Chapter 30

 

Of all the holidays on the calendar Thanksgiving was his favorite. It

was the only one that had not been tainted over the years by his changing beliefs.  He had lost his feel for Christmas and Easter when he had started to question his Christianity. The Viet Nam war had cost him the 4^th of July. He had never really loved Halloween or New Years. As far as Ron was concerned the year began in September anyway. Summer was the conclusion of the year. But Thanksgiving had always remained.

He liked the idea of being thankful. He loved the feast. He loved the football games. He loved the way that Marjorie had always respected the spirit of the holiday by inviting people to their house who had nowhere else to go. Aunt Dotty had taught him that Thanksgiving was a holiday that began in Massachusetts and that it always reminded her that she was actually a New England woman by birth.

That Thursday morning he showered and dressed happily. He wanted to call his father and wish him a good holiday, but that was another casualty of Viet Nam. When he started spouting his radical politics and Ron’s half brother and sister had begun to listen to his thoughts, Ron’s father had told him that he wasn’t welcome there anymore. That was the last real conversation that he and his Dad had. That had been over five years now.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Ronald,” said his mother. They kissed quickly. She had started setting the holiday table which started in the dining room and stretched into their living room. George was galloping around the house setting up a bar. He looked excited but glum. “I don’t know who you think is going to drink all that alcohol,” said Marjorie.

George stopped what he was doing. “It’s a holiday. People are allowed to have a drink on the holiday, Marge.”

“I don’t see why they need to,” said Marjorie. She curled her lips and crinkled her nose and shook her head slightly as if she was throwing off a bad odor.

“Who all is coming?” said Ron.

“Reverend Cooly and his wife and Reverend Pascal and his friend,” said Marjorie happily. “And of course your Aunt Mina. I asked the tenants upstairs, but they have someplace to go.”

“Yeah,” said George. “She wanted to take out an ad in the paper but the town already has a soup kitchen.”

“Maybe you should start drinking now,” said Marjorie. “At least then you’ll be able to talk when the company gets here.”

George shook his head. “What would I say to these people?”

“Of course, if it’s not about cards, or booze, or crime, or the price of vegetables, what would you have to contribute? Why do you think I depend on Ronald so much? At least he knows how to carry on a conversation.”

Ron tried to change the mood. “If they are anything like the nuns in the convent George, they’ll go through quite a few bottles of everything.”

George laughed and returned to his preparations.

Marjorie straightened and put her hand on her hip and gave Ron a look of betrayal. “They aren’t Catholics who live all shut away from everything,” she said. She paused and looked over at George and then back at Ron. “Can we please just have a nice dinner? Is that really too much to ask from the both of you?”

Ron moved into the kitchen. The aromas were outstanding.  The roasting turkey filled the house and the oven made everything so warm that George had opened the windows. Ron loved having the windows open in a warm room on a cold day. It was extravagant but the feel of the breeze reminded him of warm weather. Chipper came over and wagged his tail and Ron crouched down to pet him. “I’m gonna take the dog for a walk,” he said.

He leashed Chipper and they went out the back door and through the aluminum gate and down the street. Chipper never got taken for a walk unless Ron was there and the excitement of new smells and freedom gave him a prance to his step. They walked across Bloomfield Avenue and down to the glen, where Ron took the leash off and let Chipper roam. It was their secret that he did this. George would have been horrified that he was going to get into trouble for having a dog off of a leash and Marjorie would have been worried that he was going to run away and get hit by a car again.

Ron talked to the dog as they walked. “It doesn’t seem the same now that Aunt Dottie is gone, does it Chip?”

The dog stopped at the mention of her name. He raised his head and looked around for a few sad seconds and not seeing her, returned to his olfactory cornucopia. Ron smiled and then felt the dried leaves crunch under his feet like the spirits of the dead.

He wondered if there was an afterlife. The resounding no in his brain was painful. It was so much easier to think of his aunt and his grandmother someplace happy and beyond pain. He wondered if that was where the idea of a heaven came from. There had to be some reward for being good. Otherwise, why didn’t people just spend their lives doing what they wanted to do? Wasn’t that the whole purpose of hell, to keep people in line? It wasn’t enough to say that a person would live on in the hearts of others. What kind of real comfort was that if there was nothing about it which a person could actually enjoy? They reached the end of the Glen and Ron leashed Chipper and started back across the street.

