I saw this one with little donkeys, and I couldn’t help but think of you.
Fauve, he’ll say, how thoughtful.
She’s told him about me, surely. Her fears about my competence as a director, my questionable teaching credentials. Was she ever even a teacher before this? She isn’t a scholar, I know, but she isn’t exactly a real professional either, is she? What has she done, a couple of festivals? He enjoys Fauve’s company. It perks up the afternoon hours, which he usually murders by just smiling at the wall. But today there is this annoying phone call to make too.
Pick up, pick up, he is attempting to tell me with his mind. But the dean has no psychic powers over me.
You don’t. I won’t, I tell him quietly in my mind. I’m teaching. I’m in the middle of a class, have you forgotten the schedule? Playing Shakespeare M and W 2:30–3:45, hello? There are life lessons being learned in this very room at this very moment.
“Ms. Fitch?”
This from Skye, sitting in the far corner. Lovely Skye. All in black. With her long hair and shimmering, painted lips both the blue green of the sea. A heavy-metal mermaid.
“Yes, Skye?”
“Kendall,” the girl corrects. Auburn bob. Pug face. Frowning at me, confused. “Who is Skye?”
“Skye?” I look around the room, but Skye isn’t to be found anywhere. Just regular children looking at me with regular horror.
“Ms. Fitch, are you okay?”
I stare at them all, staring at me. For once, no one looks bored.
I think this is going to be a great new beginning for you, Miranda, Paul said when I got this job. I really do. The way he was looking at me, beaming. Like maybe we were going to be okay after all. Maybe this job would save me, save us. I remember he brushed my hair away from my face, kissed me like he hadn’t in a long time. Let’s go out and celebrate, all right?
All right. And I tried to smile, to hide the sinking feeling. That I was in over my head. That I’d soon be drowning.
The students are going to fucking love you, I’ll bet. And talk about an easy gig, right? You can do it in your sleep!
“Ms. Fitch? Ms. Fitch, are you—”
“Fine. Why don’t we cut out early today, yes? Give yourselves a break. You’ve all worked so hard.” Such a lie. Such lies I tell them. But it works every time.
“Good night,” I tell them as they go walking out the door.
“It’s still only afternoon, Ms. Fitch.”
* * *
Before I limp to the theater for rehearsal, I look at myself in the bathroom mirror. This is it for you, I tell myself calmly, slowly. It is a truth, that’s all. To be swallowed like a pill, how many have I swallowed? To be internalized. You are no longer a human woman. You are no longer sexually viable. I observe these truths a long while, and my eyes do not water. I am hypnotized by my own ruin. By this new face that is apparently my face, its static misery lines that I do nothing to disguise. Before, oh before, how I would have. I would have applied a red lipstick to my cracked, pale lips. I would have squeezed and squeezed at my cheeks until I burst blood, or beat the sides of my face with a blush brush. I would have plucked out the gray hairs. A woman attempting to crawl up the crumbling vertical wall of a cliff from which she has already fallen, her hands full of loose dirt and spiders. Desperate creature. Denial, denial, denial. My mother, God bless her, would have approved of this. A memory of her comes to me, from just before she died, one I think of often. She’s drunk, as she always was then, straightening face towels in the guest bathroom and singing to herself. Meanwhile downstairs, the kitchen was going up in smoke. A grease fire she’d accidentally started and then forgot about. Instead she was up here in the bathroom, her forehead pressed into the wall tile, straightening tiny useless towels, humming “Que Sera, Sera.”
CHAPTER 6
WHEN I GET to rehearsal, it’s just Ellie sitting alone on the edge of the stage. Her canvas bag strapped over her shoulder, lank dark hair in her moon face. Her heavily lined eyes do not look at me but at the unswept stage floor, at the dust balls fuzzy under the bright stage lights. I’m so sorry, Professor, says her silence. I did warn you.
I stare at the violently empty theater. Even Grace isn’t here. I see Briana’s triumph. Her smile. She is gazing at herself in the three-way vanity mirror in her bedroom while her mother stands behind her brushing her daughter’s burnished hair with long, slow strokes, a glass of golden wine in her other hand. All taken care of, my dear.
A low, broken cry escapes my lips before I can help it.