Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [100]
“Pretty soon all he’ll have will be Grandma and Grandpa,” Agatha said. “He’ll be taking care of them like always and shopping and driving the car and helping with the housework. What kind of life is that? I think he ought to get married.”
Now she had their attention.
“And since he doesn’t seem to know any women, I think we’ll have to find him one.”
“Miss Pennington,” Daphne said instantly.
“Who?”
“Miss Ariana Pennington, my teacher,” Daphne said.
It was just that easy.
Miss Pennington had been teaching fifth grade for only the past two years, so neither Thomas nor Agatha had had her when they were fifth-graders. Thomas knew her by sight, though. Every boy in the neighborhood knew her by sight. Not even the youngest, it seemed, was immune to her hourglass figure or her mane of extravagant curly brown hair. Agatha, on the other hand, had to be shown who it was they were talking about.
So on a Friday afternoon just before the last bell, when Thomas was supposedly in a Leaders of Tomorrow meeting and Agatha had study hall, they met at the old cracked porcelain water fountain behind Poe High and walked the two blocks to the grade school. Almost no other students were out at this hour, but Thomas greeted by name the few who were—those excused early for dental appointments and such. “Thomas!” they said, and, “Yo, man, what you up to?” Agatha merely stalked on, blank-faced. She wore a bulbous down jacket over a skirt that stopped in the middle of her chunky bare knees—not an outfit any of her classmates would have been caught dead in, but then Agatha never concerned herself with appearances. She was supremely indifferent, impervious, striding on without Thomas until he ran to catch up with her.
At Reese Elementary Thomas took the lead, choosing a side door instead of the main entrance and climbing the stairs two steps at a time. Outside Room 223 he paused, turned toward Agatha, and beckoned.
Through the small window they saw rows of fifth-graders bent over their books. Miss Pennington walked among them, tall and willowy, pausing first at this desk and then at that one to answer questions. You would never take her for a woman of the seventies. In an era when teachers had started wearing pants to work, Miss Pennington wore a silky white blouse and a flaring black skirt cinched tightly at the waist, sheer nylon stockings, and high-heeled patent leather pumps—the sexy, constricting clothes of the fifties. Her hair was shoulder-length and her fingernails were sharp red spears, and her makeup—when she turned as if by instinct and glanced toward the door—was seen to be vivid and expertly applied: deep red lipstick emphasizing her full lips, and plummy rouge and luminous blue eyeshadow. Thomas and Agatha stepped back hastily, out of her line of vision. They looked at each other.
“Well?” Thomas asked.
“She’s kind of … brightly colored, isn’t she?”
“Oh, Agatha, you don’t know anything. She’s gorgeous! Women are supposed to look that way. That’s the type guys dream about.”
“Oh,” Agatha said.
“She’s perfect,” Thomas told her.
“All right,” Agatha said crisply. “Let’s get this thing rolling, then.”
* * *
Daphne told Ian he needed to make an appointment for a parent-teacher conference. “Conference?” Ian said. “Now what’d you do?”
“I didn’t do anything! How come you always think the worst of me? I just want you to talk to my teacher about my homework.”
“What about it?”
“Well, like, are you supposed to help me with it, or let me do it on my own?”
“But I already let you do it on your own. What are you saying, you need help?”
“It might be a good idea.”
“Why don’t I just go ahead and help, then? We’ll set aside a time each evening.”
“No, first I think you should ask Miss Pennington,” Daphne