The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(26)

The headmaster raised his arm, pipe in hand. “I, too, would like to see where this train of fascism is going. Though I suspect it is traveling headlong into another locomotive altogether. But we shall see, won’t we?”

Those who voted for an authoritarian regime all kept their hands raised high. Two of the teachers stood and performed the act of counting, but Zoe knew who had won and who had lost. She saw Guto smiling at her, his arm raised high. She remembered his sour breath, his porcine tongue, his grip on the back of her head. She wanted to be enraged, she wanted to stand and accuse him, but instead she chewed her lip, overcome with emotion. She tried to think of other things as she stared back at him so she would not cry. The Pythagorean theorem, hummingbirds, the words of the poet Ezra Pound—“Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative.”

The headmaster stood up and clapped his hands. “Well done. Well done. Those of the majority party—or those newly willing supplicants—you may gather elsewhere to select your own leaders, and your rules by which the rest of us will live for a week.” The class waited as Theo stood and led his followers out of the room.

Zoe looked across the room to Mrs. Bidwell. Her teacher smiled and nodded, her eyes hopeful as though she were silently saying, It’s okay, we’ll get through this.

“Tomorrow at sunrise,” the headmaster said, “we will be living under fascist rule. Let us hope we all earn passing marks.”



* * *



That night, after most everyone had gone to bed, Zoe took a blanket, some stationery, and the book Mrs. Bidwell had given her and went outside into the warm, humid summer evening. She sat in her nightshirt atop an old picnic table in a small glade where there were so many glowworms it was hard to tell where the earth ended and the starry sky began. As the full moon rose above the trees, she opened the book and read, inhaling lines of poetry along with the fragrance of wisteria in full bloom.

Inspired, she licked the tip of her pencil and used the words of the Greek poetess to compose a note to her teacher, whom she struggled to think of as Alyce. However, on paper, Zoe found her courage. Dear Alyce. Zoe’s heart raced as she wrote the name. Again love, the limb-loosener, rattles me, bittersweet, irresistible. She added, If only I could reach you, a sweet apple turning red, high on the tip of the topmost branches, forgotten by pickers. But my tongue is frozen in silence and instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin. Zoe clutched the paper to her chest, her pounding heart. Then she finished with Someone will remember us in the future. But for now, I sleep alone.

Zoe carefully folded the letter, slipped it into an envelope, and sealed it. She looked in the direction of the school and Mrs. Bidwell’s classroom, when she saw a figure walking toward her in the moonlight. She carried a brass lantern with a candle inside. Even in the twilight Zoe recognized the green dress swaying in the breeze.

Zoe froze, not knowing whether to run, hide, or spontaneously combust.

“Fancy finding you out here,” Mrs. Bidwell said. “Everything okay?”

Zoe slipped the letter inside the book, almost dropping it. Then she held the book up and hoped the night was dark enough to conceal how much she was blushing.

“Ah,” Mrs. Bidwell said. “I brought a candle, but you brought the torch. May I join you?” Zoe nodded as her teacher sat down next to her. Zoe offered part of her blanket, which Mrs. Bidwell used to cover her bare legs.

“What are you doing out here?” Zoe asked. “Don’t you live in town?”

Mrs. Bidwell nodded. “This is what happens, Zoe, when you’re an old spinster like me with no one to go home to. You start to collect cats by the dozen, or ghost about, stringing violets at night.” She tied off the open end of a garland and draped the flowers around Zoe’s neck. “There, now you look a proper goddess. You’ll make all the other pagans jealous.”

The flowers were painfully soft. Zoe felt her heart beating amid the chirping chorus of field crickets. “You’re hardly a spinster.”

To Zoe her teacher looked as though she belonged on the campus of the University of Suffolk. She still had the youthful bearing of an undergrad. It pained Zoe to think of Mrs. Bidwell living alone while her husband was off traveling the world.

I wrote you something. Zoe said the words in her mind but couldn’t bring herself to say them out loud.

Her teacher sighed.

To Zoe, Mrs. Bidwell seemed equal parts happy and sad. Victorious and defeated. Brave but frightened. Surrounded by students, but perpetually alone. She turned and for a moment, Zoe thought a dam might burst between them, words pouring forth, creating a whirlpool of sentiment, drowning them both in honest confession.

“How do you like the book?” Mrs. Bidwell asked.

“It’s breathtaking.” Zoe shook her head. “I can’t thank you enough.”

“Seeing you out here, sitting under the stars on a night like this, book in your lap, this is what teachers live for,” Mrs. Bidwell said. “What I live for, anyway.”

Zoe thought about the note she’d written.

“Do you hear that?” Mrs. Bidwell said as she closed her eyes. She turned toward Zoe, eyes still closed, whispering, “That’s a nightingale.”

Zoe leaned in.

She’d kissed many boys. From the chasing, giggling, kiss game she’d played as a little, to the awkward, chapped-lip, teeth-bumping exchanges with boys her own age. But until this moment she’d never understood the fuss and why other girls seemed so preoccupied with the act. Now she understood why Shakespeare wrote so many sonnets. She understood why Mr. Darcy closed his book and watched Elizabeth walk about the room. She understood what crossing the Rubicon really meant, because here she was, close enough to smell perfume, to feel the warmth of quickened breath.