At 2:46 p.m., Eleanor Lipkowitz, a math teacher who did not want to be a math teacher, farted silently and decided to blame it on a student. Eddie Vicenti sat in the second-to-back row and had crystal grey eyes and a mouth that hung slightly open all the time; he was the kind of kid who people described as a burnout even though he had perfectly acceptable grades. He was a good person to take the blame because he was popular enough that he wouldn’t get made fun of it for too long but not so popular that someone would come to his defense.
When the fart happened Eleanor had been drawing an isosceles triangle on the board, her back to the class. The lines of the triangle were haphazard to the point where the figure vaguely resembled the state of Idaho—she had terrible motor skills and in fact used a compter program for all the shapes on her worksheets and tests. Eleanor had known, the minute she’d realized what had happened, that she had to find a way to prevent herself from being identified as the source of the expulsion; she knew that she was not a well-respected teacher and that such an embarrassing, public gaffe might finally push her into the realm of complete laughability. She’d already delivered a serious blow to her reputation a few days earlier, when, distracted by a particularly attractive student in the front row, she’d put the wrong variable in the quadratic equation and had been corrected by Leonard Fishberger in front of the entire class.
“Edward,” she’d said. “If you have to pass gas, please leave the room.” It was a cruel thing to say, even if Eddie had been the one responsible for the fart, and the rest of the class emitted a flurry of snickers. One of them even smiled at Eleanor and raised his eyebrows as if she had done something especially cool.
Eddie didn’t even attempt to defend himself. He just glanced up, briefly, and then turned his head down to face the desk, to face the floor, to face deep into the molten core of the Earth.
So that should’ve been that, but she found herself besieged by guilt over the incident. Later that afternoon, clipping her toenails in the bath, she’d thought of Eddie, imagined him in a sticky seat at the back of the bus—she had no idea if he took the bus, actually, for all she knew he lived close enough to walk, or even had a car, but he seemed like the kind of kid who took the bus—headphones on, embarrassment filling his cheeks. As she lay in bed that night, trying not to spill orange juice on her homemade quilt, she imagined him reconstructing the afternoon over and over in his mind, trying to figure out exactly what had happened. It was a terrible thing, to be caught in a fart. She’d farted on a date once, a second date, and even though the man had pretended to laugh it off he’d suddenly changed his mind about wanting desert and then he’d driven away in his yellow Hyundai and never called her again.
She was surprised at this, this feeling of guilt, because she wasn’t the kind of teacher who normally felt any sense of duty or responsibility towards her students. She had not gone into teaching because of any lofty ideals or dreams of making the world a better place. When students came to her for help after school her most prominent thought was usually something about their zits, or whether she’d remembered to set the DVR to record In the Kitchen with Orley Watercrest.
Whenever she took a break in the second floor teachers’ lounge—and she didn’t do it often; she always felt out of place there even though it had been designed specifically for her and the nine or ten other teachers whose cubicles were on the second floor—she became instantly aware that the other teachers were different from her, that they possessed some ineffable quality which she did not. She’d watch Ellerby Fletcher grade tests while eating his balogna sandwich, being so careful not to get even a smidge of mayonnaise on each one even though he must have know, must have, that everyone was just going to dump them in the recycling bin (or the trash; probably the trash, actually, now that she thought about it). Or she’d be sitting next to Cheryl Trenchant—god, Cheryl Trenchant, with her bad dye job and eight packets of non-dairy creamer—watching her scrawl detailed comments on every last paper as if the kids were going to look at anything but the circled grade at the top of the page, and she’d start to laugh to herself, she’d start to mock Cheryl and Ellerby and all the rest of them in her head, but then she’d see their wide eyes and their bent smiles and she’d be forced to realize that maybe they were happy, living in their own single-member school districts where they were Making A Difference, where they were Educating the Leaders of Tomorrow, where they were Doing Something With Their Lives.
The next day she made decaf by mistake and a CD she didn’t like had gotten stuck in her car player and then Eddie didn’t show up for her class. She didn’t so much teach the students that day as spit facts at them while staring at Eddie’s empty seat, in the dazed way where the images from her left and right eye stopped overlapping accurately.
Where was he? He was almost never absent and when he was it was always on Tuesdays, when the school’s variable-rotation class schedule put his section of math first thing in the morning. Sure, he could be sick, but if he’d gotten sick in the traditional way there would’ve been a phone call to the school and a note sent to her through the official channels. Here, now, there was nothing.
