MY KID’S TEACHER IS such a hot lusty
ball of blond, even the worst boys behave.
But if I were in her class, I’d get me
some of that time-out-that’s what I crave:
Ms. Bishop sitting my spanked bottom down:
young man, here we use our inside voices;
you sit still ’til you’re ready to rejoin
the rest of your class and make good choices.
“Good choices”-this is the constant refrain in Franklin’s second-grade class: Marshall, was that a good choice? April, we make good choices in second grade. Parents, I’m just trying to teach the kids to make good choices, and I know exactly what goes through the minds of the other fathers (and not a few of the mothers) as they listen to nasty lovely sweet Ms. Bishop of the pouty mouth and black-lined eyes, because it’s exactly what goes through my mind: Oh, you hot minx of an elementary school vixen, there are some bad choices I could make with you right now. On conference night, you have never seen so many fathers haunting the halls: smartly dressed, cologned, they pace and pretend to contemplate child-art and Popsicle stick dioramas, eager for a glimpse of Ms. Bishop’s famous paint-on skirts tracing her perfectly symmetrical and round a-(Stop, bad choice!) For me, a true Bishop connoisseur, it’s not the tight skirts (so obvious, unrefined) but the blouses, and it’s not the eye-catching fronts-these are for Bishop neophytes, with their V-cut, cleavy, gravity-defying peakage. No…my Bishopiphany came on Open House Night a few years ago, when she turned to the chalk board during a school open house and I caught a glimpse of the symmetrical small of her lovely back. It was as if, weary from riding all night, my horse and I had come upon this gentle, narrowing valley, smooth, gracefully tapering down from her shoulders, and there I saw it, this small, quiet place…an easy place…a place where a man could rest his head after two hours of extremely questionable choices.
Teddy was in Ms. Bishop’s class then, three years ago, and it was Lisa who noticed how, after we got home from school events, she and I couldn’t keep our hands off each other; it was as if Ms. Bishop were some sort of fertility goddess. After ice-cream socials and candy sales, pizza parties and school auctions, Lisa and I would fall off each other in bed, sweating and breathing deeply, and it was lovely Lisa who first said it: “Wow. Extremely good choice.” For a while, in the good old days, it became our code in front of the kids: “I’m thinking of making a good choice tonight.” “I hope you’re planning on making good choices later, young man.”
This, however, promises to be a less-than-erotic meeting with Ms. Bishop.
I’ve rescheduled my desperate wollie purchase (now I not only have to pay off the mortgage and private school tuition, I also have to cover eleven hundred in lumber I just bought from the guy Bishoping my wife) to come to school and talk about frail little
Franklin, who is accused of making an unprovoked attack upon a defenseless playmate using as his weapon the little wooden blocks he was supposed to be clacking together primitively in his music class.
Every father-whether he admits it or not-is gripped by two opposing thoughts immediately upon hearing that his child has been in a fight: first, the hope that no one was hurt, and second, the deep fear that your kid might not have won. (The art of losing isn’t hard to master.) Two days after punishing Teddy for slapping a classmate in the third grade, I found myself surreptitiously teaching the boy how to make a fist, how to keep his left up, jab, jab, cross with the right. (Speed, boy: stick and move, stick and move!)
“It’s just not like Franklin,” Ms. Bishop says.
“No,” I say helpfully, “he usually makes such good choices,” and the Pavlovian reaction to that phrase causes me to cross my legs. Franklin is cooling his heels in the office while I talk to his teacher, the rest of his class in Afternoon P.E. as Ms. Bishop and I sit alone in her classroom, surrounded by penguins and thick cursive letters and easy math problems, wedged into little chairs, and while this is serious stuff, our legs nearly brush and it’s all I can do not to look at Ms. Bishop, because then it will all be over, and I will not be able to affect the serious parent I need to be. My unemployment and Lisa’s recent flirtation with affairing has cut into my sex-frequency-it’s been nearly a month-so this is not a good time for me to be dropping in on women like Amber Philips and Bea and Ms. Bishop (whose jersey has long ago been retired from the delusional list of women who secretly long to sleep with me).
