Hummingbirds Read online

  The bell rings.

  Walter gathers his things and heads for the door. He looks back. “Aren’t you teaching first period?”

  Binhammer is now standing by the window, looking out over the tops of the Central Park trees across the street. “I’m just letting them get settled.”

  As Walter goes out, Lonnie Abramson, another English teacher, comes in looking splendid.

  “Well, well,” she says. “Binhammer. How was your summer?”

  “I just saved somebody’s life.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” She comes over and gives him a kiss on each cheek, putting her hands on his shoulders to lift herself up. “You’ve saved my life lots of times.”

  She throws herself down on the couch dramatically and lets out a sigh.

  “Can you believe the summer’s over already? Can you believe it? I can’t even tell you how unprepared I am to teach this year. It seems like every year I get a little more unraveled. So what did you do over the summer? Anything interesting? Oh—have you seen Pepper? What about Sibyl? They were looking for you this morning.” She lowers her voice and winks. “I think Sibyl wants to tell you about her marriage situation. You didn’t hear it from me, but I think things have taken a turn. If you follow me.”

  “How’s George?” he asks to divert her attention, sitting down next to her on the couch.

  “Oh, George. Well, you know. Husbands.” She rolls her eyes back. Then she catches her breath as if reminded suddenly of something. “Oh, do I have a story to tell you. You should see this character Andie brought home over the summer. I don’t know where she found him. I mean, he’s a cute boy—charming, and bright, I think—but there’s something about him. Something a little off. I want to ask your advice about it when you have time for the whole story.”

  “Sure. Sure. I have a class now, but—”

  “You know how the girls adore you,” she says, leaning forward and putting her hand on his knee. Her breath smells faintly of peppermint. “And I just can’t talk about it with her father. You know George—he can only think in the extremes. Either he wants to cut off their you-know-whats or he wants to make them junior partners in his firm. My husband lives in the 1950s. No subtlety.”

  The hall outside has gone quiet. The clock on the wall reads five minutes after the hour. He points to the clock and stands, and she stands too—stretching her whole body with a feline fluidity, as though she has been lounging for hours.

  “I can’t wait to hear about it,” he says. “Maybe at lunch?”

  “That would be great,” she says, giving him a hug that lingers. “It’s good to see you again. And I’m dying to hear about your summer. I want all the details.”

  “I’ve written them down,” he says, extracting himself from her embrace and crossing the room to the door. “Just for you.”

  She giggles. Then, as he steps into the hall, she calls out, “Oh, Binhammer! Don’t forget the department meeting after school. Mrs. Mayhew will kill you.”

  Down the hall he peeks into his room and sees the girls of his senior class sitting in packs on the tops of their desks, giddily reacquainting themselves.

  They’re fine.

  So he goes around the corner and into the nurse’s office—where she says, “Already? It’s only the first day”—then into the faculty men’s room a few doors down, where he swallows the two aspirin the nurse gave him, scooping a handful of water from the sink into his mouth. From outside in the hall, he hears a girl whistling—or trying to whistle, her breath getting in the way of her tune.

  He leans with his hands on the edges of the sink and looks into the mirror. The face looking back at him is still young and dark, gaunt in a way that would be unsettling if it weren’t for the soft features that give the blurred impression of movement. The eyes contain something: a gaze that weighs a ton and requires a crane to move it from one place to the other, a sackful of crumbled concrete attention that pins you to the ground. Sometimes people ask him what he thinks he’s staring at—who does he think he is? Other times people, frequently women, seem to warm themselves under his gaze, as though the weight of boulders makes them feel safe and assured.

  He looks at himself with lazy interest and thinks, That’s the face that used to get me called a boy by the other teachers, that used to make the girls wonder how someone so young could actually be teaching literature. And what now? All their chirping girlvoices. What do they want from me next? What can they be asking of me now that I will have no strength to refuse them?

