The Eliot Girls (12 page)

She would have to find a way to leave the room, naturally or not. The impossibility of remaining was obvious.

Perhaps part of the problem had been the edge in her voice. She had heard it without understanding why it was there, and the mystery of its origins rendered her unable to control it. Even as she had wanted to go unseen, to make a getaway into her book, when she heard the teachers talking she had felt eager to disagree. Ruth had to acknowledge that to herself, even as the heat of their ire suffocated her. She had wanted to show herself to be more honest and perceptive than they. If only she had Larissa's air of moral authority, she could express ideas in a dispassionate way that would make people believe her.

“Let's all take a deep breath,” said Henry, sitting forward. “The verb ‘darken' here does in fact refer to the casting of one's shadow across the threshold. I'm a great believer in the healthiness of lively debate. But let's make sure we get our facts straight.”

“Nevertheless, the name-calling is unacceptable,” said Michael.

“I have to go,” Ruth said.

She stood and left, not backing out tentatively as she had in her mind, but moving in a quick series of motions that came much closer to flouncing. In her clumsy desperation for escape, she nearly slammed the door behind her. Her heart was beating erratically as she made for the side stairwell, afraid that before she could get away, one of the teachers would be dispatched, in a parental capacity, to chase her down and strong-arm her into apologizing.

She was almost at the stairwell door when she heard footsteps behind her. She turned around, and indeed, there was Henry, clearly heading straight for her. Although he usually moved restlessly, with a kind of distracted poise, as though the present bored him but his mind was full of amusing diversions, he approached now with resolve. Unwilling to be seen as running away, she stopped outside a classroom to let him catch up. She realized that she had left her half-empty coffee mug on the table, but she couldn't, she absolutely couldn't, go back to tend to it. No doubt she would find a memo in her mailbox later reminding her that all teachers are responsible for cleaning up after themselves.

When he reached her, Henry stopped and plunged his hands deep into his pockets. “I'm sorry for that,” he said.

Ruth said nothing.

“It got out of hand,” he said.

“Mm,” Ruth replied, looking down at her shoes. She was afraid to speak for what her voice might sound like. She knew she should be angry, that she had every right to be angry, and a ferocious sense of righteousness had certainly flooded her as she fled from the room. She wished she were angry: it would be easier to speak, dispassion be damned, if indeed she were. The difficulty was that she was no longer feeling any reassuring fury. Her throat was tight and her knees were wobbly, and she knew that if she spoke, the unmistakable warble in her voice would betray this weakness, this mortifying upset. She couldn't allow anyone—certainly not Henry, with his infuriating calm—to see her in this pitiable state. She knew that he hadn't done anything to start the fight, but she blamed him for it. His mere presence brought the women to a pitch.

Avoiding his gaze, she glanced at the window in the door to the classroom, and she saw Audrey sitting in the front row, next to Seeta. She realized that she had never asked Audrey whom she sat beside. Chuck Marostica was standing at the blackboard, scribbling out the barely legible numbers and letters of a math equation with dizzying speed, and Audrey was watching with that look of concentration and wonder that reminded Ruth of the little girl she had been, poring over the pictures as she read on Richard's lap. That expression: Ruth knew it so well. It always made her feel penitent, and wracked with painful love.

Henry's eyes followed hers.

“I'm going to try to get Audrey involved in the play,” he said. “She has a real talent for delivery.”

But it was all too much. She walked away without looking at him again, letting the swinging door be her reply.

