Alternate Endings Page 13

  “Why not call your parents, dear?” Calyce suggested. “Where do they live?”

  Selene said, “Minnesota.”

  Effie remained stationed in the living room near the tree, which sparkled with a thousand lights, or so it seemed to Calyce, who had never before loaded so many on her fresh pine. So many strings had been used that Selene had had to buy a power strip. Funny, Calyce thought, she’s not worried about overload.

  Selene had bought new ornaments too, which hung from the branch tips like brightly painted fingernails. Her “thing,” she had said, was the solar system, so she had purchased glittered crescent moons in gaudy colors, but Calyce liked them. They reminded her of nighttime outside.

  As they waited, and waited, Effie told Selene about the wise men figures posed near the barnlike crèche, which Calyce had set up at the base of the tree because she had no fireplace or mantel.

  Effie told Selene to pick up the kneeling wise man. “See the beard? See where it’s been chewed off at the bottom? That was Calyce. She used to like the taste of the plaster. That means more to me than all of it, and that’s why I gave it to her when her father died, rather than to Simon or Nina.”

  Calyce stole away to check her email. In her room, inhaling alone for a moment, she saw there was nothing from Belinda or anyone in the English Department. No one anywhere for that matter wishing her a Merry Christmas.

  Nina called long-distance but didn’t want to talk long to her. She told Calyce to put on their mother and then only spoke to Effie for a few brief moments, saying she still didn’t have much service.

  Simon too phoned for a minute, promising his mother he would see her “very soon.” He had nothing but stiff courtesies for Calyce.

  As Christmas day dragged and they exhausted conversation, Calyce announced after calling Maria that they were going to open presents anyway, since Jimmy had been delayed by a nap. They gathered awkwardly in the small living room to assess who was the younger of Damion and Selene. When it turned out to be Damion by four months, he was assigned present duty.

  One of Calyce’s wrapped gifts to her mother sat on the floor next to the tree rather than under it. When Damion slid it to Effie and she noisily opened it, Effie didn’t look at Calyce but at Damion as soon as she realized it was a TV.

  “I thought you’d put it in the guestroom, then take it home with you,” Calyce told her. “This way, you won’t have to spend all your time with me in the living room.”

  To Damion, Calyce gave an envelope with a note in it that she was forgiving $250 of his debt to her.

  To her Damion gave not one but two envelopes. In the first he had slid two one-hundred-dollar bills, which he explained wasn’t payment but extra money for her to spend any way she wanted. The second he said to open when she was alone.

  “Now it’s my turn,” Selene said from her spot on the carpet near Damion. Her gift to him, she said with a smile, they had already shared privately that morning.

  To Calyce, Damion said, “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

  Selene handed a small gift bag to Calyce with white tissue paper sticking above the top edge, where the young woman had failed to remove the clear plastic hang-hook from the drugstore. In the bag was the printout of an order for three established plants of Showy Evening Primrose, which Selene then enthusiastically explained were for Calyce’s front yard, where she had “no flowers yet.” They would arrive in the spring.

  Calyce thanked her, then gave her in turn a sterling silver bracelet with manufactured opals glinting blue and green like the earth seen from space.

  “But you’ve already given me Damion,” Selene said as she hugged her, which Calyce found awkward.

  The two boxes for Effie from Simon and Nina jointly were a white terrycloth bathrobe and matching white slippers. “They’re thinking ahead,” Effie observed before giving Calyce her Harry & David and Damion his gifts from Nordstrom’s.

  To Selene, Effie gave a bottle of Night Jasmine perfume, telling her, “Damion says you like this.”

  All the gifts were opened except the last one kept out of sight from Calyce in the powder room. Damion and Effie together made a big show of telling her to close her eyes, getting up to drag it out together.

  “It’s from me,” Effie said. “Look!”

  It was a huge but thin brown cardboard box, unwrapped, with black lettering below a picture of a large flat-screen TV.

  “It’s for your bedroom!” Her mother clapped like a child. “It’ll fit on the whole wall so we can watch up there together on your bed. We won’t have to come down. I know you gave me that little TV to take back with me, but I’d have to watch it alone in the guestroom. This is so much more sociable, don’t you think?”

  A well-dressed, beautifully spoken young man from Charleston with equatorial skin, Greg had fallen hard for high-cheekboned Maria, who had received in the gene pool the most beautiful parts of Calyce and Dorothy-Dandrige Effie.

  Maria in turn had been intrigued by the unfamiliarity of him and his sophisticated background and was soon willing to give the urbane man a hand in her future. She had volunteered so enthusiastically in fact that Calyce had had difficulty persuading her to wait until after she graduated to marry.

  Jimmy had followed a year after the small ceremony they both had wanted and Calyce had insisted on paying for. They had been married for nearly four years, long enough for them to know that the Georgetown School of Foreign Service master’s program was the first step in Greg’s professional calling.

  His family had some money, enough so he didn’t have to work while going to school, which to Calyce made him wealthy. She had met his people briefly before the wedding, and she had been pleased with their kind offer of financial assistance. They had been besotted with her “lovely Maria,” who seemed swooningly happy. Greg was a good husband and a doting father.

