Alternate Endings Page 11

  She accosted him. “You didn’t tell me they’re consolidating the English Department school-wide.”

  “I just found out,” he answered. “How did you know?”

  “Dan told me.”

  “Oh yeah. He and I exchanged emails this morning.”

  In the cutting wind the trees in the traffic circle in front of the school waved their barren branches.

  “It’s good,” she said. “The middle school doesn’t prepare them well enough. We constantly have problems with the basics. We can tell them what to cover now. I’m tired of having to re-teach things the kids should already know by the time they get up here.”

  He stopped short in the flinching cold.

  “You’ve got it exactly wrong,” he said brusquely. “The parents think the high school’s English is largely redundant, not the middle school’s. They told Administration the kids are being re-taught the same things again at the high school that they’ve already learned.”

  “Well that’s ridiculous.”

  Four boxes blocked her front door that evening. The stack reached past the doorknob, all addressed to her mother. Calyce saw that one was Harry & David, her mother’s perennial gift to her. If this were like every other year, the most expensive present would be for Damion.

  Calyce shifted the packages. Here it was. Nordstrom’s. The other two were probably for Maria, her husband Greg, and little Jimmy.

  This doctor was young too, like nearly all of them, and he was already a specialist. It had been a transition for Calyce when a doctor became her age, rather than some older man, but this was something new, this toddler in his white coat with his full name embroidered over his left breast pocket.

  She had found him at the last minute after yet another disorienting spasm. Barely competent, she thought, because he had had time available on a Saturday when she couldn’t take any more weekdays off, not in the days before Effie’s surgery. But at least he was in her HMO.

  She slouched once more on a sterile examining table. This ENT too felt her throat, neck, and lymph nodes. He had wanted to shove that long white thing down her nose too, but she told him it wasn’t necessary.

  “There’s no swelling,” she said. “And the larynx looks fine.”

  He smiled. “You a doctor? Let me ask you, when do you eat dinner?”

  He was standing very close and had a smell of masculine she wasn’t used to. “Do you eat late in the evening?”

  She nodded. “I got into the habit with my son because of his work schedule. He doesn’t eat with me anymore, but I still do it.”

  “When?”

  She shrugged. “Nine?”

  “And when do you go to sleep?”

  “Ten. Eleven.”

  “And you feel this high in the back of your throat, it says here. Today too?”

  She nodded.

  “When did you eat last?”

  “Two hours ago, maybe.”

  He thought, then said, “Mrs. Tate, I think you may have laryngeal pharyngeal reflux.”

  “No reflux,” she answered. “My regular ENT says I don’t.”

  “This is a different kind. He probably told you about GERD. See, the esophagus has two sphincters.”

  He made a fist and tightened and untightened it as he spoke. “They keep the contents of your stomach in your stomach where all the acid is and prevent that acid from rising into your throat. There’s one sphincter at the bottom where the esophagus meets the stomach and another behind your trachea, where your Adam’s apple would be if you were a man.” He put two fingers on his own.

  “With this kind of reflux the stomach contents come up through that upper sphincter too, all the way up your throat. It’s called LPR. Silent reflux, because there’s often no heartburn. You know, that burning feeling in the lower chest. I want to do a twenty-four-hour pH probe. It’s a device that measures the fluctuating pH levels in your throat so we can see how much reflux you’re getting. It’s a tube about the size of a strand of spaghetti that goes down your throat and comes out your nose and connects to a monitor you have to wear. Do you work? Unfortunately the lab’s not open on the weekends. You can take it out by yourself. The only thing is inserting it, which they have to do at the lab on a weekday.”

  “I’ll be on Winter Break starting next week. I teach at a high school.”

  “Then that’s when we’ll do it. LPR sounds small but it isn’t. It can scar the throat and voice box, and if not treated it can cause worse things.”

  He didn’t say it but his face did.

  She asked, “Cancer?”

  “Rarely, but yes. The reflux alters the lining of the throat. That’s why I want to know if I’m right and if I am, how bad this is already. We’re about to start the holidays with all that food. I want you to take care of yourself. Can you get this done before Christmas?”

  The annual faculty winter party was held, as always, at Sharon Bornstein’s house, one of a hundred square, brick, center-hall Colonials on Sharon’s three-syllable-alphabet street. One of the high school’s longtime art teachers, she had lived in it for thirty years, raising her three accomplished children with her non-profit-executive husband in a too-small house that today they could not possibly afford to buy. The furniture was eighties lacquered wood and the main floor powder room they all used more and more as the yearly late Sunday afternoon fête wore on was still painted Wedgwood blue and sickly mauve in wide stripes. Calyce hated it so much she drank as little sangria as possible.

  The party always started not at night but 5 p.m. so people could get home and to work the next morning, which was always the Monday of the last week before Winter Break began and everyone had two weeks of vacation. The festivities were as rigidly scheduled as April’s taxes.

