The English Teacher Read online

  Praise for The English Teacher:

  “The dizzying complexities of melding stepfamilies provide much of the drama in this spare but acutely observed second novel. … This fine book demonstrates how a short novel can illuminate difficult real-life issues with sensitivity and insight.”

  —John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Moving and deeply absorbing … With the momentum of a Hardy novel, albeit with a more hopeful outlook, The English Teacher snowballs to its heartwarming … conclusion … saved by King’s considerable psychological acuity and intelligence.”

  —Heller McAlpin, Newsday

  “The English Teacher has moments of real insight, some sensitive portrayals, and most significant of all, the narrative drive that testifies to a real storyteller at work. … Ms. King is a novelist worth watching.”

  —Claire Hopley, The Washington Times

  “A marriage of single parents is more often the stuff of sitcoms than of serious novels, but King uses it to great effect in this intense character study. … King renders Vida’s seething withholding in a free, direct style that captures everything. … She’s also excellent on the children’s reactions to each other as the households come together and then separate, dramatically and perhaps permanently.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Lily King writes equally movingly and beautifully about both the large, dramatic and the small, seemingly inconsequential acts that destroy and define family.”

  —Lily Tuck, Winner of the National Book Award for

  The News from Paraguay

  “King beautifully delineates the grieving children in all their confused steps toward recovery.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “From its powerful beginning, The English Teacher soars. It is a book filled with surprises; a novel that takes unexpected turns. Yet as you read on—and in this book you will absolutely read on—there is a sense that unfolding events are inevitable. King is a masterful storyteller. Her description of adolescent interaction in the Belou-Avery blended family is as believable as it is wrenching. King has a wonderful ability to convey in a few short sentences how seemingly innocuous events change characters. … An uplifting book with a message of hope for problem-torn blended families.”

  —Lloyd Ferriss, Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram

  “She has the intuitive touch of a writer whose primary interest is the inner world of her creations. … The novel delivers something subtler and far more compelling: a look at the illusions we carry throughout life, through love or chaos, most of them in service of what we couldn’t bear to see.”

  —Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

  “King really shines when she writes in Peter’s point of view. … Peter’s voice is authentic, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful. King is masterful at capturing teenagers. Wonderful, too, are the scenes in which we get to watch Vida teaching English. These are so accurately drawn, they will bring anyone back to their own high school English classes. … The English Teacher is a solid follow-up to The Pleasing Hour. King is a terrific writer who delivers a suspenseful and emotional story. Read the books in order and I guarantee you will become a fan of Lily King. I am.”

  —Ann Hood, The Providence Journal

  “King delicately delves into the fragile bonds holding families together, even when logic favors their dissolution. … [She] writes with subtle clarity, displaying an intuitive understanding of the vulnerable psyches of teenagers, and with pinpoint perception of her characters’ inner lives.”

  —Booklist

  “King’s prose throughout this fine novel is restrained and powerful, whether she is describing Vida’s paralyzed witness of her own life, or tangential class and in-group observations.”

  —Wingate Packard, The Seattle Times

  “As intriguing as Lily King’s debut … King has delved into the depths of two lonely souls and treated us to a wonderful experience.”

  —Nandini Bandyopadhyay, The Tampa Tribune

  “This wise and moving novel is much like Sue Miller’s fiction, set amid the rocky landscape of family life. … The heart of the story is its lovely depiction of wounded people struggling to find solace and stability in each other.”

  —Anne Stephenson, The Arizona Republic

  The English Teacher

  Also by Lily King

  The Pleasing Hour

  The English Teacher

  A NOVEL BY

  Lily King

  Copyright © 2005 by Lily King

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  King, Lily.

  The English teacher : a novel / by Lily King.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4664-0

  1. English teachers—Fiction. 2. Remarried people—Fiction. 3. Stepfamilies—Fiction. 4. New England—Fiction. 5. Islands—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3561.I4814E54 2005

  813′.54—dc22 2005045384

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Tyler, who brought everything to life

  Life is beginning. I now break into my hoard of life.

  —Virginia Woolf, The Waves

  ONE

  October, 1979

  THAT SHE HAD NOT KILLED HIM IN HER SLEEP WAS STILL THE GREAT RELIEF of every morning.

  Not that she actually believed he was dead when he slept in on a Saturday. It was merely a leftover ritual, the weak ghost of an old fear from years ago when she awoke and waited, barely breathing, as close to prayer as she had ever got in her life, for a single sound of him: a little sigh, or the scrape of his feetie pajamas across the floor. He’d scuffle into her room still warm and puffy and half asleep, and the piercing relief of him collided with the horror of possessing such a fear and the dread of its return the next morning.

