The Ghosts of Lovely Women (3 page)

Kathy looked aghast, as did several other committee members, all of whom were eating unimpressive looking sandwiches. Chad Rivera’s PBJ looked as though he had sat on it before starting it, and the smell of peanut butter was overwhelming in the little classroom.

“The fact is, the trees are quite expensive just to dig up; then to transport them and have them planted here would be equally expensive, and there’s always the chance that they would die anyway once transplanted. We’d be looking at well over 100 thou.”

Everyone stared at him; Kathy’s mouth hung open slightly. Her normally neat red hair looked rumpled. “We have 5000 total,” she said.

Joshua tapped his teeth with a pencil. “That’s why I’m thinking this
might
not be feasible. But I’m going back to the internet, see what I can find out. What if we PLANTED some SEEDS? It would only take twenty or so years for us to see the fruits of our labors, assuming the seeds took to our Midwestern soil.” He nodded, pretending to like this idea.

I would have felt sorry for my colleagues if it weren’t for the fact that they were just so perpetually humor-impaired. Joshua had worked here for ten years. How was it that some of them didn’t know that he refused to take things seriously?

Josh put his arm around me. “Teddy thinks it’s a good idea. I’m going to delegate some of this research to her.”

Just then our principal, Anthony Fairchild, poked his head in the door. “Hey, this is the landscaping committee, is it not?” he asked. As usual he was elegant in a three-piece suit while the rest of us were bordering on business casual. My black pantsuit actually looked, I thought, quite professional, but the secret was that it was stretch knit: comfortable as pajamas.

“Yes, that’s us,” Joshua yelled, squeezing my shoulder and adopting a faux “I love this committee” face.

Anthony pushed in someone I’d seen before. “This is Derek Jonas; he’s our new social science chair, and I’ve selected some committees for him so that he can start getting a sense of St. James. I know you’ll show him the ropes.”

Kathy Olchen’s face turned sour; Anthony, ever professional, refused to see it, but sent a radiant smile to us all and smoothed a hand over his bald brown head, as though to tame the memory of his hair. Then he disappeared.

Derek Jonas scanned the room with a bashful smile and sat next to me. Joshua’s hand slid off of my shoulder and he turned to bait Kathy, who had suggested that palm tree seeds might not be the way to go.

“Sounds like compelling stuff,” Derek Jonas said.

“If by compelling you mean painfully boring, then yes.” I was looking through my bag for anything chocolate and then realizing I hadn’t packed any. I’m sure my face fell.

“Not a good lunch?”

“No. I must not love me.”

He laughed.

“Don’t you have anything?” I asked.

“Didn’t think of that this morning. I’ve been sort of rushing around.”

I shook my head. “We’ll share my sandwich. You’ll need the protein to get through the day.” I handed him half of my turkey on rye and munched my half while I listened to Joshua teasing Kathy with great skill.

“I should stop him, but it’s just so fun,” I whispered to Jonas.

“I’m taking quiet revenge,” he murmured back. “She cornered me this morning and gave me a piece of her mind.”

“Oh, God!” I turned to him, scandalized. “Not on your first day!”

“I made the mistake of cutting one of her projects. It’s entirely inappropriate, with no apparent pedagogical value.”

“The ‘people who are disturbed in my family?’ project?”

He chuckled. “That’s not what she calls it, but yes.”

Kathy taught two psychology classes; she had horrified the faculty with her annual project, which encouraged students to apply current psychological maladies to their own families, i.e. who might be manic depressive, obsessive-compulsive, agoraphobic, etc. and why. The worst part was that the kids loved the experiment and somehow Kathy had gotten approval from Fred and Anthony and, apparently, the recently resigned James Gruben.

“Well, I approve of your actions,” I whispered, offering him some potato chips from my carefully portioned baggie. He reached in and I noted his forearm, covered with a golden-brown layer of hair. Not too hairy, but masculine. It was the same color as the rest of his hair — the plentiful, wavy burst of it on his head and the neatly trimmed mustache and goatee that should have looked ridiculous but in fact looked attractive.