Ron held the leash so that it just slacked slightly across the dog’s back, just enough for him to keep his pace and not feel the jerk of confinement. He loved Chipper. It was true that George had announced that it was his dog and then failed to housebreak him and slapped him in the mouth far too many times, so that Chipper had developed that self defensive urge to bite. But the one time that he had bitten Ron, he had with some strange instinct,  crouched down on the floor and held his hand up to Chipper’s mouth and said pleadingly, “no.” That formed a strong pact. Chipper never bit him again and Ron never ever slapped the dog. They turned up the asphalt driveway and through the metal gate and the leash was off, Chipper romped for a few seconds and then came wagging up the backstairs and into the house.

Glimpsing down through the lower windows into the basement and flashed on how he had stayed down there with Chipper when George had taken to chaining the dog there because he could not stop him from urinating in the house. Ron would ask each night if Chipper was allowed out of the basement and George would say, “Not tonight.”  Ron would nod and take his plate from the table and walk downstairs to share his dinner with the dag and sit by him. This move, of course, had driven Marjorie totally insane and she would peck at George about her son eating in the basement until George would inevitably throw up his hands and say, “Do whatever you want.” They moved passed the pantry and up into the kitchen where Ron saw his father, sitting with Marjorie and George, having a holiday drink.

“Hello, Ronald,” said his father with slick gentleness that did not withhold a hint of judgment.

Ron looked up and saw at once that his mother looked younger and sat with a fresh glass of cider in front of her and seems to be glowing. George was sitting back. Ron was not sure what George was seeing.”Hello Dad.”

Ron felt like he was instantly transported back to the age of fourteen or even younger, back to that time in his life when he worshipped his father and everything that his father did. His dad was now sitting in front of a cut crystal glass into which George had poured two fingers of Scotch over two ice cubes. He had also made himself one.

 

“Come and sit at the table, Ronald,” said Marjorie. Ron felt himself moving and sitting. Chipper followed and sat by his side with a look of moral support. “Now, it’s time for the two of you to stop your foolishness and just make up,” said Marjorie.

Now the heat in the room was making Ron sweat, but he resented the way that his mother had put him on the spot and with of all people, his father. “What would you like us to make up, Mom?”

“There’s no reason to be shitty,” said Marjorie.

Ron met his father’s blue eyes with a steady look from his own hazel eyes. He felt the fluttering inside that he always felt when he looked at his father. “It’s good to see you Dad. I hope everything is going well.”

“I hear that you have a job teaching,” said Harry. And then unable to help himself, added “So I guess that you finally finished school.”

Ron eyes flashed a look of defiance. “I may go back. You can never learn enough, you know.”

Harry turned to Marjorie, “Twenty-five years old and still in school.”

And then his eyes panned back to Ron. “You can’t learn everything from books, Ronald.”

“Thanks Dad.”

“Now the two of you just stop it right now.” Marjorie could see her plan swirling around the toilet bowl and just about ready to be flushed.

“How are Carol and Tim?” said Ron, referencing the two children that his father had from his second marriage, the two children that Ron had been told to stay away from.

“They are great. Timmy is playing basketball at Bloomfield High School and Carol graduated from East Orange Catholic last year and is learning to be a lab technician.”

Ron smiled. “That’s great Dad. Tell them that I said, hello.” Ron stopped himself before he added something about unless you think it’s too dangerous for them to hear my name mentioned.

“Why don’t you tell then yourself?” said Harry.

“And just how am I supposed to do that, Dad?”

“You’re welcome at the house anytime.”

“Since when?” said Ron.

“I never said that you couldn’t come there, Ron. I said that I didn’t want you filling their heads with your crazy ideas.” Ron knew that was a lie but it didn’t matter to him.

“Yeah, I know. Thinking that the war was a tragedy and that Nixon was a monster were really crazy ideas. Almost as crazy as thinking that black people were people, huh Dad?”