As the students cheated off each other on a ten-minute in-class exercise, she began to think that maybe she had hurt Eddie, that maybe his embarrassment had lasted for more than an hour or two. Was it possible that he had been too ashamed to face the class? After all, she herself had considered skipping class after the Leonard Fishberger incident and that was far less embarrassing; it was just a math mistake, and everyone in the class thought that math was stupid anyways.
Eddie hadn’t done anything to deserve this. Eddie was an okay kid, a straight-B student. Eddie sometimes told her to have a nice weekend when he filed out of class on Fridays, something that none of the other students did. Most of the time Cheryl Trenchant didn’t even do that.
Eddie wasn’t in class the next day, or the day after that, and that weekened Eleanor was pumping out grades in the wicker chair in her living room when she realized all at once: he knew it was her. She tried to tell herself that she was just being paranoid—she thought back to the one time she had ever smoked marijuana, at a party full of people who all wore the kinds of clothes skinny people wear even though they, the people at the party, were not skinny; she’d accepted a marijuana cigarette without realizing what it was and had developed an overwhelming fear about something involving Ronald Reagan—but no. She was not being paranoid, not about this. Eddie knew. It all made sense now; that was why he hadn’t been coming to class. How could you come to class when your teacher had betrayed you?
She decided then—and it was the kind of decision that comes into existence in the space between moments, the kind of decision that you don’t consciously make, the kind that you simply realize you’ve already made—that she would go to his house. She would go to his house, and she would knock on the door, and she would apologize.
His address was listed in the student directory; it turned out to be a good twenty minutes away. Like many of the other teachers Eleanor did not actually live in the town in which the school she taught at was located, since the houses in that town were all unaffordable on a teacher’s salary. She got in the car—that damn CD was still in there—and she turned the key with force, and she drove.
She knew exactly how it was going to happen. She would knock even if there was a doorbell. He would answer in boxers and a t-shirt, or just in boxers, or in a towel, hair still wet from the shower. He would be surprised to see her, but not that surprised. “Ms. Lipkowitz,” he’d say, eyes blank. “Come in.”
She drove past trees that looked like pictures of trees and stores that looked like advertisements for stores. She hadn’t been to this area many times before but Eddie’s house was easy to find. It looked similar to the houses next to it but not exactly the same; a fraternal twin. She knocked on the door, then rang the bell. There was no answer. She paced back and forth on the front steps. She rang the bell again. Finally the door opened and there he was, wearing what he always wore, looking the way he always did.
“Eddie,” she said. “Hello. I—
Picture Eleanor, eighteen, a college freshman—she’s Ellie, now—hips bucking on top of Dr. Edwin Anders, professor, architect, man with fading har. Ellie thinks of him as very old, although years from now she will look back and realize that she has reached his age and she won’t think of herself as old then. Ellie has never slept with anyone before Dr. Anders and after him she will not sleep with anyone else for a long time.
Ellie is the kind of girl who came to college with her courses for all four years already planned out, the kind whose answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” has not changed since she was in Kindergarten. She stepped onto campus just a few days ago, planning to be an architecture major and then an architect, and so she’d tracked down the department head’s office and knocked on the door several times, fresh-faced and sweaty, and had started saying, “Hello Dr. Anders, my name is...” before he’d even opened the door. Later he will tell her that she is the first student he’s had sex with in years and she will take it as a compliment.
She prides herself on being an intellectual and she understands that their relationship is not destined to last; she doesn’t even call it a relationship. She reminds herself over and over not to develop feelings for him and she will be more successful at this than she anticipates. In fact she will be amazed that it is he who lets his feelings get out of control, he who, several weeks from now, will confess an attraction that is increasingly emotional. She will be appalled when he estimates with a numerical percentage the degree to which his feelings of affection for her have increased.
She will tell him that she thinks they need to stop seeing each other and then she will never speak to him again, but a little over a year later she will recieve a handwritten note from him. It will be attached to her application into the architecture major. We are sorry to inform you, the application will say, that we cannot accept you into the architecture program at this time. And he, Dr. Edwin Anders, soon-to-be-retired professor, former architect, man with exponentially increasing baldness, he will write below the typewritten notice, in his pitch-perfect script, Hope you are—.
The last word will be smudged to the point of illegibility but she will assume, have to assume, that it is well.
