MRS. JOCELYN’S SON Hammond had been doing spectacularly in pre-algebra and it was a delight to tell her so. I waxed on about Hammond’s innate quantitative ability, his friendly and helpful manner in class, his creative problem-solving skills. I segued to a gentle suggestion that there might be occasional interpersonal difficulties, but nothing to worry about. These I knew were primarily due to Hammond’s poor hygiene—his nickname among his peers was “Grease”—but I had no intention of mentioning that in a parent-teacher conference. The kid caused me no problems and was a whiz at the math.
Mrs. Jocelyn beamed brighter as I brought the conference to a close with the classic pleasure-to-teach. Not that I’m insincere when I use it, but you develop a certain shorthand for these things, and sometimes it’s surprising how completely parents fall for it. Mrs. Jocelyn’s pride in her son shone through an otherwise haggard demeanor—Hammond was the third of her kids I had taught in as many years, and God only knew how many more were in line, wearing the poor woman out with their hygiene issues and their need to be fed and their unsettling intellectual gifts Hammond and his siblings all attended Sheffield Academy on academic scholarship. Mrs. Jocelyn was proud of her brood, and genuinely grateful for the opportunities Sheffield afforded them. She touched a hand to the ruffled neckline of a pale green, faded-looking dress when she thanked me.
The conferences were drawing to a close. Most of the parents had been sane and polite and unassuming. Others lived up to the cliché of private school parents, furrowing their brows and jabbering on about college prospects, with the occasional hint of threat underneath the concerned veneer, as though five years from now I’d better watch my back if their kid ended up at the ag tech. A good portion, maybe a third of the total, had no clue about their twelve-year-olds, academically or otherwise. That proportion would increase sharply over the next few years, reaching something close to a hundred percent parental cluelessness by the time the kids hit tenth grade. I was starting my third year of teaching and felt pretty confident with he ropes. It’s amazing how fast you learn to read the parents, how few surprises there ever are. Early in the evening, Emily Warrenton’s mother had cried a little, but that was nothing I hadn’t seen before.
It was exactly ten after nine when I ushered Mrs. Jocelyn out the door. I said goodbye with the freshest smile I could muster at that late hour, and reminded myself that I was almost done—only Timmy Dolan and Rachel Allimont left to go. I worried that I might not be up to the task of filling the Dolans in on the subtleties of what I perceived to be Timmy’s rather deep-rooted problems, partly because I was getting fuzzy with fatigue. I’d caught myself at one point telling Mrs. Jocelyn that Hammond had gotten a whiz on the last test, but I was pretty sure she hadn’t noticed.
Rachel’s parent were waiting in the hall, sitting awkwardly in the student desk-chair combinations that had been lined up out there, an indignity all the parents had to suffer. They were scheduled for after Timmy’s parents but had arrived early. Rachel’s mother, a petite woman in jeans and a jean jacket with a notebook open in front of her, said hello to Mrs. Jocelyn and then apologetically to me, “Don’t mind us, Mr. Wesley. They told us how you like to stick to your schedule.” She mimed zipping her lip and waved me back into the classroom with complicated self-effacing semaphore: we’ll wait our turn, we’re humble people—an offering of patience tot he teacher conference gods, that her mute deference might earn her daughter a glowing report. Her husband sat next to her smiling dully, a big genial man crammed into his desk, obliviously used to this kind of nonsense from the little lady. I was sure it all said something about why Rachel was so clearly headed toward eating disorders, but I was too tired to piece it together. I considered telling them to come in and get it over with since there were no Dolans in sight, but instead I waved my thanks and ducked back into the room for a breather.
I went back to my desk and turned to my notes on Timmy Dolan, wondering which “they” had made me out to Rachel’s parents to be a persnickety schedule Nazi. Probably Mary Ann in the front office, who had always had some kind of problem with me. I glanced out the window at the leafy autumn parking lot, where several figures milled about among the cars in the eerie glow of metal halide lighting. I was about among the cars in the eerie glow of metal halide lighting. I was about to let the Allimonts in when there was a knock on the door. I put on a charming attitude and rose to greet the Dolans.
