Alternate Endings Page 9

  “I disagree,” Calyce replied. “Grammar is a necessary part of a proper education.”

  The woman laughed out loud. “Where did they find you?”

  Calyce closed her spiral with grades in it. “I’ve been here twenty-six years.”

  “Maybe that’s why. You don’t understand modern writing.”

  Calyce ceremoniously looked at her watch again, which she had worn today as she did on every parent-teacher day, expressly for moments like these.

  “I’m afraid our time’s up. Thank you for coming.” Calyce rose, holding her pen with both hands so she didn’t have to shake hands again.

  “But I’ve got four minutes left.”

  Calyce loomed silently above her until the woman finally stood.

  “I’m sorry but others are waiting.”

  That night, in the middle of the night, she piston-coughed as she stomped down the stairs toward the throbbing music that banged through the closed door of Damion’s room. She nearly pounded, but she withheld herself. Instead she bent to take his dirty laundry off the floor. She thrust her son’s soiled underwear under one arm so she could also lift the two spaghetti-stained dishes and two stacked coffee mugs making rings on the entryway tile.

  John DeGroot was empurpled. Calyce had never seen him so mad.

  “Do you have any idea who she was?” he demanded early the next morning. “She’s one of our biggest donors. Tens of thousands a year. Her book’s on the bestseller list right now.”

  It rained in torrents that evening as Calyce sat in the dark, alone in the house with no company but the frenetic TV screen from the couch in her living room. Not the one where she had come upon Selene being serviced, but the other, the one facing the kitchen she had just cleaned after a late solo dinner of microwaved baked potato slathered in butter and sour cream along with a paperback Junot Diaz at the dining room table.

  Now she watched the half-hour sit-com with only the corner table light on. It was a fat-bottomed, faux-ceramic Southwestern lamp she had purchased years before that had horizontal ridges meant to convey handmade pottery, but it in truth it was only heavy plastic.

  The show had a laugh track, Calyce noticed. The main character’s every smirk was screamingly funny. It was a riotous party she heard but wasn’t actually attending. She picked up the remote and turned it off, then heard only the harsh rain and the infrequent thunder that punctuated it. She listened to the water hitting the windowpane to her right. Otherwise, there was utterly no sound. Not even the icemaker hummed.

  She turned the TV back on. Again the colors flashed, hammered by the aggressive laugh track.

  She flicked it off again and once more plunged into silence. She listened for a step, a thump, a rub, a squeak of floorboards. Nothing. No dishwasher sound. No fan whirring. No alive sound but her own breathing.

  She reached for the lamp and switched it off. She sat in total darkness.

  She turned on the screen again. The laugh-trackers howled. The male lead had just tripped on an ottoman.

  She flicked it off and heard the emptiness.

  She turned it on.

  She switched it off and sat in blackness.

  She had invited Belinda to take a hike with her and to her surprise she had said yes, so they met the next Saturday morning in the parking lot at Great Falls, on the Maryland side, where the Potomac River hurtled violently as it tumbled and crashed through a shredding rocky gorge. Kayakers loved the place, and it killed them.

  It was so cold that last weekend before Thanksgiving that Calyce wore two layers under her fleece. Belinda arrived in sapphire blue, diamond-sewn goose down, the new kind of jacket that hugged the body rather than upholstering it. They began a walk that roundtrip would take an hour, starting at the old white-painted brick tavern building that served as the Visitor Center. It had been built in the 1800s next to the then-new C&O Canal, which had for almost a century flowed barge traffic more than one hundred and eighty miles from Georgetown in D.C. to very near the Pennsylvania border. The narrow dirt towpath that ran on the river side of it provided a bucolic interlude at the western edge of the manic city. Calyce hadn’t been there but once before, which she now couldn’t understand.

  As they walked, Calyce was saying, “Ever notice how short the shows are now? I was watching Big Bang Theory and it seemed like all it was was commercials, so I looked it up. Cheers –remember Cheers? – used to be twenty-seven minutes. This new show is just over nineteen. The rest is ads. That’s an entire subplot.”

