Alternate Endings Read online

  When Belinda finally appeared, Calyce fell in quickly beside her, asking for “a brief minute,” which Belinda said was all she had.

  Calyce tugged her into a corner and said she needed to know what Belinda and Dan had been discussing so guiltily in the stairwell.

  “‘Guiltily’?” Belinda’s chin pulled back. “And why is that any business of yours?”

  Calyce feared that Belinda could see the rabbiting in her throat as her heart bounced.

  “If it affects me, it is my business.”

  “I’m not sure I agree with you, but yes, it was about the vote. Dan is running too, and I think he’d be good. He’s collaborative. That’s not your strong suit.”

  It’s four days from now. Calyce was texting with Javier that night as she searched for the pastry-shop chocolate fondant cake that Damion had brought for dinner earlier that week as a surprise. But she couldn’t find it. A broad wedge wide enough for two slices had still been on the cake stand an hour before when Calyce had gone upstairs to shower.

  Don’t. Javier replied, using the period. Let him be

  From the kitchen, Calyce raised her voice to be heard through the closed door of the powder room, where her mother was making bodily noises. “Did you eat all the cake that was left?”

  Why? she texted.

  “There weren’t any names on it,” Effie yelled back.

  Don’t trust him

  “Both pieces?”

  You don’t? Or I shouldn’t?

  “There was only one big one.”

  Yes

  Calyce said, “You never asked!”

  She texted, Before the meeting I need to know what he’s thinking

  Effie said, “I can’t read your mind. If you don’t want me to eat something, you need to tell me. I’ll be out in a minute.”

  He wants dept head. That’s all you need to know

  What’s he been saying about me? Calyce asked as her phone rang on the counter.

  “It’s Nina. What’s up? You left a message.”

  Calyce spoke to her sister quietly and in a hurry. It was Damion. He shouldn’t have enough money to pay his rent, or rather, his half of it that Selene didn’t cover, but he seemed to have a lot of disposable income.

  Calyce said, “He came for dinner this week in a new v-necked pullover, and he brought a cake for Mom from one of those fancy new stores on his street. It came in a pink box with a ribbon.”

  “For Mom? Not for you?”

  “For Mom.”

  Imagine the worst

  She steeled herself to talk to him, finding him alone in a classroom at the end of the next day, collecting finished tests.

  She had never looked for him before, and she had no idea where he would be, so she had had to check the schedule before she left the English Department office. She also had had to plan when to arrive, exactly as the bell rang and the door flew open in front of a wave of fifteen ninth-graders. One girl had been so tiny and prepubescent still that she looked like a fifth-grade boy, which was a full year older than some of the childlike boys tumbling out behind her seemed to be.

  Dan was surprised to see her. She saw it in his wide face before it closed. He cast his eyes to the papers and began squaring their edges but she started in nonetheless, telling him in a word-rush how much she wanted it. She had waited years. Decades. Since Dan was in grade school. She had waited that long for John DeGroot to leave it to her so she could be Head of the department.

  He tapped the pile of tests hard on a tabletop.

  “It’s not personal, Calyce. You and I have different visions for the department and I think it’s good that people have a choice.”

  “You can do it next time, when I’m done with it.”

  He let a beat pass. “It’s not yours to own. It’s not a hereditary position.”

  His calm unnerved her. She said, “There’s never been a black Head of the English Department before. It’s time we had one.”

  “Do you think it’s still 1968?”

  “You weren’t even born then.”

  He countered, “You want affirmative action? No one cares about numbers anymore.”

  “I’ve waited twenty years!”

  “During which time we’ve elected a black president. What are your accomplishments? What have you done for the department? What are your plans? That’s all that matters these days.”

  He was combative, and ready. To Calyce no answers came.

  “You could win this,” he said. “But not if you talk about your being black and all your years of waiting. We get it, but that’s not relevant to me or the others. We’re not standing behind you in line at the Safeway. It’s not the grocery store, Calyce, and we don’t have to wait our turn.”

  The day of the departmental vote, Calyce ran into Roger at 7 a.m. Her fingers tingling with anxiety, she tried to avoid him once she saw him, slowing as she walked from the garage, but she couldn’t stop altogether on the sidewalk, all alone, so she had to smile gamely and catch up with him as he waited for her.

  He insisted on holding the front entrance door. “Today’s the day, huh? I can see it on your face.”

  They nodded at the vigilant men at the guard’s desk, who were all former D.C. cops. Every one of them was black.

  “Can I do anything to help?” Roger asked.

  “You can talk about something else.”

  Then in a non sequitur, she said, “I’m learning how to fall. I was practicing on my bed, standing on the mattress. I saw it on YouTube.”

  But then she turned right for no reason and left him, heading down the wrong hallway. He watched her get halfway along it before she realized she was walking by math classrooms.

  They all assembled from both campuses in a conference room hidden under the first-floor auditorium’s slanted main riser-wall. Desk-chairs had been pulled into a big donut square and created an uninterrupted surface of fake wood broken only at the entrance near the single door, which was glass in a wall of glass to make the claustrophobic space seem more open.