The wife opened the door and smiled at me apologetically, mock-devastated. She was white, which I had heard, and tall. She moved confidently into the room, revealing a startlingly handsome black man with a squarish face that I recognized immediately. Gray at the temples, tall like his wife, wide shoulders, tweed jacket. He looked at me and paused in the doorway as if considering a retreat, then stepped in and closed the door behind him in a kind of dazed slow motion. I’d had sex with him in Yellow Notch Park. Twice.
Mrs. Dolan said, “I’m so, so sorry. Are those poor people in the hall waiting because of us?”
I half nodded, half shook my head, keeping my eyes on hers.
“It’s inexcusable, I know,” she continued. “I’m Loretta Dolan and this is my husband John.”
I extended my hand and she took it in both hers and squeezed a further apology. When she released it, I extended it toward her husband, with a dizzying awareness of having done so in the past. He took it and we shook hands perfunctorily, but with a moment of direct eye contact. In one glance we both saw that the other knew, and that we were on our own.
I remembered those eyes: beautiful and deeply brown. They had once looked at me with raw appraisal and veiled interest, and then, when we ran into each other the second time, with recognition and playfulness and desire. And he had noticed mine, too. Those are some beautiful green eyes now, aren’t they?
“Nice to meet you both,” I said, motioning them to take the chairs that faced my desk. THey were adult-sized folding chairs, not demeaning student desklets, but as I took my own more comfortable seat behind the bulwark of my desk, I wondered if the arrangement might make some parents feel an unwelcome power dynamic. It occurred to me that in this ase I should feel grateful for any advantage, but I’d had no such intention when I first chose the setup two years ago. The prospect of unconscious unacknowledged intentions of all sorts suddenly filled my brain, vaguely and alarmingly.
And yet my exterior seemed to show no alarm, no distress, any. more than Mr. Dolan’s did. He sat next to his wife and took her hand in his. He wore a thick gold wedding band, which had not been there in the park. From all indications—the small, finely calibrated smile on his face, the precise relaxation of his body, neither too rigid nor too loose—the initial panic I was sure I had witnessed just seconds earlier had completely vanished, or perhaps had never been there at all. He sat with his wife and waited for me to begin. The beautiful eyes showed friendliness and attentiveness in perfect proportion for the parent-teacher conference scenario. I smiled at Mr. and Mrs. Dolan exactly as I expected to be smiling at Mr. and Mrs. Allimont in ten minutes’ time. It was astonishing how accomplished Mr. Dolan and I both were at this, whatever it was we were doing.
“Okay,” Mrs. Dolan said with a comically exaggerated sigh, “let’s hear the bad news.” She glanced at her husband with a little laugh, then back at me.
“Oh, no. No bad news,” I said. “Not really.” I pushed around some papers on my desk, looking for my notes on Timmy, and remembered that they were on top of the pile.
“Timmy’s a great kid,” I said, habit coming to my rescue. It generally seemed best to start with something noncommittally positive like great-kid. It was never really a lie. A kid could be great in any number of ways—most kids were, if you looked hard enough for the evidence—and still be abominable in plenty of others.
“Oh, good,” said Mrs. Dolan. “It’s so nice to hear at least something positive, even if you don’t really mean it. The reason we were late was Ms. Davis had so many bad things to say about Timmy that she kept us there for twenty minutes, didn’t she, honey?” Nadine Davis taught earth science. She and I had often commiserated about Timmy over coffee.
“She was unkind,” said Mr. Dolan. The voice was deep and masculine, self-confident, not quite how I remembered it. I had known him to use it only sparingly—some beautiful green eyes now. I wasn’t sure I had used my own at all in my encounters with him. His was all direct efficiency now, but its availability for sensual nuance was there in the undertones. The smile appeared to be fading.
“No, not unkind,” said Mrs. Dolan, removing her hand from his. She looked at me to check my reaction, which I hoped was neutral. “She was just very clear about certain things.”
