The office was a high-ceilinged room on the first floor of the Ridenour Library, the one building on campus that looked like it belonged on a campus. The lights above her head hung down on long, dark poles and ended in wide globes that gave out too much light. She could see her reflection in the leaded-glass windows in front of her desk, and her head looked as if it were encased in a helmet of light. I should dye it a different color one of these days, she thought absently. Then she tapped the stack of papers in front of her, the ungraded ones, ten to twelve pages each, researched and footnoted. It was impossible to explain to anybody who hadn’t had to put up with it just how bone-numbingly boring it all really was, day after day with these kids whose lives had been so perfect they might as well have been produced by Disney. She’d heard all the stories about alcoholic mothers and absent fathers, but she didn’t believe any of it. It was the kind of thing rich people liked to say about themselves in order to appear to be Suffering, and therefore all that much more Virtuous. She knew something about alcoholism and absence. Alcoholism was her father getting fired from his fourth job in two years. Absence was the ritual placement in foster care, three months here, five months there, over and over again—never the same family; never the same school bus; but always the same school—so that everybody knew, all the other students, all the teachers, and she would walk the halls very careful never to let her body touch another person or another thing. If she hadn’t been a truly extraordinary person—far and away better than those boarding school girls she’d met when she first went to Wellesley—if she hadn’t been unlike everybody and everything around her, she would never have ended up where she had. She’d have been waiting tables back in Providence the way her sister still did. Marta couldn’t remember how long she had gone on thinking of herself as a truly extraordinary person. She did remember when she had stopped. It was on that day she had walked down Chapel Street to mail the letter telling Windsor Academy that she would be happy to teach American History and serve as a dorm parent in Barrett House for the next full school year.
She swiveled her chair around so that she could look through the open door onto the hallway. She always kept the door of her office open. When she closed it, she felt as if she were suffocating. She heard the sound of heavy footsteps in the hall and then saw, suddenly, the hulking figure of one of the students she liked least and respected not at all—Mark DeAvecca, looking as usual as if he had fallen off a garbage truck and was still wearing the odd banana skin. He said, “Hi,” without looking at her. He was staring at the floor, something else that was usual. He either stared at the floor or over your left shoulder. He never looked directly at you, and his body was never completely still. She mumbled something in reply that could have been anything except encouragement. He kept moving until he was out of sight. There he was, that bright, eager prep school student she had heard all about, a monumental mess who never did the reading, never handed his homework in on time, and never studied for tests. He might as well have been playing football at some farm belt regional high school where all the kids wanted was to take over the family farm, except that he was no good at sports either. He just had a famous mother and a rich father, and that was all he needed to get into a school that was supposed to be more selective than most American colleges. Marta knew, too well, what “selectivity” meant when it came to schools. It meant that they were places that were very careful about who they let in of those people who could not be said to already belong.
For a second she felt energy surge through her as if somebody had turned on her switch. She was suddenly purposeful and angry. She bolted out of her chair and across the office to the door. She stepped into the hall and looked both ways for Mark. She had no idea what she intended to say to him or why she wanted to say anything. She only knew that she wanted to grab hold of him and do something. When she saw that the hallway was already empty, she felt angrier still—and then the door at the other end opened, and Alice Makepeace came in from outside, wearing that black, hooded cape that fell to the floor and always reminded Marta of The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
“Marta?” Alice said.
Marta did her best not to cringe. Alice was the headmaster’s wife, and no matter how progressive and egalitarian Windsor Academy was supposed to be, junior faculty did not piss off the headmaster’s wife without expecting some repercussions from it. Marta bit her lip and looked in the other direction, the direction she had seen Mark go. Alice was … one of those people. She had an accent like William F. Buckley’s. She was too tall, and she actually looked good in leather jeans.