  In the classroom the girls are picking at the hems of their skirts, putting their hands in each other’s hair, lifting it into various configurations, saying, “Look, what about this? Here, give me a clip.” When Binhammer finally comes through the door, they drop everything and swarm to him. Almost all of them have been in a class of his before, and now they surround him as though he were a mysterious but favorite relative they haven’t seen in years.

  “Aren’t you glad I’m in your class, Mr. Binhammer?”

  “What did you do over the summer, Mr. Binhammer?”

  “Mr. Binhammer, do you want to see pictures of me in Saint-Tropez? But you can’t look at all of them, because over there you’re not supposed to wear a top on the beach.”

  “How is your wife, Mr. Binhammer?”

  He likes the attention—this flurry of femininity stirred up solely because of his entrance into the room. And the fact that it takes so little to appease them—a simple smile, a raised eyebrow, an obligatory chuckle. He is reminded of hummingbirds, their delicate, overheated bodies fretting in short, angled bursts of movement around a bottle of red sugar water.

  Once they are quiet, their voices running down like little wind-up toys, he passes out to each girl two pages of text—explaining to them that they are the opening passages of two different books. Then he sits at the desk in front of the room and leans back in the chair to watch them read. Miriam likes to pinch her lower lip when she concentrates. She has to reapply her lipstick after every class. Judy twirls a strand of hair between two fingers. Sometimes she draws the strand across her upper lip as though it were a moustache.

  “Here’s what I want you to do,” he says after a few minutes. “I want you to figure out if you can tell which one was written by a woman and which by a man.”

  He wonders if they appreciate the irony of the situation, that the Women in Literature senior seminar is being taught by the only man on the faculty of the English department. In truth, they seem to take it in stride, as though it were perfectly natural—if you want to learn about women, you have to ask a man.

  They have too much faith in men, he thinks. They believe too easily.

  The class is one of six themed English seminars offered to the Carmine-Casey seniors in preparation for their college courses. Each class is taught by a different English teacher and is built around that teacher’s individual interests. When he came on the faculty seven years ago, Binhammer suggested that someone should teach a course on gender theory—deferring, as he imagined was only right, to the other members of the department, who were all both senior and female. But none of them wanted to do it. Pepper was too deeply entrenched in her Other America course, which focused on minority writers, and Sibyl said simply, “I’m tired of women.” So it fell to him.

  “I think this one is the one by the man, Mr. Binhammer,” says one of the girls, holding up a sheet. “I mean, who cares about fishing?”

  He says something to make them laugh. They are a willing audience; they are ready to be amused. They sit and listen to his voice and watch his hand gestures. At one point a girl yawns inadvertently and makes a silent gesture to him that it’s not his fault—she’s just not used to getting up early. They are nice girls.

  Except for Liz Warren. She’s sitting in the back of the room, and about halfway through the class period it becomes apparent that she’s not going to let herself laugh at any of his jokes. Realizing this, Binhammer finds it more and more difficult to distract himself f
rom her sullen, hunched shape. She’s paying attention, there’s no question about that. But she stares at him from under eyelids drooping with apathy.

  She was in his class before, last year, carrying with her the same dour indifference, and he was sure she would never elect to take a class with him again. But now there she sits, like a dead battery. Worse still is that she is a bright girl, one of the true intellects in the school, a fulminating insight stirring behind that severe, immutable expression, and it was with a begrudging antagonism that he had labeled the top of each of her papers with an A.

  He can feel himself getting nervous, jittery. He wonders what it is she wants. Does she want him to get down to business? Does she think he isn’t serious enough? Does she believe her time is being wasted? He can feel her intractable presence pricking behind his eyes like a burr or a stinging bee.

  When the bell rings at the end of class, he watches her gather her things silently and walk to the door, her limbs seeming to resent any superfluous movement.

  “Great class, Mr. Binhammer,” says a voice at his side.

  It’s Dixie Doyle. She’s gotten up from her seat in the front row and is now standing over him, leaning her hip against his desk.