“Do the two of you always have to be like this?” said Marjorie with desperation in her voice. She looked at Ron and pleaded with her eyes, tried to reach that place where he knew how important this was to her. Bur Ron was unreachable now. He and his father were locked into each other with a gaze that was unbreakable.

“If you had seen the things that I have seen, Ronald, you would understand why I feel the way that I do.”

Ron knew that his father was in and out of some of the seediest bars in Newark New Jersey, a city whose very name struck fear into the minds of some suburban people. He had to admit, he had not seen the things that his father had seen. “Poverty and discrimination make people do very strange things Dad. It’s not like everything became great when the Civil War was over, you know?”

“I’m not one of your students, Ron.” said his father with a steely timbre in his voice.

“No Dad, my students are mostly Black and Hispanic.”

“Bunch of animals,” said George, trying to show solidarity with Harry.

Anger flashed across Ron’s face.  “You know what I have found George? The Hispanic families are very much like the Italian ones. They love their culture. They take care of their kids. They resent anyone who is not the same as they are and they like loud meals. And to top it all off they are Catholic.”

George reddened. To his way of thinking he had just been called a spic. Harry could see this wasn’t going the way that Marjorie had said that it would. “Well I guess that I better get going. Ronald, you are welcome to come over whenever you want. Carol and Tim would love to see you.”

“Really?” said Ron. “Where do they think I’ve been?’

Harry didn’t answer but stood and put on his coat. Marjorie automatically stood up to. So did George. Ron sat there. He really didn’t want his father to go, but what could he do about it now?

Marjorie walked Harry to the door and when she came back her face was set into a hard mask. She walked into the kitchen where Ron was petting Chipper and waiting for what he knew was coming. “Why are you such a bastard?”

Ron didn’t answer.

“Your father is a proud man. Do you think that it was easy for him to come here and apologize to you?”

“Did I miss the apology?”

“Him coming here was an apology. He knows that he’s made some mistakes. But he is a good man and he is your father!”

“Makes you wonder about nature and nurture doesn’t it?”

“I’m not as smart as you are, you little bastard, so I guess I’m going to have to ask you to explain that to me.”

“What it means is, Mom, can you imagine what it would have been like if he had stuck around to raise me?”

Marjorie was taken aback. That was not what she had expected him to say. Harry would have been very hard on Ron and she knew how free he was with his hands. She regretted a lot of things about her failed marriage with Harry, but seeing Ron and then trying to imagine how he would have turned out with even more of Harry’s influence on him was not one of them, even if he did need a good clout in the head once in a while. She knew that Harry would have been jealous of his brain.

Chapter 29

Ron woke up and saw that there were still two and half joints left in the ashtray. Maybe he was slipping. The dream left him troubled as it always did. He made coffee and kept seeing glimpses of the floor in his head.

His phone was ringing.

“Ronald, this is your mother.”

For a moment Ron was stunned. Had they found the body? Is that why she was calling? “Hi mom,” he said almost shakily.

“Why aren’t you working?”

“They gave us the half day off.”

“I just had an interesting phone call. It was Robin. It seems that she thinks that you are living here.”

A new fear gripped Ron.  “What did you tell her?”

“I didn’t tell her anything. Just that you weren’t here.”

“That’s good,” sighed Ron.

“I really don’t want to see you mixed up with that girl again, Ronald. She isn’t any good for you.”

“I know Mom.”

“And I really don’t want to be involved in your lies.”

“I know Mom.”

“Your father was a liar and I thought that I had taught you better than that.”

“You did Mom.”

“Well it doesn’t really seem that I did. Anyway, she asked that you call her.”

“OK.”

“Are you going to call her?”

“Yes,” he said quietly.

“Why? she said. “So that she can break your heart again?”

“No Mom,” he said with a slight tone of exasperation creeping into his voice.

“I always thought that you were so smart. Why do you have to be so stupid about this?”

Ron didn’t say anything.

She went on. “But I suppose you are going to do whatever you want to do. You always have. You won’t care how it hurts me or anyone else to see you the way that she makes you.” Ron felt his head hang and he began pacing as he listened to her.  “Well, I don’t suppose that there is any chance that you would have the time to take your mother to the cemetery today.”

“I really had plans, Mom.”