I found myself searching for a phrase that wouldn’t come to me, something descriptive of this encounter or some aspect of it. There was a perfect word for it, but I couldn’t think what it was.
“I call it unkind when someone calls my son maladjusted,” he said.
Mrs. Dolan rolled her eyes in my direction as if to ask my indulgence, then turned to her husband and said, “She didn’t say that . And do you mean unkind to him or to you?”
Down low was the phrase. He was having sex with other men in secret. He was on the down low.
“To him,” he said evenly. He shifted his focus to me. The smile fell away. I imagined I saw him decide, in his annoyance with his wife and Nadine, that if behaving normally was going to be his goal, he might as well drop the politeness act. “But why don’t we hear what Mr. Wesley thinks.”
“Oh,” I said, “I’m sure Ms. Davis doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” The disorientation that sets in after three hours of conferences is a kind of drunkenness. I felt unfit for the concentration this was going to require.
Mrs. Dolan laughed, as if I’d made an intentional joke. Mr. Dolan was unmoved. He said, “How is Timmy doing?” He stared at me, impatiently I though, but as though it had nothing to do with me, as though impatience were a habitual state with him. He was bouncing a knee. It looked as though it could bounce forever. The eyes were steady, comfortable in impatience.
“As you probably know,” I began, “he hasn’t been doing all that well on quizzes and test so far this year.”
“No, we didn’t know,” Mr. Dolan said, with no hesitation and no request for corroboration from his wife. “Ms. Davis said the same thing and it was news to us. How badly is he doing?”
“We didn’t actually think there had been enough time for tests yet,” Mrs. Dolan said, defending herself in advance against charges of not keeping close enough tabs on her son and his quizzes and his college prospects and his at-risk behaviors. We were six weeks into the year and I’d given three quizzes and three test.
“The transition to middle school can be rough for some kids, and there can be some transitioning for parents as well. Sheffield is very big on quizzes and test, even though we’re not supposed to admit that.”
The bid for conspiratorial camaraderie had no discernible effect on either of them.
“So how badly is he doing?” Mr. Dolan asked again.
“Well.” I knew the answer, but took some time to look at my notes anyway. “His average is a 63.”
“So he’s flunking.”
“He’s not off to a good start, no.”
Except for the discomposure of his first few seconds in the room, we still had not shared the slightest acknowledge of our situation—no subtle warning in an inflection of voice, not even a conspicuous avoidance of eye contact from either of us. I was sure that any observer—Mrs. Dolan, for example—would be incapable of detecting anything out of the ordinary, other than the typical tensions of a conference with a teacher who’s failing your child. But that absence, that refusal, was itself a bond. Mr. Dolan and I shared an impregnable hiding place, some pitch-black cave where we couldn’t be seen, even by each other, hunched in our separate corner—but we were both there.
“There’s still plenty of time to get him on track,” I said. “And I was wondering how you thought we might be able to work together to make that happen.” This was standard issue, Education 101. When a child has emotional and developmental problems, you’re not going to get anywhere without full collaboration with the family. But as soon as it was out of my mouth, I realized what bullshit it was, because I saw what bullshit Mr. Dolan considered it to be.
He lowered his eyebrows a tad. “So you need help from us on this,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “it’s Timmy who needs all our help.”
“Because his problems are so sever?”
“He didn’t say that,” said his wife, her pitch rising with her annoyance. ” I think my husband is just concerned, Mr. Wesley. We’re both more concerned that we expected to be this evening. We think Timmy is a good boy.”
“Oh, he is!” I said. My need to please had taken over, the need to keep the meeting safe, and I heard the insincerity and weakness in my voice.
“If things are so bad, why is everybody just mentioning it to us now” asked Mr. Dolan. His frown deepend, demanding something coherent from me, something they could use.
