The Ghosts of Lovely Women (22 page)

“What kind of questions?”

“Well, for one — did Jessica say anything to you about someone in authority? Someone she resented for some reason? Someone — oh, I know I’m not saying this very well — but someone she felt should NOT be in that position of authority?”

Rosalyn studied my face for a moment. “It’s weird that you ask that, because she — I don’t know — she seemed like she had this feeling of power.”

“Power
over
someone?”

“I don’t know. She was saying stuff like about how she had a unique chance to make a difference. That she had waited far too long. I figured it was just like, paraphrasing from all those books she was reading. I didn’t really get into that stuff — all that self-help sort of stuff.”

“Did she say what she wanted to make a difference about?”

“Not really. I mean, at the time it didn’t seem like anything important.” Her eyes moistened. “I feel bad, you know? Like maybe I should have listened harder.”

“Do you feel that she was trying to give you any… clues? When you think back to your conversations over the last few days with her — her e-mails, her My Space chatter, her phone calls… anything weird or out of the ordinary?”

She shook her head, then paused. “There was one thing, but that was just a weird thing between us.”

“Oh?”

“We used to get together sometimes and cook dinner. We both liked cooking. I had this old cookbook of my mom’s called
Creative Cookery
and we would make all sorts of dishes from it and then use our families as guinea pigs. We pretended that we had our own show on the Food Network. My sister Rachel would videotape us.”

“How neat.”

“Yeah. Anyway, that last day, we were in her back yard and she said she had to go out later, and that she’d meet up with me and Danny at
The Riviera
for some iced coffees. She said she was going to put someone in his place.”

“Those were her words?”

“Well, something like that. Put him in his place, teach him a lesson, something. I figured she was being metaphorical. Like maybe she was going to tell off a store manager or something. I had no idea. She was talking about giving back. I guess like giving back to the community?”

“What about giving
it
back? Didn’t you say she had said something about cash? Having lots of cash?”

She looked at me blankly. “No.”

“No, wait — that was Danny. And Mitch, you know him. They said Jessica had been burdened by something — perhaps by money that someone had given her. Might that be what she was “giving back?”

Rosalyn nodded. “That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. She was being so weird that day, but I remember her putting something in her purse before she left. I thought it was a packet of letters; you know, like bills she was mailing for her mom or something.”

“Ah.” I pictured Jessica stowing cash in her purse. I thought of Kathy’s note: “2000 dollars so far.” Had she brought that much money with her? To whom was she “giving it back?” And if she were returning it, then certainly it hadn’t come to her as the result of blackmail?

“There’s something else, Ms. Thurber. Before she left she told me she changed her My Space password. She asked if I could guess what it was. I said no, and she said, “Cookery.”

“Ah.”

“So I laughed, and we just moved on to other stuff, but later I realized that it was weird.”

“That she changed her password?”

“No — that she told me. I mean, why would I need to know? Besides, Jessica was ultra private about stuff like that. She didn’t give out her locker combinations or things the way some kids do.”

“Huh. Jessica seemed to be leaving little mysteries with everyone, without really providing a chance to solve them. She seems like she was content to keep her secrets.”

I thought of Nora Helmer in
A Doll’s House
, saying
My secret — my pride and joy…

In any case, if Jessica had left some sort of clue on My Space, the police would surely find it. They must have examined all of her accounts, all of her e-mail, her entire presence online. I sighed.

“Thanks, Rosalyn. I don’t know that we can help with anything, but it’s good to think about it. You know what I say about writing papers? Getting inspiration?”

“Nothing will come until we start writing,” she parroted obediently.

“Right. The same is probably true with solving mysteries, don’t you think? We have to start the work, and then the ideas come.”

“I guess so.”

The class had started to file in. Danny approached Rosalyn and me where we sat. “What’s going on?” he said.

“I was hoping for clues. Something that would help the police.”

“Me, too,” he said. “I’ve been thinking it over…”

I wanted to pursue that, but then Steve Jansen and Juan Perez, the boys who had helped me off the floor the week before, marched in. “Hey, Miz T, did you know that it’s going to be hot today? I mean really hot!” said Juan, looking pleased.