 

THAT EVENING, RUTH HAD
to stay late at work. At lunchtime, Larissa had summoned Ruth to her office—initially Ruth had expected a scolding for the staff room argument—but what Larissa really wanted was to reveal that she had selected Ruth to be the chief editor of that year's Junior School literary journal,
The Pomegranate
. Early in their relationship, the women had shared certain literary sensibilities. In addition to enthusiastic assaults on what they perceived to be the misogyny of certain male writers—Larissa said that she sometimes wished Hemingway were still alive so that she could trounce him in a hearty debate—some of their earliest conversations had been in praise of writers no one else Ruth knew seemed to care about: Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Muriel Spark (though Larissa admitted that she had found it difficult not to read
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
from the perspective of an educator). Those had been the days when Ruth was excited about almost everything Eliot stood for. She had sometimes come to work early expressly for the purpose of having tea with Larissa, to sit in the office overlooking the green fields, talking of books. In time, however, their tastes diverged, and after a testy conversation about the relevance of a reader's morality—Ruth said that to be encumbered by one's own moral framework was to be a weak reader, Larissa strenuously disagreed—their literary talks were reduced to Larissa commenting patronizingly on whatever book Ruth was carrying.

Larissa now evoked those early days of fond agreement. “Though we might disagree on some matters, I have the utmost faith in your taste,” she said. She produced from her desk a copy of last year's
Pomegranate
, edited by Candace McClelland, the grade six teacher, and leaned across the desk confidingly. She had had reservations about allowing Candace to edit, she said, given the botched villanelle she had penned for Eliot's fifth anniversary, and so she had only herself to blame for several wasted mornings of self-recrimination after she saw the cover photograph Candace had come up with, a decidedly blurry image of an open pomegranate, purchased at
IKEA
.

Ruth had to admire Larissa's artfulness, casting the extra work as a privilege. She did indeed feel flattered. Such was the difficulty of her relationship with Larissa McAllister. Ruth could not help wanting her approval, no matter how little she enjoyed the woman, as though in that affirmation lay some objective assessment of her worth.

After the school emptied out, Ruth settled herself on the staff room couch with a folder of submissions. There was a time when she had loved being at Eliot after hours. Alone in the dark, she had never been scared; she had felt the enormity of purpose in the space around her. There had been peace in having her life decided.

Her mother, Antonia, had opposed Ruth's decision to become a primary school teacher. How unimaginative, she bemoaned. How unambitious. Was Ruth under the impression, she asked, that because women had been schoolteachers at a time when they were allowed to be little else, Ruth would be showing some useless female solidarity in becoming a teacher by choice, that precisely because “the schoolteacher” was an archaic profession, it was daring, or transgressive somehow, to seek it as a modern woman? Did she believe that in reclaiming the terms of oppression, Ruth would find true freedom? Antonia's ideas were immovable behemoths: the arguments went on for months.

It wasn't until she met Larissa McAllister at an acquaintance's dinner party that Antonia gave up the fight. Larissa had spoken of her nascent school all evening, and although Antonia had not found her exactly interesting, she had been transfixed by Larissa's intensity, her ideological fervour. One of Ruth's greatest weaknesses, Antonia felt, was that her ideas were muddy and inconsistent, always changing. She was all inspiration, and inspiration was formless, undependable. Larissa's ideology would give Ruth structure. Not long after, Ruth met Larissa and knew instantly that her mother was right, that being a teacher at this school was exactly what she ought to do. (How could it be that someone who readily saw the worst in you still fundamentally understood you?)

It all seemed so very long ago. Before Ruth now was a folder with nearly two hundred submissions, often multiple submissions from the same ambitious girl, and as much as she wanted to be invigorated, her interest in the project was already waning. After flipping through last year's
Pomegranate
, she was confident that with barely an ounce of effort she could do a far better job than Candace, who had commissioned poems on subjects such as “My Favourite Summer Holiday” and “My Favourite Christmas (or Chanukah) Tradition” and had bookended those sections with inspirational aphorisms such as “Everyone smiles in the same language.” Larissa had encouraged students to submit plentifully. She didn't mind that many girls' work wouldn't make it into the published version. It was never too early to begin teaching the lesson that at the core of life was a basic hierarchy of superior and inferior and that hard work resulted not only in private satisfaction but in public approbation. This meant that Ruth now had to endure fifty poems about the exact shade of green in the summer grass. It was on her to judge the relative merits of rhyming couplets about rainbows and similes about happiness. Her heart sank as she realized she probably wouldn't make it home before nine o'clock.

