Brief Encounters with the Enemy (16 page)

Now Molly was on my lap. Her legs wrapped around me. Her skirt rode up high.

“Come back,” I gasped.

“I will,” she whispered.

“When?” I asked.

“Soon,” she said.

“How soon?”

By the time Lola came tearing out of the bathroom, flinging herself on my couch/bed, and screaming, “Let’s play war!” Molly and I were sitting in our respective seats talking about the weather. We were pros.

The days were getting longer and warmer, but the sky was overcast and it still hadn’t rained. To get to school each morning, I drove over the bridge heading east. Down along the river, I could see the factories all in a row, their smokestacks going. A few of them had closed since the war had ended. That was an unintended consequence of the peace. The people who had come in from the outskirts for work were heading back to the outskirts.

As for my classroom, it was established that the students hated me. Even those Mrs. Tannehill had described as “loving,” “caring,” “forgiving” loathed me. In the beginning I tried to curry favor by handing out candy from a large glass jar that I kept on my desk—a blatant disregard of teaching ethics—but it didn’t achieve the desired result. The children would eat the candy sullenly and in a manner of obligation. I had become the enemy in their eyes, and even when the enemy gives something good, it is received with suspicion and resentment. Naturally, I began to hate them in return. I fantasized about failing them, each and every one. I would fail them through no shortcoming in their classwork, but it would serve them right all the same. I would teach them a lesson about the vagaries and the violence of the real world. Unfortunately, failing them would require more work from me than passing them. It would require written explanations and conferences with parents. Dr. Dave would want to know what had gone wrong and where. In the end, it would be simpler to pass them. A’s across the board. But those A’s would come at a price. There would be no drawings, no dioramas, no excursions
to museums. No candy. In short, no fun. That would be our pact. If I were the enemy in their eyes, then I would play the role of the enemy.

Meanwhile, they made quick work of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Victorian Era, the Great Famine. Decades fell by the wayside. Their collective rigor and acumen were impressive. They wrote thoughtful, insightful essays about the reasons one million people had to starve to death. Their grammar was excellent, their spelling perfect. I could find no fault. The twentieth century loomed. It wasn’t until the Civil War that I managed to bog them down. War made their shoulders slump and their eyes glaze over. I punished them all the more for it. I spent whole classes standing at the front of the room, reading aloud from eyewitness accounts about Harpers Ferry and Bull Run—“Yonder down below, I descried a figure …”—trying to draw subtle, meaningful parallels to our present. Other times I copied long passages verbatim from the textbook onto the chalkboard, and as I copied, they copied. For an hour the only sounds in the classroom were the scraping of chalk and pencil and the sprinklers going
shuck, shuck, shuck
. On Thursdays they read aloud, on Fridays they read to themselves. On Mondays I turned obscure. “Who was General Zollicoffer, Chloe?” Chloe didn’t know. Chloe must memorize. “Where was the Battle of Pea Ridge, Trevor?” Trevor must study more.

“History is dead,” I said one day, apropos of nothing. “The past doesn’t exist.” I slammed the textbook closed for emphasis. The idea had come into my head fully formed. I thought it sounded profound, but the students looked weary. I opened the jar of candy on my desk and took out a handful. They had
not had any in quite a while. I jiggled it in my hand as if considering. They stared at the bounty. I went from desk to desk, slowly giving one colorful piece to each student.

The enemy sometimes gives spontaneously and for no apparent reason.

They unwrapped their treats reflexively. They stuck them in their mouths. They waited for the bell to ring. They thought of Mrs. Tannehill.

It was during the Gilded Age that Dr. Dave showed up one morning unannounced. I was content with the Gilded Age. I had slowed the class perfectly, and with summer vacation approaching, we would have enough time to dip a toe into the twentieth century. That was all we needed to do in order to say we had done it. Then they could go on to seventh grade.

“Is it okay if I sit in today, Mr. Mattingly?” Dr. Dave asked. There was a hint of agenda in his voice.

“Of course it is,” I said. But I was ill prepared for observation. I made a grand sweep of my arm toward a desk in the back, as if my hospitality were immense.

I instructed the class to welcome Dr. Dave and they obliged mechanically: “HEL. LO. DOC. TORRRRRR. DAY. VE.” I scanned my students’ faces, trying to determine who among them had betrayed me. Someone no doubt had said something to their parents, who had called Dr. Dave. He had decided to come investigate for himself. The first thing he was sure to notice was the jar of candy on my desk. It glowed multicolored and bright.

He took a seat in the back row with his blue jeans. He was too large for the desk and he crossed his legs, trying to find purchase. He waited. The students waited. They knew something
was amiss. They sensed my predicament. The enemy was being watched. Crimes would be revealed. As the bromide goes, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Dr. Dave may very well have been the students’ enemy too. He had it in him. I had observed him once bring to tears an eighth-grade girl who’d made the mistake of referring to him as “Mister.” “Good morning, Mr. Dave.”

“I worked very hard for my doctorate, young lady,” he’d explained, inches from her face.

So we stepped lightly, the students and I, we groped for détente.

I loosened my tie and smiled. They smiled in return. I asked if they had plans for the weekend. They murmured some response.

With small talk depleted, I broached the subject of the Gilded Age. “Who here can tell me about the Gilded Age?”

There was a great, wide silence. I had overwhelmed them with too broad a question. They couldn’t have responded if they had wanted to. My technique had ignored the principles of how a young mind was equipped to think. Begin with relatable details, work toward larger concepts, expand outward into interpretation. It took everything I had not to glance in the direction of Dr. Dave. It took everything I had not to open the jar of candy.

“Who here can tell me,” I tried again, “about the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt?” Again silence. I had whittled the era down to the size of one human figure, though I wasn’t sure whether the students would have given me an answer even if they had one.