  Belinda had her hands in her pockets as they crunched in their tennis shoes along the dirt path in the overcast morning. “You still deconstructing everything?”

  “I can’t write it, but I can rip it apart. Seems like that’s all I’m doing.”

  The day smelled crisp-edged like winter was coming.

  “Ever notice how many stories there are now?” Calyce said. “They’re everywhere all the time. The news is all stories, and endless shows on cable and Buzzfeed and all those movies now on iTunes and Netflix and Amazon. And the movie-movies. It’s twenty-four hours. I don’t think we’ve ever had so many stories at one time in history.”

  “So where’s yours?” Belinda said suddenly, her dangling brass earrings swinging. She hadn’t worn a hat and her hood was down, so her soft hair blew like grass in a wind-wave.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You keep saying there are no stories about us, middle-aged women. Men don’t fight over us anymore. We aren’t beautiful. We live our lives, go to the store. You talk about it all the time, so why don’t you write about us? For example.” Belinda smiled. “Why not write about some lumberjack going down on you and your son walking in?”

  She laughed a fat guffaw that got even louder when she saw how embarrassed Calyce was. “Seriously. I’ve never heard of anything so outrageous.”

  Calyce said that it had been Selene’s idea. Damion was blameless, really, just giving into what she wanted in the heat of the moment.

  “On your couch, in your living room? Where’s the reaction you had the other day? You always do this. You get angry then bury it. He should have told her no.”

  Calyce remembered then that they had kept on, with Selene staring at her. Calyce remembered the smell, too. In her shock that night she hadn’t registered it.

  Above them the pudding clouds began to slice icy drizzle. Soft glitter turned to freezing shards then jagged pellets within seconds on their shoulders, driving with such force that the two bundled women turned together without speaking and rushed back toward the distant parking lot. The grey cusp of winter had charged in to overtake them.

  Again that night, when her barking cough had once more jerked her awake, Calyce gave up and groggily descended to her kitchen. She put water on to boil for tea with honey, but she couldn’t find her mug. She searched for it in the cabinet, in the dishwasher, and again on the countertop. Large enough to cup in both hands and with an extravagant looping handle, it was her favorite, but she couldn’t see it anywhere.

  “Did she take it? I can’t believe she took it again.”

  Calyce found the mug with one other outside Damion’s door. It hadn’t been stacked there when she had come in but it was there now, dirty, with a smeared spoon in it, needing to be washed before she could use it.

  She picked up the mugs, holding the spoon, and she scooped up the wrinkled shirt Damion had wadded and tossed by the baseboard. She got two steps before she stopped, then turned.

  She dropped the shirt back onto the tile and banged down the extra mug. It clanged but she didn’t care. Into it she let fall from two feet up the spoon, which she aimed perfectly. It rang.

  Upstairs a half-hour later, Calyce pulled toward herself at the dining table a few sheets of white copy paper. She clicked her pen. Her mug steamed contentedly beside her.

  “Today we’re going to work with surprise endings,” Calyce said to her class. “The assignment is Hard Times by Ron Rash.”r />
  Her son Ryan was still living at home despite being in his late twenties. He was still in his downstairs childhood room, and it looked like he would remain there forever. He had tried, and he kept trying, but there seemed to be some one thing missing in him that employers wanted, some ineffable quality. Maybe it was his almost palpable lack of oomph.

  Catherine had made it to Scout Lookout, though she did not know the name. All she knew as she walked the gentle new incline was that she had finally gotten upwind of the outhouses.

  She saw the sign.

  On a large color picture of the precipitous fin of rock that presumably rose somewhere beyond her, a universal, international, no-language black and white picture of a stick-figure hiker falling into mid-air with tumbling rocks accompanied these frightening words:

  Since 2004, 6 people have died falling from cliffs on this route.