  Also ritualized were the “heavy appetizers,” paid for by the school, which meant dinner for some if the attendees were greedy, which the same ones were every year. All the newbies came and about half the veterans, each group cramped into its own diminutive room. Calyce found it laughable that the room never changed though the rosters did, with each new generation of young, fervent teachers knowing apparently instinctively that the dirtying kitchen was for them. As the years passed, they each moved out to join the grown-ups in the living room, where Calyce was now standing, having barely been able to close the front door the crush was so dense.

  She had come late and planned to leave instantly once she had just as ritualistically thanked Sharon, who would say she was glad Calyce came, exchange a few words about their respective grandchildren, and wait politely for Calyce to move on.

  Calyce had dressed in a black suit with a tri-string of artificial pearls she too had had since the eighties, when Barbara Bush had made them popular and the look had enjoyed a brief rage among new professional women. The clip-on earrings were also pearls, though the tiny clusters were real. She wore no coat, for she didn’t want to lose it as she once had in a mountain on a bed upstairs.

  Her dark hair, which she had just had done, was all soft waves and shoulder-length curves away from her face. Her bag for a change was black and small with a handle that looped over her forearm. The length of her unremarkable skirt was conservative 1960s middle school: if she knelt on the floor, it would have touched the ground. She was out of place and out of look, for everyone else had dressed in what Sharon called “elegant casual,” which Calyce didn’t own and couldn’t pull off, except for those few men who wore ugly Christmas sweaters, which had become another sacrament of the annual bacchanal. As the evening progressed they would drunkenly tug them off and hand them around for “aw, come on, try it” photo opportunities, yet another reason Calyce was already craning her neck above the fortifying crowd, peering over tops of heads, searching for Sharon and her quick exit.

  But then she saw through the archway to the dining room John and Janice DeGroot laughing with arms around each other in the center of an adoring circle. Calyce considered waiting until the worshipers thinned but
realized she would just be standing alone where she was even more awkwardly, so she unmoored to make her way through the clear patches, speaking to no one but making her face smiley.

  As she maneuvered she spied Belinda, who had approached them as well but from a different angle. Calyce watched the sudden hugging, and not just from the DeGroots. The entire herd was now congratulating her old friend on being named the high school’s new permanent Vice Principal.

  When it was Calyce’s turn, she told Janice DeGroot sincerely how much she would miss her.

  The woman said into her ear that it was time. “I’m too old now.”

  Janice then pulled back to announce to the group that it had been a tsunami for Belinda, whose new job would begin after the New Year.

  “I’ve never seen anything so well-orchestrated,” Janice said with a grin.

  John leaned into Calyce to whisper, “I’m sorry I was so hard on you about the desk. I’ve got a job lead for your son. The guy’s hiring, and I told him everything I knew about Damion. I’ll email you the information.”

  Calyce passed through the kitchen to complete her one circuit and saw Dan, who was in a tight pod with two of the other high school English teachers, wearing a bulky dark green sweater with teddy bears wearing mufflers. The pod greeted her but the pause she had caused in the conversation was palpable.

  Calyce looked from one to the other before Dan said finally, “We were talking about the consolidation.”

  Another teacher said, “What does it mean for who’ll run the department? Don’t they all get to vote too?”

  A third asked, “And what if everything’s run out of the middle school?”

  “It won’t be,” Calyce answered. “The high school’s the top of the pyramid. The only way to consolidate the curriculum is from the top down.”

  But then he was there at her left elbow, Roger Bosch in a tweed jacket and plaid tie and perfectly pressed caramel gabardines. His face was shiny smooth and his fouetté hair tamed into a stiff meringue.

  “Hi,” he said to the group, beer in hand.

  Her colleagues all fidgeted and peeled off. Roger asked if she had seen the deck, pointing to the back door behind them.

  The winter crepuscule had already fled during the half-hour she had been inside and stars now pierced a velvet-cloak indigo. Roger looked up as they stepped onto the wood. “It’s not up yet, the winter circle. You can find it from the Belt of Orion. See those three stars in a row?”

  In the quiet, he moved behind her to point and she felt his hand on her right shoulder. They were alone, she realized.

  Calyce side-stepped away from him.

  He said to her in the yellow porch light, “I’m glad you were here tonight because I have a Christmas gift for you.”

  Somewhere, someone had lit a fire in a hearth. Calyce smelled smoke and burning wood.

  He reached into his inside coat pocket to pull out a drawstring pouch, which he gave to her. It was heavy with small hard things that shifted, and she heard the slide of glass. She tugged on the string, then put her fingers in to draw out a polished stone cut into five points, black with white spots all through it. A star.

  She held it in her palm, where it was warming already to her touch. Gold light bounced on its smooth tumbled surface.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “I got them online from a rock shop in Springdale. I got all ten. They’re each different. I thought you’d like a memory of that place because you love it so, something tactile to hold, to remind you that you can always go back there.”

  She didn’t know what to say. She kept holding the stone, feeling its cool, carved soft-sharp edges.

  He said, “You know, Angel’s Landing used to be called the Temple of Aeolus. The first East Coast visitors were classics educated, and so of course they saw Aeolus up there at the top of it. You know who he was? The god of the winds in Greek mythology, the one who gave all four winds to Odysseus.”