“I didn’t know.”

“There’s like some major heat wave coming up from the Gulf. We’re gonna go to the Dunes this weekend if it keeps up,” Steve added.

This was not good news. Hot weather and I have never been friends.

Since I had missed Period 1 the day before, my students had been forced to process double the reading on their own. They launched into complaints about the length of the assignments. “Four chapters! Do you know how many pages that was!”

“I’ll bet you do,” I said, setting down my briefcase.

“Eighty-six! It was eighty-six pages of long Russian sentences,” said Walter Hirsch, who seemed downright insulted.

“I know, it’s tough.” I had re-read it myself. “But we only have four weeks to read this, and it’s long!”

“Why do we have to read it at all?” Rosalyn asked.

I sighed. “Kids, this is a college preparatory school. Do you know why they call it that?”

Chris Angelini sighed. “Because it prepares us for college.”

“Right. You know what you do a lot of in college?”

“Reading?” Their little faces looked desolate at the thought.

“Yes! And the more we do, and the more we practice looking for the most important stuff, the better, the faster you’ll be able to move through that college reading.”

“College is scary,” said Jennifer Barnes.

“College will be a revelation. It will be the most important time of your life,” I assured them. “You’ll grow in a million ways.”

I went to my podium. “I’ve made a start on the rough drafts for your research papers.” The class groaned, but Javier looked surprisingly cheerful. He had brought me his two pages the day before, and they had not been bad. He was going to make it, after all.

I was the one, now, who was on a deadline. While some of their papers could be genuinely interesting, I always had to grade them rapidly so that the students could get to work on revision, and the grading took me forever. It was exhausting and time-consuming, and they could never understand why I couldn’t just return forty rough drafts the next day. They never thought about the fact that it was 400 pages of text which I actually read and made comments upon. This year, though, Derek had helped me.

I introduced the new vocabulary words (they all got a big chuckle out of the word “brouhaha”), and spent half an hour on
Crime and Punishment
. The detective, Porfiry Petrovich, was closing in on Raskolnikov, using the good cop/bad cop technique that was such a torment to the murderer, who was himself a divided man. Porfiry, therefore, divided himself in interrogation. He adapted psychologically to the nature of his prey.

I wondered if any police outside of fiction were actually that brilliant. Did Kelsey McCall know how to play the psychology game? Did she have any suspects as smart as Raskolnikov? Does someone strangle a teenage girl because they’ve plotted a brilliant crime, or because they’re angry? Afraid? Desperate?

I was fanning myself, literally sweating over Russian literature, when the bell rang.

* * *

By lunchtime I sat grouchily in the big lounge, which was air conditioned, listening to twenty or so colleagues chat about the weather. “Isn’t it gorgeous today?” asked Ted Simpson from the math department.

“Oh, just lovely!” said Brenda James, the drama teacher.

“I’d be happy if it were like this all summer long,” added Chip Henders, the business chair.

Derek smiled at me while he ate the sandwich I’d hastily prepared that morning. “Sorry it has no lettuce,” I said quietly.

“It’s delicious. You have a special sandwich-making gift.”

“I suppose you love hot weather, too?”

“Not really. Seventy degrees is plenty for me. Sixties are my favorite.” Then he looked at me, surprised. “Did I just say something right?”

“You have no idea. I think you must be a dream.”

He finished lunch smugly, pleased to have earned points.

I dragged myself out of the air conditioning and back up the humid stairwell. My classroom was now as moist as a Peruvian jungle. “Ms. Thurber, you look hot,” a girl observed as students filed in.

By my last period I was also told that I seemed grumpy. Students had no qualms about making personal remarks. I routinely fielded questions about my love life, whether or not I dyed my hair, how I intended to vote in the next election. When I first began teaching I tried to tell them that their questions were rude, but then I realized that they were simply acting the way they were taught to act at home. I always answered politely that certain things were none of their business — but it didn’t seem to deter them from asking more. Or, I noted today, from commenting on my general mood and appearance.