“No, it’s not like Franklin at all,” says Ms. Bishop. Franklin is the frail one. I fully expect Teddy to get in fights, but Franklin? His teacher shakes her head; she’s in a plaid skirt and buff-colored blouse that clings to her as if she’s just come in out of the rain. “That’s what’s so disappointing,” Ms. Bishop says. “That Franklin
would make such a bad choice.” She crosses her legs with a sweep of fabric and a glimpse of toned, muscled leg and I clear my throat to cover the sound of the whimper I feel in my chest. I stare at the ceiling, hoping it looks like I’m taking the details of Franklin’s assault especially seriously: apparently, in the middle of music, while they were learning the concept of keeping a beat, Franklin snapped and, without provocation, swung his clackers and hit his friend Elijah Fenton in the face. Elijah curled up. Franklin fell on him, crying, then hit him twice more before Ms. Bishop managed to pry the clackers from his cold dead fingers. (Clackers don’t kill people; people kill people.)
“Do we know,” I ask, “what precipitated it?”
“Some teasing, apparently, although Franklin wouldn’t tell me what it was about. I told him it doesn’t matter. The children know that nothing excuses physical behavior like this.”
(There’s some physical behavior I’d like to…)
“Franklin knows that violence never solves anything,” Ms. Bishop continues. “I told him that if he’s being teased in the future, he needs to come talk to me or to you or to Mrs. Prior about it.” (Who? Oh, right. Mrs. Prior. My wife. Bad choice.)
Ms. Bishop walks with me down to the office, where Cool Hand Frank is stewing in the hole, principal’s office. (My boy can eat fifty eggs!) I stare straight ahead, but the sound of Ms. Bishop walking nearly does me in. (What’s happening to me? Irrational, passive jealous reactions? Swooning over stoop kisses? Dizziness in the proximity of attractive women? I am officially fourteen again.)
Outside the office, Ms. Bishop explains that the school has “a set of violence and aggression protocols that Franklin has now accessed” and she sounds like my old editor, the nonsensically evil M-and I find myself wondering when the business jargon people took over education, or maybe it was the other way around. According to the violence and aggression protocols Franklin has ac
cessed, my little offender gets a one-day suspension for the first act, a week of suspension for the second and expulsion for the third. Because Franklin has never done anything like this before, Ms. Bishop says, she and the principal have agreed that if he writes a note of apology to Elijah, he will not be suspended, but this will count as his first act of violence. Any more acts, though, and he will be suspended for a week. I thank her. “Nothing is more important than providing a safe atmosphere for learning,” Ms. Bishop says.
In the principal’s office, poor Franklin is sitting with his head in his hands. “Come on,” I say. He moans. Thirty minutes later school is over and the boys sit in the backseat while I drive home. Franklin sniffs as he stares out the window. Teddy works like an old reporter, trying to get information about the fight.
“What kind of noise did it make when you hit him? Was it a slapping sound or a thumping sound?”
“Enough, Teddy.”
Another sniffle sniffle from Franklin.
“Elijah Fenton is kind of a jerk, Dad,” Teddy says. “It’s not the worst thing in the world that Frankie hit him.”
“I don’t think that’s true, but even if it were, you know it wouldn’t matter, Teddy,” I say. “It’s never right to hit people.”
Teddy asks, “What if they’re gonna kill your family with a grenade?”
“Elijah Fenton carry a lot of grenades, does he?”
“He probably said something really bad,” Teddy says. “He swears a lot.”
“It doesn’t matter. We don’t solve problems that way. No matter what someone says.”
“What if they say they’re gonna kill your family with a grenade?”
“Let’s stop talking about grenades and think about how Elijah
feels.”
Another moan from Franklin.
“He was playing kickball after school,” Teddy says. “He’s fine. Can’t I just ask what Frankie hit him with? Please. Let me ask that one question and then I’ll be quiet.”
“No.” I’m stuck behind someone turning left; I miss the light. Traffic is hateful.
