Philly Stakes (5 page)

A middle-aged woman sat next to me, carefully, slowly, unwrapping her shiny package in a long charade of anticipation and pleasure. Her excitement was contagious.

“I do love presents,” she murmured. “When my Thomas was alive…” Her hazel eyes looked almost bruised with fatigue.

Carefully, she pulled the tape off the cardboard box, disengaged flaps, removed Styrofoam pellets and finally, lifted her prize out of its nest.

And then those tired eyes stared, dumbfounded, at what I had last week declared the very worst of the gift donations, a porcelain figurine of a man in lederhosen. It had annoyed me for its stupidity—as if the homeless carry knickknack shelves around. But all the same, when the student who had solicited the donation looked hurt, I left it in the pile of gifts. I had meant to remove it later, but had forgotten.

The woman bit her bottom lip. Her long fingers played with her unkempt hair and her eyes welled up.

I felt responsible for her grief. Intentionally or not, I’d let the idiot thing pass. Merry Christmas—here’s some insult to add to your injury.

“There’s been a mistake,” I said, trying to save face for both of us. “That figurine didn’t belong with—certainly wasn’t intended for—there are so many other things. Scarves, gloves. I’ll find you another—”

“This isn’t mine?” she asked. “I wasn’t supposed to get it?”

I was so ashamed of us.

“I didn’t steal it.”

“Of course not. I didn’t mean—”

She cupped her hand over the little man’s head. “Your Santa gave it to me. Please don’t take it.” She looked as if she might crinkle up into herself.

“But—”

“The other gifts,” she whispered, “they’re for people who don’t have anything and never will. But this—” she pressed it to her, “this makes me know I’ll have my own place again someday. This is a real Christmas present. For a real person. I had a house, you know. Before Thomas…before my luck turned.”

“Tell me,” I said, and for a long time I heard how a once-solid woman, Gladys, her name was, could shrink through disease and bad luck and loneliness and confusion and age until she was no more than a statistic falling through the cracks. Not all her connections to reality seemed too secure, but she was very optimistic. We talked intently until a voice booming “Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night,” surprised me soundly.

It had no effect on the crowd. The room was so flooded with goodwill there were high-water marks on the walls, and nobody wanted to pull the plug.

However, I had late night with Mackenzie as an incentive plan for moving on, so I said good night to Gladys and stood up, the first to go.

I wasn’t the only one leaving. Peter and Laura were at the front door. Peter had his coat on and presumably, Laura would have also been bundled up and away, but Santa had her shoulder in a vise.

Alice Clausen had emerged. She stood by the door with her fixed and anxious smile, as if she saw nothing odd in the taut little drama before her. In fact, as if she saw nothing, anywhere, ever.

They were like a bad, slow-moving silent film. Peter waited, tense and dangerous as a Doberman, and Laura stood limply as if all her bones had dissolved. Her father, in disgust, released her, turned and walked back into the crowd.

“Larkly parny,” Alice Clausen said, breaking the silence. She giggled. “Lorvely parny. Party.” She hiccuped. Her eyes crossed, and she peered at me, leaning closer and closer, until I realized the rest of her was also tilting en route to the floor. I put out my hands to stop her at the same time Laura grabbed one of her arms and Peter the other.

“Can I help?” I asked.

Peter shook his head. “Laura knows how to handle it, but thanks anyway.”

“I’ll—I’ll see you both tomorrow,” I said.

Still propping up her mother, Laura turned and pierced me with a look so dark and intense it felt like a scream.

“Save me,” her eyes cried. “Save me.”

I would like to think that if I’d known for sure how to save her, and from what, I would have done so, instead of standing there gape-mouthed, convincing myself that what I had really seen was a desperately embarrassed teenager whose privacy I was violating.

If I had known for sure, I would have stayed.

That’s what I’d like to think.

Three

AT HOME, I MARKED COMPOSITIONS AND LISTENED TO SEASONAL SELECTIONS on the radio until “The Little Drummer Boy” became the holiday equivalent of Chinese water torture. In silence, I continued working. Macavity the cat slurked over, on the prowl for moving ballpoint pens. I looked at Laura’s paper again, sighed, tried in vain to find my way through to its secret heart, then put it aside. There were other papers to grade.

Macavity immediately sat down on her composition, purring, poised to thwack my pen the next time I used it.