  Jimmy’s parents released him to play after Christmas dinner as the adults remained at the table. Calyce refilled their coffee cups as she told them that her becoming Department Head was no longer a certainty.

  Damion shrugged.

  “Why do you care so much?”

  Maria protested, “But Mom, it’s your turn.”

  Calyce took Damion’s question seriously. She sipped her ginger ale before she answered.

  “I care because I’ve earned it, and we’ve never had a person of color head the department in the forty years of the school. You can’t just talk about equality. You have to do it. The school’s finally got a black Vice Principal. It’s time for that to happen in English too, particularly given the extraordinary black presence in literature. It’s one thing to read about it. It’s another to take action and promote deserving blacks into positions of power.”

  Effie said, “Over whites?”

  “Over everybody. Otherwise, it’s just an abstraction.”

  At the table still, Damion expounded with one arm over the back of Selene’s chair. He explained expansively to the group that things were different now, far different for his generation than for his mother’s.

  “It’s much more difficult to find a job,” he said to Effie. “Greg here has even had to go back to school.”

  Greg started to speak but Damion held up a hand. “We were born in the AIDS epidemic and became aware on Nine-Eleven. I was thirteen, in middle school. And I graduated from college in the middle of the worst recession our country has seen since the Great Depression. No wonder we can’t find jobs.”

  Greg said, “But I –”

  “You’ve been out of college for years,” his younger sister Maria interrupted.

  “We’re only just now making a recovery,” he said. “But I have some news. Yesterday I had a phone interview and I’ve got a follow-up face-to-face after the first of the year with this guy who’s opening a new club in downtown D.C.”

  Calyce asked, “Is that who John DeGroot told you to call?”

  “Mom, this is good news. He’s a big deal. No
t some contact of someone who’s a teacher at your high school.”

  In the bathroom upstairs Calyce opened the second envelope Damion had given her. It contained a handwritten note saying that he was paying not only all his December bills but a double payment toward his loan balance. In the envelope was a thousand dollars.

  He had given her twelve hundred in a single day.

  There was a handwritten note from him tucked in with the money.

  The Courvoisier works, it said. Merry Christmas.

  She and Maria cleaned up while Effie and her “three men” talked in the living room. Damion and Greg at least had ferried in all the dishes. Greg had also loaded the tablecloth into Calyce’s washing machine along with the soiled damask napkins.

  As they tidied, Maria suddenly hugged her mother.

  After a moment, when she didn’t move, Calyce patted her arm awkwardly and asked, “What’s this?”

  Her daughter whispered, “You must be so worried about Grandma. Please, please don’t ever have this happen to you.”

  Calyce was half-awake still in the middle of that night. When she finally gave up and got up, she slammed her toe into the huge TV box Damion had hauled upstairs and slid between her bed and her bathroom.

  The pages of the short stories on her nightstand required too much brainwork, so she absent-mindedly checked her email, which she hadn’t since early afternoon. Four new ones had appeared in her school inbox, two from seniors proposing even more stories and a third from Amita reminding her of Amita’s upcoming New Year’s Eve party.

  The fourth had come in at nearly midnight from Lee, the high school’s principal, who had apparently found herself alone too as Christmas night had turned into the 26th.

  I’m scheduling the family orientation meeting for our Quest trip to Zion in May. Are you coming to Utah this year? Please let me know so I can include you on the email list and get you the meeting date.

  In Calyce’s personal AOL inbox was an automated email from Effie’s surgeon’s office reminding them of Effie’s appointment the Tuesday after the New Year.

  Calyce stood with Effie, Damion, and Selene in her kitchen before an array on her counter of open containers that held the leftovers of leftovers they had already attacked for lunch.

  “I can make turkey tetrazzini,” Calyce said. “I bought linguine and mushrooms.”

  “Let’s go out,” Effie said. “Damion wants sushi. And there’s a movie he wants to see that starts at 7:20.”

  But when Effie told them which movie, Selene reacted. Her face flushed and she was suddenly irate.

  “You just decided that?” she said to Damion.

  “I thought you’d want to see it.”

  “He thought you’d like it,” Effie said simultaneously.

  “You can’t just do that,” Selene told him. “You have to consider me.”

  “I did.” He was mad now too.

  “What you did was decide that you wanted to see it. You’ve been talking about that movie non-stop since we got here, and I already told you I don’t like car movies.”

  Selene went on as Calyce and Effie stared. “You keep doing this and I keep telling you, that to find out what I want you have to actually ask me. And then you have to listen.”

  Calyce had never heard anything like this before. Certainly, no such statement had ever been directed at her son.

  On the way to the car, Calyce said to Damion quietly, “Now that Christmas is over, please follow up with John’s friend about the interview.”

  He was suddenly as red-hot angry as Selene had just been.

  “I thought you’d be happy about this club thing, but no, there’s no pleasing you, is there?