The enemy was hunted. The enemy was cornered. The enemy would capitulate. Now was not the time to show mercy.

It was warm in the classroom and I was beginning to sweat. To buy time, I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of my chair. I was sure that patches of sweat were visible around my armpits. One of the drawbacks about teaching in a quaint one-hundred-year-old building was that no provision had been made for air-conditioning. When the temperature rose, we suffered for it. The best you could hope for was that George the janitor would bring you a fan. Outside, the sprinklers toiled over the baseball field, but the grass was turning brown. Grass all over the city was turning brown. Rain was what was needed.

On the last day of the school year, Dr. Dave summoned me into his office. “Can I have a word with you, Jake?” is how he asked. I’d been expecting something of this sort but hadn’t prepared an able defense.

His feet were on the desk when I walked in and his diplomas were on the wall. He was dressed in a black suit with cuff links in the shape of mortarboards. Today was graduation and presently he would be standing onstage handing eighth graders their diplomas, intoning to each, “Give your best, get your best.”

It was strange to see him in a suit, and he looked severe. Severe like a magistrate. I took a seat across from him and waited for what no doubt would be an unfavorable verdict. He was dressed to inflict maximum punishment.

“I have a proposition for you, Jake,” he said without preamble. Then he launched into a strange and roundabout story—interrupted periodically by the ringing of his phone—that had nothing to do with my lack of pedagogy.

He was looking for a house-sitter.

Now that the war was over—“Thanks to you, Jake”—he would be doing some traveling. He was going to see the world. He and his wife. They were leaving in a few days. Day after tomorrow, actually. He had lined up a house-sitter—a friend of a cousin—but that person had fallen through at the last minute because he was young and irresponsible. Dr. Dave had thought of me. I had popped into his head. Would I be interested? There was no money, of course. “But I’m sure you could use your own sort of vacation, Jake.” We laughed together at this. He knew my salary. He probably knew the size of my apartment. All that was required of me was to collect the mail and water the garden. Other than that, I would have the run of the house, including the forty-two-inch high-definition television.

“Do you want to think about it?” he asked. No, I didn’t want to think about it.

I called Fred the subletter the next day. This time he was happy to hear from me. He showed up with a dozen boxes and the first month’s rent in cash. My mother was there, helping me pack. It was her day off from answering phones and she had nothing better to do. There wasn’t much to pack except clothes.

“We’ll be out of your hair in no time,” she told Fred. She was always apologizing for things that didn’t require apology.

“If you forget anything,” Fred said to me, “you’re always welcome to come back.”

“I know that, Fred,” I said.

By the time we left, he was reclining on my couch/bed with his shoes off and his arms behind his head as if he had been the tenant all along.

Dr. Dave’s house was located an hour away, on the other side of the river, in the exclusive and upscale Cranberry Township. In the car, I gave my mother half the rent money.

“Oh, I don’t need that,” she said. She took it anyway.

Fifteen minutes into the drive all traces of the urban world were gone, replaced by the countryside. The countryside would have been picturesque, except it was wilting. I’d been to Cranberry Township once, when I was a boy, eight years old maybe, visiting a friend I’d made at day camp. Rodney. It had been a summer day but we’d spent our time in the basement playing video games and eating potato chips. In the evening his father had driven me home in his Mercedes-Benz. I’d had the idea that I would be returning to Cranberry Township shortly, but twenty years had passed.

“All I’m saying,” my mother was saying, “is it’s wrong.” She was complaining about the war. The second wave of soldiers was coming home and apparently no one cared, including me. This is why it’s good to be first.

“It’s just not right,” she said, “it’s not good.” It was a sign of bad things to come. She paused, waiting for me to agree with her. I turned the radio up louder. After a while she started humming along, one hand tapping out the rhythm on her thigh. Her thighs were getting thicker. Her hair was getting
grayer. She’d be retiring soon. She’d end up with back problems and a decent pension. Suddenly she turned to me and said, “How’s your girlfriend?” The word “girlfriend” reverberated within the confines of the car. I couldn’t tell if she was using the word ironically. I couldn’t tell if she knew something. That was always one of the concerns with having an affair: you never knew who knew something.

She’d seen Molly once by accident. We’d gone to the movies together, Molly and I, on one of our clandestine romantic outings, and my mother happened to be sitting in the back row. I was hoping she wouldn’t notice me, but she did. I introduced Molly to her as my girlfriend. It had slipped out inadvertently. I’d never used the term before or since. “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” my mother had said with overblown formality. Molly and I sat in the front holding hands, but I couldn’t follow the plot. We ended up leaving midway without my mother seeing us. She called me later to say, “Your girlfriend’s got nice hair.”

The farther I drove, the more the countryside wilted. The earth was drying up. The trees were losing their leaves. Brown swaths covered the hills like a disease. In Cranberry Township the houses got larger and the streets got wider and the grass got greener. The streets had bucolic names like Eagle Claw Lane and Turtle Dove Drive.

My mother said, “Looks like a fairy tale.”

I turned right, I turned left, and there at the bottom of a steep hill, set back about one hundred feet behind two trees, with a mailbox and a weather vane, was my final destination for the summer: 14 Misty Morning Way.

The blue jeans did not begin to tell the story. The blue
jeans were an affectation bordering on fraud. Whatever else Dr. Dave had accomplished at such a young age, his house had to have been the ultimate accomplishment. Ivy covered two walls. The walls rose three stories. The windows were framed by wooden shutters. On the front door was the number fourteen carved in wood, and when I turned the key in the lock, the door swung open onto a foyer with two umbrellas in an umbrella stand. Stepping over the threshold, I had the sensation that everything had just changed for me, changed for the better, that I was passing through a very difficult epoch of my life and arriving at something akin to success.