Savaging the Dark Read online

  9

  Through all of this is Connor Blue and his sunshine smile and his old movies and his appreciation for anything I do for him no matter how small.

  It occurs to me more than once that I have developed an unhealthy preoccupation with this boy, but I can’t think what to do except to try to forget it. I’ve been a model teacher for Connor these past months. I’ve helped him learn sentence structure and spelling. I’ve tutored him in his other subjects, especially math, where his grades are slowly improving. I’ve been a support system for Connor, a cheerleader, just as a good teacher should be. I have nothing to be embarrassed about or ashamed of regarding Connor Blue.

  And yet I’ve begun to feel that I’m hiding something from people, that behind the smiling Mona Straw they know is a subterranean other, a strange girl-woman whose mind is filled with smoke and shadows and darkness. This alternate Mona, this private soul, begins to alarm me. She’s not unfamiliar—I’ve known her since I was a child—but something about her is becoming increasingly insistent, as if she were literally inside my body struggling to get out, to burst through my belly or climb up through my throat and take over my life, my family, me. For some time I don’t know what to do about it. I wake in the middle of the night from sweat-drenched dreams, I turn away from my husband, my body goes haywire with menstrual blood and diarrhea and vomit. I miss days of work due to illness, something Ms. Straw never does. Lying in bed the entire day, all alone—Bill gone, having taken Gracie to school himself—weird visions seem to play in my mind and along the walls of the bedroom as I fade in and out of wakefulness. I hear voices, male voices, some consoling, some accusing, none speaking words but rather just sounds, guttural dark man-sounds. Except Connor’s voice, which comes clear and sharp: You okay, Ms. Straw?

  Ms. Straw is not okay. Ms. Straw gets over her bout of what she has decided to call the flu and returns to her routines, to her existence as wife and mother and teacher, but something seems wrong now, some aspect of the perspective she has on life has inexplicably shifted, tilted, changed. When she talks to her husband or daughter it’s as if she is a clever impostor, someone with Mona Straw’s exact face and body and voice but somehow not her. Some kind of unreality seems to come between Mona Straw and what other people think of as the world. Even at school, during class, she has this odd sense of otherness, a notion that she isn’t herself anymore, that something has happened.

  I try to talk to another teacher about it, an older woman named Estelle Higgins. We’ve always had friendly relations and I think she might be willing to listen. But as I try to talk about it I see the expression on Estelle’s pudgy face begin to alter. I’m unaware of what I’ve said to her, actually. I’d begun with Estelle, I have such strange feelings lately, I’m not sure what’s going on with me but then must have gone somewhere very different because she’s scowling in a perplexed way, a confused way, she’s murmuring about how she has to get to class and how she hopes I feel better. Was I raving? I don’t know what I was doing. Someone else seems to have been doing it. I wonder if the other, darker Mona, the one hidden away inside me, has come out, has climbed up through my throat and pulled her way into my mouth and opened my jaws and slipped out into the world, my world.

  I find myself thinking less and less of Bill or Gracie. One afternoon I forget to pick my daughter up at school and I’ve been home half an hour when the phone rings, Ms. Straw, where are you? Is everything okay? I curse myself, rush out the door, make it back to the pre-school quickly enough. No harm done. Anyone can forget something. But there are other things. One afternoon when I pick her up she’s crying. What happened? When she’d opened her Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lunchbox at noon today she’d discovered only the detritus from yesterday in it, a sandwich wrapper, an empty plastic bag containing Oreo crumbs, a crumpled juice box leaking drops of orange all over everything. I’ve completely forgotten to pack a lunch for her, simply handed her the lunchbox as she’d brought it home yesterday. A trip to McDonald’s assuages her, and things are all right again, aren’t they? Aren’t they really? As I sit there with my coffee in front of me watching Gracie consume her Happy Meal I suddenly realize that I’m crying. I have no idea why.

  “Mommy, what’s the matter?”