  The 1.1 mile (1.8 km) round-trip route from Scout Lookout to Angels Landing is a strenuous climb on a narrow ridge over 1,400 feet above the canyon floor. This route is not recommended during high winds, storms, or if snow or ice is present.

  Past the sign, sandstone layers stepped in soft, gritty, flat pieces dusted with sandy powder that slid hikers to their deaths. That was why it was called slickrock.

  To her right, low bushes clung to the eroding cliff-top whose sheer wall plunged hundreds of feet to the bottom of Refrigerator Canyon, where she had just walked. To her left the burnt-orange rock simply stopped at a naked ledge. As she inched forward she saw the east rim of the canyon far away, unreachable on the other side of a mile-wide gap that only birds could cross. There was no railing, no banister. One step and she would be airborne.

  She realized she was seeing a bird, a huge one, hanging just above her in the wind that blew. She noticed the air too, and the dust it brought to her face. The bird was a broad-winged black and white one with long black-tipped feathers like fingers groping. It had no feathers on its head but skin instead like a plucked chicken, only reddened as if sunburned.

  A woman in sneakers was pointing and jabbing her companions to look up and away from their feet as the massive creature dipped in soundless concentration, self-correcting with a flick in the updraft, a white boomerang zigzagged on the underside of its vast wingspan.

  “It’s a condor,” she heard the woman say. “They eat carcasses. Biggest flying bird in North America.”

  Catherine had never been so close to something so deadly. She was in its world now, full of currents a thousand feet up, and it was hunting. She watched it cock its head.

  She arrived finally where Scout Lookout ended at a rock hill of hardened eddies that eons ago pooled and glopped when they were moving sand, each hardened rosy lip now just a bit higher and inward from the curving lip below it. Only the narrowest of resulting ledges allowed for a foot jammed sideways to maintain a body’s balance.

  To her right a heavy chain led upward as it hugged the sandstone. Someone had sunk thick metal posts into the eroding slickrock and attached them with thick, weighty links through needle eyes. From where she was standing the chain seemed to continue all the way to the top, but she would have had to bend in half to hold it. She wondered how long the fat chain had been there. How many hands had tugged on it? How many at a time, and how hard? If she bet her life on it, would it hold?

  To her left was a thousand-foot plunge without a railing. One step and she would fall eight long screaming seconds to the bottom. She was standing on solid rock but in open air three-quarters of the height of the old World Trade Center, three-quarters of the way up the Willis Tower in Chicago, entirely above the pointed top of the Eiffel Tower, a full 250 feet above one of the orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a hundred feet above two London Eye Ferris wheels stacked on each other.

  She had never been so high before without being safely inside, surrounded by metal.

  She was thirsty and hot and the sun blazed on her bare arms, which were red from their cooking. She knew that once she stepped over there, to her right, and committed to that first life-or-death chain, she would be without shade until she stopped, and again until she returned to this place.

  She checked her water. She didn’t have any.

  Her companions were far, far away. They had long ago forgotten her.

  She shifted her backpack and felt its weight again. She could not go on without it, for it contained all her belongings – her wallet, her keys, her expensive Sony camera with zoom that added a constantly shifting three pounds in the fat wide bottom of the large second compartment. The straps connected with a cross-strap that pressed into her sternum, and she suddenly felt like she was strangling.

  She began. She stepped right and carefully lodged her foot to buy herself as much width as possible but almost immediately the little spaces disappeared and she was trying to move over sloped and sanded rock. She bent, clinging to the chain but not trusting it to hold her. Afraid, she couldn’t keep herself moving. The bulk on her back slid, knocking her balance off.

  She looked ahead and up, then to her right to see the curve that fell down and away, down into Refrigerator Canyon. She looked up the rock face, where she saw now that the chains stopped. One of the posts was even uprooted and chainless. To get to the next short run of links, she had to somehow just arrive there, in the air, with nothing to brace her. She reached for a stone, a ledge, a piece of earth to hold on to, but there was nothing.

