Three Days in June

three The Day After

Very early on Sunday morning, so early it was barely light out, I woke not by degrees but all at once. I just found myself awake—wham!—with the cool damp nose of a cat daintily probing my left ear.

Oh.

The cat.

I turned onto my back, and the cat started purring and settled herself in her favorite spot next to my ribcage.

It’s over, I thought. Debbie’s wedding day is over, thank God. And really it all went fine.

She was probably still asleep now, on this very first day of her marriage. I didn’t feel any sense of envy. What person in her right mind would want to go back to being a newlywed? There was so much she had yet to adjust to, she and Kenneth both; I was just glad to be past all that.

Once upon a time, Debbie had sworn she would never get married. Back in fifth grade, this was. Never, ever, she had said. She’d have to be crazy to get married. That was my fault entirely; I knew it even then. I’d fallen in love with another man that year and torn our family apart forever.

His name was Andrew Mason.

He was the college admissions counselor at Millwood High, where I taught algebra and remedial math.

A medium-height, medium-weight man in his late forties.

Short brown hair, pale gray eyes, and a complicated mouth that made his smiles seem slightly held back, slightly reluctant, in an appealing sort of way.

He always wore a suit to work, but he wore it casually, as if merely to satisfy some requirement, and his shirt was open collared, without a tie.

I met him on his first day at Millwood, at the start of the 2000–2001 school year.

He’d been hired to replace June Cannon, who’d retired the previous spring at the age of (I’m guessing here) a hundred and five.

As I was walking back from Bert’s Beans, where I’d just bought the takeout coffee that I liked to begin my day with, he pulled up next to me in a little beige Volkswagen Beetle.

“Excuse me,”

he called out his window. “Are you familiar with this area?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Would you happen to know if there’s a grownups’ lot around here for Millwood High?”

“A grownups’ lot.”

“The parking lot behind the school seems to be just for students, and I can’t find any grownup parking.”

“Oh,”

I said, “the kids must’ve been tinkering with the sign again. It’s supposed to say ‘No Student Parking,’ but they keep painting over the ‘No.’ You’ll be fine there.”

“Thanks,” he said.

And both of us went on our way.

I guessed even then that he might be the new college admissions counselor. So I wasn’t surprised to see him in the front hall that afternoon, tacking a notice up on the bulletin board. “Hi there!”

he said, and I said, “Hi,”

and gave him a wave.

The notice—as I saw when I passed by again later—announced the specific hours when students could come talk to him without a prior appointment. I thought that showed good sense. June Cannon’s office had been sheer chaos, from the looks of it.

I didn’t see him again until a couple of days after that. I’d stopped by the school library to check the Recent Acquisitions shelf, and I found him doing the same. He turned and raised his eyebrows and smiled. “It appears you’re following me,” he said.

“I can understand why you’d think so,”

I told him, “but that must have been my twin sister.”

I have no idea what led me to say that. Well, I do have some idea: it was the first time I’d seen that smile of his, that smile-in-spite-of-itself, and I wanted to make it grow wider. Which it did, in fact. It turned into an actual grin. “My mistake,” he said.

And then we kind of tilted our chins at each other, acknowledging the joke, and I went back to my classroom.

At the end of school hours that Friday, he happened to walk past my office. I had a tiny office of my own that was separate from my classroom—no more than a cubbyhole, really—where I could meet with my remedial students one-on-one, and I was just collecting some papers for the weekend when he paused outside the door. “I should have introduced myself before,”

he told me. “I’m Andrew Mason.”

“Hi, Andrew. I’m Gail Baines.”

“Yes, I know you are,”

he said, and he took a step in to survey the room, such as it was. Behind my desk was a low bookshelf holding files and half a dozen framed photos—Debbie in a kiddie pool, Debbie and I at a playground, Debbie and Max and I at my parents’ anniversary party. Andrew circled the desk to look at these. Then he said, “I don’t see your twin sister.”

“Oh, she’s here,”

I said, and I pointed to the playground picture. “This one’s her.”

“No, it’s not,”

he said. “It’s you. I can tell by that little white scar on your chin.”

He was talking about the half-inch line, no wider than a thread, that ran vertically from just above my jawbone to just below it. (A roller-skating injury from childhood.) I was surprised he’d even spotted it. I said, “Actually, we both have that. I got mine first, and then she cut one on her own chin so we could still match.”

“Tisk, tisk,”

he said, giving the word an ironic pronunciation. “A copycat twin.”

He picked up the playground photo and examined it more closely. “Very unoriginal of her.”

“I won’t tell you which is which in the others,”

I said. And the odd thing was that as I stood gazing at the photos myself, I really did feel all at once that they showed two different women.

Which was the case throughout the time I knew him, it strikes me now. Two completely different women: one who loved her husband the same as always, and another who wanted to reach out a finger and very, very gently nudge this man’s smile a smidgen higher at the corners.

