Chapter 21
People don’t tap their watches anymore; have you noticed?
Standard wristwatches, I’m talking about. Remember how people used to tap them?
My father, for instance. His watch was a Timex with a face as big as a fifty-cent piece, and whenever my mother kept him waiting he would frown down at it and give it a tap.
Implying, I suppose now, “Can this possibly be correct? Could it really be this late?” But when I was a little girl, I imagined he was trying to make time move faster—to bring my mother before us instantly, already wearing her coat, like someone in a speeded-up movie.
What reminded me of this recently was that Marilee Burton, the headmistress at the school where I worked, called me into her office one Friday morning as I was walking past. “Come chat for a moment, why don’t you?
” she said. This was not a regular occurrence.
(We were on more or less formal terms.) She waved toward the Windsor chair facing her desk, but I stayed in the doorway and cocked my head at her.
“I thought I should let you know,” she said, “I won’t be coming in on Monday. I have to have a cardioversion.”
“A what?” I asked.
“A procedure for my heart. It’s been beating wrong.”
“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t pretend to be surprised. She was one of those ladylike women who wear heels on all occasions, the perfect candidate for heart issues. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” I told her.
“They’re giving it an electrical jolt that will stop it and then start it again.”
“Huh,” I said. “Like tapping a watch.”
“Pardon?”
“Is it dangerous?” I asked.
“No, no,” she said. “I’ve had it done once before, in fact. But that was over spring break, so I didn’t see the need to announce it.”
“Okay,” I said. “And how long will you be out of the office?”
“I’ll be back on Tuesday, good as new. No need to alter your routine in the slightest. However,” she said, and then she sat straighter behind her desk; she cleared her throat; she briskly aligned a stack of papers that didn’t need aligning.
“However, it brings me to a subject I’ve been meaning to discuss with you. ”
I stood a bit straighter myself. I am very alert to people’s tones of voice.
“I’ll be sixty-six years old on my next birthday,” she said, “and Ralph just turned sixty-eight. He’s starting to talk about traveling a bit, and seeing more of the grandchildren.”
“Really.”
“So I’m thinking of handing in my resignation before the new school year begins.”
The new school year would begin in September. We were already in late June.
I said, “So…does this mean I’ll take over as headmistress?”
It was a perfectly logical question, right? Somebody had to do it. And I was next in line, for sure. I’d been Marilee’s assistant for the past eleven years. But Marilee let a small silence develop, as if I’d presumed in some way. Then she said, “Well, that’s what I wanted to chat about.”
She selected the top sheet on her stack of papers, and she turned it around to face me and slid it across her desk.
I stepped forward, grudgingly. I squinted at it.
A typewritten page with a newspaper clipping stapled to one corner—a black-and-white photo of a serious young woman with energetically curly dark hair.
“Nashville Educator’s Study on Learning Differences Wins McLellan Prize,” the headline read.
I said, “Nashville?” (We lived in Baltimore.) And I had no idea what the McLellan Prize was.
“I brought her name to the board’s attention when I first began to think of retiring,” Marilee said. “Dorothy Edge; maybe you’ve heard of her. I’d read her book, you see, and I’d found it very impressive.”
“You brought her to the board’s attention,” I repeated.
“After all, Gail,” she said. “You’re sixty-one years old, am I right? You won’t be working much longer yourself.”
“I’m sixty-one years old!” I said. “Nowhere near retirement age!”
“It’s not only a matter of age,” she told me.
She was looking at me with her chin raised, the way people do when they know they’re in the wrong.
“Face it: this job is a matter of people skills. You know that! And surely you’ll be the first to admit that social interactions have never been your strong point. ”
“What are you talking about?” I asked her. “What possible interactions could you be referring to?”
“I mean, of course you have many other skills,” Marilee said. “You’re much more organized than I am. You’re a much better public speaker. But look at just now, for instance. I tell you I have a heart condition and you just say, ‘Oh,’ and pass right on to the question of taking over my job.”
“I said, ‘Oh,’ ” I reminded her. “I said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ ” (Another of my strengths is that I have a very good audial memory, including for my own words.) “What more did you require of me?”
“I ‘required’ nothing at all,” she said, and now her chin was practically pointed at the ceiling.
“All I’m saying is, to head a private girls’ school you need tact.