  “Really. It was really interesting.”

  “Thanks, Dixie. It seems like a good group, doesn’t it? With Mary and Judy. And Liz—did you see Liz over the summer?”

  “Liz?” She lowers her voice confidentially. “You think I hang out with Liz?”

  Dixie and Liz despise each other, he knows that. But he also knows that Dixie is a rich soil in which to dowse for information. She rarely suspects her resources are being tapped.

  “I always wondered about that,” he says, leaning in toward her. “How come you and Liz aren’t closer friends?”

  Her face coils up in distaste. “I don’t know,” she says. “She’s just…I don’t know. She just thinks she’s so smart.”

  What she’s thinking about as she says this is that Binhammer’s tie is a little crooked. She feels her hands wanting to reach out and straighten it for him. She would straighten the tie and then smooth her hands down the front of his jacket, as though he were her mannequin husband.

  Then she wonders why he thinks she and Liz should be friends. Does he really think she is the kind of person who would be friends with Liz? She doesn’t like the way he kept glancing at Liz in the back of the room while he was talking to the class. She followed his eyeline and found the girl sitting there like a patch of weeds. This is the girl he thinks she should be having lunch with?

  She used to like to imagine that Binhammer had really figured her out—that he knew her even better than she knew herself. Now she just feels frustrated. As she leaves for her next class, she looks behind her and sees him staring at the back of the room as though Liz Warren were still there.

  What she’ll do, she decides, is stop him in the hall later to say something casual. She’ll say, “Oh, Mr. Binhammer, I wanted to ask you when the first paper is due.” A little thing. She’ll put herself in front of him so he’ll have to look at her. And then he’ll walk away having had two encounters with Dixie Doyle that day, while all the other girls will have only been able to claim him for one.

  Later, during lunch, she finds Andie Abramson sitting at the same picnic table under the sugar maple where the two convened earlier in the morning. After a while they are joined by Caroline Cox and Beth Barber. There are only a few other groups of girls scattered about the yard—which is not a popular place because of the chilly air and because of the dingy squirrels that scurry down from the trees.

  Caroline stuffs a cream cheese and jelly sandwich into her mouth, but the others seem reluctant to eat. Beth climbs on top of the table and lies down.

  Everything seems fanciful.

  Dixie looks straight up in the air and makes herself dizzy looking at the deep blue sky. Then she says, “In September for a while, I will ride a crocodile, down the chicken soupy Nile.”

  “What’s that from?” Caroline says. But nobody answers her. Caroline is the kind of girl who does not always require a response.

  “Oh god,” Beth moans. “Don’t remind me it’s September. I can’t think about September. I almost didn’t wake up this morning at all.”

  “Wait, what’s that from?” Caroline says again. “That crocodile line?”

  “It feels like I’ve been here my whole life,” says Beth, who now lies flat out on the tabletop with her hands folded on her stomach as though entombed in a sarcophagus. Then she puts her palms together over her chest and closes her eyes in imitation of prayer. “And it’s only the first day.”

  Dixie, in her pigtails, unwraps her second lollipop of the day and begins to suck on it. The crocodile rhyme seems to be her only contribution for the time being.

  Andie sits hunched over the table with her shoulders pulled in toward each other, drawing intricate filigrees in ballpoint pen in one corner of her notebook. Without looking up, she says, “Who do you have for biology?”

  “I mean it,” Caroline goes on, “I’ve heard that crocodile thing before. But I can’t remember from where.”

  “Meyers,” says the praying Beth. “I’ve got Meyers again. She hates me so much she wanted me two years in a row. She loves to hate people. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo—”

  “Stop it, Beth,” says Andie. “That’s creepy.”

  “I have Ms. Doone.” Caroline has given up on discovering the source of the crocodile poem. She cannot sit still and instead walks in circles around the table, sometimes pretending she’s balancing on a beam. She is not as pretty as the other three girls, but she does not seem to know it—which gives her a fumblingly seductive quality. “Was the summer shorter this year?” she asks.