It could have gone either way from there.

He could have become a good friend who went to the symphony sometimes with Max and me, just like Morrie Gray from the science department.

But somehow, I don’t know…For one thing, our encounters happened to take place in private, for the most part.

Andrew never ate in the cafeteria, where the teachers gathered in a chatty bunch at a single long table, because noon was one of the times he kept open for drop-in students.

Nor did he attend the Friday-morning assemblies; it wasn’t part of his job description.

Generally, we’d just fall into step with each other in the parking lot or the front hall corridor.

We would both slow down and I might ask how he was settling in (very well, he always said), or he might add some new embellishment to our twin myth.

Then gradually he developed the habit of stopping by my office to ask for my advice on how to deal with our difficult principal, or where to take his sister to dinner when she came for a visit.

He might even settle on the chair opposite my desk for a moment, if our discussion grew more involved.

He was divorced, and he had no children.

The divorce had happened some years ago; the marriage had been brief and—I sensed—lacking in impact.

His ex-wife lived in Virginia now with her current husband and their three daughters.

He had never wanted children himself, he said; just hadn’t developed the urge, somehow.

He lived in a small house in Pimlico, and he referred often to his yard—what fall colors his bushes were changing to and what he thought he might plant next spring—so I gathered he was the gardening type.

Which I was not, most emphatically, and neither was Max.

I did mention him to Max, but not in any detail. I might quote something Andrew had said that had amused me, but then I’d move on to discuss the new basketball coach or the latest feud among the English teachers.

Max was dealing with his own issues at the time. He was threatening to quit his job at St. Theresa because they focused too much on religion. “It’s a religious school, for gosh sake,”

I said, but he said, “They still shouldn’t be meddling with my reading list.”

And so on and so forth. The point is, Max was not fully present right then.

But I realize that’s no excuse.

I confided to Andrew that the trouble with Max was, he didn’t take things seriously. He didn’t take himself seriously. He had a tendency to wander off course halfway through a project, as if his life were just a casual experiment.

“I think most of the world works that way,”

Andrew told me. “People look at where they’ve arrived and say, ‘Huh! So that’s how it is!’ as if they themselves had nothing to do with it.”

“Right,”

I said. “They’re so…accepting.”

Andrew smiled. He said, “You say that as if it’s a shortcoming.”

“Well, sometimes it is,” I said.

Andrew’s office was on the first floor. So was mine, but my classroom was on the second floor. Anytime I came downstairs to confer with a student in my office I would feel this acute consciousness, this prickly awareness in the back of my neck as I walked past Andrew’s closed door.

When I imagined becoming involved with him—not that I really would! I told myself.

Not that I’d actually do such a thing!—I pictured its happening in my cubbyhole.

He would stop by and we’d get to talking and then gradually we would fall silent; we would look at each other across my desk; we would know what the other was thinking.

Or he would catch up with me in the parking lot and, “Gail,”

he would say, “we have to talk,”

and then he’d take hold of my arm and lead me to my car. Or I would just be turning my key in the ignition when I heard his tap on my driver’s-side window.

But in fact it happened in my classroom, in my big sunny open classroom with its bank of giant picture windows and its seating for thirty-two students.

I was eating lunch at my desk one day because I had a stack of exams to grade before the next period began.

I was feeding myself a spoonful of yogurt when I chanced to look up and notice him in my doorway.

Just standing in my doorway, watching me.

He might have been there for some time.

He said, “How long can we keep this up, Gail?”

I had to finish dragging my plastic spoon upside-down along the length of my tongue before I could answer him. I had to swallow. It was awkward. Then I said, “I don’t know how long.”

What I should have said was, “We can keep this up forever. We can go on leaving things unspoken, letting them teeter in the balance, because isn’t everything perfect just the way it is?”

But I didn’t.

* * *

In my earlier life, my pre-marriage life, my few scant romances had proceeded as if by mere chance. A guy and I would get close and then closer, and then on the spur of the moment off to bed we’d go. But not anymore, of course. Now we had to make an appointment ahead of time.

Or I had to make an appointment.

Not so much Andrew.

Andrew’s life was spare and orderly.

Mine was cluttered.

Andrew worked from eight thirty to three, five days a week.

I also worked from eight thirty to three, but in addition I had a husband and a daughter to see to.

Carpools, playdates, pediatrician appointments…It didn’t leave a lot of room for romantic assignations.

In fact, we had to wait three days that first time before we could finally be together.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

On Friday, Debbie would be spending the night with a friend from her school.

It was her very first overnight, and she kept checking with me on Friday morning to make certain I would rescue her if she got homesick.

“I can call you if I need to, right?”

she asked. “I mean, like even if it’s the middle of the night I can call and you will come for me.”