I turned away abruptly, trying to key in on the current debate. “If palm trees weren’t ridiculous enough, what in the world would be the point of a giant ice sculpture that would only last a DAY?” Kathy was saying. I watched her pick up an important-looking briefcase which I envied (I toted my papers in a Whole Foods bag) and spin the little gold combination locks until the numbers matched. Then she flipped it open, I half feared to retrieve some sort of weapon to use against Josh. No — just more research material, submitted for the committee’s approval.

I heard Derek laughing quietly beside me, but I didn’t look at him again until the bell rang and he leaned in to say, “Thanks for lunch,” and then was gone.

Joshua tapped my arm. “It’s almost too easy with that girl,” he sighed. “So what’s with the new guy? Any gossip about him yet?”

“No. Leave him alone; he seems very nice.”

“Nice?” He stared at me.

I ignored him.

“Okay, fine,” Joshua said as we moved out of the room. Kathy and several committee-ers had stayed behind, probably to raise hell about Joshua and me. It could only be hoped that they’d lodge a complaint and that we’d be kicked off the committee.

A wave of exhaustion and sadness came over me. “You know I’ve been thinking about Jessica all day. Her ghost is following me around.”

He sighed. “She was a bright one. All that talent, for God’s sake. I don’t even like to talk about it.”

“I don’t understand why men kill girls and women. I’ll never understand it.”

Josh turned and raised his eyebrows as we paused in front of my classroom. Mark Twain leered at us from a poster on my door. “What makes you assume it was a man, Ms. Thurber?”

I laughed, but I felt grim. “Oh, it was a man, Josh. Mark my words, it was a man who killed that girl.”

“Oh, Kristine, I feel so light and happy! Won’t it be lovely
to have stacks of money and not a care in the world?”

—Nora,
A Doll’s House
, Act I

By the time I reached the parking lot at close to four o’clock, I was exhausted. I’m sure all jobs are exhausting in their own way, but teaching required something I hadn’t anticipated in my student days: the ability to be “on” for long periods of time, class after class. One needs to channel intense amounts of energy to guide, inspire, entertain, inform — all while trying to prevent distractions. It involves great planning and then high levels of performance. In between those bursts there are the meetings, the substitute teaching during free periods, the detention monitoring, the co-curricular planning, the grading, the grading, the grading. I had a stack of essays in my bag that would probably keep me busy until evening.

But when I sat in my car and closed my eyes, it was the image of Jessica Halliday that floated behind my lids: her face, tanned and pretty, as I had seen her seven months before.

I had been running errands in town when I ran into her; she was wearing a tiny top with spaghetti straps, a pair of short blue jean shorts, and flip flops. She looked effortlessly beautiful the way that an eighteen-year-old girl can in any outfit. Her blonde hair had grown out a bit, and she wore it in a tiny ponytail; there had been little rhinestone studs in her ears, and they glinted in the sun as she leaned forward to hug me, to say “Hey, Ms. Thurber! I was just thinking about you!”

I ended up asking if she’d like a cup of coffee; we were by Common Grounds, a local coffee place that had better seating than Starbucks. She seemed pleased that I’d offered, and we walked in while she regaled me with tales of New York, how awesome the college looked during her visit, how thrilling it would be to become independent, autonomous, a free young woman.

There was a certain euphoria in leaving home, at least for girls like Jessica. She was a free spirit, and her anticipation of college must have felt like a wonderful new beginning. There were some who were homebodies, and for that reason they picked schools in or near Chicago so that they could visit home whenever they wanted — or perhaps even keep living at home and commute to school. Not Jessica, though; that never would have pleased her, much as she seemed to love her parents and her brothers — and her boyfriend.

“How’s Danny?” I had asked her. Her face furrowed.

“He’s good. It’s hard for him, you know, with me going far away. But I told him I’ll get to visit him a lot next year, and of course we have the summer…” But Jessica didn’t sound very certain about the future. I wondered if she was hoping to meet a boy in New York. Jessica was young, pretty, lively, and not likely to commit to one person for the rest of her life. She had once joked in class that she would “settle down at thirty-nine” after she’d had lots of fun with lots of men.