  When Calyce arrived early, four other teachers were already seated together. They saw her but didn’t wave her over. She claimed the center spot in the precise midpoint of the side under the whiteboard.

  As the many others filed in and took seats without filling in the chairs on either side of her, DeGroot arrived. He didn’t like that she had taken the head position. She was a candidate today, not Interim Head, he said when he bent down to whisper.

  She got up with all her papers and moved to another side and pulled out a lonely chair between two groups chatting. It wasn’t until nearly everyone else had settled in that Dan blew in and took the one free seat now left, next to DeGroot who sat where Calyce had first been sitting.

  DeGroot led the jammed room of twenty-five people in a routine discussion of unimportant initial agenda items, then announced that it was finally time to hear what Calyce and Dan each had to say, then vote.

  “I’ve already received proxies from Michelle and Brian,” DeGroot said about the only two absent faculty members. “We’ll do this alphabetically. ‘Tate’ comes before ‘Waggoner,’ so Calyce you’re up.”

  Calyce talked from her seat as she touched her prepared pages with soft tips of trembling fingers. She saw Javier in the crowd but her eyes fixed on gorgeous Amita directly across from her, so she spoke only to the young woman.

  Calyce started with all she had done during her years at the school, the changes that had been in place now for decades, the suggestions she had made for books the school now used perennially, the fact that she had taught a quarter-century’s worth of students.

  “And,” she tried to smile. “None of them failed.”

  She had been a student advisor for twenty of those years, and she had served on countless school committees, chaperoned innumerable dances, tutored probably two hundred students, taught at every level from elementary to seniors and at all three campuses. She had covered fo
r the other teachers likely a thousand times when someone had been sick or needed time away. She had the finest attendance record of any teacher in any department in the school’s history. Ten years ago, she had even won a teaching excellence award that had been reported in The Washington Post.

  She then talked about her efforts recently to learn what the faculty wanted.

  “At the high school,” one of the middle school teachers interrupted.

  “Let her finish,” Javier said.

  Calyce said, “I’d be happy to hear what your needs are too.”

  “Dan,” DeGroot said when Calyce had run out of words eventually. “Your turn.”

  She had not once mentioned her race.

  Dan got up, though Calyce had remained seated throughout her presentation. He walked behind DeGroot, touched DeGroot’s shoulders, and stepped into the open area at the center of the room. He had no notes as he stood silently for a full five seconds, letting people size him up before he began speaking. Calyce saw him in profile, and she noticed his newly shined brown shoes, his dark jeans and the baby blue buttoned collared dress shirt below his moon-pie face.

  He started by thanking everyone at both the lower and middle school campuses for having met with him one-on-one over the prior three weeks.

  Calyce looked around the room and saw all the nodding.

  He had heard their concerns, he said, and he knew from them that collaboration must be their motto moving forward. It was now a consolidated department, and that was done for a reason he had endorsed and had participated in because it made for a unified, focused mission. He turned away from Calyce as he said that he had purposefully not drafted an entirely new curriculum because that should be done together, with representatives from the lower, middle and upper schools on one joint committee.

  “And I wouldn’t choose them,” he said. “That too we should all do collaboratively.”

  It was still only May. Changes could certainly be identified and implemented by September. The point was that heading the department would be peer-to-peer and not some top-down, kingly position.

  “Or queenly. But there’s something else I have to say, which I think is vitally important.”

  He was making deliberate eye contact with each person, quarter-turning as he did it. “As many of you know, I’m gay. This school has never had an openly gay department head in its history. Not a single department, and there are no gays in senior administration either. None. Not one. One hundred percent of the school’s management at all levels objectively appears to be straight.”

  He began ticking things off. “We have white people. We have white men and white women. We have black people, both men and now even our black high school Vice Principal, Belinda. As you know, I personally led the charge to get her appointed. So black women are represented, even older black women, if grandmothers are a separate group.”

  He smiled. “But there’s not a single gay man or lesbian woman despite the school’s declared goals of diversity and acceptance. There’s no white gay man or black lesbian at any level of management at any campus. So I ask you, isn’t it time?

  “I want to say something else that’s difficult. We as a school emphasize our roots in the Jewish and black communities, which is great, but that means there’s an ethos of oppression that’s always in the air. It’s a one-down, underdog sort of atmosphere that permeates. Amita mentioned this recently.”

  He turned to face Calyce as if on cue. “There’s this sulking sense of wrongs that still need to be righted, like we’re continuing to fight battles from fifty years ago. I’m sorry but it’s true. But the gay story isn’t that. Sure there’s oppression and violence, but it’s ultimately a story of attainment, of celebration, especially now. It’s about empowerment and it’s uplifting for our department and the school. And I say, let’s celebrate a new beginning, and let’s have that positive attitude imbue our new collaboration as an integrated department.”

  He then turned slowly, all the way around, looking at each voter before he sat down.