  Now here he was at quarter of eleven, finally, his boots whacking the stairs, missing steps, his shirt unbuttoned but with an under-shirt beneath (she didn’t know what grew on his chest now and didn’t want to). He shook out half a box of cereal and ate it in a few loud smacks at the other end of the table. Still, what sweetness flooded beneath her skin! She did not, could not, let him see it, and instead told him to remember to close his mouth please.

  His back to her, carrying the empty bowl to the sink, he said he was going over to Jason’s. To take apart a television.

  She watched him cross the soccer fields diagonally—no home games today, thank God—and disappear down the path to Jason’s house. All the delicious, fleeting relief of him went, too.

  She returned to the mounds of essays in front of her. Within a few hours she reached the bottom of the freshman papers and moved on to the juniors’. Peter didn’t come home for lunch, so she forgot to eat.

  Vida began to contemplate canceling her plans for the evening. Tom would want to touch her again, scrape his mustache against her neck.
Her armpits grew slippery. The telephone on the wall urged her on—a virus, a migraine. A quick call and it could all be over, the sweating, the rancid taste, and the sensation that she was no longer inside her body but beside it. And yet it was this disassociation that immobilized her, prevented her from getting up from her grading and walking the five paces to the phone. Instead she continued to watch the pen in her hand make small thick checkmarks beside the strong passages, and larger aggressive comments beside the weak, and then, below the last line of each essay, deposit a grade. She always graded more harshly in the afternoon before an evening with Tom Belou.

  Peter answered the door. When had he come home? She hadn’t heard the doorbell. It would be Lloyd or Wendell, the custodians, looking for an extra hand to move some chairs from one wing to another. But then there was a strange swishing in the hallway, coming at her, and Tom himself appeared in her kitchen. He was wearing a parka. She’d never seen him in any sort of coat. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since last weekend. It was beige, with a belt he let dangle at the sides.

  “You off to climb Everest?” she said, feeling trapped in her seat at the table. She didn’t go to great lengths primping before she saw him, but she did brush her hair and her teeth and change out of her old slippers with the stuffing bulging out. Until this moment their encounters had been quite formal, with precise beginnings and ends, no sleepovers, no weekends away. Neither had ever dropped in on the other like this; their children had never met. Their touching was tentative, nearly absentminded, though her memory of it was acute, a confusing ache of pleasure and shame. No intercourse. Miraculously, they were in silent agreement about that.

  Her dog Walt nudged Tom’s hand with the long bridge of his nose, but Tom didn’t respond as he usually did. He just stood there in the doorway, his eyes flicking over her impatiently. He was going to break it off. It couldn’t have been clearer to her. This was just the way he would do it, in person, in a parka, perhaps after a trip to the dump. He needn’t bother. It was hardly anything to her. She had enjoyed his company, his lack of demands on her, but that couldn’t have lasted much longer.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pointing to the sea of essays, “I know I’m interrupting.” His hands were red from the cold.

  Let’s just get it over with, she thought, anger and humiliation prickling her throat. Her mind felt calm, detached, but her heart had another engine altogether and thudded painfully.

  “I just had this … I was planning to … but it just made me so crazy, all the …” He walked the length of the kitchen, away from her, the bulky parka sleeves squealing as his arms flailed about. She wondered if he’d stitched it himself, this awful coat.

  She wished she’d never said she loved him. She was just being polite, returning the compliment late one evening. But now it turned out he’d been mistaken. Of course it had been too soon. His wife had only been dead a short while. She wished he’d just spit it out and go home.

  He reached the far counter, spun around, and with three long strides he was there before her, hovering over her and her work. He smelled of something familiar. Maple syrup, maybe. His eyes finally settled on hers. “I love you, Vida. I do. But it’s not enough for me. It’s not enough to simply love you. I wish for everyone’s sake it were but it’s not. I want to marry you.” A laugh or a sob, Vida couldn’t tell which, pushed its way out of his chest. “I want to marry you.”

  Out of the parka came a ring, no box, that clinked as it landed in her teacup. “Damn,” he said, fishing it out with thick shaking fingers. “I’m sure you’ve had better proposals than this. I’m just not that type.”

  It was, in fact, her first proposal. Another woman, a better woman, might have confessed this. She never would. She had let him believe, along with everyone else up here, that she’d been married to Peter’s father.

  The ring hovered now, too, caught in the tips of his fingers. Suddenly she understood the true role of the ring. It forced, as T. S. Eliot would say, the moment to its crisis. Without it, a proposal was just a question, a query, and the response could be the beginning of a conversation that might last weeks, or years. But the ring demanded the final answer within a few seconds. You either reached up and took it, or you kept your hand on top of Hank Fish’s essay on Emerson. And once you took it, you’d have an awkward time of giving it back. But to not take the ring, to leave it untouched, to watch it go back into the parka pocket, the proposal marked with a fat F—who could deliver that blow? She heard Peter upstairs, crossing the landing to the bathroom. She’d always imagined these moments filled with ecstatic conviction, but this moment was about ending the embarrassment, stopping the shallow breaths through Tom’s nostrils and the little laugh-sobs he was trying to suppress. It was about Peter upstairs and her terror of the mornings and all the years they’d been alone together in this house.