  Panic set in. Her breathing shallowed. Heart racing, she couldn’t figure out where to put her hands and people were coming now, both ways, and all of them were waiting. There was only one trail up or down, and she was the blockage, hunched in terror.

  She sat and tried to push her way, only that didn’t help either. She was stuck, turtle-like, her backpack wedged behind her against the rock. She was taking up as little space as possible on the mountain, but they couldn’t move by her and still she couldn’t move.

  December

  At lunch that day Catherine made sure to sit by the door, where Mike would see her, as she took the seat at the round table that faced the entry. She knew exactly when he would arrive in the faculty lounge, if he came unaccompanied, and as the minute approached she lowered her eyes so he wouldn’t catch her yearning.

  Act casual, she told herself. Aloof, all while she prayed that no one else would join her, for she knew that Mike would weave past her to his friends if she weren’t a stray needing company.

  And there he was, towering in the doorway, so tall she knew without looking up that she would see the deeply shadowed bottom of his square jaw. He would be wearing the beige tattersall, she knew too. Yesterday had been the Black Watch and tomorrow would be the red MacPherson. This last was her favorite because it made him a flame from his narrow waist to the top of his rumpled red head, which he couldn’t keep his fingers out of. Sit here, sit, please sit with me today, she mouthed to her sandwich.

  He stopped. She thanked God. “You all alone again?”

  As Mike ate complacently, scanning the room, she struggled for topics to bring him back to her. She offered the conversation she had had the day before with their boss Frank, the school’s Head of Academics. She reminded the handsome biology teacher of her hunt for new literature as English Department Head, and she told him, putting on a bright smile, that she had spoken up rebelliously for once at the last faculty meeting. She had mustered herself – “You know how I am” – to question the high school’s single-minded focus on Jewish and black oppression. Even the History Department did Himmler’s Jewish Tailor every year.

  “You know what Frank said? That it’s our demographic. The parents expect it. But what about the Asian experience? David’s right. You know David in my department?”

  Mike nodded.

  “He said the only thing we do is The Year Of the Boar and Jackie Robinson, and that’s in fifth grade. We’ve got more and more Asians. David gave me Everything I Never Told You and I told Frank I want to do it next year. Aren’t you pr
oud of me?”

  With her hands she shifted on the steep slope and twisted full around to face it, her backpack cantilevered into thin air. She found a tight spot for her right foot and jammed it in, but there was nowhere to move her left and only smooth round rock above her. There was nothing to grasp but she reached anyway. She strained in the bright sun but the new length of fat chain started ten feet above her on the eroded sandstone.

  She twisted around again and tried to push herself up the incline on her butt, but the pack jammed against the rock and trapped her.

  “What do I do?” she kept saying to herself. “How are they doing this?”

  People waited. They piled up now beneath her on the slant to Scout Lookout, wanting impatiently to climb up. Above her too, they waited with growing irritation, holding onto the high, far end of the chain she could not reach, watching from a spot that was more horizontal. No one was helping her, or even offering to, as the hot day scorched them all.

  She was stuck and without a clue and no one else could move until she made a choice.

  Catherine had roused her gumption to ask Frank for a private appointment. It was the first one she had ever requested of her direct supervisor, in a diffident email she had revised five times and hesitated three days to send. Frank had then taken 36 hours to respond with a sentence fragment allowing her fifteen minutes at 7:30 a.m. on a school day four days later.

  At the appointed time she rapped lightly on the closed door of his office, which was hidden on an upper floor where students and parents and new teachers could not find it. Frank liked his aerie, she had overheard him say once.

  Why?

  “Scarcity principle.”

  She was there very briefly, she hastened to say when he did not invite her to sit, because she knew he was very busy. She “just” needed his approval to endorse Alice to succeed her as English Department Head starting the next year. The woman was clearly heir to the position, though she did not say this to Frank specifically. She assumed he knew it, for he had known hard-working and good-hearted Alice as long as she.