The English Teacher by Lily King

supper they’ll be free. These things wrap up very quickly.” She tried to think of an example and couldn’t. She was hopeless when it came to historical facts. The events didn’t adhere properly in her brain. She never understood why moments in novels were unforgettable, while in real life the details slipped quickly away. A few weeks ago she couldn’t even explain the Bay of Pigs to Peter. All she knew was that she was reading Middlemarch at the time. She remembered Dorothea and the wretched Casaubon, and how they had just arrived in Rome for their wedding journey when her mother called her in to listen to President Kennedy’s speech. But she couldn’t recall what he’d said or in what order the events had unfolded or exactly how it had been resolved. All that came to her when she tried was Dorothea and Will’s trembling kiss by the window at the end.
They passed through the stone pillars, Scientia carved into one and In Perpetuum into the other, and followed the slow-moving line of station wagons up the hill. She hadn’t been part of this carpool convergence for sixteen years. She glanced over the girls’ field to theirold house and the path that ran across a ridge to the school. When he was younger, Peter had a small red canvas backpack that was never filled with more than a pencil and a few exercise sheets. He’d run ahead of her on that path to school, the nearly empty backpack bobbing behind him, stopping only to scoop up something from the ground and drop it into her hand, the soft brown ball of a frightened caterpillar or a long, sticky worm.
There was no ancestral tug as the mansion came into view. There never was. The oversized house, with its bays, turrets, and copper-plated mansard roof, was a school to her, just as it was to everyone else creeping up the long driveway this morning.
Vida pulled into her faculty spot beside the cafeteria. Through one window, a few students from Peter’s class hunched over their notes, cramming for something, and through another Marjorie and Olivia in their white uniforms and nurses’ shoes were already setting up for the lower school snack.
They sat for a moment in the stilled car.
“You have a test today?” she asked.
“Quiz.”
“History?”
“Yeah.” He was poised to bolt. He didn’t like to be seen walking into school with her anymore.
She could tell he was worried, but she couldn’t brush his bangs out of his eyes or lift his chin toward her. She couldn’t do that anymore, if she ever had. He was changing so fast and she was too scared to look at him for any length of time. “Did you get a chance to study last night?” she said gently.
He gave some sort of stifled snort through his nose and shook his head. It was rude—the snort, the aversion of his eyes, the lack of words. She wasn’t used to rudeness in him. But before she could correct him, he got out and slumped away around the building to the front entrance where he would blend in with the rest.
How dare he be disillusioned already. She slid her bookbag from the backseat onto her lap and shoved open her door. Screw it if he didn’t like it. He’d gotten what he asked for. Welcome to life and all its shitty little tricks. Her irritation at him rose, chafing hard against her affection. This was the nameless emotion she felt most in life, this abrasion of love meeting anger.
She walked up the scrubby knoll to the basement entrance, her tight fists bared to the cold, her head leading her body like a sledgehammer. She was a hard woman. Yet Tom said last summer, when he first kissed her, that she was like a heron, with her long neck and delicate bones.
In the vestibule outside the auditorium there was a bronze bust of her grandfather. No delicate man, he. His wild wiry eyebrows, suspended at the edge of his enormous brow, and his thick, nearly detached jaw belonged in a natural history museum. He had the childlike impatience of an old man who did not want to sit for a sculptor, who did not care