“What, to mope around your apartment and sulk about Robin?”

Then a new thought seemed to strike her. “Where’s the other girl? The little mousey one.”

“She isn’t mousey.”

“When she squints through those glasses she is mousey.”

“She’s with her parents for the holiday. If you really need me to take you to the graves…” his voice trailed off.

“Oh no, I’m not about to beg you to go and see your grandmother and my mother and Uncle Mike and the Aunt that you professed to have so much love for.” She paused and then said. “How many times have you visited your Aunt’s grave?”

“I don’t know Mom.”

“When was the last time that you were there?”

“I don’t remember”

“Such a fine memory and he can’t remember the last time he went to the cemetery. I suppose it will be the same way with me, won’t it? You’ll never visit my grave”

Ron had had enough and then he said out of nowhere, “Do you think that there’s a body buried in the basement?”

“What!” he voice was incredulous. “What kind of a thing is that to say to a person?  Do I think there’s a body buried in the basement? George will you listen to this?” she called out. “Ronald wants to know if we have a body buried in the basement.”

“Go and do whatever things that you have to do Ronald. What time will you be here tomorrow?”

“Whatever time you want me there, Mom.”

“You’re not bringing Robin are you?”

“No, Mom I’m not.”

When he hung up the phone, he called Robin immediately. She answered on the second ring.

“It’s Ron, my mom said that you called.”

“Yes, she was surely happy to hear my voice.”

Ron didn’t answer for a long time. “You know how our parents are. None of them, with the exception of my father, seems to like the one of us for the other.”

“That’s not really true Ron. My mom likes you very much.”

“Anyway,” said Ron. “What’s up?”

“Are you still mad about last night?”

“I wasn’t mad,” he said. “I was hurt. Why do you always think that I’m mad when you’ve hurt me?”

“I don’t want to argue, Ron. I called to tell you that I’m going back on Saturday and I was wondering if you could take me to the air

port?”

“I don’t think I can. I have something that I promised to do with a friend.”

She was silent. She was not at all used to Ron saying no to her. Then she said, “We’re even going to lose our friendship because I won’t fuck you aren’t we?”

For the first time in Ron could not remember how long, he felt himself seething with anger at Robin. His had gripped the phone tightly.  “Yeah Robin, fucking you is what I’m all about.”

“I didn’t say that. But the truth is Ron, that if I were fucking you, you wouldn’t be mad at all.”

Ron’s voice with almost a hiss when he spoke.  “I asked you to marry me last night and we haven’t made love in years now. And you still think that it’s all about me sleeping with you? It doesn’t matter what I say or do for you. You still think it’s all about that.”

Robin seemed to recoil on the phone. Ron could sense the look on her face. He could see the way that her jaw line squared. He could see the way that her forehead furrowed. He could sense the way she tilted her head so that he blond hair hung down over her face. “If it’s going to be like this, we shouldn’t see each other anymore.”

Ron caught himself before he uttered the word “fine.” He kept it locked inside of his brain. “Do you want me to drive down and pick you up?”

“Not if we are going to fight.”

“We won’t fight,” he said.

“Then I would love to see you,” she answered.

Ron drove down the parkway wondering why it was that he found himself so helpless around her. Was it because that she was the first woman that he really had loved? Was it because she was the first woman that really had hurt him? In fact she had devastated him. He had needed to have people put him back together and in some ways he felt that he would never be the same. He thought about a Fitzgerald essay. Was he like “a cracked plate” that had been glued back together and which people would never really trust because it could always fall apart? Was he so damaged that he would never again feel really whole? Was it like his knees? He remembered lying in the hospital bed after that first surgery and realizing that he would never be the same again. Was this like that? Were affairs of the heart very much like what happened to damaged limbs? They could be put back together but they would never have that “full throated ease” or feel that unrestrained joy again.

He reached her mother’s apartment and stood at the door. He needed answers to these questions but he was pretty sure that the answers were not going to come from a conversation with Robin. They didn’t have those tender conversations any more. It was then that the realization hit him that he could not rely on her.

When she opened the door she put her arms around his neck and kissed him. It was a lover’s kiss. She molded her body to him and he swore that he could feel her hips moving against him. She said, “I didn’t think that you’d come.”

