He was a tall man who had a tendency to slouch, and the kids called him Frankenstein.
Johnny seemed amused rather than outraged by this. And yet his classes were mostly quiet and well-behaved, there were few skippers (Sarah had a constant problem with kids cutting class), and that same jury seemed to be coming back in his favor.
He was the sort of teacher who, in another ten years, would have the school yearbook dedicated to him. She just wasn’t. And sometimes wondering why drove her crazy.
‘You want a beer before we go? Glass of wine? Anything?’
‘No, but I hope you’re going well-heeled,’ she said, taking his arm and deciding not to be mad anymore. ‘I always eat at least three hot dogs. Especially when it’s the last county fair of the year.’ They were going to Esty, twenty miles north of Cleave Mills, a town whose only dubious claim to fame was that it held ABSOLUTELY THE LAST
AGRICULTRAL FAIR OF THE YEAR IN NEW ENGLAND. The fair would close
Friday night, on Halloween.
‘Considering Friday’s payday, I’m doing good. I got eight bucks.’
‘Oh … my … God,’ Sarah said, rolling her eyes. ‘I always knew if I kept myself pure I’d meet a sugar daddy someday.’
He smiled and nodded. ‘Us pimps make biiig money, baby. Just let me get my coat and we’re off.’
She looked after him with exasperated affection, and the voice that had been surfacing in her mind more and more often – in the shower, while she was reading a book or prepping a class or making her supper for one – came up again, like one of those thirty-second public-service spots on TV: He’s a very nice man and all that, easy to get along with, fun, he never made you cry. But is that love? I mean, is that all there is to it? Even when you learned to ride your two-wheeler, you had to fall off a few times and scrape both knees.
Call it a rite of passage. And that was just a little thing.
‘Gonna use the bathroom,’ he called to her.
‘Uh-huh.’ She smiled a little. Johnny was one of those people who invariably mentioned their nature calls -God knew why.
She went over to the window and looked out on Main Street. Kids were pulling into the parking lot next to O’Mike’s, the local pizza-and-beer hangout. She suddenly wished she were back with them, one of them, with this confusing stuff behind her – or still ahead of her. The university was safe. It was a kind of never-never land where everybody, even the teachers, could be a part of Peter Pan’s band and never grow up. And there would always be a Nixon or an Agnew to play Captain Hook.
She had met Johnny when they started teaching in September, but she had known his face from the Ed courses they had shared. She had been pinned to a Delta Tau Delta, and none of the judgments that applied to Johnny had applied to Dan. He had been almost flawlessly handsome, witty in a sharp and restless way that always made her a trifle uncomfortable, a heavy drinker, a passionate lover. Sometimes when he drank he turned mean. She rememberd a night in Bangor’s Brass Rail when that had happened. The man in the next booth had taken joking issue with something Dan had been saying about the UMO football team, and Dan had asked him if he would like to go home with his head on backward. The man had apologized, but Dan hadn’t wanted an apology; he had wanted a fight. He began to make personal remarks about the woman with the other man. Sarah had put her hand on Dan’s arm and asked him to stop. Dan had shaken her hand off and had looked at her with a queer flat light in his grayish eyes that made any other words she might have spoken dry up in her throat. Eventually, Dan and the other guy went outside and Dan beat him up. Dan had beaten him until the other man, who was in his late thirties and getting a belly, had screamed. Sarah had never heard a man scream before -she never wanted to hear it again. They had to leave quickly because the bartender saw how it was going and called the police. She would have gone home alone that night (oh? are you sure? her mind asked nastily), but it was twelve miles back to the campus and the buses had stopped running at six and she was afraid to hitch.