A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [51]
David Henskin, the principal, was eyeing me, trying to gauge if the rumors he’d heard were true. He was at the end of his career, and yet he was still a formidable man, with steel-colored hair; the small black-framed glasses that were known, when I was small, as “retard glasses”; and the fresh, smooth, smelly skin of a man who has to shave more than once a day. He looked in my direction and then he snapped to attention because they were moving down the agenda to the issue of the boiler. He was in his element when it came to the boiler. It was old. He loved the apparatus, but the new models were also beautiful as well as efficient. Everyone on the board was knowledgeable about heating and cooling systems. The men were warming up on the ruined and dangerous mechanicals so that when the time came to deal with the school nurse who couldn’t do CPR they would be prepared. If Luke could just give me a sign, a small flicker of recognition; then I would know he didn’t think I had meant to drown Lizzy.
He was looking right over the top of my head at the chalkboard. I remember how sick that made me feel, as if I was in a boxcar that suddenly lurched to a stop. I covered my face with my hands to try to steady myself. I couldn’t bear the smell of school lunches, years and years of school lunches, and floor wax, new basal readers, workbooks, gym classes, bad boys, obedient girls. This was the world that, with a great deal of luck, my children would inherit. They were aching to grow up. They would think, as they got older, that their adulthood was going to be filled with an embarrassment of riches: ice cream after every meal; sexual intercourse, mystical in nature, morning and evening; happy hour with wine coolers, all with no repercussions. In fact, the grown-up world was sitting at school-board meetings while the men ordered the boiler of their dreams, and Catherine Trumper wrote down everything they said. The adult world was fabricating lust for the likes of Luther Tritz, who was probably extravagant only in his organizational skills. Emma and Claire would no doubt live in a society where it was no longer possible to turn away from the daunting problems many of us had ignored and insisted were none of our business. The garbage and disease would come crashing into my girls’ yard like waves coming to shore, along with the lost and broken and heartless people, shouldering their semiautomatic weapons. Instead of guiding our children in their interests, instead of sharing with them the fascination of history and music, we should prepare them for the cruelties, for coping with famine and menacing gangs.
I looked up then, out the far window, and there, just within sight, the sun was going down across the river. It was dull red, no longer shining over the land, its rays brought home to roost, contained within its sphere. The sky was streaked with lavender, a pulsing pale blue, purple and smudged pink and orange melding into one another all the way to the horizon. How I longed to rush away from that cafeteria, into the cool of the dusk, into the color, the color—after weeks and weeks of blasting heat and sunlight that had bleached the landscape to a lusterless gold.
Luther Tritz was staring blankly at nothing, when he could have been enjoying the scene out the window. He had probably become deaf after his years listening to junior-high students channeling their pent-up energy into the slender mouthpiece of a brass instrument. He probably didn’t laugh anymore because he couldn’t hear what was being said. There was not much pleasure left for him because his senses were shot. I used to imagine that he looked at me across the parking