  Something has gone wrong somewhere, something’s frayed and snapped, something’s broken but I don’t know what. I’m as absent-minded with Bill as I am with Gracie. I don’t remember to buy dinner, or if I buy it I lose myself watching TV and forget to cook it. Bill tries to be good-natured, sensing something amiss, trying to jostle me out of it: “C’mon, Mona, where are you? I know you’re in there somewhere.” But I’m not sure that I am. I’m not sure what I know and what I don’t know anymore. I know that I have trouble focusing at school, forget to grade assignments, leave the educational video at home that had been my lesson plan, neglect to make up the regular Friday quiz. My faculty room box overflows with unread catalogs, unopened circulars. But I never forget the books I promise Connor, or the old movies. I never forget that we have a lunch meeting each day.

  None of this is really too bad—not yet. The efficient and high-functioning Mona Straw has become somewhat scatterbrained, that’s all. Her behavior is well within the range of normality for any person. People forget things. It’s true that she rarely forgot anything before, but she’s under a lot of stress. Having a husband and four-year-old daughter while holding down a full-time teaching job isn’t easy. Everyone understands that, everyone backs off, gives Ms. Straw, Mona, some slack. But Estelle rarely talks to me anymore, rarely makes eye contact.

  The truth is that there are times I can hardly take my eyes off Connor Blue. I realize this about myself and try to make sure no one notices. There’s no one to see other than a bunch of middle-schoolers anyway, but they would if I weren’t careful. What would they think if they realized? They’re too young to imagine anything like, “Ms. Straw is in love with Connor!” The other way around, yes, but not that way, not at their age. And most certainly I am not in love with Connor. But at the same time I have trouble not staring at him, at his clear green eyes, his freckles, his small but muscular arm and graceful fingers as he moves a yellow pencil across a sheet of white lined paper. Yet he’s no different from any boy in my classes, any boy anywhere. I know that. Every period my room is filled with young boys with clear eyes and muscular arms and high young voices. Connor’s no different from the rest, I tell myself. Growing up with no mother and a cold, unsympathetic father? Let him join half the human race. Connor’s no different. He is not.

  ***

  But I can’t convince myself of it, not during those private lunchtime sessions when he sits munching his daily apple and I watch him while trying to make sure it’s not obvious I’m watching him. I watch his Adam’s apple rise and then drop again as he swallows. I watch his eyes move across the pages of the movie book on the desk in front of him. I watch his left leg vibrating up and down and the slight movement of his foot within his sneaker.

  “I want to see The Thirty-Nine Steps,” he says, looking up at me brightly.

  “That’s a really old one,” I say, careful to hold my voice steady. “Hitchcock made that in the 1930s.”

  “I know. I’d like to see all those early ones. The only one I’ve seen is The Lady Vanishes. They run that on TV.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “It was funny. Sometimes I can barely get what they’re saying, though. Like, the accent.”

  “The English accent?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you saying that the English don’t speak good English?”

  “Yeah! The English don’t speak good English!”

  We both laugh. The sound he makes is very high, girlish. His face is luminous. Hardly aware of what I’m doing, I stand and move to his desk, sit down at the one next to him.

  “See?” he says, pointing at a photo of Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll. They are out on some studio-created moor, handcuffed together. “The Thirty-Nine Steps. Looks go
od.”

  “It is good,” I say, leaning toward the book, toward him. “I saw it years ago.” I rest my hand on the corner of his desk, studying the photo. I’m aware that our fingers—mine are much bigger and longer than his—are inches apart. I wonder if he’s aware of it too. I look at the handcuffed couple in the photo, and a picture flashes in my mind of handcuffs around Connor’s thin wrist with an unbreakable silver chain leading to another cuff around my own. The movie, I remember, raised all sorts of implicit questions about how a man and a woman who hardly know each other would behave when handcuffed together. How would they manage the toilet, or their sleeping arrangements? What possible modesty could they maintain? Such questions obviously delighted Hitchcock. I find my heart racing as I study the photo, our hands, Connor’s face in profile.

  On his forearm, I notice, is an oval bruise, not too big, but impossible not to see. “What happened here?” I ask, pointing at it, my finger moving very close to his skin.