“Please.”
“No!” I snap, then, realizing I’ve overreacted: “The wooden blocks from music.”
“Clackers! You hit him with clackers. Wow!”
Franklin moans.
“Teddy, that’s enough.”
I pull into the driveway. Inside, Teddy and Franklin retreat to their rooms. I try the Providential Equity prefixes again, leave voicemails all over their phone system. Since Lisa mysteriously claimed to have something to do this evening, I make dinner-chipped beef. Dad comes in from the TV room, sets his remote on the table, wrinkles his brow but doesn’t say a word about what I’ve made. It sits on bread on his plate, covered in white-gray septic gravy.
“Chipped beef, Dad.”
“Gravy looks funny,” he says, but he eats it, fork clacking the plate. The boys herd the food around. Dad gets seconds without a word. We’re a stoic breed-Prior men.
When he’s done, Dad pats his chest for a missing cigarette, then grabs his remote, gives a sigh and marches into the TV room. Plops down in his easy chair. The boys pick at their chipped beef, give me plaintive looks. I give them an extra scoop of ice cream for dessert.
Dark settles in. I help the boys with their homework, avoid
doing dishes, and another night bleeds away (where the hell is she?). I drink a cup of coffee alone at the table (maybe it’s too late…they’ve run off together), check on Dad, who remarks that playing quarterback in a beard would be tough (“Itchy?” I ask), tuck the boys in (have I lost her?) and lean over Franklin in his twin bed, finally ready to have a talk with my little ultimate fighter.
“What did Elijah say that made you so mad?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“Sorry, pal, you have to.”
The covers are at Franklin’s chest; his too-small Shrek pajamas ring his neck. “He called Ms. Bishop a bad word.”
“What word?”
“I don’t want to say it. I’ll get in trouble.”
“I’m giving you a mulligan, Frankie. Bedtime amnesty.”
“What’s that?”
“Means one time you won’t get in trouble for saying it.”
“He said Ms. Bishop was a slut.”
“How do you know that word, Franklin?”
“Elijah always says it.” And then, possibly thinking I don’t know the word, Franklin adds, “It means a girl who kisses lots of people. Elijah says Ms. Bishop kissed his dad, and that his mom called Ms. Bishop a slut. I said she isn’t and he said she is and then…I got real mad. And I hit him.”
But it’s the earlier news that I can’t process. Elijah Fenton’s dad kissed Ms. Bishop? Bullshit. Carl Fenton? No way would that tool have a chance with Ms. Bishop. Not possible. Although…if a tool like Carl Fenton can get in there…
“So you just…hit him?”
“I kept saying she wasn’t a-” he looks at me to see if his amnesty is still in effect…“-slut, that she was nice. Elijah said that I must love her too, and I probably want to kiss her. So I hit him.”
His eyes tear up again. “When he said I liked her, it made me so mad.”
“Maybe…because…you do like her?”
“Da-a-d.” He looks at me like I’m crazy. “Come on. Have you seen her?”
And as much as I empathize with him, this is a lecture I must deliver. The highpoints: (1) Violence is always wrong, except in rare instances of self-defense, or to protect those who can’t protect themselves. (“Like grenades?” Franklin asks, echoing his older brother. “Sure.”) (2) While it was certainly wrong of Elijah to say those things, stacking a wrong on top of his wrong just makes a higher pile of wrong. (3) Next time, Franklin should tell me or tell his teacher, even if it’s embarrassing. (4) It is, however, perfectly natural to have a crush on a teacher. (Especially your teacher, my God, that taut little guitar string…)
Franklin sighs and promises he won’t hit anyone with clackers ever again. (I imagine his next defense: you never told me not to use shakers.) I kiss his forehead and he grips my arm one more time. “Do people have to sleep even when they’re old?”
“Yeah,” I say. “They do.” More hypocrisy from me: king of the sleepless.
Franklin falls back in bed. The world is so incomprehensible to him, so difficult; he must imagine there is some other world after dark that he can fit into. This is the kid I have to worry about, I suddenly see, the one most likely to land outside a convenience store.
