Song of Silence. Cynthia Ruchti
her life avoiding those three letters?
The name Charlie used two of them. Not that he could help it.
***
The worst Monday in the history of Mondays. Perhaps in the history of days.
She’d slogged through the weekend, dodging despair, awkward questions, and piles of bitterness like tiptoeing through a heavily used dog park. Avoiding church seemed counterproductive, though tempting. But arriving late and leaving early kept it from turning into a sympathy-fest, a party she couldn’t handle yet. Too soon.
Then dawned the inevitable Monday. Lucy didn’t have to wonder who among her teacher friends had heard the news and who hadn’t. Their eyebrows told the story. Neutral eyebrows? Hadn’t yet heard. Pinched together with a slight head tilt—even without a word spoken—signaled a wave of sympathy that became an undercurrent riptide by midday. Survivor guilt kept some from talking about it. They’d received contracts, not RIF letters. Others expressed their sympathy in rib-dislocating hugs. Like Charlie’s.
If it hadn’t been frowned upon by the administration, she would have stayed in her room to eat lunch. Lucy considered breaking the rule this one time. What was the worst they could do? Fire her? It was the closest she’d come to laughing in days.
But she’d vowed to behave herself to the end. Two more weeks of classes. No vindictive actions. No tantrum-like rebellion. No cement in the toilets or graffiti on the walls. No letters to the op-ed page of the local newspaper. No anti-school-board picketing or bucking-the-establishment T-shirts. No coasting. No phoning it in or phoning in sick.
“Résumé polished and ready to send out?” Ania Brooks slid onto the one blank square foot of Lucy’s desk.
“At my age? Your chances of finding another teaching position are a lot better than mine. Age does make a difference.” Lucy snagged a piece of music too near the clear zone. “And right now, applying to substitute teach feels like the difference between running a karaoke machine and composing a symphony.” The words felt coarse in her mouth. Some of her favorite teacher friends subbed. Bright, skilled educators willing to rewrite their schedules when needed. What was wrong with her?
Ania flipped her thick, loose black braid over her shoulder. “Don’t be so sure. About my flood of opportunities.” The younger woman picked at loose threads of her fashionably tattered jeans.
Wait. Tattered jeans? Not exactly school policy for staff. Lucy retrieved her insulated musical score lunch bag from the bottom drawer of her desk and pointed with it toward the spot where Ania’s bare knee showed through. “Dress code no longer applies to you?” She feigned the voice Principal Rust might use.
“Contract no longer applies to me.” Ania pulled an apple and a bag of microwave popcorn from the deep pockets of her hand knit cotton sweater. Coral. Somehow the faded blue scarf looped around her neck and the fused glass pendant strung on what looked like an athletic shoelace screamed “art teacher” without Ania having to wear a nametag.
“We’re still under contract for two more weeks.”
“A technicality, my rules-bound friend. Merely a technicality.”
The hitch in Ania’s voice belied her mask of courage. She couldn’t be as cavalier on the inside as she appeared on the outside. Not yet thirty, she was sure to find another position, though. Maybe in a larger public school without the budget woes of Willowcrest.
A school without budget woes. And other fairy tales.
The two recently riffed walked the hallway toward the teachers’ lounge as they had many times. Never this speechlessly.
Was it imagination, or did the level of chaos in the halls decrescendo as they passed? Like freeway drivers reducing speed for the quarter mile before and quarter mile after the state patrol car parked in the median, the students quieted a few decibels then resumed their normal ear-splitting volume.
“Hey, Mrs. Tuttle. Sorry to hear about—”
A rib-jab cut the condolences short. “You tosser!” the jabbing student said.
Ania’s look revealed a need for translation.
“A meme of British expressions is circulating on social media again. The students think we don’t know.”
Ania smiled. “Some of us don’t. What’s a ‘tosser’?”
Lucy lowered her voice. “Idiot.”
“Are you going to call the kid on it?”
“And blow our cover? Don’t worry. I gave him my fierce look.”
Ania’s laughter helped cut through three days’ worth of tension. “On you, Lucy, fierce looks an awful lot like ‘Oh, you sweet child.’ ”
“I squinted.” Even Lucy knew that was a lame defense. She squinted? No wonder the school board had no trouble making her a target.
She stopped herself. Paranoia wouldn’t help. They’d dumped both the arts and music programs. Nothing personal, they’d said. Uh huh.
Two steps into the teacher’s lounge and Lucy knew the better choice would have been to sneak her egg salad and grapes in her room. The lounge erupted with anger over the school board’s decision. Lucy wasn’t ready for anger yet. She held tight to despair.
***
Her students watched her more intently than on an ordinary day, far more intently than they would under normal circumstances this close to the end of the school year.
She’d taught them to watch her hands and facial expressions as she directed, to listen for the breaths she took that reminded them when to breathe. She’d taught them to express the emotion of the song, not how they felt about the person with whom they shared a music folder. Under her guidance, they’d learned to focus on what the music asked of them, often a response contrary to their young nature, their personality, their mood, or how much sugar they’d ingested at lunch.
Now they watched, too, for her reactions to a crashing tympani blow to her life’s plans.
Lucy thought she had an easy out for the day. A way to survive without having to engage her overworked brain. Each class could review the video of last week’s concert. Tradition. The students expected it. She, on the other hand, didn’t anticipate the fortitude it would take to sit through that many replays of her final moments in concert.
The nuances she witnessed on the video hit like memories of a too-recently deceased loved one. Would she have felt the same if her choirs and band hadn’t performed as well as they did, if the audio didn’t resonate now as near-perfection with enough sniffles and coughs and squeaks for her to know it was real?
The parallels to life made her jaw hurt.
Everything seemed too tender to touch—a deep, aching life bruise. Memories of the concert high points, career high points, the tears when especially sensitive young people caught a whiff of gossip about the music and art programs, the condolences of other teachers, the pile of unfinished projects on her desk . . .
The music-themed gifts from students—mugs ad infinitum, pens, coasters, pins, note cards. Handwritten thank-you notes tacked to the corkboard, representing a hundred more in file folders.
She mattered here. The music mattered. It changed people. Including her.
If her heart kept beating until the end of the school day, she’d start packing her personal belongings. Taking them home a few at a time would be less painful, wouldn’t it? You can’t rip a bandage off a wound that’s still bleeding.
***
“Are you still here?” Ania’s voice carried too well in the acoustics of the empty, high-ceilinged music room.
Lucy nestled another resource book—Music and the Young Mind—into the nearly full cardboard box on the seat of her office chair. She reached for another from the top shelf. “Just a few more minutes.”