When I arrived home, I flipped on my air conditioner and guiltily made the long-delayed call to my mother. I had sent her a brief e-mail to say that I would call soon, but then everything had happened. I apologized for my lateness and assured her that the woman on Masterpiece Theatre was NOT Gwyneth Paltrow. “So tell Dad he owes you five dollars or whatever.”

“Thanks, Sweetie. Dad actually figured out how to look it up on the Internet. He’s still mad about the fact that he was wrong.”

I laughed. “And in regard to the ‘boy’ in the grocery store—”

“Yes?” my mother asked brightly.

“I didn’t see him again. But I am seeing someone. I like him a lot.”

“Oh?” My poor mother was pulling hard on her own reins; I knew she was dying to fire questions at me, but also afraid she’d send me skittering off into my privacy, shuttering her out.

“He’s a teacher at St. James. Just started a couple weeks ago. He’s also a psychologist.”

“A man with degrees!” she said. “And the two of you are — what? Dating?”

“Yes. We’re — kind of exclusive already.”

“Well, that sounds very romantic! And what is the name of this mystery man?”

“Derek Jonas.”

“Derek! Is he British?”

“No. I mean, he might have ancestors—”

“What does he do at St. James?”

“He’s the Social Science chair. He—”

“How old is he, honey?”

“Uh— I don’t know. I’m guessing about thirty or so? Thirty-two?”

“Well, you need to find that out, Teddy. Has he ever been married?”

“No. I mean, he would have told me that. At least I don’t think—”

“Teddy, you need to get to know this man.”

“That’s what dating is, Mother.”

“When will Dad and I meet him?”

“Well, when can you come to visit? I can’t come down there until closer to the end of the year. I’m going to be bogged down with research paper drafts and then actual research papers. Plus my night class—”

“My busy girl. What if Daddy and I just came up for lunch one day? Then we could drive over and have dinner with Will or Lucky afterward. We like to get all three of you in one trip.”

My parents lived in the more distant suburbs of Chicago, and in the construction-plagued traffic it could take as much as two hours to drive there. “That would be great, Mom.”

“But of course we’d want Derek to be there. You talk to him and pick a date you can both agree on, and we’ll come out.”

“Mom.”

“Yes, Teddy?”

“I really like him. I’m pretty infatuated at this point.”

“Was it love at first sight?” My mother did not believe in that phenomenon, but the closer I got to thirty the more she was willing to give it a shot.

“For him, he tells me. For me it took a little while.”

“How about if we come for your birthday? Then I can bring your cake and presents and everything.”

“Mom, you don’t have to make a big deal.”

“But Teddy, it’s your Golden Birthday!” My mother had always showered us with special gifts on our birthdays. But in my family the “Golden Birthday”—that is, having your age match the number of the date of your birth — was fodder for intensified celebration. I was to turn 30 on May 30
^th
.

“Okay. I’ll ask Derek and I’ll get back to you. Love you, Mom.”

“Love you too, Sweetheart.”

I hung up and took a shower; then I dug out the books for my graduate class. I still had to read about a hundred pages and write a response paper. I felt better after my shower, but my mother’s reminder of my birthday had depressed me. Whenever I thought of turning thirty, I thought of Nick Carraway’s famous speech from
The Great Gatsby
: “I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.… Thirty — the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.”

Because of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I had never seen thirty in a very positive light. My mother wanted to celebrate it with trumpets and balloons, but I felt a strong desire to go into hibernation on the morning of May 30 and wake up refreshed and inevitably older on the 31
^st
.

I shook my head and forced myself to read. My reading matter was not much less depressing; Jessica Halliday had wandered back into my mind, and I wondered what she would think of Lois Tyson’s
Critical Theory Today
. This week’s reading, relative to everything that had been happening lately, was Feminist Theory. The reading pointed out several feminist assumptions, one of which was that “In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is
other
: she is marginalized, defined only by her difference from male norms and values, which means defined by what she (allegedly) lacks that men (allegedly) have.”