Ms. Duffy didn’t answer. She was still looking around the classroom, at the small ways it was now strange, at the names taped onto the backs of the chairs, names that had no meaning to her.
She said, “I lost Theo McKibben at the Metropolitan Museum. My first year.”
“Theo?” Ms. Hempel laughed. “That’s easy to do.”
“It was a nightmare. My first waking nightmare.”
“The first of many,” said Ms. Hempel. “But just think: You’ll never have to go on a field trip again.”
Ms. Duffy smiled slightly. “Never again.”
And then Ms. Hempel realized with a sickened feeling that she had forgotten to distribute the permission slips for next week’s outing to the planetarium. Only three days left: not a problem for the organized ones, but it didn’t allow much leeway with the children you always had to hound for everything. She would have to resort to an incentive plan: Early dismissal? Ice cream?
She paced around the desk mindlessly and saw it as both hopeful and doomed: the careful stacks beginning to slip, colored pens littered everywhere, memos from Mr. Mumford protruding at odd angles, the plastic in-box taken over by trading cards, half-eaten candy bars, extra-credit assignments on the verge of being lost.
“You’re brilliant.” She turned to Ms. Duffy. “You are. Because we can’t leave to make more money; that’s despicable. And we can’t leave to do something easier, some nice quiet job in an office; that would be so embarrassing! Am I supposed to tell my kids, ‘Okay, I’m off to answer phones at an insurance company’? It’s impossible. So what can we do? We can always…” Ms. Hempel gestured helplessly at Ms. Duffy’s belly. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
She had imagined a body cast instead.
Again Ms. Duffy gave a thin smile. It wasn’t clear whether she took Ms. Hempel’s compliment as such.
“So what’s stopping you?” she asked idly. She plucked a long, loose hair from the sleeve of her sweater and dropped it onto Mr. Chapman’s floor. Then suddenly she seemed to remember that she was herself pregnant, and undergoing a remarkable experience. She lit up. “You should do it!” she said with abrupt conviction. “You’ll love it. You will.” She pushed herself off the little table and moved warmly toward Ms. Hempel. “We think we have all the time in the world, but in reality we don’t. And when you find the right person, you just have to go for it. There’s never a good time; it’s never convenient; don’t fool yourself into waiting for the perfect time—”
She stopped. Her hands flew up to her mouth. “I’m so sorry!”
Ms. Hempel touched the fair, freckled arm. “Oh, don’t worry. Please, really, don’t worry.”
“I’m an idiot,” cried Ms. Duffy.
“You’re not,” said Ms. Hempel. “Because I forget, too. After I do the dishes, I get this panicked feeling that I’ve put my ring down somewhere and now I can’t find it.” She lifted her bare hand and looked at it. “Everything was friendly, it really was.”
Ms. Duffy nodded, her face stricken.
“Amit and I still talk on the phone. And last week he sent me a book.” She didn’t mention that it was actually one of her books, a book that had been swept up in his wake and had now washed up again on the shores of his new apartment. “We’re in very good touch,” she said.
Ms. Duffy remained unconsoled. “What happened?” she murmured. “What made you decide—”
It was hard to keep straight; they had told people different things at different times. There was Amit’s fellowship in Texas, which he couldn’t turn down; and there was the difficulty of finding time to plan a wedding, not to mention the expense; there was their youth, of course, and the uncertainty that comes with it, the fearful cloudiness of the future (and what a mercy that was, to be considered, at nearly thirty, still hopelessly young).… All of which was true, just as all of it was prevarication, and even in the midst of saying these things, she was never sure exactly whose feelings were being spared, just who was being protected. For whose sake was all this delicacy required? She hated to think that it might be hers.
“It wasn’t the teaching, was it?” asked Ms. Duffy.
Oh no, it wasn’t that. At least she didn’t think so. But funny how everyone had a theory they believed yet also wished to see refuted. “It’s not your father, is it?” her mother asked, her father dead two years now but his absence still brimming as his presence once had. When she showed her the ring, her mother had offered to walk her down the aisle. “But I know it’s not the same,” she said. “I know that.”
So she had told her mother no, it wasn’t because she missed her father. Though she still could feel his warm, dry, insistent hand hovering just above the top of her head. And she had told Mr. Polidori no, it wasn’t because of him, either. Though at moments she could still feel his hand, too, as it made its way down the length of her spine. She had been surprised that he’d even asked. A surprising glimpse of vanity, of self-importance. He had cornered her by the jukebox and gazed down at her earnestly—the earnestness also a surprise.
But it was only a kiss!
And some nuzzling, some breathless pressing and hugging, in one of Mooney’s indeterminate bathrooms. Ages ago, on one of those happy Friday afternoons. After he had ended things with Ms. Duffy but before he had fallen for the gamine younger half sister of Mimi Swartz. A pause between the acts, there in the dark stall at Mooney’s, everyone giddy with the fast approach of summer. She had tumbled into the bathroom and found him, back to the door, penis presumably in hand, and before she could even gasp he had glanced over his shoulder, told her to wait, and then unhurriedly finished, washed
