The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(88)

When she heard the younger students snoring, Zoe closed her eyes to try to sleep. She smelled the stale wool of the blankets, paint and solvent that had become a permanent fixture of the room, and, much to her surprise, the faint hint of something lovely, something floral and fragrant. She looked up and noticed a wreath of violets hanging from the ceiling by a bit of twine.

She sat up, looked around, and found a small stepladder.

“What are you doing?” Theo whispered in the fading light.

She ignored him, positioned the stepladder, climbed up, and untied the wreath, which felt soft and cool in her hands. She held the circle of green and purple to her nose and inhaled the happiness, the hope in that circlet of flowers.

“I guess they didn’t dispose of all the art,” Theo said, rolling over and pulling up his blanket. “What are you going to do with that, wear it to bed?”

She looked at him, then at the door. “I’m going out for a walk.”



* * *



Zoe crept through the shadows, wary that Guto and his lot might have monitors watching them, creeping about, up to no good. But the evening was peaceful, quiet but for a symphony of crickets as she walked back to her favorite glade, which was empty, except for a woman sitting at a picnic table, reading a book by lamplight.

Zoe carried the wreath, her heart speeding up with each step.

Mrs. Bidwell looked up from her book. “My mother used to say that flowers have a language all their own. They’re Victorian symbols that say something about the giver and the receiver.” She smiled. “I see you got my message.”

Zoe sat next to her teacher, waited a moment, then threw her arms around her. She hugged Mrs. Bidwell, who hesitated, then hugged her back.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Zoe said.

Zoe thought about what Mrs. Bidwell’s life at home must be like. How lonely it must be to want to hang out on the school grounds while it was still in the grip of Guto’s cruel social experiment. “What are you reading?”

“It’s a study of Edgar Allan Poe,” Mrs. Bidwell said, closing the book. “About how Poe writes about women who are mentally strong and have moral fibers more powerful than their male counterparts. Like Ligeia, who is fierce, but eventually she dies. It seems that all of Poe’s women are fated to tragic ends. Madeline Usher, Berenice, Annabel Lee. They’re the ideal feminine, and yet they all die in mysterious ways.”

The sun disappeared and Zoe felt a cool breeze. She sat closer. “Maybe they put their fates in the hands of the wrong people?” Zoe spoke, thinking about Mrs. Bidwell’s husband. She watched her nod in agreement. Then Mrs. Bidwell held Zoe’s hand, causing her heart to race. She felt warm and head-spinningly happy. She held on, not wanting to let go as her teacher stood in front of her, taking both of Zoe’s hands, letting an unspoken moment pass like a warm breeze, then she let go and took the wreath from Zoe’s lap.

Mrs. Bidwell smiled as she placed the ring of laurels atop Zoe’s head.

“Be mindful of whose hands you place your fate in, Zou yi,” Mrs. Bidwell said.

“I will, Alyce.” Zoe inhaled the fragrance of the wreath.

“That would make me very happy.” Mrs. Bidwell kissed her fingertips, then touched them to Zoe’s cheek. Her teacher was smiling, but her eyes betrayed a certain sadness. She sighed and climbed atop the picnic table, sitting behind Zoe, one leg on either side. She felt Mrs. Bidwell’s slender fingers running through her long dark hair and leaned back as her teacher moved it aside. Zoe’s arms turned to gooseflesh. She felt the gentle exhalation of breath on the back of her neck. She trembled, heart racing, and closed her eyes in anticipation. Then Zoe realized her teacher was untying the black ribbon from around her neck, freeing her.

“The most important lesson I can teach you,” she spoke softly as she used the strip of fabric to tie Zoe’s hair, “is to never settle for what others want you to be. Find a way to be the person you need to be to truly be happy. Don’t give in to convention. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Marriage to the wrong person is like stepping in quicksand, you lose yourself, bit by bit, slowly suffocating until you disappear completely.”

In that moment, Zoe’s heart didn’t just long for her teacher, it broke for the young woman Mrs. Bidwell must have once wanted to become. The woman named Alyce was stuck in the only life available to her. In that life, Alyce had been replaced with a shadow bearing a man’s last name. Despite all that, Mrs. Bidwell was still the most strident, intelligent, and bravehearted woman Zoe had ever known. A maverick teacher at a maverick school, yet trapped in an unhappy marriage to conformity.

“Why can’t you leave?” Zoe asked as she looked back at her teacher, whose fair skin appeared spectral in the lamplight.

Zoe tried to interpret the wordless reaction of her teacher. A sad smile. A pitying look, but also perhaps a yearning for the innocence of youth.

“You’re so dear,” Mrs. Bidwell said. “Unfortunately, the state can only grant me a divorce if I prove cruelty, or insanity, or adultery. I can’t even prove desertion, since he comes home at least once or twice a year. Who knows where he really is or what he’s up to when he’s so far from home? But as long as he comes back once in a while—like he did this week—I have to play the role of dutiful wife. Even though he always accuses me of being unfaithful. I’m like a toy on a shelf that he rarely plays with or even remembers. Yet if his toy goes missing…” She sighed and looked up at the stars, as though waiting for a wish to come true. “Some prisons have armed guards, bars, and iron gates, and some have a white picket fence and a garden.”