She looked at me. “How did you do that thing where you dribble between your legs?”
“Practice,” I said. “Just kind of using both hands to put the ball in the right place, bending your knees.”
“Can I do that?” she said. “Can you teach me?”
“Sure,” I said.
She looked up at the hoop like it was a mountain, like the air was thinner up there. She weighed the ball, shifting it between her hands, and then threw up a pretty ugly shot. It took part in three distinct movements, but I was amazed that she got it up to the hoop, just over the front of it. It bounced up in the air, and then it bounced and bounced and bounced, and I was just praying, Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease, and then the ball fell through the hoop, the luckiest shot I’d seen in a long time. It was true happiness I felt, that I felt for Bessie, because I knew what it felt like to make that shot, to get what you asked for, and how rare that was in life.
“Oh my god, Bessie!” Roland shouted. “That was amazing!”
“Was it good, Lillian?” she asked me.
“It was amazing,” I said.
“I think I like basketball,” she said, not smiling, a little angry, like she was accepting some kind of ancient curse.
“I don’t like it so much,” Roland admitted, “but it’s okay.”
“Let’s go back home,” I said. “We have lessons.”
The kids groaned, but I could tell that they weren’t that upset, that they’d let me take care of them, that I’d make them do stuff they hated, but they’d let it happen. Because who else did they have but me?
Eight
The next day, still no fires, deep breathing, a little yoga from a tape that Carl had left on our doorstep, we sat in the living room, class in session. They had their notebooks open, pencils ready, and I felt like a small animal about to be run over by a tractor, or like a meteor was about to hit Earth and I was the only person who knew and I was trying to be real cool about it so no one panicked. I had assumed that if I had been a good student, it wouldn’t be that hard to be a good teacher. But teaching required preparation. You had to learn it first, and then you taught it. I didn’t have that kind of time. At night, the children slept in my arms, bashing me with their limbs while they dreamed of manageable terrors. When would I study? They were always with me. So I was winging it.
The night before, my eye had swollen completely shut from Madison’s errant elbow, the skin angry and purple. And I rued the fact that the other side of my face, where Bessie had clawed me in the pool, was just starting to heal and scab over. The kids kept asking if they could touch the new bruise, if I wanted to put more ice on it, like I hadn’t spent the last few hours holding a bag of ice to my face. They seemed intrigued by my pain, the way I seemed to bear it without complaining. I think they appreciated this about me, that I wouldn’t cry. I had battle scars, and their skin could not be marked, not even by fire.
That morning, when I looked in the mirror, it was gruesome, radiating nearly to my hairline. During our breathing exercises I would occasionally steal a glance at the kids, and they were openly staring at the injury, the whole time taking cleansing breaths of air into their lungs.
We were doing Tennessee history, since I wanted their learning to be connected to their lives, to feel like we weren’t rigidly adhering to whatever “the man” said we needed to learn. But now, I kind of missed “the man.” He was always so confident, even when—especially when—he was fucking things up left and right.
“So,” I said, tapping the cool little chalkboard, like something from a one-room schoolhouse on the prairie, “let’s think of famous Tennesseans and then we can go to the library and find out more about them.” I want to say that, yes, the Internet existed. Madison had it in the mansion. But I didn’t really know anything about it. The one time I’d been on it, at the house of a guy who sometimes invited me over to smoke weed, I’d waited for, like, thirty minutes to print off Wu-Tang Clan lyrics. I honestly had no idea what else the Internet might be used for.
So what we had was the library, and I used that, a trip out in public, as a way to get them to focus. “Who are famous people from Tennessee?” I asked them. They just shrugged.
“You don’t know anyone famous who was born in Tennessee?” I asked again, then I tried to think if I knew anyone famous from Tennessee. I knew the professional wrestler Jimmy Valiant was from a town near my own, because some guy at the Save-A-Lot talked about it all the time. But he didn’t seem famous enough.