  Calyce held back until all of them had left, which meant she had to sit and watch DeGroot depart with Dan, throwing his arm around the younger man as they moved down the hallway. She saw them bonding through the plate glass.

  The next day was the first of her creative writing class’s final two sessions.

  She didn’t want to distribute all the five stories, though, that had made the winning top ten through six.

  “Why not?” a young man now headed to Brown asked her.

  “I’ve made copies of ten through seven but not number six.”

  “Why not?” a young woman on her way to St. Andrews said.

  “It’s mine, that’s why. The Greek flash fiction about Aeolus on Angel’s Landing when his children have left him.”

  “I loved that one!” a young woman going to UVA told her.

  “We all do!” they said. “Please make copies of that one too, so we can keep it.”

  Calyce asked her ducklings-turned-to-swans bashfully, genuinely wanting to know, “Is my story really that good?”

  Dan was in the tiny conference room/coat rack/storage area with the small round table grading tests with his back to the open door. All Calyce could see was his gray crewneck sweater. No one else was in the English Department office that same very late afternoon.

  Calyce knocked. Dan turned to look at her but he didn’t motion her inside.

  “I wanted to extend my sincerest congratulations,” she told him.

  He didn’t speak. He was observing her like a specimen.

  “Well . . . that’s why I came by. They obviously wanted you and not me.”

  Nothing.

  “So, congratulations.”

  She turned to go.

  But she had taken one step when he said it. “You were too easy, you know.”

  She turned.

  “All I had to do was let you be you,” Dan said. “Your way is all you see. All I had to do was stay under your radar and not do anything in front of you and you never noticed. You were so arrogant about your own entitlement that you didn’t see a thing.

  “There’s nothing sophisticated about you, Calyce. Nothing unusual, so it wasn’t even interesting. You’re just a grandmother treating us all like we’re eleven.”

  As a last salvo, he said she’d have more time now “for your hiking. That was easy too, to remind them of all the times you’ve talked about Zion. And they saw the walks you were taking at lunch. All I had to do was nudge them into thinking that by electing me they were doing you a favor. That plus saying that Javier wanted the job, which of course he didn’t, but it distracted you from seeing me.”

  Effie insisted on taking Calyce out to dinner at the most famous old time-y seafood restaurant in the next suburb. Unchanged since the 1940s, the place had two narrow rooms. A large lunch counter curved in one of them, and bare tables and chairs filled the other. Effie told the waitress they wanted one of the tables for two on the “restaurant” side, where they were seated near the clattering front door.

  Calyce wasn’t interested in eating, or in eating out with her mother, but she couldn’t make up a reason fast enough to avoid it, so she came, and she drove them. There was a great deal of Friday night traffic, so parking was hard to find.

  “Don’t worry,” her mother said. “I can walk miles now.”

  All through dinner, Effie had smiled with some hidden knowledge. She had charmed the waitress and flirted with the young male manager, who had come by to see how they liked their clam chowder and crab claws with a hot dipping sauce that Effie had always found addictive. She licked her lips as she wiped her fingers and reached for yet another paper napkin.

  “It’s casual,” Effie said over the din and the banging front door that blasted late-May humidity onto their shins. “But it’s good.”

  Calyce said, “This dinner will cost you a fortune. Seafood is expensive.”

  When their coffees arr
ived, Effie leaned to pull from her purse on the floor something she then handed with a flourish to Calyce.

  “This is to make you feel better.”

  It was a brochure for a Caribbean cruise, to start the Saturday after the Friday that school ended in early June. It was an exterior stateroom, with two twin beds and a balcony. The colorful brochure showed the sea viewed from two balcony deck chairs angled toward each other. In them, a gray-haired couple held hands across the air, their love knot of fingers centered perfectly in the frame.

  “That’s us,” Effie said. “Only we’re mom and daughter. But this is the beginning, now that that awful school has given you more free time. I know you needed the extra money from being Head but since I’m here you don’t.”

  Calyce looked at her, nearly speechless.

  “You can afford a cruise? For two? You have that kind of spare money?”

  Calyce asked Effie the question in the car, in the dark, before she started the ignition. They had parked two blocks from the restaurant, and the question had dawned and brightened into certitude as they had walked.

  “You’re paying Damion now, aren’t you? You’re helping him with his rent. He’s unemployed. He can’t possibly afford that stuff he’s buying.”

  “He gets jobs.”

  “Not enough. Are you paying his other bills, too? How much are you giving him?”

  “I don’t think I like your tone.”

  “That’s why he brought that fancy cake. It was for you.”

  Effie crossed her arms but didn’t deny it.

  They drove silently toward home.

  Finally, at a stoplight, Effie said, “He needs the money.”

  But in the townhouse driveway, after Calyce pulled onto the cement, Calyce took in her breath suddenly, and said, “I know why you’re doing it. I’ve been thinking about it the whole way home. You’re paying him so he doesn’t try to move back here. You don’t ever want to go back to Florida. You want to stay here, and he’s taking your money because he’s in on the whole thing.”