Downstairs I check on my own father, who is staring warily out the dark window, ignoring the television in front of him. He turns to see me in the room, and it takes a second for him to remember who I am. Pats his chest. “Know what I miss?” he asks.
I pray for Rockford Files.
“Chipped beef.”
Back to the kitchen, I scrape shit and shingles, wash, stack and stare at a second cup of coffee. Clock ticks. Mail sits on the counter, waiting for Lisa, a stack of red-lined bills and rustic catalogues that I consider throwing away. I get nervous whenever Lisa picks up a catalogue; since her binge, she’s seen them as cruel taunts, news from the outside. Even before her recent trouble, of course, Lisa had a complicated relationship with shopping and with money. She grew up an only child, spoiled for the first decade of her life by her oft-traveling car-dealer father-although, as it turned out, she wasn’t spoiled as much as the kids in his other family. Lisa was twelve when Walter McDermott died of a heart attack and this odd bit of truth came out: not only did Walter have two McDermott Dodge dealerships in two states…he also had two wives in those states. In court, it was established that Lisa and her mother were actually Walter’s second family-he’d never divorced Wife #1 (nor had he told Lisa’s mother about her), so the entire estate went to the first wife, and to Walter’s three older children. Lisa and her mother ended up with nothing. To hear Lisa and her mother talk about this period, you’d think it was the siege of Leningrad, them boiling shoes and eating tree bark. Finally, when Lisa was fifteen, her mother found a responsible, older man to support them and pay for Lisa’s college (this was her advice to Lisa, obviously ignored: go for a wealthy man at least a decade older than you). The surprising thing for me was how Lisa continued to idolize Walter. The unsurprising thing is that she grew up so conflicted about money, security and men-and that her deepest anxieties remain where those three things intersect. I remember being a little scared when we’d just started dating, and Lisa dragged me into a shop that had a belt she’d been scouting. I flipped the price tag: $280. I said that all of my clothes together didn’t cost that much. She was mad for two days, angry at me for humiliating her (and for letting her down), but irrationally angry also at the store for the affront of stocking
clothes she couldn’t afford, and at the world, for excluding her from its best things. This was before I realized that Lisa would always take issues of wealth and poverty personally, before I understood that, while she loved me, Matthew D. Prior didn’t exactly allay her deepest fear about being stuck with a breadwinning failure…(or, perhaps she fell in love with me because of that, because I remind her of dangerous old Walter).
Maybe we are drawn to our own destruction, pulled into our own 7/11s.
Where is she? The clock on the kitchen wall says five minutes to ten. I look out the window, past my tiny reflection, into the black backyard. I knew two years ago that this would be a difficult time for Lisa, watching me quit my job to venture into something as unlikely as a financial poetry website. But how could I know the economy would go this far south, that I’d get laid off from the job I scurried back to, or that our house would lose nearly half its value. Or maybe I didn’t care (…we are drawn to our destruction). I recall once watching Teddy, when he thought no one was looking, staring at a cup of milk on the edge of the counter. Inexplicably, he gave the cup a little nudge. Or it wasn’t inexplicable…these cups sit on the edges of counters and sometimes you just can’t help yourself.
Finally, a few minutes after ten, headlights come down the alley. I watch the garage light come on. And three minutes later, my cheating wife comes in the back door.
She’s wearing a plaid skirt, too…must be in style. And even if her legs lack some of the tone of Ms. Bishop’s, they are great legs, and they are the legs I’m married to, legs I’d wrap around my waist if they’d have me. She’s also wearing a red, wool beret. The cap is not something I’ve ever seen Lisa wear and the sight of it breaks me a little, as if she’s on her way to becoming someone else, top-down. A gift from Chuck, maybe? As if reading my thoughts, she sets the
cap on the counter.
“Thanks for putting the boys to bed.” Lisa looks through the mail: But she seems too nonchalant, even as she flips through the catalogues, as if even they have no power any more (in love maybe?) her good mood pissing me off. “Any news from school?” she asks.