Ron felt like a dog who had been given a treat. He wondered if he should wag his tail in the hopes of another. Robin felt his immediate reaction when she pressed against him. Feeling his hardness, she was reassured.

Chapter 28

 

On Tuesday, Robin told Ron that she was going back to Minneapolis after the holiday. She told him on the phone. She didn’t want to see his face when he heard the words, but she saw it in her mind’s eye anyway.  She asked him if there was anything special that he wanted to do with her before she left.

“When are you coming back?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about over Christmas?”

“That’s too soon,” she said. “I won’t be able to afford it.”

Ron blurted, “I don’t want you to go.”

“That’s my home now Ron and besides you have a lot going on here. You have your students and you need to find a place to live. And I think I will be better off out there.”

“What’s so great about Minneapolis?”

“You thought it was beautiful when you were here.  Maybe you’ll come back and visit me again.”

Ron felt himself freeze on the other end of the phone. Go back there! She really expected him to go back there? The last time it almost killed him to be there.

She heard the silence on the other end of the line. Then she said in a small voice, “What’s so great about living here?”

“It’s our home.”

“It’s your home.” Now she wondered if she should have told him at all until the last minute. He would spend the next two days sulking about it and be no fun at all. Why couldn’t he just learn to accept things as they were? Why did he always have to try to change everything until it was the way that he wanted it?

They drove into New York City.  Ron told her that the school had given them an extra half day off. The rumor was that they wanted to save the money on heat but no one cared. At the end of the day on Tuesday, Irene Emanuel came on the loudspeaker and announced that Father Jones had decided that everyone could use the extra time as a reward for their hard work and so the girls could help their mothers prepare for the holiday feast. They were also reminded that there would be extra masses said on Thursday and that there was no better way of showing thanks and appreciation than to come to God’s house to start the holiday.

The city was alive with traffic and holiday lights and an air of the frenzied festivities. Ron was pleased to see that the backstreet where he was always able to find a place to park was still relatively undiscovered. He side his Chevy neatly into a place and then they walked around the block to her old school.

Before she’d left for Minneapolis, Robin was on scholarship to an acting school. He had picked her up from school the four nights a week that classes were held and they had walked these streets together often and knew all of the cafes.
Ron thought that the West Village was nothing like the East Village. Things seemed cleaner and more expensive. They slid into a booth at a café on West 4^th Street. They stared out the window and Robin remembered how much she loved The City and how she would someday come back and live here.  Then he began quoting lines from the Leonard Melfi play Birdbath.

It was a play that they had done on stage together. And the lines made her laugh and he was laughing too and then he took her hands and said, “I really don’t want you to go.”

He noticed that she didn’t pull her hands back when she said, “I know.”

He decided to plunge on. “Suppose we got married?”

Now she did pull her hands back.  “Ron, we aren’t even lovers anymore and besides, I’m seeing someone.”

Ron face crumpled like a squashed carton.  He lit a cigarette. His hands were shaking. The place seemed very hot and noisy. He looked at his reflection in the glass. He stared at the table. He tried to look anywhere but at her. He desperately wanted not to cry. Finally, he asked, “Do you love him?”

She laughed lightheartedly. “I don’t think so.”

Then he got very quiet. All he could see was images of Robin and her faceless, nameless lover. She stood on her toes to kiss him. Her hands hurried his hips as they made love. Her special smiles were all reserved for him. It was for him that she brought home presents. It was to him that she told her secret thoughts. She told him how she counted in colors. She sang Broadway tunes for him. He could see her now. Her voice gentle and high as she sang, “I would die, I would die, I would strangle myself with my tie. If ever you said good-bye, then I’d die.” He remembered when she has sung that for him and now he did wear a tie every day.

Robin quietly kicked herself for the way that she had handled it. Why hadn’t she seen it coming? Why had she told him that she was going back? Why had she ever mentioned Richard?

“Ron, don’t you see how much baggage we have?” she asked quietly.

“I see but I don’t understand why we can’t make it different.”

When he dropped her off, she leaned over and kissed him. It was a long and tender kiss. He felt her arms go around his neck and felt her breasts push against his chest and he tried hard not to over-react and so he didn’t react at all.