  Whether she spoke or simply nodded she’d never know. All she knew was that the ring, several sizes too big, was slipped on her finger and Tom was kissing her, then burying his face in her hair, then kissing her again. Everything felt rubbery. She had the sense, despite his enthusiasm, that it wasn’t really happening this way, that they were rehearsing, hypothesizing, and that the real moment would happen later, would happen differently.

  Tom called up to Peter, who launched himself down the stairs immediately, his lack of athleticism embarrassing to her in Tom’s presence. His face was bright red. He already knew. Even before Tom made the announcement, clutching her at the shoulders, she saw that Peter already knew.

  “I am so psyched,” he said, pumping Tom’s hand, then raising both fists in the air as if it were the successful end of a soccer game. “Congrats, Mom,” he said to her and pecked her on the cheek. There was a bit of a bristle to his chin. “This has been a long time coming.” He was beaming at her, though he barely knew Tom. A handful of hellos at the door, that was all.

  They celebrated with cookies and cider. She filled the glasses, passed the plate, but still she was somewhere apart from her body, and this moment was somehow apart from the rest of her life. Again and again she felt they were practicing, all three of them, and each time she smiled at Tom or Peter, she felt they were acknowledging that, too.

  She walked Tom out to his car. She hoped that this would serve as their date, that she could have the rest of the evening to herself to finish her work. But he hugged her again and said he’d pick her up at seven.

  He got into his car, then leapt out. “I almost forgot.” He reached into the backseat. “A little engagement present.”

  It was a blue box with his insignia on it, Belou Clothiers. He had been that certain she’d say yes.

  “When I was a very little boy,” he said, leaning against the car and pulling her toward him in a gesture of familiarity that was probably familiar only to his wife in the grave, “my grandfather made a dress for a customer, a very simple dress. A few weeks later a friend of hers came in the shop and ordered the exact same dress. She said her friend had told her it was a magic dress. After that he got another request, and another. My grandfather must have made twenty-five of those dresses. I forgot all about them and then when I saw you I remembered. I remembered the dress exactly, right down to the pearl buttons. I don’t know why.”

  She lifted off the top. It was yellow, a color she never wore. She was relieved that it was a summer dress with tiny capped sleeves: it would be at least eight months before she’d be expected to wear it.

  “It’s lovely,” she said, holding it up to herself. Dear God, what had she done?

  “It’s magic.” He kissed her again. The kisses were different now—firmer, possessive.

  Tom the Tailor made me a dress, she imagined telling Carol, though she knew she wouldn’t.

  She watched his car turn off her gravel road and onto the paved school avenue, which carried him past the mansion and all its new limbs, then the tennis bubble, then the hockey rink, in a long arc before finally setting him back on the main road. She would have to lea
ve this campus, this haven of fifteen years, if she actually married him.

  “Aren’t you freezing?” Peter called to her from the front door. There was a thrill, a wildness, in his voice she’d never heard before.

  She opened the trunk of her car and tossed the box in. What’s in the box, he’d ask when she got a little closer. He was going to have so many questions this afternoon. She stopped on the path to the house and lit a cigarette to buy herself some more time.

  TWO

  AT HIS MOTHER’S WEDDING, PETER DANCED WITH HIS NEW STEPSISTER Fran, whose attention had slid over the top of his head at the beginning of the song. She wasn’t focused on anything in particular, which made her lack of interest in him all the more apparent. But he was simply happy to be dancing with her. He might never again have the opportunity to dance with someone so thoroughly out of his league.

  This marriage was exactly what Peter had wanted and now it was here, all around him, written on balloons tied to chairs and on the inside of the gold band his mother now wore—the first piece of jewelry he’d ever seen on her. It had all happened so fast, and he was still dizzy with his own good luck. There was something creepy to people about a boy living alone with his mother for his whole life—fifteen and a half years. He’d been embarrassed by it. And now that long chapter was finally over. Tonight they’d go home to a regular house on a regular street, husband and wife in the master bedroom and four kids sprinkled in rooms down a hallway.

  The song was coming to an end. He hoped its last notes would bleed into the beginning of the next. But there was a pause as the lead singer, his math teacher, Mr. Crowse, took a swig of beer, and Fran wavered like a leaf in the silence, poised to catch the first wind away from him. He had to secure her in place, and his mind spun in search of the words. After they had lived together for a few weeks, he’d probably have a ton of things to say, but now they were strangers. He’d already complimented her bridesmaid’s dress, as well as her poem the night before. He could make fun of the band, the Logarithmics, which was made up of the very geekiest teachers at Fayer Academy, but he wanted to say something big, something that would intrigue her.