  January

  The powers that be always scheduled the school’s Empowerment Assembly for the first week after Winter Break, since Administration knew that no new teaching happened during the short interval before school-wide midterms the next week. Only review days occurred as teachers recapped the entire first semester’s material, so two hours of devoted LGBT celebration were always calendared for the morning of the third day back at school. Not the first or the second, but the day by which Administration figured everyone would have reliably returned.

  Calyce stuck her head into the high school office on the first floor near the front entrance. The small offices inside were arrayed along an outside wall with windows looking out to the plastic green playing field and the pool building. Calyce searched for Belinda’s new space and found it and walked in, but her friend wasn’t there.

  Calyce recognized a few things Belinda had moved from her desk in the History faculty office upstairs, but they were a tiny portion of what Calyce was now seeing. Over Break, Belinda had covered every wall and surface with personal items that didn’t look new but likely brought from home, a home Calyce had never visited.

  Three large black-framed original charcoal drawings of young women’s faces and headpieces made a triptych on the door wall. In a far corner, by the glass, a herd of tall painted wooden giraffes clustered with their thin heads looming over the nearest of the two guest chairs. One of the animals was six feet tall. On both chairs were brown, white, black and tan geometric mud cloth lumbar pillows. They looked new, and they had been perfectly placed, exactly centered against the school-issued beige chairs’ woven back cushions.

  On the way out, Calyce was nearly run over by Lee, who had shot out distractedly from her corner office next to Belinda’s. The high school principal stopped, though, when she registered it was Calyce, and Calyce realized she hadn’t yet replied to Lee’s email.

  Calyce told her quickly, “I don’t think I can come to Utah this year. I’ve got a freshman English class and there’s no one to substitute. It’s all we can do to cover for John.”

  Lee’s face flashed irritation. “I’ve already scheduled the orientation dinner for next week. I had to when I didn’t hear from you. Can you at least come talk to the parents about the trip?”

  “Yes,” Calyce said. “Yes of course.”

  Across the hall a loud crowd had already gathered in the auditorium. Other kids and teachers, both newly coming out and long-timers, had lined up already in a long queue that stretched the length of the short hall outside and nearly completely up the stairs to the first level of classrooms. Calyce spotted Dan midway up, talking with the AP Statistics teacher.

  Calyce stopped walking. She cocked her head at Dan but recovered an instant before he saw her and waved, having fun.

  She smiled a quick smile and hurried into the auditorium, where she found a seat on the stair-step of the second row. A minute later, a sixty-ish white male Latin teacher sat near her but at arm’s-length, being careful to keep a space vacant between them.

  When neither spoke, he finally said, “You’d think we wouldn’t need these assemblies anymore, what with gay marriage having been decided. We’re all kumbaya.”

  Calyce waited a beat, then had to say to him, “Have you ever heard of Loving v. Virginia?”

  “No.” The man was wary, knowing her.

  “It was the Supreme Court case that struck down the miscegenation laws that forbad blacks and whites to intermarry. 1967. You think that eliminated race discrimination?”

  She turned to see Lee enter with Belinda, who took a seat at the front. At the last moment, just as Lee was leaning in to speak into the podium’s microphone, John DeGroot sneaked in sideways, spied Calyce in her solitary vortex, and hopped the two steps to where she was. The Latin teacher scooted even farther away.

  “Damion never called,” DeGroot whispered. “My sister’s brother-in-law called me last night.”

  “He’s family? You didn’t say that.”

  “Distant, but yeah. It’s embarrassing. What happened?”

  “How’s your mother?”

  Roger had slipped in beside Calyce as they all left the auditorium. Calyce was scanning for Belinda, hoping to catch her.

  He asked, “When’s h
er surgery?”

  “It’s on MLK Day, the Monday of the long weekend. Belinda!”

  “Can I do anything to help?”

  “Darn, she got away.”

  Calyce said to her students, “You’ve really never heard of Rock Hudson?”

  She told them about the midterm, though only a couple of them took notes. They were seniors, they had just submitted their regular-decision college applications by the January 1 deadline, and they no longer cared about high school. All they had to do was maintain a second-semester transcript sufficient not to get their offer retracted at year-end from whatever university they accepted by spring. And it would be a short term, too, because all the seniors vacated the high school in May for a month for their senior “quests,” which someone in Administration had perhaps dreamed up years before to eliminate the problem of lingering, insouciant, rowdy near-graduates causing chaos, or property damage.

  Calyce had only four months more with her senior creative writing class.

  “For the mid-term I’m going to give you three short stories,” she told them. “You’ll have to read them, then write your own, on the same theme, in the time allotted.”

  “What theme?” a boy asked. He was the only student paying attention. The others were talking and she couldn’t get them to stop.

  “It’ll be obvious from the titles, but you can prepare if you want by reading every short story Bessie Head has written, and Ray Bradbury, and Katherine Mansfield.”

  “Aw, come on,” he said.

  “And this time, I’m writing one too. I’ll distribute it later in the month and we’ll critique it together. It’ll be your chance to get even.”

  That night before she went to bed, Calyce in her nightgown and robe walked a clothes basket full of clean wash down to Damion’s door, in front of which sat one of her big ceramic serving bowls with remains of lettuce and creamy salad dressing, along with a fork and a soiled paper napkin.