The English Teacher by Lily King Page A

about his house being transformed into a school, despite all the undeserved credit bestowed upon him. He’d been forced to sell because his only child, Vida’s mother, had married a dreamer who’d whistled through the family’s money within a decade. Though she had no memories of ever having visited this house, she did remember him, a crooked branch of a man, speechless from strokes, tufts of white hair growing from the tops of his ears. He was the one who named her. He hadn’t spoken for months but when her mother placed her in his arms for the first time, saying, “It’s baby Vivian, Grandy,” he smiled so wide her mother said she heard his face crack, and he said eloquently, seemingly proficient in a language no one had known he knew, “No, mi amor, su nombre es Vida.” Another crack, then “Life!” That was his final word, though it took him several more years and the loss of his house to die. When Vida left Texas all those years later, without a map or a plan, nothing surprised her more than finding herself in Fayer, atthe enormous front door of her grandfather’s house. No one had told her it had become a school. Within a few weeks she had a job as a substitute English teacher, and by the next fall she’d been given a full-time contract and the gardener’s cottage.
Though she’d requested high school, they started her with the sixth grade and she’d had to push her way up a grade a year until she’d secured herself a spot in the English department of the upper school. Since then, she’d turned down every promotion offered to her: English chair three times, dean of students, dean of faculty, curriculum director, and assistant head of school. The only thing Fayer Academy had offered her that she’d accepted, above and beyond a teaching contract each year, was the Hutchinson Prize, chosen and awarded at graduation by the senior class for superior teaching, which she’d received four times, most recently last June. She didn’t know then, as she rose to accept another sparkling silver bowl, that a man named Tom Belou was seated in the seventeenth row. What she did know is that she was a fool at the podium, fighting back tears of all things, tears for the senior class with whom she’d formed a special, unexpected bond, and tears for her dear friend Carol whose son, she had learned that morning, had committed suicide. She’d pushed out a few platitudes of thanks and hurried back to her seat beside Peter, raw and embarrassed. At that moment, Tom claimed, Vida became the first thing since the death of his wife to disturb him, to make him anxious for the passing of time as one senior then another then another rose from a folding chair, ambled self-consciously across the grass to the lectern, received a diploma, and ambled back.
By the end of the ceremony he’d worked his way to her row of seats and was the first to congratulate her on her award. He was the godfather of one of the graduates, he told her. Could she join them for dinner? She didn’t like thinking back on this day and the breaks in her voice at the podium. What could he have seen in her then?Perhaps it wasn’t her at all but that crazy senior class whom she’d loved, who’d risen and hooted and whooped as she walked to the lectern, as if she were not a teacher but a stripper in nothing but high heels and tassels. Was it simply the energy of that moment, such a contrast to the wake of death he found himself bobbing in? Here was life, he might have said to himself; seize it now. Oh she would disappoint him. She was not life. They were all wrong about that.
Assembly had already started. On stage, Greg Rathburn, the history chair who took every world occurrence personally, was explaining the events in Iran. Vida remained in the doorway instead of taking her seat with the juniors across the room. Greg asked for a moment of silence for the ninety Americans being held at the embassy. Vida bent her head but did not shut her eyes or think of the