“Will you call me tomorrow?” she asked.

“Sure,” said Ron and then she was gone. He drove down towards Rahway and when he passed the house he saw that all the lights were on and that there were cars in the driveway. He slowed down but he didn’t stop. He drove back up the parkway to his apartment and when he walked in the door the phone was ringing. It was Zoe.

Ron loved many things about Zoe but right now chief among them was that she never asked where he had been. He was there now and that was all that she seemed to care about.

“I can’t wait till Friday,” said Zoe. “I miss sleeping with you and drawing you and doing the things that we do.”

“It’s good that you’re getting to see your sisters and your parents. How are things going up there?”

“Heidi really wants to meet you. She says that you sound neato.”

“Neato,” repeated Ron. “Well, tell Heidi that’s the very first time that I have been told that I am neato. And what has your older sister had to say?”

“She just says to have fun with you and to be careful to not let you break my heart. But I don’t care. You can break my heart if you need to break it.”

All at once Ron felt tender and guilty. She was so incredibly vulnerable. She deserved at least some modicum of loyalty.

“On Saturday, can we go and pick out a stone?”

“Sure,” said Ron. “Should we be stoned to pick out a stone?”

He waited for Zoe to laugh but she answered seriously. “I think it would help if we were. We would caress the surfaces with more sensitivity and feel if there were interior cracks or faults.”

Ron smiled. Maybe this was the girl for him. Then she solidified the feeling saying softly, “I’ve been so horny. I’m wet all the time. I can’t believe how much I have missed sleeping with you.”

After the call, Ron looked through his albums. They had salvaged much more from his burnt out shell of an apartment than he thought would have been possible, and Zoe had brought down her stereo. He put an old Dylan album on the turntable and grinned to himself as he placed the needle in just the right spot. Dylan intoned, “If you’re travelling in the North Country fair, where the winds hit heavy on the borderline. Remember me to the one who lives there. She once was a true love of mine.”

Immediately tears sprang to his eyes. He needed to smoke a joint. He always needed more than one and so he rolled his customary 3 joints and lay back and listened to the songs roll over him. Then he shifted to Jackson Browne’s first album and dropped the needle at the start of Jamaica. He lay his head back and thought, there they were in a nutshell. Robin the girl from the north county, and Zoe the beautiful Captain’s daughter from Jamaica.

The taste of the pot was fine. He felt it swirl into him with a welcoming haze and the soft glow of the interior light that illuminated his brain when he was high. But then “My Opening Farewell” found its way into his mind and he saw Robin standing in front of that open window.  He wondered if it would be easier if he was the one who was going and not the one who had been left behind.

When he slept that night he had one of his two recurring dreams. He could almost feel himself groan in his sleep when the dream started. It was by far the one that scared him the most. In the other dream, he was waiting in a car and then he was shot and in a hospital bed while people gathered around him. He was not in pain in the dream but he could not move and then he felt himself getting better and stronger and would find himself in the car again waiting to be shot. That was the easier dream, but this one scared him so completely.

He was in the basement of his mother’s house. And he was digging up the concrete floor. He was digging up a body that he had buried there. The body was wrapped in plastic and he could not see who it was but the fear that rushed through him caused his heart to race and made him break out into a sweat in his sleep. He could not remember killing someone. But there was this body and he was sure that he had put it there and now he was trying to get it out before someone discovered it. He pounded on the concrete and felt it crack and then break into huge chunks. He swung the sledge hammer down hard and watched sparks and dust and small shards of stone break off. And then he could see the plastic and the sight woke him up.

He sat up shaking in the darkness. He could never really kill anyone, could he? The answer did not come from inside of him. Was the silence an indictment?  Had he really done it and repressed it? Would he be found out as the murderer that he was and thrown into some dank hole and be forgotten? Had he really ended a life? No, he tried to scream to himself. He could not have done that, he would never do that.

