Above her rises a face, smooth and round like a moon, or a peach, or the seed of a lychee nut. Two eyes gaze at her, black and still like a pool.
“Ms. Hempel.” It is Jonah. His chin is resting atop a high, plush seat. His dark eyes shine in the light from a streetlamp outside the bus. “We’re home,” he says. “Wake up.”
Ms. Hempel stirs. “I’m awake,” she says. And she is; her eyes are open.
“I thought that place was fun,” Jonah says.
“So did I,” she says, and suddenly wants to reach up, to touch him on his cheek.
MS. HEMPEL HAD TOLD HER CLASS about the Indians’ admirable habits. “Even the hooves,” she said, “would be used as ceremonial rattles.” She drew a circle on the chalkboard to illustrate the wholeness of their lives, and inside of this she wrote the words harmony and balance. When she described the Europeans’ profligacy, and their brutal massacres, her students became enraged, and when she described the shrinking of the Indian population, they looked bereft. “But there’s a silver lining,” Ms. Hempel said. “I guess you could call it that.” Then she told them about the casino she had visited the previous summer: the great glittering elevators, the famous comedian, the tables thronged with customers, all losing money. “The Pequots are very rich and powerful now,” she said, and the class grinned with relief.
Having spoken of the Indians so approvingly, Ms. Hempel was dismayed to find, during a Sunday afternoon in the bookstore, a new publication dedicated to contradicting her. She stood in the aisle and frowned. According to the latest anthropological discoveries, Indians were not good friends to Nature; they clear-cut forests, hunted game to near extinction, savored delicacies such as the buffalo fetus while leaving the mother to slowly decompose in the sun.
The book was displayed on a shelf that held a variety of other books all with apparently the same bent. Ms. Hempel realized that a small industry had sprung up, whose sole purpose was to reveal the lies and hoaxes of American history. Paul Revere did not shout “The British are coming!” Thomas Jefferson did seduce and impregnate Sally Hemings, his slave. The founding fathers were not in the least bit interested in equality for all. And mad John Brown was perfectly sane. Even the land bridge theory was under attack. It looked like the first Americans didn’t wander over the Bering Strait, after all.
Ms. Hempel felt irritated and betrayed. It had taken her a long time to finish reading America! America!, and now here was a whole shelf of scholarship casting doubt on everything that she was about to teach.
But—she admitted it—these books did seem necessary; their existence made sense to her. History was so difficult to tell truthfully. A person could not be relied upon to faithfully recount her own past, much less the story of an entire country.
Before she discovered the history section, she had sat in a very comfortable chair, looking at a book of stories. The story she happened to read concerned a girl visiting boarding schools with her parents. At one of the schools, the campus is divided in half by a public street, and students must cross the street between classes. That night, the girl tells her parents that she likes this school best; she is impressed by how the students saunter across the street without even checking to see if there is traffic coming.
As she read the passage, Ms. Hempel trembled with recognition. It was her school! Not the school she taught at, but her school, the one she had gone to as a student. It had to be—the ancient campus, the street, the students ambling across. And, as whenever she thought of her school, Ms. Hempel was overcome by affection and wistfulness. What a magical time that was, how wonderful! She had spent four years there, in all seasons, but whenever she pictured her school, it was always late afternoon, and the light was always golden, the treetops always red; a boy sat cross-legged on the quad, and a guitar was in his lap. Somewhere, a pile of leaves was burning.
These feelings were very powerful, and they were also patently untrue. Ms. Hempel understood, quite rationally, that she had spent her four years in a state of fury and bewilderment. She had never understood how a person could be coltish until she saw the girls at her school—awkward, blond, impossibly appealing, chasing after soccer balls and hockey pucks and lacrosse balls with a long, loping stride and furious concentration. She gained weight in protest. She hid out in the costume closet, drinking cough syrup and despising the Grateful Dead. She won the role of a blowsy prostitute in the school play. When her history teacher, Mr. Warren, looked to her