I had a few pleasant surprises that began with “I never thought I’d say this, but…” and went on to express actual pleasure in the experience of poetry.

Not enough, though. The numbers were on the side of the maddening fakes who numbly regurgitated my words, my least favorite species of student.

Forced to make a choice, I’d take the depressing but honest variations on “Why All Poems (Especially the One You Assigned) Are Incredibly Stupid and Boring.” For example, from the pen of Clemmy Tomkins: “A person should say what he means so normal people could understand without a teacher. Who cares anyway because mostly its about symbols and images and dumb things no normal person cares about anyway except love maybe but even then it isn’t love like for a normal guy so its still dumb.”

I fixed his punctuation, suggested changes in wording and then gave up, since brain transplants haven’t yet been perfected, and I could think of no other method of improving Clemmy’s writing. I put the paper aside for Mackenzie, who thinks of himself as a normal guy even though he’s known to show off with a line of poetry from time to time.

There was only one paper to go when I heard C.K.’s knock. I took that as a sign that we were almost in sync—emphasis on the “almost.”

We have developed a discreet, efficient system. He knocks, then uses his key. If I am otherwise occupied—so far a hypothetical situation, since I have chosen not to be since meeting him—I use the chain lock as well, and he retreats into the night. This is rather ornate, but it accommodates my independence and his unpredictable working hours.

Before he finished knocking, I opened the door and felt the happy rush the sight of him inevitably produced. C.K. Mackenzie is a fine specimen of manhood, but not tritely Hollywood or Madison Avenue handsome. I am dangerously overfond of his salt-and-pepper curly hair, light blue eyes, slouch, drawl and all the ephemera that make up his style.

Actually, I am overfond of him, period. At least, I think so. He’s never around long enough to be sure. Certainly we are not career compatible. I don’t know if it goes deeper than that, because his job interrupts, disrupts, dictates and generally keeps us at arm’s length, so who knows which part is Mackenzie and which is The Detective?

Mackenzie says that I have artificially separated the two, and that, not his job, is my problem. He claims that the man and the job are one and the same, and I have some kind of learning disability.

It isn’t as if I’m pushing for an ultimate commitment. I’d panic if a major life decision loomed. But lately I feel as if I’m part of a movie, stuck in a freeze frame. I’d prefer a hint as to what’s going to happen. Even a promise that something, anything, eventually, will.

This year, Sasha, who never worries about the longevity of love but insists it be painted in primary colors while it’s around, gave me an early gift, a photo of a man and woman completely out of focus and dimly lit. She titled it, “C.K. and Mandy, Wherever at Last.”

“Feels so fine to be here,” he said after the initial kissing and hugging. He meant it, because his accent deepens under the press of emotion, and he was almost unintelligible, mushing his way through “fahn” and “heah” in a soft slur. He retrieved a beer from the refrigerator and hunkered down near me.

“One more paper,” I said.

“No problem,” he murmured, but all the while, his hand greeted my anatomy in ways that did not facilitate concentration.

“Be amused.” I passed him Clemmy’s paper.

He read, chuckled and sighed with exasperation and then, having exhausted the nuances of Clemmy Tomkins’ world view, resumed distracting me.

“Two seconds,” I said. “If you’re bored, please decipher that damned answering machine for me.” Then I remembered Laura’s paper. “Wait, read something instead, would you? I want to know what you think.”

He settled in again, long legs crossed as he studied her paper. One of the many traits I admire about Mackenzie is his ability—very rare, very sexy—to give the subject at hand his full attention. “Showed me her stuff before, haven’t you?” he said after checking her name.

“This feels different.”

I read an airball essay on “Thanatopsis,” frequently glancing at Mackenzie, monitoring his reaction. I had never before realized how poker-faced he could be. Finally, my eyes rested on Laura’s last paragraph, waiting for him to join me there. “Nothing has changed since then,” she’d written. “Nobody cares about anything except his own life and concerns. Icarus, unnoticed, still dies every day.”

Mackenzie looked up. “Want a fire?” he asked. “You’re shiverin’.”

“What do you make of it?” I asked.

“Must be hard for her to be in the same class as that Clemmy,” he said. “I’m impressed, is what.”

I waited for more, but Mackenzie was eyeing the answering machine, as if revving his motors to begin the trek across the living room.