Why would he bury the body there? Right in front of the washing machine and the dryer. How had he repaved the floor? George would surely have noticed. He would have been caught a long time ago if it had really happened. But he kept dreaming it and the dreams came at the most unexpected of times. A body wrapped in heavy plastic beneath a concrete floor in his mother’s basement and he was responsible for it being there. He was the only one who knew that it was there. Ron tried to tell himself that he read too much Edgar Allen Poe.

Chapter 27

That Monday Ron sensed a new feeling in his classes; it was the air of expectation. They had not had a holiday since school began and with the brief exception of Halloween, it had all been business and their teachers had driven them to start to create an atmosphere of hard work. No one had driven them harder than Ron, but he was probably the least aware of it. He was having fun. He was learning to teach and it never occurred to him one time that he was assigning pages each and every night and that they were writing on average two essays a week.

He was surprised when Irene Emanuel asked him to stop at her office and to bring his grade book with him.  He had tried very hard to be neat with the book, but there had been a large number of transfers. Most of these had happened during the first weeks of class. Irene Emanuel had a keen ear and she had heard the girls talking about how much they loved his class. She had also questioned some of the older girls about what went on in his room.

“He works us like slaves, Sister, but he makes it seem like fun. I wind up doing twice as much work for him as I do for my other teachers, but it’s not because I am afraid of him.”

“Then why, Andrea, do you think it is that you work so hard for him?”

“I don’t want to hurt him, Sister.”

Irene Emanuel looked at her with some sense of surprise. “What do you mean?”

“When some of us didn’t do our homework, he was hurt. We could see it on his face. It depressed him and made him sad. And we want to make him happy, because the class is so much fun when he is happy.”

Irene Emanuel thought that either this man was a genius or the recipient of dumb luck to have stumbled into that situation. She had spent enough time talking with him to be pretty sure that he was no genius.

They sat together in her office and Ron handed her the grade book. She looked at it and hid the shock that she felt at seeing 20 graded entries for each student. She wondered what he was grading them on. She said, “The assignments are numbered, Mr. Tuck, how do you remember what the numbers represent?”

“At the back of the book Sister, there is a list of the assignments for each class with the numbers next to them.”

She scanned the back of the book. She felt her mouth open when she saw how many of the assignments were essays. Ron searched her face while she scanned his book. He looked for some clue that would let him know if she was pleased with his work or if he was about to be fired. He couldn’t take it if they were going to fire him. If he had to leave his students and be a failure to them, everything that he said to them would be lost. They would just be the words of some loser guy who claimed to know what was right but was just full of shit like everyone else.

“Mr. Tuck, I rarely say this, and I cannot actually remember having said it before, but you need to slow down. It’s a long way until June and you do not wish to exhaust yourself and your students before you even get to the winter.”

Ron breathed a sigh of relief. If he knew anything at all about the Catholics in general and these nuns in particular it was that they would never fire him for working too hard.

When he got home from school he changed his clothes quickly and was out the door before the call came from Zoe. She listened to the phone ring in the empty apartment and thought about just surprising him and driving down. After all it was her apartment too, even if she didn’t pay any of the rent. Why did she feel that she always had to call first? But she let the phone ring and ring and then hung up and went into the bathroom so that she could vomit up her lunch before it turned to fat.

Robin looked very tense when she answered the door. Ron could see it immediately. “Is something wrong?”

She shook her head and her eyes got this faraway look in them. Her high cheekbones seemed more hollow than usual and she said the words while she stared at a closed door. “She locked herself in there and she has been drinking all morning. It reminds me of why it is so bad for me around here.”

“It’s because you are living with her,” he said.

“That’s part of it. I thought I would be staying with you and then I wouldn’t have to see any of this.”

Ron felt a freezing wash of guilt pass over him and she saw it too. She knew what it was. He was feeling the need to protect her. She didn’t want him to protect her. She didn’t want anyone to protect her.

They walked to the corner store and bought two containers of coffee and then they sat in his car and drank them. Ron tried to brighten the mood. He grinned his best dimpled grin and said, “Do you remember what our holidays used to be like?”

Robin sipped and smiled, and then she laughed. “They were awful, Ron. Between your father and mother and my father and mother and Rahway, we ate five meals and went home feeling sick and wanting to die.”

Ron said, “And our mothers would time each of our visits to see who we spent more time with.”