“Yes, of course,”

I said, because by then I would have been home for hours. I had to fix supper for Max, after all. “I’ll come in my pajamas, if I have to.”

“Or, but, if I’m just getting into Pam’s mom’s car after school and I change my mind then, I can call too, right?”

“Right,”

I said, but more faintly. “Although it might be harder to reach me then. You might have to go on home with Pam and I would pick you up a bit later.”

It was Max who drove Debbie to school every morning, because their schools started later than mine did. But even as I was walking out of the house she was hanging on to my wrist and saying, “You promise? You won’t tell me I should try to stay there when I don’t want to, will you?”

“I would never do that,”

I said. And I meant it.

But she managed the whole thing just fine, it turned out. She and I had both worried for no reason.

The plan was that at the end of my school day, I would follow Andrew home in my car.

I followed him past the Pimlico racetrack and then northward on a series of little neighborhood streets until we reached a small white cottage with yellowish stains descending from the eaves and all the windowsills.

The yard, though, was meticulously cared for.

Grass like a flawless green velvet carpet, a row of flowerpots in graduated sizes marching down the steps from the stoop, and a dwarf Japanese maple out front with leaves that glowed magenta.

When I stepped out of my car my first words were “Is all this your doing?”

So of course Andrew had to give me the garden tour, leading me around back so he could show me his little vegetable plot with its abundance of acorn squash and zucchini even this late in the fall. “Mm-hmm, I see,”

I kept saying, and, “Goodness! Look at the size of those!” but inwardly, I was worrying I’d worn the wrong underwear.

It was black, and very lacy—too obvious, I realized.

I should have worn plain white, as if I’d given the subject no thought.

(“And are those bushes lilacs?” I asked.) Actually, I told myself, it wasn’t mandatory that we should have sex on this very first occasion.

In fact, I’d prefer not to.

I would put him off; I would say I wasn’t ready.

I would suggest we meet again next Tuesday, when Debbie had gymnastics practice.

We wouldn’t have as much time then—I had to pick her up at five—but it was manageable.

And I would wear white underwear, except that my bra would be the extra-nice one with the seashell-shaped cups.

We went inside. (Neat as a pin, but a bit too sparsely furnished. His ex-wife had taken all the best pieces, he said.) In the kitchen I stalled a bit by pausing to run an index finger across the spines of his cookbooks, but that proved unnecessary because next he offered to make coffee. “I’d love some coffee!” I said.

“Is decaf okay?” he asked.

“Decaf is perfect.”

“I can’t sleep a wink if I drink real coffee after ten a.m.,”

he said, and I said, “Ten! Well, that is early. I have real coffee with my lunch, lots of times, but I wouldn’t want to risk it any later in the day.”

I don’t know why I was speaking so loudly.

He filled his coffeemaker with water and ladled the decaf in with a measuring spoon. Meanwhile I found the sugar bowl in a cabinet and set it at the center of the table. My scheme was that we should have our coffee in the kitchen. Kitchens were more…vertical than living rooms.

I looked in the fridge for cream (a nicely stocked fridge; he must actually cook), but when I didn’t find any I took out the milk instead. He was probably one of those people who think cream is unhealthy. I poured the milk into a cream pitcher and placed it on the table next to the sugar bowl. Andrew, meanwhile, was watching the coffeemaker burbling away, his focus so intent you’d think it couldn’t have functioned without his gaze.

“Silverware?”

I asked, and he turned toward the table then and said, “Oh!”

I thought at first he was surprised I hadn’t set things up in the living room, but what he said next was, “I’m sorry you went to all that trouble. I happen to take my coffee black.”

I said, “I don’t, though.”

“Oh, right.”

“Where will I find the spoons?”

I asked him.

He gestured toward a drawer.

“And napkins?” I said.

“There beside the toaster.”

The napkins were white linen, stacked in a wickerwork box. Aha, a conversational topic. “I’m impressed,”

I told him. “Max and I just use paper, I’m ashamed to say.”

Clumsy of me to mention Max. It was habit; that was all.

“The fact is, I like to iron,”

Andrew told me.

“I know what you mean!”

I said. “I love to iron.”

“You do?”

“It’s like you get an instant effect when you iron.”

“Exactly. Things start out all screwed-up and crinkled—”

“But then sudden, perfect smoothness.”

“And I don’t believe in steam irons,”

Andrew said.

“No, you want to really soak things,”

I said. “Do you own an actual sprinkler bottle?”

“I do own a sprinkler bottle!”

Andrew said.

We smiled at each other. The coffeemaker stopped burbling, but he just stood there smiling at me. So it was up to me to step forward, finally, and wrap my arms around him and press the length of my body against him and lift my face to his.

After that, he was the one in charge. He drew away from me and took my hand and led me out of the kitchen, and through the foyer, and up the stairs.