  “That?” He looks at it as if he’s never seen it before. “I don’t know. I think I bumped into a door.”

  His mustached, bartending father crosses my mind. I let it go.

  “Have you seen The Lady Vanishes?” he asks, turning the page and breaking the odd spell. I slip my hand off his desk and onto my lap.

  “Yes, I have. You’re right, it’s very funny.” Ladies, vanishing—vanishing into what? In the movie, into thin air. Here, in this classroom? Into…the words child abuse erupt suddenly in my mind. A sense of panic stings me and I stand, knocking my chair back awkwardly. Connor looks up at me, his expression slightly puzzled. Looking down at his sweet sinless face, I mutter, “I—” but can’t manage to continue what I was going to say, if I was going to say anything at all. Sweat suddenly pours from me. My fingers and feet tingle. I back away from Connor, from the vision of the handcuffs and the bed and the bathroom, back away slowly as if he were some wild animal primed to attack and I his hapless victim.

  “Ms. Straw? Are you okay?”

  We’re in the same room together but we’re not, not really. We’re not in the same world. I walk carefully back to my desk, drop down in my chair, try to breathe. How ridiculous I must look to him, I think. How strange.

  I swallow and will myself to speak my words evenly. “I’m fine, Connor. I’m glad you’re enjoying the book.” Then, unable to stop myself: “I’d love to watch one of those movies with you someday.”

  ***

  I hurl myself into my work, spending extra hours on lesson plans and highly detailed grading and reading up in the kinds of educational journals that are always around in the faculty room but which I never bother to look at. I clean out my faculty box, glancing cursorily at the endless educational catalogs and offers and invitations from groups with names like Kidsplay and Mid-Level Readers’ Club and Youth Leadership for America before tossing them in the garbage. I focus on Lauren Holloway and Richard Broad and Kylie McCloud, I counsel them after school, I call home concernedly, I care as only the best teachers do. I focus on Gracie too, playing jacks and hopscotch with her, helping her make clothes for her dolls, watching cartoons with her, reading with her, fun-splashing her in the bathtub to make her laugh and squeal. She’s a wonderful child, actually. Very smart, very neat, pretty, mild-tempered. A mother could hardly ask for more. And I focus on Bill, I ask him how his work day has gone, make him his favorite dinners, rent movies I know he’ll like—recent special-effects blockbusters, he’s bored by old classics—and initiate activities in bed we’ve not done in years, or sometimes ever. He’s flattered by all the attention but clearly a bit mystified by it as well. “Is everything all right, Mona?” Of course, everything is fine, how could it not be, what could possibly be wrong?

  But none of this activity pushes Connor Blue from my mind for more than a few minutes at a time. When I dress for school in the morning I find myself wondering, even as Bill kisses me goodbye, even as Gracie runs around, what Connor will think of this pink top, how many buttons I can get away with leaving undone, whether he likes me better in pants or skirt, if I can wear the black heels or if they’re too close to fuck-me pumps and then I shake my head violently and clear my mind of all such thoughts, toss what I’d begun to put on to the closet floor and go with the simplest, plainest professional clothes I have: long-sleeved white blouse buttoned high, tan skirt reaching almost to my ankles, plain brown flats. The woman staring back at me in the mirror looks like exactly what she is: a schoolteacher. Neither attractive nor unattractive. One of the invisible people of the world.

  At school I find myself sometimes growing short with Connor, deliberately not calling on him when he raises his hand in class, dismissing his answers brusquely when I do. I abruptly cancel some of our lunch hours, claiming I have meetings. I all but ignore him in the after-hours tutoring sessions with the other students. He begins to look at me in a hurt way, his eyes darkening, his face tense with unhappiness. Or so I imagine. It’s possible he doesn’t care at all. But I think he does. I think it when his hand is up enthusiastically in class and we make eye contact and I turn away and call on another student, watch him in the corner of my vision and see his perplexed expression. He cares. I know he does. I think I know.