“That was your mother,” said Robin. “God, how that woman hates me.” She doesn’t hate you as much as she was frightened by the way that I feel about you. She thought we were going to get married.”

The thought pierced into Robin’s brain instantly. There had been a time when she had thought so too. Before all the pot and before the arguments about how he made his money and before he had forced her to have Hank live with them. She supposed that she could still have him marry her, but then how would she ever see the world? Ron was staying in New Jersey. He was a local guy. He had limited expectations for what he believed was possible. He would tie her up and hold her back and eventually she would wind up knocked up, poor and living with a man who reminded her too much of her father. It was only one small step from that to her becoming her mother and that was not going to be her life! She felt her resolve grow stronger. Ron watched her face harden and wondered what he had done wrong.

Chapter 26

On Sunday, Ron threw himself into his work. He lay across the mattresses and spread out papers and drank coffee and read. And then he was transported. He was back with his students and their essays embraced him like loving arms and he shared his feeling for them through his eyes and through his pen. He could picture each of them now as he read. He could see their faces and saw their hands crafting the essays as he walked up and down the aisles of his classroom.

Andrea wrote, “I can’t say that I enjoyed these stories but I’m glad that I read them.”

Donna wrote, “I feel stupid when I read this stuff because I never see the things in the stories that you do and I don’t think that I ever will.”

Lizette wrote, “These people were corny but not as corny as the Grendel story. I really hated that one.”

Anita wrote, “It helped to have us tell the stories to each other. Maybe they were stories that were meant to be told instead of being read because it was really interesting to hear them but really boring to read them.”

Judy wrote, I don’t agree with the Wife of Bath. I don’t think that women wish to have dominion over men. I think they want men to treat them like people. I think they still want that.”

Ron read the last one again with large smile on her face. She got it! That is what the literature is for. It is to help people to think about the world and themselves in the world.

Yvonne wrote, “I understand why they hated Jews, I hate them too.” Ron groaned as he read that one. “They got what they deserved for killing Jesus.”

Ron wondered if he had the right to address those kinds of prejudices. Was his goal to teach them about the language or to change the way that they thought.  Well, the two did not have to be mutually exclusive Could he show her that he hated that attitude and not have her think that he hated her for having that attitude?

The phone rang and it was Zoe and she sounded vibrant and filled him with her electricity. “Are you working?’

“Yes, I’ve been at it for hours.”

“Have you thought about me?”

“Yes.”

He wondered if a woman really deserved to hear the truth when she asked a question like that. He hadn’t thought of her once. He thought about Robin and their conversation and their plans for tomorrow evening. He had thought about his students. But he hadn’t thought about her. Did that mean that he didn’t love her?

“Do you want to see me?”

Ron winced. “I can’t drive up there today Zoe, I really have too much work to get done before tomorrow.”

Zoe giggled. “With my sisters at home there are plenty of cars around. I could just drive down to see you.”

“That would be great,” said Ron. “Why don’t you leave in about an hour? That way I will be completely ready for a break when you get here.”

When they hung up, he thought. “Zoe is like a wet dream and I thought of nothing but her until I got Robin’s letter. And since Robin has been here, I haven’t thought of her at all, except how to keep her a secret from Robin. But Robin doesn’t make me happy and Zoe does. Does that mean that I don’t want to be happy?  Shouldn’t I be thinking about the girl who does make me happy? But would that make me a real phony if I tried to tell myself what I should be thinking about? Too many questions without answers!” Ron tried to think about Zoe and automatically found himself squeezing his cock. He never touched himself when he thought about Robin. He wondered if that had always been true and what it meant if it was true. Then he turned back to the papers.

Rosa wrote, “All these people were greedy and their stories talk about how bad greed is. Did they know they were being bad when they were greedy?”

Una wrote, “I want to read stories that are true. Why are all the stories that we read made up?”

Ron wrote back to each of them like they were having a conversation. He knew that sometimes what he scrawled was illegible but they would just ask him what he had written and it would give him a chance to say what he had said to that particular girl to the whole class. Illegible handwriting could be a tool, it occurred to him. Unless they didn’t ask what it meant. In that case they probably wouldn’t have wanted to read what he had written anyway.