  “Oh god, I feel like I was just here.” Beth twists her hands out of the palm-together position and does a little trick with her fingers. Then she puts her hands over her face and sighs. “Doesn’t it feel like we were just here?”

  Behind them, a door opens and from inside the school comes the itinerant bustle and chirping of students on their way to and from the cafeteria. Beth raises her head and sees a miniature-looking girl—obviously a freshman—come out into the yard toward them. When the door closes behind her, the relative quiet of the yard reasserts itself.

  “Hi,” says the freshman cheerily. “Do you know where the cafeteria is? Someone told me I could get to it this way.”

  The four girls look at each other, trying silently to decide who should be obliged to answer. Finally dark-haired and silly Caroline, still pretending she is balancing on a beam, speaks. “Only if you’re coming from that side of the building,” she says, pointing. “You have to go back in and down the hall all the way to your right.”

  “Oh, okay,” the girl says, not yet moving. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m new here. My name is Sally.”

  Caroline nods and smiles faintly.

  “Introduce yourself, Caroline,” Beth scolds from the table and lays her head back down.

  “Oh…sure. I’m Caroline. Nice to meet you. That’s Beth. And this is Andie,” she says, putting her hand on top of the head of Andie, who is still drawing elaborate curlicues. “And over there is Dixie.”

  “Ugh,” Beth says, after the freshman girl has gone back inside. “Was she a cartoon character? Sally.”

  “Sally,” Andie says.

  “Sally,” Beth says again.

  “I don’t know.” Caroline reconsiders. “I guess she seemed like a nice girl. Maybe we should make friends with her.”

  Andie looks up from her notebook. “She was kind of pretty. You can tell she’s going to be pretty. Can’t you?”

  “Ugh,” Beth says again, sitting up sleepily. “It’s too early in the year even to think. I’m not ready to go back yet. What about you, Dix?”

  “I don’t know,” pigtailed Dixie Doyle says, taking the lollipop out of her mouth with an audible slurp. It is the first she’s spoken in a while. “I’m
actually kind of glad the summer’s over. I was getting tired of doing things.”

  The other girls stop to think about this. The leaves of the sugar maple rustle thoughtfully.

  “Everywhere you go there’s someone calling you wanting to do something. Let’s do something tonight. Why don’t we do something tomorrow. How come we always have to be doing something?”

  Caroline looks concerned. “But not me, right, Dix? I mean, you never thought that when I called, right?”

  “No, of course not, sweetie. Not you. Everyone else.”

  “You’re not kidding, Dix,” Beth says. “Every day it was something else. Now that you mention it, I’m glad it’s over.”

  “And my summer clothes,” Dixie says. “I can’t tell you how tired of them I am. We should just make a big bonfire of our summer clothes.”

  “And then start fresh next year,” Andie says.

  “I am so tired of my summer clothes,” Caroline adds, belatedly.

  Beth looks back toward the school, which seems to swell with a frenzy of girls. “Yeah, I guess it’s okay to be back. I mean, I guess it’s all right.”

  “Sure,” Dixie says. “Look at it this way. If Carmine-Casey was a boat, like the Jolly Roger or something, then we’d all be pirates. You can’t deny it.”

  And they can’t.

  chapter 3

  Lonnie Abramson is the first person at the English department meeting other than the chair, Mrs. Mayhew, who already has her plan books spread out on the conference table before her and is sitting, immobile, with her hands folded in her lap. For a few minutes the two women just sit on opposite sides of the table—the older gazing down at her plan books without moving her head, and the younger delivering sighs and clucks and chuckles that seem to indicate she has a story to tell if anyone is interested in asking.

  “I reminded Binhammer about the meeting,” she says finally, as though everyone were his communal mother, sharing the responsibility of keeping him accountable. “So he should be here.”