Bridge of Clay(61)
On her first day, she came back beaten: “They’ve eaten me alive.”
On the second, it was worse:
“Today they spat me out.”
There were times when she would shout at them, in total loss of control—of them and of herself—and kids moving in for the kill. When once she near exploded, screaming, “QUIET!” then a mutter of “Little shits,” the class erupted with laughter. The mirth, the mockery of teenagers.
The fact of Penny Dunbar, though, as we know, is that she might have been slight, and perennially fragile, but she was an expert at somehow surviving. She spent lunchtimes with whole classes—the queen of detention and boredom. She bludgeoned them with organized silence.
As it turned out, she was the first candidate in years to last the student-teacher period, and they offered her a job, full-time.
She left the cleaning completely.
Her workmates took her out drinking.
Michael sat with her next day, by the toilet. He rubbed her back and spoke to her soothingly: “Are these the spoils of freedom?”
She threw up and sobbed but laughed.
* * *
—
Early the next year, when Michael picked her up from work one afternoon, there were three giant boys surrounding her, with their sweat, their haircuts and arms. For a moment, he nearly got out, but then he saw it—she was holding a copy of Homer; she was reading aloud, and it must have been one of the gruesome bits, for the boys all grimaced and crowed.
She wore a dress the shade of peppermint.
When she realized Michael had pulled up, she clapped the book shut and the boys all cleared a path. They said, “Bye Miss, bye Miss, bye Miss,” and she got into the car.
But that’s not to say it was easy—it wasn’t.
When he was heading out to work sometimes, he heard her talk herself into it, in the bathroom; it was hard to face the day. He’d say, “Which kid is it this time?”—for the job became working with the toughest ones, one on one; and sometimes it took an hour, sometimes several months, but always she wore them down. Some would even protect her. If other kids mucked up, they’d be taken to the toilets, and shoved amongst the troughs. Don’t mess with Penny Dunbar.
In many ways, the title of ESL was ironic, because a good percentage of her students were kids whose first language was actually English, but could barely read a paragraph—and those were always the angriest.
She’d sit with them by the window.
She brought a metronome in from home.
The kid would stare, incredulous, saying, “What the fuck is that?”
To which Penny would answer flatly:
“Read in time with this.”
* * *
—
But then, it had to happen.
After four years of teaching, she came home one evening with a pregnancy kit, and this time they did go out to celebrate, but would wait out the week for Saturday.
In the meantime, next day, they were at work again: Michael was pouring concrete.
He told a few of his friends there—they stopped and shook his hand.
Penelope was at Hyperno, with a belligerent yet beautiful boy.
She read with him at the window.
The metronome went click.
On Saturday, they ate in that fancy place in the Opera House, they stood at the top, on the steps. The great old bridge, it hung there, and the ferries pulled in at the Quay. By midafternoon, when they came back out, a ship had arrived to dock. There were crowds of people on the esplanade, and cameras and smilers in flocks. At the building and glasswork were them—Michael and Penny Dunbar—and at the bottom of the Opera House stairway, five boys had appeared, and stood standing…and soon they came down to meet us.
And we walked back out together—through the crowds and words of people, and a city all swollen with sun.
And death came walking with us.
Of course, Henry had to make an entrance that night of fists and feathers and brothers.
When I think of it now, I see it as the last wave of our collective adolescence. Just like Clay, individually, when he walked out the Bernborough Park tunnel that last time, so it was tonight for this, and Henry, and us. In the next few days, on and off, there’d be a kind of holding-on; a final nod to the last vestiges of youngness and dumbness.
We’d never see it or be it again.
* * *
—
It wasn’t long after. The TV was on.
There’d been much arguing, and Rain Man was replaced by a movie I got from Rory one year for Christmas. Bachelor Party. In Rory’s words, if we had to watch bullshit from the ’80s, it might as well be the good stuff. In Henry’s, it was Tom Hanks in his heyday, before he started getting crap and winning Golden Globes and shit; he’d researched it.
All four of us, we sat there:
I was icing my hands.
Rory and Tommy were laughing.
Hector was sprawled like a steel-striped blanket, purring on Tommy’s lap.
Clay was on the couch, quietly watching; quietly bleeding away.
It was right at Rory’s favorite part—when the ex-boyfriend of the female lead falls naked through the sunroof of a car—when Henry finally arrived.
First there were footsteps.