And I realize this is exactly what I’ve been lying in wait for, and I try not to sound too pleased with myself as I lay out the whole while-you-were-out-doing-God-knows-what-I-had-to-deal-with-keeping-this-family-together clacker incident, and maybe it goes on thick, maybe even embellished-the ferocity of Franklin’s attack, severity of the school’s reaction, passion of Franklin’s crying afterward-but I’m feeling desperate and I hope that ten logs of pure-grade guilt will shock Lisa out of this thing that she’s on her way to doing to our family. Indeed, she covers her mouth and shakes her head as I tell the story.
“My God, Matt. Why didn’t you call me?”
I shrug. “You said you had plans tonight.”
“And…you didn’t think I could take a phone call?”
I give another passive, wounded shrug. “I didn’t know what you were doing. I didn’t want to interrupt if it was something important to you.”
It is this to you that I hope will sting. I look down at the table.
“Interrupt…what…what do you…interrupt?” She stares at me in disbelief. “You knew what I was doing. I told you a week ago. I was at Karen’s candle party!”
Candle party? And now that she mentions it, I do remember something about candles…I quickly look for refuge from my own guilt, something to be mad about: those candle parties always start at seven, which doesn’t explain why she wasn’t home for dinner. “All night?” I ask desperately.
Lisa turns away. Hands shaking, she pours herself a cup of
coffee, but throws it in the sink, cup cracking in the basin. “It was a fucking candle party, Matt!” She turns to me, eyes red and teary. “You want me to feel shitty about going to a candle party?”
I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes.
“Because I do! Okay? Happy? I feel awful. I felt awful sitting there with all those women ordering candles and drinking wine and talking about where they were going for the holidays. I could feel their pity, Matt! They were sitting there feeling sorry for me. And do you know why? Because they know I can’t even buy a fucking candle, because…because-” She covers her mouth and cries silently. I sit at the table, staring into my coffee.
We both know why she can’t buy a fucking candle.
My mom used to describe Lisa with the best praise she could ever heap on another person. Matty’s wife, she would say, now there’s a woman who is put together. To my mother, the best men were “real gentlemen” and the best women were “put together.” Oprah Winfrey? “Put together.” Hillary Clinton? “Really put together.” My oldest sister’s mother-in-law? “Likes to think she’s put together.” And while my dad would scoff (his stripper friend Charity, now there’s a woman put together, surgically so), Mom merely meant by the phrase that a certain woman was successful, sure-of-herself, composed. All those things Mom believed she wasn’t; all those things she wanted to be.
When Lisa went back to work and couldn’t find a job, I thought about Mom’s pet phrase. And I thought about it again almost a year ago, when-in the fog of poetfolio.com-I happened to get the mail and saw a bill from MasterCard. It wasn’t the URGENT stamp on the bill that got my attention; while I paid the mortgage, Lisa took care of the monthly bills, and I knew she sometimes mugged Peter to pay Paul. It was the fact that we didn’t have a MasterCard. We had Visa. As it turned out, we had both now, and Discover, too, and all
three were maxed out. I went out to the garage, where the boxes had been piling up-investments, Lisa called them-and I started opening them, porcelain dolls and commemorative plates and limited edition plush toys. After five or six, I stopped. None of this was secret. I’d seen the boxes. And she’d tried to tell me about the online “business” she’d read about-buying collectibles on eBay, holding them for a few years as their value increased, then reselling them on craigslist (or maybe it was vice versa). Deep in my own delusions, I’d only pretended to listen, so I missed the desperation and envy in the way she described people who made a living buying and selling such crap online, and I completely missed the fact that my wife-who, an hour later stood in front of me, weeping (it just got away from me, Matt)-was suffering deeply, unsure of her place in the world, of her value, pathologically afraid that the solid man she’d married was morphing into her irresponsible father-and that she felt she needed to do something immediately to take care of herself.
Here’s the thing: if you’re put together, you can also come apart.
