• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 924 0

Lees Ardor's mother was so admired by everyone who knew her that they felt no need to say so over and over again, and there were no teary toasts in her honor because, it was agreed, Mrs. Ardor would have hated such a gesture. Lees Ardor, I imagined, had been so moved by this stoic show of respect that she cried at the funeral, cried out loud for the first time she could remember. She put her hands over her face when she wept, and her crying sounded oddly far away, as if she were a princess holed up in some distant castle. Lees Ardor's mother was gone from the world and there would be no one else like her, and now there was just Lees Ardor herself. Lees Ardor could never carry on her mother's legacy, she knew that. How could she emulate her mother when she could barely stop crying long enough to accept the strong coffee from her mother's cronies, who would soon also die stoically? I'd imagined all of that, sitting there in my desk chair, and I bet the women in the class had, too, and in doing so we'd imagined our way into empathy for Lees Ardor. Someone even sucked back a sob, which Lees Ardor did not appreciate. I know this because she stared furiously at the class ― her hair glinted like armor in the buzzing overhead lights ― and said, "My mother was a cunt."

This was too much: there was a collective gasp, and then all the women in the class left en masse, even the Chairman Mao pierced-tongue kook. Almost all of the men left, too, not because they were offended by the word "cunt," I'm pretty sure, but because they hadn't been paying attention and saw the women leaving and probably assumed class was dismissed early. Then it was just me and Lees Ardor and the Richard Nixon kook, who was looking at her as though in the throes of both fear and love. He was probably one of those buttoned-down guys who couldn't love anyone unless he was terrified of them. Lees Ardor's repeated use of the word "cunt" had no doubt made him fall for her hard.

"Get the hell out of here," Lees Ardor told him. The Richard Nixon kook went pleasurably limp in his desk chair and then got up, wobbly legged, and left the room. Lees Ardor crossed the room and closed the door behind him, then sat in one of the student desk chairs and started crying with such force that I was afraid that her eyes were going to fall out of her head and onto the desk, smearing the graffiti. And then, as if the weeping wasn't enough for her, Lees Ardor began banging her head, softly at first and then harder and harder, like a woodpecker determined to serve its purpose without its beak. I was afraid she was going to do some real damage, to herself and her forehead and to the desk.

"Please don't cry," I told her. I had said the same thing to Mr. Frazier just two days earlier. Was this what a detective did, after all? Did a detective try to get his suspects to stop crying long enough to ask them the things he needed to know? "Please don't."

"I loved her, so much," Lees Ardor said.

"Your mother?" I guessed.

"Yes," she said. "Why did I call her that?"

"You don't really think she's a cunt, do you?"

"No," she said. "I loved her."

"Then why did you call her that?"

"I don't know."

"Oh yes, you do," I said. Because I'd often given this answer ― "I don't know" ― to my mother when I was a boy and confronted with an especially difficult question, and I'd also tried it with my packaging-science professors, and none of them had accepted "I don't know." I bet Lees Ardor didn't take that sort of answer from her students, either, and now I wasn't going to take it from her. "Tell me why you called your mother a cunt."

"Because," Lees Ardor said. Her head was down on the table, her hands locked behind her head as though she were being arrested, and so the words came out muffled but with force, probably because she'd been wanting to say them for so long. "Because I didn't want to be a character in the book my students had been reading."

"You didn't want to be Ántonia," I said, although I wasn't really thinking about that book, or even about Lees Ardor: I was thinking more about my mother