friends—who seemed boring and childish during the first few weeks of Aaron—become exciting again. Parties and gatherings and drinks and selfies posted to Facebook and comments and inside jokes. It’s a sad feeling when an obsession becomes slightly less obsessive. It’s as though she realizes she doesn’t have it in her to die for her own heart.
There is an actual moment when it happens. She has just left his class, where he seemed so into her. His gaze was penetrating and his shirt looked like something from a department store where nobody she knew shopped. The other kids in the class laughed a lot that day and Maggie felt dislodged, lopsided, almost as if she were an exchange student.
She walks outside and stands by the entrance to the high school. Formations of students walk past, laughing, gloriously unencumbered. Maggie feels she might have the most private of everyone’s private life. Maybe there is something incestuous that happens in the home of one of these other girls or boys—an uncle with a rotting back tooth and a wandering palm. Perhaps someone has killed a dog on purpose. But Maggie knows how big her secret is, how much it flies against her Catholicism and the religion of her friends, who would look at her like a broken doll in the trash if they knew. They wouldn’t think it was cool that she and everybody’s favorite teacher were “together,” sexlessly but otherwise wholly. She knows what their faces would look like and what they would say to her. But mostly she knows what they would say behind her back. The way they did after Hawaii.
She stands there and tries to figure out if she really loves him or if her feelings are utterly reactionary—that they exist only because he wants her. It isn’t that she’s angry at him. It’s the opposite. She feels that he cares more than she does, suddenly, and this freaks her out. It makes her feel sad for him and it makes her feel she will suffocate under the pressure to reciprocate; and this feeling of suffocation in turn begins to lessen her liking of him, so the situation becomes cyclical.
What she finally comes up with is that she cannot go back in time. If this were a boy from another school it would be easy to meet him at the bowling alley and say, This is going too fast. We need to slow down. And then wait a few hours to reply to his texts until one day she doesn’t reply at all. But she can’t do this with Aaron. He’s her teacher, and it’s simply too late.
Maggie’s parents met in high school. When her mom, Arlene, was a sophomore she attended a party and saw from across the smoky room a handsome young man with penetrating eyes. He looked right at her. But she was shy and dating a classmate. Mark was one year older, and she felt all of those days younger.
She saw him again at her sister’s wedding in the late summer before her junior year. The wedding reception was held at the Gardner Hotel and Mark came, uninvited, with some buddies. Since he wasn’t a dancer, she knew he’d come for her. He brought her outside by the arm. It was a pleasant September evening and Arlene was wearing a long dress and he kissed her inside a telephone booth. The moment the kiss ended she knew the boy she was dating was nothing, a friend. She knew this is what it was supposed to feel like. Desire. Mark and her boyfriend decided to meet in a nearby park to have it out over Arlene, but Arlene said it was only up to her, whom she would date. And she had made her decision.
Arlene and Mark’s union had lasted forty years. There were a good number of problems, marijuana and alcohol and depression, but in moments when life was good and Mark was at peace he would look at her and listen to her and make her feel she was the best woman in the world. He would say this to her. Lene, you’re the best woman in the world. When Mark’s attention was on you it was the sun. And if things were not going your way, this man gave the most restoring hugs. If Arlene had a bad day at work, Mark would put his hands out and say, Come here. She would melt into them, and hell would fall away.