All's Well(23)

“Maybe I’ll make you one anyway,” she says, getting up. She slings her canvas bag over her shoulder. Smiles at me with something like love in her eyes.

“See you later in rehearsal, Professor Fitch.”



* * *



Class is a black hole. Playing Shakespeare, what a joke. I gaze at my students. Already so unemployable. Already doomed. You’re doomed, I want to tell them. Instead I say, “Good afternoon.” I attempt to lean back against the desk, but my sitting time with Ellie has made even this posture unbearable. Grunts inadvertently escape my lips. My face, I know, looks pale and cracked down the middle. My lips hiss with dryness no matter how much I lick them. The good thing is Playing Shakespeare can pretty much teach itself. Get them to read whatever play aloud in class. A play, after all, is meant to be performed. Get them to perform a scene. Two scenes, why not? Get them to discuss the staging of said scenes in groups. Get them to discuss at length. Get them to present their findings to one another. Appear to take note of all this from where you lean against a wall, trying not to die. If you have time left over, play a video clip. Play the whole fucking video. Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen when they were young and beautiful and talking about scansion. A Lifetime network version of a contemporary and utterly implausible Othello. A shakily shot YouTube video of Dream being staged in a Utah field. It’s all instructive. Ignore the ringing of your cell phone. Which is the dean calling again, surely. He’s in his office. Likely standing at his window observing the quaint campus green, the dollhouse residence halls and white church-like buildings that make up this toy college. Cell phone to his ear, stupid smile on his face. Perhaps Fauve is in the office with him, bearing witness to my humiliation. She’ll often pay him visits, ingratiating herself. Bringing him coffees, baked treats, new animal ties.

I saw this one with little donkeys, and I couldn’t help but think of you.

Fauve, he’ll say, how thoughtful.

She’s told him about me, surely. Her fears about my competence as a director, my questionable teaching credentials. Was she ever even a teacher before this? She isn’t a scholar, I know, but she isn’t exactly a real professional either, is she? What has she done, a couple of festivals? He enjoys Fauve’s company. It perks up the afternoon hours, which he usually murders by just smiling at the wall. But today there is this annoying phone call to make too.

Pick up, pick up, he is attempting to tell me with his mind. But the dean has no psychic powers over me.

You don’t. I won’t, I tell him quietly in my mind. I’m teaching. I’m in the middle of a class, have you forgotten the schedule? Playing Shakespeare M and W 2:30–3:45, hello? There are life lessons being learned in this very room at this very moment.

“Ms. Fitch?”

This from Skye, sitting in the far corner. Lovely Skye. All in black. With her long hair and shimmering, painted lips both the blue green of the sea. A heavy-metal mermaid.

“Yes, Skye?”

“Kendall,” the girl corrects. Auburn bob. Pug face. Frowning at me, confused. “Who is Skye?”

“Skye?” I look around the room, but Skye isn’t to be found anywhere. Just regular children looking at me with regular horror.

“Ms. Fitch, are you okay?”

I stare at them all, staring at me. For once, no one looks bored.

I think this is going to be a great new beginning for you, Miranda, Paul said when I got this job. I really do. The way he was looking at me, beaming. Like maybe we were going to be okay after all. Maybe this job would save me, save us. I remember he brushed my hair away from my face, kissed me like he hadn’t in a long time. Let’s go out and celebrate, all right?

All right. And I tried to smile, to hide the sinking feeling. That I was in over my head. That I’d soon be drowning.

The students are going to fucking love you, I’ll bet. And talk about an easy gig, right? You can do it in your sleep!

“Ms. Fitch? Ms. Fitch, are you—”

“Fine. Why don’t we cut out early today, yes? Give yourselves a break. You’ve all worked so hard.” Such a lie. Such lies I tell them. But it works every time.

“Good night,” I tell them as they go walking out the door.

“It’s still only afternoon, Ms. Fitch.”



* * *



Before I limp to the theater for rehearsal, I look at myself in the bathroom mirror. This is it for you, I tell myself calmly, slowly. It is a truth, that’s all. To be swallowed like a pill, how many have I swallowed? To be internalized. You are no longer a human woman. You are no longer sexually viable. I observe these truths a long while, and my eyes do not water. I am hypnotized by my own ruin. By this new face that is apparently my face, its static misery lines that I do nothing to disguise. Before, oh before, how I would have. I would have applied a red lipstick to my cracked, pale lips. I would have squeezed and squeezed at my cheeks until I burst blood, or beat the sides of my face with a blush brush. I would have plucked out the gray hairs. A woman attempting to crawl up the crumbling vertical wall of a cliff from which she has already fallen, her hands full of loose dirt and spiders. Desperate creature. Denial, denial, denial. My mother, God bless her, would have approved of this. A memory of her comes to me, from just before she died, one I think of often. She’s drunk, as she always was then, straightening face towels in the guest bathroom and singing to herself. Meanwhile downstairs, the kitchen was going up in smoke. A grease fire she’d accidentally started and then forgot about. Instead she was up here in the bathroom, her forehead pressed into the wall tile, straightening tiny useless towels, humming “Que Sera, Sera.”