Now Lisa stands in our kitchen, leaning on the sink. She sets her face, shakes her head without looking at me and leaves the room. In the TV room, she offers a flat “Hi Jerry” to Dad, whose voice cracks raspy and urgent, like a man dying of thirst: “I miss chipped beef!”
“I know that, Jerry,” she snaps, and then, softer, “I’m sorry.” And then Lisa goes upstairs, and after a minute, I hear her gentle, sweet voice in Franklin’s room-just a low hum, I can’t make out any words; this goes on for several minutes, punctuated a few times by Franklin’s voice, first frantic and then high, then low, easier-muffled jazz horn of comfort. Lisa won’t make more of this than she should. She’s good that way, good with them, a genius of per
spective and calm. I know Franklin must feel better, and I feel another rush of jealousy. I want that comfort, that voice. Then I hear her feet pad across the floor upstairs and the toilet flushes and there’s more padding and the door opens on the office-my eyes tracing her movements in the lines in the ceiling, as if I could see through the floorboards to the world where Lisa lives now, and then I hear the first, faint clacks of computer keys. (U will never guess what he did now…)
I know I should go up there and talk to her. And what? Apologize? Confront her about Chuck? Wait for her to confront me? What do I say? We’re in a perpetual blind stalemate here; lost. I can see how we got here-after each bad decision, after each failure we quietly logged our blame, our petty resentments; we constructed a case against the other that we never prosecuted. As long as both cases remained unstated, the charges sealed, we had a tacit peace: you don’t mention this and I won’t mention that, this and that growing and changing and becoming everything, until the only connection between us was this bridge of quiet guilt and recrimination. I don’t bring up her insistence on remodeling and her online shopping binge and she doesn’t stare across the dinner table and say, with all due respect, Matt: financial fucking poetry? And on and on we go, not talking-all the way to the incriminating cheating and weed-dealing mess we’re in now.
We’re not husband and wife right now; we are unindicted coconspirators.
It’s almost as if Lisa and I deserve this. Or believe we do. And I don’t think we’re alone. It’s as if the whole country believes we’ve done something to deserve this collapse, this global warming and endless war, this pile of shit we’re in. We’ve lived beyond our means, spent the future, sapped resources, lived on the bubble. Economists pretend they’re studying a social science, and while the
economy is a machine of hugely complex systems, it’s also organic, the whole a reflection of the cells that make it up, a god made in our image, prone to flights of euphoric greed and pride, choking envy, irrational fear, pettiness, stinginess, manic euphoria and senseless depression. And…guilt. Embarrassment. Somewhere a genius economist is factoring the shame index into this recession because we want to suffer, need to suffer. Like the irritating talk radio host who’s been giddily predicting economic collapse for five years, and now is more than I-told-you-so self-satisfied. He actually seems aroused by the specter of soup kitchens and twenty percent unemployment; I’m telling you, the man has a recession boner. Politicians and TV analysts put on leather stockings and whip their own backs like self-flagellating end-times Christians, slathering for payback for profligate spending, for reliance on debt, for unwise loans and the morons we elected, for the CEOs we overpaid, the unfunded wars we waged. We are kids caught lying and stealing: guilty, beaten children of drunks; give us our punishment so we can feel loved, so we can feel something.
And Lisa and me? We constructed our trouble, for better or worse, richer poorer, built it out of mistakes and arrogance and yes, at some level, we deserve this…bottoming out. No other explanation. She deserves an unemployed pothead husband. I deserve a distant, cheating wife.
I stare at the ceiling separating us. She’s up there.
I hear the low buzz of the TV in the room next door. Dad sighs.
I could still go upstairs. And what will I see? Lisa on the computer? Or lying in bed, texting him? Is there the slightest chance she’ll lift the covers and say, Matt, don’t go out tonight? Or the awkward silence, avoiding eyes, me shifting my weight, making my lame excuse and Lisa simply shrugging when I say I’m going out
for milk for the third time this week?
There are always moments in which a person can stop, crossroads where you can change course…there are those moments…until there aren’t any more.
I grab my keys.