It was a nastiness. That was the word Nadine and I had settled on. Never a punch, never a swear word, never any detentionable offense. Nothing that could be said, nothing to point that would begin to cover it. Just constant, low-level meanness, self-satisfied underachievement, unpleasantness, unworthiness. He sneered at people. He sneered at his classwork and homework. Most of the other children hated him and avoided him. The friends he did have were always just back from a suspension or on their way out again. We didn’t like him, but we were worried about him, or at least we thought we should be.
Mr. Dolan was looking into my eyes in a new way, as if he’d heard my thoughts. The look was ironic and predatory at the same time, aware of both the game and the stakes, like the first look he ever gave me. He was bringing it into the open, warning me to remember myself on my knees before him under the pine trees before I dared to say another word about his son.
And then the pine trees of Yellow Notch Park, surrounded us there in the classroom, where I never allowed them. Their Christmas smell, the cool damp of their shade. I’d been living in Burlington a week or two when I discovered them, out for an innocent drive in the Vermont countryside the summer before I started at Sheffield. The parking area showed all the signs—secluded, silent, a few empty cars, a few with single men behind the wheel who watched you as you drove by and then as you parked and wandered into the woods to see what might be there to sees. Something to do if you’re new in town, or lonely and lazy, or daring, or shy, or too redneck for the bars, or married. I called myself curious. I’d been curious since puberty.
A path led down along the creek that dried up to nothing in the summer. Mr. Dolan and I circled each other at a distance the first time, slow, spiraling in, cautious, probably not cautious enough. The second time was months later, last April, and there was no circling, no hesitation then. Beautiful green eyes now, aren’t they?
I turned to his wife. She looked at me as if waiting for me to say something. I imagined her guessing the truth from my eyes and racing home in tears, piling Timmy and some clothes in a car and getting as far from her husband and me as she could. Or—did she already know? Maybe she’d been putting up with it for years. Or maybe she liked it, liked to watch. Or had secret lives of her own. Maybe she was an old hand at sitting politely, pretending everything was in her control, waiting in secret for the components of her life to fly apart. Why shouldn’t she be as good at the game as her husband and I were?
She waited for another moment, and then said, “What exactly are we talking about Mr. Wesley? How do you think we can help?” She was holding her husband’s hand again. Whether for comfort or to restrain him, I couldn’t tell.
“No,” I said, “It’s not. . .”
Mr Dolan leaned forward in his seat.
“I’m only here as hi math teacher,” I said. “Maybe if you could help with him homework from time to time—”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Dolan, seizing on this as a solution to whatever the problem was. “We should do that. We can do that?”
She looked to her husband and I remembered his hands on me, under my shirt.
“The problem is fractions,” I said.
Mr. Dolan looked as if I’d spoken Latin. “Fractions?” he said. “What does that mean?”
“He doesn’t have them under control.”
“He doesn’t have fractions under control?”
“What is so hard to understand about that?” his wife asked him, clearly furious with him now and trying not to show it, but still holding the hand with the wedding ring, holding to the idea of the unified front. “Mr. Wesley is the math teacher and he’s telling us that Timmy is having trouble with fractions.”
“What’s hard to understand about fractions?” Mr. Dolan asked me.
“Well, you know. How to add them. Finding the lowest common denominator. For Timmy, even what they mean, really.”
“What they mean?”
“Yes.”
“What do they mean?”
“Well, you know, in the sense of what the numerator and the denominator represent.”
“What do the numerator and the denominator represent?”
“John!” said Mrs. Dolan. “What is your problem tonight?”
“Apparently it’s some kind of a math problem, Loretta.”
“I apologize,” Mrs. Dolan said. “He knows perfectly well what the numerator and denominator represent.”
“Do you?” He asked her.
“Yes! Piece of Pie!”
“Sometimes,” I interrupted, falling back again on the tried-and-true, falling back, falling back, “I try to use real-world examples to make it easier and more fun, especially since some kids, like Timmy, aren’t able to think . . . abstractly yet at this age. But Timmy doesn’t really respond to that the way some other concrete-thinking children do.”
“Okay,” Mr. Dolan said. He help up his hands in a sarcastic surrender. “Think of me as a concrete child. Give me a real-world example. Make this easier and more fun.”
