Chapter 27
That Monday Ron sensed a new feeling in his classes; it was the air of expectation. They had not had a holiday since school began and with the brief exception of Halloween, it had all been business and their teachers had driven them to start to create an atmosphere of hard work. No one had driven them harder than Ron, but he was probably the least aware of it. He was having fun. He was learning to teach and it never occurred to him one time that he was assigning pages each and every night and that they were writing on average two essays a week.
He was surprised when Irene Emanuel asked him to stop at her office and to bring his grade book with him. He had tried very hard to be neat with the book, but there had been a large number of transfers. Most of these had happened during the first weeks of class. Irene Emanuel had a keen ear and she had heard the girls talking about how much they loved his class. She had also questioned some of the older girls about what went on in his room.
“He works us like slaves, Sister, but he makes it seem like fun. I wind up doing twice as much work for him as I do for my other teachers, but it’s not because I am afraid of him.”
“Then why, Andrea, do you think it is that you work so hard for him?”
“I don’t want to hurt him, Sister.”
Irene Emanuel looked at her with some sense of surprise. “What do you mean?”
“When some of us didn’t do our homework, he was hurt. We could see it on his face. It depressed him and made him sad. And we want to make him happy, because the class is so much fun when he is happy.”
Irene Emanuel thought that either this man was a genius or the recipient of dumb luck to have stumbled into that situation. She had spent enough time talking with him to be pretty sure that he was no genius.
They sat together in her office and Ron handed her the grade book. She looked at it and hid the shock that she felt at seeing 20 graded entries for each student. She wondered what he was grading them on. She said, “The assignments are numbered, Mr. Tuck, how do you remember what the numbers represent?”
“At the back of the book Sister, there is a list of the assignments for each class with the numbers next to them.”
She scanned the back of the book. She felt her mouth open when she saw how many of the assignments were essays. Ron searched her face while she scanned his book. He looked for some clue that would let him know if she was pleased with his work or if he was about to be fired. He couldn’t take it if they were going to fire him. If he had to leave his students and be a failure to them, everything that he said to them would be lost. They would just be the words of some loser guy who claimed to know what was right but was just full of shit like everyone else.
“Mr. Tuck, I rarely say this, and I cannot actually remember having said it before, but you need to slow down. It’s a long way until June and you do not wish to exhaust yourself and your students before you even get to the winter.”
Ron breathed a sigh of relief. If he knew anything at all about the Catholics in general and these nuns in particular it was that they would never fire him for working too hard.
When he got home from school he changed his clothes quickly and was out the door before the call came from Zoe. She listened to the phone ring in the empty apartment and thought about just surprising him and driving down. After all it was her apartment too, even if she didn’t pay any of the rent. Why did she feel that she always had to call first? But she let the phone ring and ring and then hung up and went into the bathroom so that she could vomit up her lunch before it turned to fat.
Robin looked very tense when she answered the door. Ron could see it immediately. “Is something wrong?”
She shook her head and her eyes got this faraway look in them. Her high cheekbones seemed more hollow than usual and she said the words while she stared at a closed door. “She locked herself in there and she has been drinking all morning. It reminds me of why it is so bad for me around here.”
“It’s because you are living with her,” he said.
“That’s part of it. I thought I would be staying with you and then I wouldn’t have to see any of this.”
Ron felt a freezing wash of guilt pass over him and she saw it too. She knew what it was. He was feeling the need to protect her. She didn’t want him to protect her. She didn’t want anyone to protect her.
They walked to the corner store and bought two containers of coffee and then they sat in his car and drank them. Ron tried to brighten the mood. He grinned his best dimpled grin and said, “Do you remember what our holidays used to be like?”
Robin sipped and smiled, and then she laughed. “They were awful, Ron. Between your father and mother and my father and mother and Rahway, we ate five meals and went home feeling sick and wanting to die.”
Ron said, “And our mothers would time each of our visits to see who we spent more time with.”
“That was your mother,” said Robin. “God, how that woman hates me.” She doesn’t hate you as much as she was frightened by the way that I feel about you. She thought we were going to get married.”
The thought pierced into Robin’s brain instantly. There had been a time when she had thought so too. Before all the pot and before the arguments about how he made his money and before he had forced her to have Hank live with them. She supposed that she could still have him marry her, but then how would she ever see the world? Ron was staying in New Jersey. He was a local guy. He had limited expectations for what he believed was possible. He would tie her up and hold her back and eventually she would wind up knocked up, poor and living with a man who reminded her too much of her father. It was only one small step from that to her becoming her mother and that was not going to be her life! She felt her resolve grow stronger. Ron watched her face harden and wondered what he had done wrong.