  Calyce said, “No. He gave Odysseus just one, the West Wind, to sail him home, and he put the other three in a bag. You read the Odyssey?”

  Roger smiled as he faced her, his eyes dropping to her movie-star lips.

  “You think all I know is AP Biology? Odysseus takes that bag back to his ship, but his men are so mad that Aeolus didn’t give them anything too that they open it and all the winds spill out and drive them off course and when Odysseus finally comes back to ask for the winds again, Aeolus says no. He says you had them once, you don’t get them again.”

  He was close, too close.

  “I should go,” Calyce said. “I have to get home.”

  She put the stone in its bag and put the bag in her purse, snapping the flap carefully so as not to lose them.

  “Thank you for these. Thank you, and Merry Christmas.”

  Saw you at the party but didn’t get to talk before you left. I’m having a New Year’s Eve party and would love for you to come. Let me know and I’ll send you the particulars.

  The text was from Amita, and it buzzed Calyce’s phone as she climbed into her car.

  That night, alone, her lover was a tall outdoorsman who loved the rocks and dry cliffs and touched her with cool hands whose flat palms slid over her stomach and down around the soft-sharp mound of her.

  “Did you call John’s job lead yet?” Calyce asked Damion the next evening. “He’s waiting to hear from you.”

  “Relax. I’ll call him.”

  “Tomorrow morning?”

  “Mom, stop it. I told you I would.”

  She said, “I sure wish I could still get you to do what I wanted. Life would be so much easier. Don’t forget to buy a tree. And untie it so the branches fall down. I gave you money. You know where the lot is.”

  In class that Friday morning, during one of the two periods shoved in before school assembly and early dismissal for Winter Break, Calyce told her seniors about extra-credit work they could do over vacation.

  “Anyone who recommends five interesting short stories to me for class gets an A as an extra quiz grade, but don’t send me The Cask of Amontillado. You can’t Google” – she made air bunnies – “‘best short stories for high school writing class.’ I found all those lists already.”

  “You want flash fiction?” a boy asked.

  “I’ll consider anything. I’ve read hundreds of books but few short stories, really, and no flash fiction.”

  “Hundreds?” a girl said. “Why? That’s a huge amount of reading.”

  It was Christmas and nearly vacation and the shroud between teacher and student lifted for the briefest moment.

  “When I was little I used to read three books a week. It got to the point that when I would ask the librarian in our town everything she’d recommend I had already read. Books took me to somewhere else, particularly in high school, but you kids have your Smartphones. You all have a wonderful holiday and be sure to email those stories.”

  Effie was noticeably worse when Calyce arrived in Florida. In just a few weeks, her mother’s skin had gone grey and concave as though life had been sucked from her. She was manifestly exhausted too, in part from her finally ceasing the charade that she was fine.

  “It’s alright that Simon couldn’t come get me,” she told Calyce. “He’s got a job and a wife and two girls at home. You and I will have fun.”

  “It’s not a party, Mom, it’s open-heart surgery. And I have a job too.”

  Calyce hadn’t told her yet that Simon and his family were staying in Dallas for Christmas.

  She surveyed the two large open suitcases on Effie’s bed, which the old woman had overstuffed. “A bathing suit? You don’t need all this.”

  “You never know.”

  “Where did you get these bags?”

  “I bought them. Or rather, Stephanie bought them for me.”

  “She’s finally done with her divorce? You have to pay for that second bag, you know. And what about your mail?”

  �
��It’s being forwarded,” Effie said. “I gave Stephanie a key and I’ll close the blinds. I think that’s it. I’ll turn down the AC when we leave.”

  The drink cart bumped by on its maiden trip up the aisle. Effie commented that Calyce should be in her element on a plane because she loved height and air, to which Calyce replied in a non sequitur that she really, truly hated the sea.

  “Simon feels the same way,” Effie said. “It’s not the ocean’s fault.”

  With his name now in the conversation, Calyce had no choice but to inform her mother that he wasn’t coming to D.C. for Christmas. “His excuse is that Asha has to study for mid-terms.”

  “That’s understandable.”

  Effie brightened. “So it’ll be just us girls, and Damion.”

  “Nina’s not coming either. She says you talked.”

  “She said it wasn’t for sure. But that’s okay too.” Effie stroked Calyce’s arm on the armrest. “We’re a team, you and me. You’re my Samwise.”

  Calyce moved her arm.

  “You’re too hard on them. You always are,” Effie said. “They’ll come for the surgery.”

  “Samwise was in Simon’s books, Mom. Not mine. I never read them. You know ‘Samwise’ means half-wit?”

  Later, Calyce clambered over her mother to the aisle. Inside the bathroom she spoke to herself in the mirror as she washed her hands. “They leave all this to me every time and she doesn’t notice. No wonder I’m exhausted.”

  Back at her seat Calyce told her drowsy mother that she would have Damion’s room downstairs, to be closer to the front door. Effie replied that it wasn’t necessary, that she would be fine upstairs next to Calyce and there was no reason to force him out.

  Effie said, “He thinks you’re mad at him about something. Are you?”