He leaned back in his seat as though getting comfortable for a long explanation, but Mrs. Dolan pulled her hand sharply out of his, as though he had squeezed it painfully. She immediately recovered and folded her hands on the conference orientation sheet she had on her lap. Or maybe he hadn’t squeezed too hard at all and I was merely extrapolating from the bruises he had left me with, a little discomfort and discoloration to remember him by the next day. Not the first time, but the second, when his hands held my ribs and pushed me against a tree and he kissed me until I stopped struggling against it.
Mrs. Dolan sat up very straight, hands folded in front of her, still doing her best to give nothing away. And what was she struggling against? A wretched sex life at the very least. Emotional neglect. Was he in the habit of bruising her? Or Timmy? I suddenly felt that I was the one in the room with the least to lose. I wanted him to remember that I hadn’t been the only one on my knees.
“Okay,” I said. “Say one-third of the kids in the room have brown eyes and one-half have blue eyes—what fraction have eyes that are neither brown nor blue? That kind of thing.”
He looked away and stared at the wall, at my poster of pi to ten thousand decimal places. Then he looked at his wife, shaking his head in a parody of disbelief, then back to me. “That’s a real-world example?”
“A simple one.”
“You have a lot of classrooms where half the eyes are blue?”
It was the resonate voice again. The deeper, woodsy tone. Challenging me, shifting the parameters, seducing me back to his home turf.
“It’s only hypothetical,” I said.
“Why not look at the actual eyes of the actual kids in the class and use the real numbers? Everybody might learn a thing or two.”
He was doing a great impression of refusing to see the point, a tactic his son was a master of. I had allowed Timmy to decide the terms of too many arguments to allow it again here.
“Because then everything would become a simple matter of counting, Mr. Dolan.”
“Well if it’s a simple matter of counting, then it’s a simple matter of counting. Why complicate it for the poor kids?”
“It’s not a matter of . . .”
“How is it different from saying some of the kids are black and some are white and some are left over, so how many must be both?”
“John, please don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. Dolan said quietly, looking at the floor.
“Or there’s three little nelly boys in a class of fifteen, what fraction of the boys are queer? Is that what you get into with these kids, Mr. Wesley?”
Mrs. Dolan stood up. Her eyes were closed. She looked not merely mortified but genuinely shocked by her husband’s behavior, and I realized she had no idea. No idea who she lived with, no idea who was teaching her kid. She only knew her husband was insulting me, and that something was more wrong that she had suspected. She put a hand on her husband’s shoulder and appeared to squeeze it hard. Again it wasn’t clear whether it was him or herself that she was trying most to control. “Mr. Wesley, I’m terribly sorry about all this.”
Mr. Dolan shrugged her hand off and stood next to her and said, “I asked y ou a question. Are those the kind of things you’re teaching my boy, Mr. Wesley?”
Mrs. Dolan spoke loudly and with finality, an unmistakable warning to her husband not to interrupt again. “Mr. Wesley, my husband is an engineer. I’m sure he knows all there is to know about fractions, including why it’s important for Timmy to learn how to handle them. I’m not sure why he’s putting either of us through all this. We should go.” She picked her purse up off the floor and headed for the door.
Her husband remained where he was. HE stood looking down at me, back-lit by fluorescents that I could now hear humming. In the stillness of the eyes I thought I could see that he felt he’d won, but then I decided the subtlety of the approach, the first touch, the strength of his arms, the rush of fear I felt in myself and in him. The kinds of power we held over each other then and still held. And I thought again of his wife leaving him, shattered, even less able to handle Timmy on her own. Then I thought of the Allimonts out in the hall, waiting to hear what I would have to say about their daughter, expecting to believe me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure which part of me was speaking, or to whom.
He looked for a moment as though he might reply, but instead looked away, and I caught a glipse of Timmy in his profile, the same curve of forehead, the same resignation and retreat. The shame that he could not allow himself. I watched him follow his wife out of the room and I thought then, and almost believed, that I would not be going back to that park.