“It’s not her writing skills that concern me. Something’s wrong. I wanted to talk to her about it tonight, but…”I described the evening, the tension, the cryptic scenes, the sad end. Laura’s eyes. Save me.

He slouched back into the sofa pillows. “Don’t read too much into it. She’s brighter than your other kids, is all. Maybe this is about the homeless, kind of a meditation about what you’d been saying on sensitivity and caring.”

“There’s a second essay in there, Mackenzie, but it’s in invisible ink. This is written in code.”

“Don’t go overboard translating.” He stretched. “You wanted something with the machine?”

“I keep messing up.”

He shuffled over to the counter that divides my downstairs room into living and kitchen segments. I followed. “Her conclusion wasn’t part of the assignment. She didn’t have to write anything like that at all. She veered off into that—that—”

“That what?” He upended the machine and pushed buttons.

“I don’t know.” Indictment? Warning? Cry? Save me.

“Teenaged girls tend toward hysteria. That is not sexist, that is fact. Everything’s a matter of life and death. What you saw tonight is probably nothing. A daddy annoyed by his little girl’s boyfriend. You said the boy’s older, fierce looking, troubled. Who wouldn’t be upset?” He beckoned me over. “Look here, Mandy, push this for incoming calls. Adjust the volume here.”

“What about her mother?”

“Ah, that sure sounds sad, but it has nothing to do with Icarus. Now this here memo button is like a tape recorder. Say you have an idea, you press it down, see? Records what you say, for as long as you like.”

“You don’t think her paper means anything?” He’d perfected his shrug into a Gallic-by-way-of-New Orleans trademark. He used it now. “Give her an ‘A’ and relax.”

“But—”

“Now this changes your message. Push it down, wait for the light and say what you like. Only please, don’t make it cute.”

“I felt like this before about a composition. Turned out the girl who wrote it was pregnant and suicidal.”

He turned his head to me. “Killed herself?”

“No. I called her as soon as I’d read it and we talked and she got some help.”

“How come that time you knew what to do, knew for sure what you’d read?”

I shook my head. Maybe the message was clearer, or easier.

“Here’s how you pick up your calls from another phone.” He went over the code, and it sounded logical and easy. It had sounded that way when I read it in the manual, too. It had not worked that way when I tried it.

He checked his watch. “Goin’ on midnight. Too late to do a thing about Laura or her family now, anyway. It can wait till morning.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was motivated by logic or lust. “If you could have seen her eyes—” I began.

“This threatens to get real boring. The language of eyes is nice and literary, but I never did hear of an eye confession or anybody’s collected eye writings or somebody’s dirty looks being called pornography, did you? Eyes don’t really speak, and that’s why we had to go and invent tongues.”

“I’m sure—”

“Where’d you learn to read ‘eye’? Maybe you speak a different dialect, or you’re mistranslating.”

“But—”

“Because if you really can read eyes, how about mine?”

His were easy to decipher. Even so, it took a while to let go of the first part of the evening and embrace its remainder. Once I did, in the way of such things, I stopped thinking about cryptic compositions, half-glimpsed domestic strife and much of anything else.

Until the next morning, when the clock radio declared reveille. My alarm, which sounds like a Nazi storm trooper’s klaxon, terrorizes me every workday. Once I’m hyperalert, heart beating double time, I’m ready for the newscaster’s announcements of the imminent end of life as we know it. And then I’m ready for Philly Prep.

Mackenzie’s shift didn’t start for hours, so he selfishly made inviting morning sounds, sleepy, wistful moans and mewls. He attracted Macavity, the cat, who left his voyeur’s post on the chair next to my bed and snuggled in, but I was made of nobler fiber, and I left, staggering into the bathroom.

When I emerged, sans stratospheric heart rate and morning mouth, I dressed as serenely as is possible given that a delightfully rumpled alternative beckoned across the room. I felt jealous of my own cat, and wondered who cared whether I made it to school the day before vacation. Who was waiting desperately for his or her graded poetry paper? Why was I so determined to leave? Why not give a substitute a break— a real testing, the day before Christmas? The announcer proclaimed the wind-chill factor, and that almost did it, except I had mentally uttered the word “Christmas,” and that yanked back the night before and Laura. I had to talk with her.