees and clenched their cheeks on and off to give the boys a little show. He did not want to look at his students that way and so he sang with elevated eyes and his head lifted upwards to the stained glass windows in back of the altar and the mural that must have been over 100 feet in the air.

It was First Friday morning and the school had gone to celebrate the mass that was held mostly for them on that day each month while school was in session. Bernadette Catherine was in charge of the choir of girls’ voices and their songs. She beamed as they sang and moved her raised arms in slow, well timed figure 8’s. Ron tried his best to sing as well as he was able, both for her and to set an example for his kids about how it was necessary to open one’s mouth when singing. He tried to breathe from his solar plexus and move his stomach to the cadence of the songs. “Holy. Holy, holy, God of Power and Light, Heaven and earth are filled with your Glory, Hosanna, in the highest…” He felt like he was making eye contact with her when they sang and that she could see him trying so hard for her.

Two days earlier, at the convent for dinner with the rest of the lay faculty and the nuns, she had asked him about his faith. They had saved a surprise for him and re-introduced him to Sister Grace Natari, who had been his 7th grade teacher when he had first come to the school. Sr. Grace had remembered Ron and said that she was glad to see him back with their church. She told the story about how Ron had been the first Protestant boy that had ever been allowed to attend the grammar school because his mother had met one of the priests while she was in the American Legion hospital. She told them about how Ron had  gotten into trouble with the police and how his mother had come to the church and “begged” to have him admitted because he was on a path that was leading to no good. She smiled recalling how Ron had known scripture and how all the nuns had wanted to convert him to the true faith.

Ron winced when his mother was associated with begging, but he knew that it was true. He had been in trouble. His mother had gone and asked that he be allowed to go to school there. What the nuns didn’t know was that the detectives had given Marjorie the choice of either getting Ron into that school or sending him to a reformatory called Jamesburg.

Dinner was spread across five different tables and there had been bottles of wine and salad and chicken and roasted potatoes and string beans. Some of the lay faculty had known enough to bring their own bottles of wine to contribute to the meal. Ron was oblivious to this tradition and because he didn’t go to the faculty room for lunch, no one had told him that it was expected. The nuns suffered the lack of contribution patiently and with tight lipped perseverance. Some of them were sure that manners were not something that could be expected from this disturbingly popular young man.

When they prayed before dinner, Ron blessed himself with the others, feeling less awkward than he had before. He ate slowly not wanting to appear overly hungry. There was polite talk at the tables and soft bouncing polite laughter. Ron grinned and talked, not noticing that he was the only lay person seated at his table. He did not know that the table arrangements were a thing that was the object of discussion before the dinner and that some of the nuns had wanted very much to sit with him and others had expressed a desire to sit anywhere else rather than with him.

The mass reached the point of communion and the girls dutifully filed up to receive. Ron was unsure about what to do. Part of him wanted to move up, to be an example for his students. But what kind of an example would a lie be? What kind of example was he able to provide spiritually anyway? Wasn’t it all a lie when it came to that?

Ron got up and moved down the aisle towards the priest. He was determined to take the wafer in the new fashion and not to open his mouth and stick out his tongue as he had been taught. He cupped his hands hoping against hope that he was doing it right and looked into the thin worn face of the silver haired priest who seemed to hesitate for an instant before placing the wafer in his hand. Ron took it and was surprised by the lack of magic that he felt on his tongue. A cascade of memory voices used to flood him about not letting it touch his teeth and certainly not chewing it. The host was to remain on his tongue until it dissolved.

At the convent, Ron noticed that as the evening grew later that the voices around him got looser and the faces of the people became pink and red. The laughter was easier now and when Ron looked up he saw that some of the people had already left. Sister Bernadette Catherine took his hands and said softly, “When the weather gets bad Ron, you can stay here with us if it becomes necessary.”