She read dutifully until seven o'clock, when she fell asleep for fifteen minutes and woke up disoriented. Her sense of time had gone askew, and she was sure it must be ten or eleven o'clock. The windows were dark, slick with rain, and on the street below the sound of cars had subsided. When she looked at her watch she was frustrated to see that it was still quite early. She had to put in another hour before she could justify stopping. She got up to make a pot of peppermint tea and rooted through the fridge for something to eat. There was little on offer: half a carton of peach yogurt with Michael's name on masking tape across the top, and ham and cheese on a greasy croissant, no label. Ruth grabbed the sandwich and ate it at the counter, staring at the wall in a daze, until her kettle whistled. She was briefly revived, but when she returned to the couch, the urge to take another nap washed over her. She decided to go home.

She packed her briefcase, grabbed her keys to the school, and let herself out the back door to the parking lot. She was almost at her car, on the far side of the lot by the fence, when she realized she had left her purse, with her car keys, inside. Sighing, she set her briefcase on the hood of the car and doubled back.

Glancing towards the pathway on the far side of the school grounds, Ruth thought of the flasher. She felt like her girlhood self, half hoping for a sighting. The threat level was low. He had probably long since gone home—it was disconcerting to think of the flasher having a home, a stodgy, overheated apartment somewhere—and even if he were around, she was too old for him. She imagined looking up to see him standing under a street lamp, a quirky smile on his chubby, red-cheeked face. He would open his trench coat penitently, as if he just kept getting the better of himself.

She was jingling her keys in her hands, almost at the door, when she felt something from behind. For a second, she thought it was just a strong gust of wind, but then she was tripping forward, dropping her keys, and there was no doubt that she felt something now, a brawny grip on her arm and a force shoving her into the brick wall of the school. She heard the blunt force of her head hitting the wall, but she felt nothing.

A man's face was close to hers, but not the face she was expecting. He was blond, with near-white eyelashes and eyebrows, young. She could see him plainly under the parking lot lights. He was not dressed to hide himself, no black hood enshrouding his face, no toque, neither the disguise nor the demeanour of a criminal. He couldn't have been much more than sixteen years old, and his hair was like a baby's, fine enough to show his pink scalp. His face was forgettable. Already she knew that she would never be able to evoke it if called upon to describe him to the police. Only his bulk was remarkable, obliterating all the strength she thought she had, reducing her to a flimsy, insubstantial thing as it pinioned her to the wall. He demanded her wallet.

“I don't have it,” she said, out of breath. “I swear. Just my briefcase full of work.”

She gestured towards the car. Her school keys lay on the ground beside her. Would he now follow her into the school? She must prevent that above all else. She didn't think he was going to kill her—wouldn't he already have shown her a weapon if he had one?—but she knew that you were never supposed to let yourself be transferred to a second location. If he were going to rape her, he would have to do it right there. It surprised her that she was able to think about whether he would rape her so lucidly, even dispassionately. She could see what would be the right choices to make, as if she were watching a character in a movie. If he demanded to follow her in, she could tell him there were people inside. But wouldn't the empty parking lot betray the truth?

“Please don't hurt me,” she said.

“Give me your fucking jewellery,” he said, giving her a push.

At first she thought she had none, but then she realized she was wearing the sapphire necklace from Antonia, as well as her wedding ring, thin and platinum, engraved with her wedding date. She did not want to give these things up. She was amazed by how she resisted inside, how her mind leapt frantically to find a way around it, especially given how often she had hammered into Audrey's head that if she were ever robbed, she must relinquish everything without hesitation. They were just things, she told herself, as she unhooked her necklace and pulled off her ring, just objects onto which she had imposed meaning. She placed them in his upturned palm, dry and rough and bizarrely patient. Anyone looking on might have thought the transaction was without coercion.