This had been important, though, because we’d been reading Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House
, and all of the girls in class (and even some of the boys) had been offended by the plight of the 19
^th
century woman. Jessica had been particularly angry about the main character Nora’s sexual subservience to her husband. “Men just used women,” she’d said indignantly after reading a passage of the play for homework. “I mean, they basically get these girls who are given to them in marriage, and then they can just demand things all their lives and tell their wives that it’s their duty, whatever they want — sex, housework, loyalty to some pompous idea they had.”

“It’s true the women really didn’t have power,” I’d said. “But of course not every man was as oppressive as this husband. He is extremely intolerant, and as a result he wants to control every aspect of his wife’s life. Hence the title. But you notice that Nora does have one thing: beauty. And she tries to turn that into power by using it to her advantage.”

“But that’s just it! By having to use her beauty, she’s forced to see herself as an object. It’s like her very humanity that he’s taking from her!”

I’d been impressed by Jessica’s comments, and I’d told her so.

“You know what, Ms. Thurber?” she’d said. “The more I read this, the madder I get!”

I thought of this now, in my car, while the late April breeze wafted through the tiny crack in my window and made me feel sad again, this time out of nostalgia for a girl I had known, a time I had known, both of which were now gone.

Then I remembered something Jessica had said, while we sat together on a bright summer day, drinking coffee and smiling at each other. “You know what, Ms. Thurber? I feel like I’m getting revenge for Nora Helmer. About to live in New York — I already have an apartment out there, did you know?—being free, getting to find myself. Those are all things she never got to do.”

“She was fictional,” I said.

“But we all know there were women like her, thousands of women, maybe millions.”

“I’m glad for you, Jessica.”

She had given me something then — what had it been? A book she was reading, I think. A good book she’d said I should read. “I’m finished,” she said. “Take my copy, and look at the something something.” What had she told me to look at? We were already in the midst of our goodbyes, sort of talking over each other as we told each other how nice the meeting had been, each of us realizing we might never see each other again. I took the book, gave her a hug, and watched her walk lightly away.

Now, with a sigh, I turned the key in my ignition and remembered one other thing that Jessica had said to me: that she loved New York so much she doubted she’d ever live in Chicago again. “I want to be there even when I’m old,” she’d said, her eyes bright. “I want to play with my grandchildren in Central Park.”

“Now listen here, Nora — you haven’t done something indiscreet?”

—Kristine,
A Doll’s House
, Act I

I drove home and dragged myself up two flights of stairs to my apartment, where I could hear my Beagle, P.G., scratching at the door. I had a nice neighbor named Mrs. Bettenger who let him out around lunchtime, but P.G. was always ready to go again by the time I got home.

“Coming, buddy,” I said.

My dog was smart; he had his leash in his mouth when I opened the door. This was one of the cutest things about him, and it made me laugh. “Walk?” I asked.

His tail wagged hard. P.G. had some major tail muscles.

“Okay, fine,” I said.

I fastened the leash on to his collar and we went right back down the stairs, opting for our usual route, which was a square covering two blocks. P.G. followed his long nose to every spring smell; normally I drag him back onto the sidewalk, but today I was lost in thought and I let him get away with lots of dawdling. At one point he stuck his nose on a landscaping rock and left it there for a full minute. What in the world was the fascination? I wondered.

But then my mind was back on Jessica. I’d seen the girl every day, second period, for two full years. Bit by bit I was remembering things she had said, things she had done. It came back gradually, through the filter of memory. Some students, for whatever reason, never stood out in my mind. Others I could remember clearly after eight years of teaching. Jessica was one of those in the permanent file. I could summon a clear picture of her face, her voice. She was one of the students who had brightened my day. I had loved her.

A car pulled up to the curb near P.G.’s rock. I didn’t pay much attention until a voice said “Hey.”

I looked up to see Derek Jonas. Weird.

“Hey,” I said.

He looked uncomfortable as he viewed me over the top of his car. “I’m not stalking you.”