A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [56]
She pressed her lips together, and narrowed her eyes to look at me.
“When you have children,” I went on, trying to sound professional and dispassionate, “occasionally you have to think of them first, before yourself.”
She stepped toward me and said into my face, “You mind your own goddamn business.”
I smiled as hard as I could. “It’s your negligence that keeps me employed,” I said. “I suppose I should thank you, Mrs. Mackessy.” It was pointless to fight with her, I knew, but I had waited too long, itching for battle. Robbie had finally fallen asleep and she breezed past me, into the cubicle to get him.
“He’s dehydrating,” I called into the inner room. “If you are interested in the life of your child you’d better get him to a doctor.” I went closer in and I said then what I never should have. I said, “If he keeps coming to school sick I’ll report you to—It’s not right, that he’s always so run down. I’ll do that, Mrs. Mackessy. I’ll report you.”
“I’ll report you,” she snarled, coming past me with Robbie slung over her shoulder. She turned, almost cracking her son’s head in the molding of the door. “I’ll get you put away if anything is the matter with him.”
It had been October, and I’d gone home at noon to help Howard harvest the corn. I remember how he scolded me for driving the tractor dangerously fast, and how cross I had been for several days, waiting for something to happen in the aftermath of Mrs. Mackessy’s threat. I hadn’t done anything wrong in my job except for disliking them so much. There was more than enough bad feeling between both of us to make me feel uneasy.
A wind was coming up again, and the branches from our maple tree were scraping against the house. I put the pillow over my head, wanting to sleep without seeing and hearing Mrs. Mackessy. I had hit Robbie Mackessy in December because he had stared and stared at me in such a hateful way. He had absorbed the blow. It was as if the sting had gone right to a spot inside where he stored his wounds. He had stood by my desk and for the first time he looked like a lovable child. He had been perfectly still as I struck. When I stepped back his cheeks were dewy, pink, and he smiled. Later on last summer I remembered that smile again, and it seemed that he must have known how much that single blow was going to hurt me. He smiled on and on as if the slap had been a kiss. He smiled as if he was going to take it home to his mother and then watch: She would prance down the hall, doing a high step, lifting her skirts, foaming at the mouth, fully confident in her ability to win the prize.
I was thinking the wrong kind of thoughts again. I should try to get well and be positive; I should think of the ravenous green worm who all of a sudden finds himself making a cocoon, drops off to sleep, and wakes a butterfly. Perhaps that was death, nothing more alarming than complete transformation. Keep in motion. Think of beauty! “Keep in motion,” I whispered. “Keep in motion. Keep in motion.”
I was almost asleep when Howard appeared in the doorway. I was dimly aware of him coming toward the bed, sitting down, and then putting his hand on my thigh. I rolled toward him, wondering how to explain the little debacle down at the school-board meeting.
“You got back early,” he said. He stretched out next to me, with his boots on, moving his hands down my spine and over my rump. “How’d it go?”
I bit down hard on the foam pillow and said through my teeth, “Disaster.”
He began kissing the nape of my neck, and he said so fondly, between the kisses, “How many times have I told you to chew with your mouth closed?”
He smelled of motor oil and he was literally breathing down my neck. I wasn’t going to cry. I was going to ask him to stop trying to make me get well. I was not going to cry, and I was going to tell him about Grogan and Robbie, about Mrs. Mackessy, about Theresa down in the orchard. He might have thought I was waiting for him, the way I used to in the old days, waiting in bed in my black negligee, with my