You need diplomacy. You need to avoid saying things like ‘Good God, Mrs. Morris, surely you realize your daughter doesn’t have the slightest chance of getting into Princeton. ’ ”
“Katy Morris couldn’t get into a decent trade school,” I said.
“That’s not the point,” Marilee said.
“So?” I said. “Just because I refuse to sweet-talk all your rich-guy parents I’m doomed to stay on forever as assistant headmistress?”
“Or,” Marilee said, and now she lowered her chin and gazed at me directly across the expanse of her desk. “Perhaps not stay on.”
“Excuse me?”
“Think of some new occupation, perhaps,” she suggested. “Strike out in a whole new direction. Do something you’ve always dreamed of doing; what do you say?” I wondered what on earth she imagined that might be. I am not the kind of woman who dreams of doing things.
“Dottie, I mean Dr. Edge, has expressed a wish that we bring in the assistant she’s been working with in Nashville,” Marilee said. “Apparently the two of them have formed quite an effective team together.”
Dottie.
All this time, I’d been clasping my purse with both hands in front of me.
(Marilee had caught me on my way to my office, at the very start of the day.) Now I felt like some sort of beggar, like someone lacing her fingers together and pleading for a favor, and I dropped my purse to my left side.
“Well,” I said, “I hope they’ll both be very happy here. Good-bye, Marilee.”
“Gail?”
I spun on my heel and walked out.
“Gail, please don’t be like this!”
I walked back down the hall to the foyer, past the trophy case, and out the front door to the street.
Didn’t even stop to collect the pen-and-pencil set on my desk, or the photo of my daughter in her cap and gown, or the cardigan I kept hanging in the closet. Someone could send it all to me later, I thought. Or throw it out; what did I care?
In the parking lot there were only three cars—Marilee’s and mine and the custodian’s.
The sky overhead was gray and looming—rain had been forecast for later—and the two workmen setting traffic cones on the nearby sidewalk wore bright orange slickers.
I got into my Corolla and started the engine and took off immediately, not even pausing to roll down my window, although the interior felt like an oven already.
I couldn’t bear to be observed, was why. I felt embarrassed; I felt conspicuous.
Although it wasn’t as if this were my fault!
I lived in a neighborhood so close to the school that sometimes I walked to work, but I had driven that morning because I’d been planning to stop by the cleaner’s afterward and pick up the dress I’d be wearing that evening.
It was the evening of my daughter’s wedding rehearsal, with dinner to follow.
But now I couldn’t imagine attending, even.
I pictured sitting in the half-empty church while the rest of the wedding party pointed at me and whispered.
“Poor, poor Gail,” they would whisper. “Have you heard?”
She was let go, at age sixty-one.
Lacks people skills.
Wasn’t even consulted about her daughter’s Day of Beauty today at Darleen’s Spa and Massage.
The groom’s mother set that up entirely on her own.
(What could Gail have contributed? she must have thought.
Such a…right-angled person, such a pale-faced, straight-haired person who doesn’t care in the least about looks!)
But they could at least have discussed it with me. I was the mother of the bride.
Never mind that I hadn’t known there was even such a thing as a Day of Beauty.
—
I didn’t stop by the cleaner’s. I drove directly home.
I parked at the curb and climbed the steps to the porch, unlocked the door and walked into the living room and sank into the first chair I came to, facing the front window.
A gauzy white curtain misted the view, so no one could look in and see me.
Grandpa Simmons’s mantel clock ticked on the bookcase.
I didn’t possess an actual mantel. This was a very small, very unassuming house, two-bedroom, built sometime in the sixties.
TV set so old that it stuck out in back a good foot and a half.
Crocheted afghan draped over one couch arm to hide where the upholstery had worn down to bare threads.
I did own the house outright, though. I bought it with the money my father left me.
I could have taken over my parents’ house, since my mother moved to a high-rise immediately after his death, but by that time my marriage was already on rocky ground and I knew that what I needed was a place I could maintain on my own without needing to count on Max.
I don’t mean that Max was a deadbeat, or anything like that; it was just that he had a tendency to choose low-paying jobs.
To this day, he lived hand to mouth—taught at a school for at-risk teenagers over on the Eastern Shore.Rented a one-room apartment above somebody’s garage.