Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [68]
The following Tuesday, Fenstad’s mother was again in the back row next to York Follette. One of the fluorescent lights overhead was flickering, which gave the room, Fenstad thought, a sinister quality, like a debtors’ prison or a refuge for the homeless. He’d been thinking about such people for the entire week. For seven days now he had caught whiffs of the woman’s breath in the air, and one morning, Friday, he thought he caught a touch of the rotten-celery smell on his own breath, after a particularly difficult sales meeting.
Tonight was how-to night. The students were expected to stand at the front of the class and read their papers, instructing their peers and answering questions if necessary. Starting off, and reading her paper in a frightened monotone, Mrs. Nelson told the class how to bake a cheese soufflé. Arlene Fisher’s paper was about mushroom hunting. Fenstad was put off by the introduction. “The advantage to mushrooms,” Arlene Fisher read, “is that they are delicious. The disadvantage to mushrooms is that they can make you sick, even die.” But then she explained how to recognize the common shaggymane by its cylindrical cap and dark tufts; she drew a model on the board. She warned the class against the Clitocybe illudens, the Jack-o’-Lantern. “Never eat a mushroom like this one or any mushroom that glows in the dark. Take heed!” she said, fixing her gaze on the class. Fenstad saw his mother taking rapid notes. Harold Ronson, the mechanic, reading his own prose painfully and slowly, told the class how to get rust spots out of their automobiles. Again Fenstad noticed his mother taking notes. York Follette told the class about the proper procedures for laying down attic insulation and how to know when enough was enough, so that a homeowner wouldn’t be robbed blind, as he put it, by the salesmen, in whose ranks he had once counted himself.
Barb Kjellerud had brought along a cassette player, and told the class that her hobby was ballroom dancing; she would instruct them in the basic waltz. She pushed the PLAY button on the tape machine, and “Tales from the Vienna Woods” came booming out. To the accompaniment of the music she read her paper, illustrating, as she went, how the steps were to be performed. She danced alone in front of them, doing so with flair. Her blond hair swayed as she danced, Fenstad noticed. She looked a bit like a contestant in a beauty contest who had too much personality to win. She explained to the men the necessity of leading. Someone had to lead, she said, and tradition had given this responsibility to the male. Fenstad heard his mother snicker.
When Barb Kjellerud asked for volunteers, Fenstad’s mother raised her hand. She said she knew how to waltz and would help out. At the front of the class she made a counterclockwise motion with her hand, and for the next minute, sitting at the back of the room, Fenstad watched his mother and one of the sanitation workers waltzing under the flickering fluorescent lights.
“What a wonderful class,” Fenstad’s mother said on the way home. “I hope you’re paying attention to what they tell you.”
Fenstad nodded. “Tea?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Where’re you going after you drop me off?”
“Skating,” he said. “I usually go skating. I have a date.”
“With the pharmacist? In the dark?”
“We both like it, Ma.” As he drove, he made an all-purpose gesture. “The moon and the stars,” he said simply.
When he left her off, he felt unsettled. He considered, as a point of courtesy, staying with her a few minutes, but by the time he had this idea he was already away from the building and was headed down the street.
He and Susan were out on the ice together, skating in large circles, when Susan pointed to a solitary figure sitting on a park bench near the lake’s edge. The sky had cleared; the moon gave everything a cold, fine-edged clarity. When Fenstad followed the line of Susan’s finger, he saw at once that the figure on the bench was his mother.