  But I can’t keep it up, any more than I can keep up my new enhanced perfect-mother perfect-wife perfect-teacher routine. One by one my new resolutions to do better fall away. I return to passiveness regarding Lauren and Richard and Kylie. I stop spending so much time with Gracie. At night I turn away from Bill, plead headache, tiredness, cramps. I return to myself. But I’m not there, not anymore.

  10

  When winter comes it comes ferociously, an early December storm hurling down a foot and a half of snow with near-blizzard winds blowing it around into whiteout conditions. School closes for days. Bill still goes to work, so I’m left alone in the house with Gracie watching videocassettes of Pocahontas and The Lion King and Babe, each for what feels like the twentieth time. Our power flickers, goes black now and then, lurches on again. The cable TV turns to static. I’m overcome with a sense of dread, a sensation that I’m entering a darkness from which I’ll never rise again. I play with Gracie, let her “help” me make cookies and dinner, but I find a strange lassitude in myself regarding her. It’s as if she’s someone else’s child, not mine at all. I’m soaking in the bathtub one afternoon, sweat pouring from me, my skin red and tender, when there is some kind of explosion that seems to rock the house. Gracie runs in panicked, I wrap a towel around myself, hold her hand as we look out the front window and see that a huge snow-heavy branch from the neighbor’s white oak tree has crashed down on my car, crumpling the hood, cracking the windshield. Immediately it feels like judgment, a judgment on me, a sentence carried out on the guilty. Or at least a warning. I stare at the snow falling for a long time, stare at my broken car. Finally Gracie pushes something soft and warm into my hand, saying, “Mommy? Your towel fell off, Mommy. You shouldn’t be naked in the window.”

  The storm finally passes, school reopens, life resumes. The car gets fixed. But when I arrive in my classroom that first day back it feels as if something has changed in me, some inner lens has undergone a permanent and profound refocusing. I realize that I’ve been lonely over this past week of snow days. I’ve felt adrift, lost. And yet when I look at Connor Blue come into the room for fourth period, enthusing to one of the other boys about the fun he’d had sledding yesterday, I know I’ve found myself again. I watch him make his way to his desk, drop himself down. His hair is askew, his cheeks flushed. He’s talking about going sledding with another boy, Douglas Peterson, a good development—he needs to socialize more with boys his age, I know. But then I realize that what they’re talking about is checking out a couple of the school sleds and doing it during lunch period today. My heart seems to drop into my stomach. I’ve not seen Connor in over a week and he wants to go sledding with his new friend rather than spend the time in this room with me? Suddenly everything seems to go gray in my vision, I feel my knees
buckle. But I don’t faint. I shake my head, right myself, welcome the students—“Hi Lauren, Hi Richard, Hi Kylie, Hi Douglas, Hi Connor”—and ask them about their snow day adventures before beginning the lesson. Stories of snowmen, snowball fights. Connor raises his hand and talks about sledding down the big hill near his house, his eyes bright and excited in meeting mine. Does he know how this hurts me? Is that why he’s doing it? I don’t want to believe it of him. But part of me suspects.

  At the end of the period, as he gathers up his things and confers with Douglas about getting sleds, I say coolly, “Connor, may I speak to you for a moment?”

  He glances up, seemingly unconcerned. “Huh? Oh, sure, Ms. Straw.” To Douglas: “I’ll catch up with you. Get two, okay?” The boy leaves, they all leave. In a minute it’s just Conner and me alone in the room. He walks up boldly to where I sit at my desk. “What’s up, Ms. Straw?”

  But I suddenly realize that I have no idea what I want to say to him.

  “Are—are you and Douglas friends now?” I ask in a small voice. I seem to be having trouble breathing.

  “Huh?”

  “You. And Douglas. Are you friends?”

  He cocks his head. “I dunno. I guess we are.”

  “That’s—that’s good.” I stare at his white sweater, at his soft young hands. His blue jeans are faded and frayed. I should buy him new ones, I think, and instantly dismiss the notion, tell myself I didn’t think that at all.