Page 2 of The Things We Never Say

He walked over to the window and saw again the soccer field and the trees behind it, the top of that one tree turning red. Something moved deep inside him, a memory perhaps of his childhood in Revere, where his father had been the super of the three-story wooden apartment building they lived in as well as the two similar buildings right next to it. Artie and his sister and their parents had lived in the basement apartment; today it would be called the garden apartment, but back then it looked like, and pretty much was, a basement apartment. Where was this memory of a red-topped tree coming from? Artie turned back to the class as a memory clicked into place: the state hospital his mother had been sent to two times in his youth, going there with his father and his sister on a weekend to visit her, seeing her slumped on a thin mattress on a metal bed. There might have been such a tree outside her window.

He went and sat down at his desk.

Every year Artie received a few notes—in the far past they had been handwritten—from students saying that he had changed their lives, he was their favorite teacher ever, this sort of thing. In recent years, the notes were more apt to be emailed to him, and Artie would print them out and put them with all the other notes in his mother’s big jewelry box in the attic. He never understood why the box was so big; his mother had had almost no jewelry, and the few pieces she had were not remotely expensive.

Except for his wife, Evie, Artie told no one about the notes.

—

“Mr. Dam?”

He stood and bowed toward Rhonda Lazarre, who had raised her hand. “Yes?”

“Uhm, could I go to the bathroom?”

“You may indeed.” He nodded at her gently. The poor girl was unfortunate-looking. Artie had had her in a study hall last year, and he had a special place in his heart for her. She was short, her neck was short, her glasses were always skewed; it’s just who she was. Her mouth was often open, and she walked with her arms out. (“I don’t understand much,” she had written in her first-day essay, “and sometimes I get mad at God.”)

Rhonda smiled shyly, looking down, covering her mouth with her hand. “Thank you,” she said, and she left the room.

—

When she returned a few minutes later, Artie saw Danny Marino rise up halfway in his chair and do an imitation of the way Rhonda walked, swinging his arms out, his mouth open, and Artie knew, as the students who saw this knew, that he was making fun of Rhonda.

An unexpected fury rose within Artie, and he stood up from his desk and said, “I just now saw that one of you thought you were better than someone else in this class.” He did not look at Danny Marino or at Rhonda Lazarre. Artie could feel his face getting red, his face was hot—hot!—and he said, “Do not ever feel that you are superior to someone else. Because you are not.” He sat down. He held out his finger to the whole class and shook it. “No one is superior to anyone else in this world.”

He glanced fleetingly at Danny Marino and saw that Danny—and the fellow next to him—understood that he was the one being spoken about; Danny looked down at the floor. But as Artie finished with a final admonition—“Don’t you ever think you are better than anyone else here on God’s Earth!”—he allowed himself a quick look at Rhonda and saw that she had no idea that she was the one who had provoked this reaction in him. And so that was good; she did not know that she had been made fun of.

A few minutes later the bell rang, and Danny Marino left the room right away, but the rest of the students walked out quietly, almost sheepishly. Lockers in the hallway could be heard slamming shut, and then it was silent. For many moments Artie remained sitting at his desk, staring out the window. Finally, he roused himself and went down the hall to the teachers room, where Carl LeBlanc said to him, “You going to take a sail this weekend?” And Artie said, “You bet, the weather’s supposed to hold.” People understood that Artie loved sailing; his modest sailboat sat in the center of the small harbor, and he was often seen getting out of his dinghy and into the sailboat, and then off he would go. Evie did not like boats, she never had. But that was all right, he still went out when the wind was right.

As many people do, Artie and Evie had suffered a tragedy. Ten years earlier, when their only son was seventeen years old, he had been driving at night with his girlfriend and the car crashed and his girlfriend had been killed. Her name was Heather Morrison, and her family had—naturally enough—gone crazy with grief, and they tried for more than a year to sue Rob Dam, meaning his parents. The case was eventually settled; the Morrisons moved out of town. But Rob had never been the same.

Artie had sat at the conference room table in the law office with his son during depositions, and this is what he remembered: Rob sitting, pale, while he was questioned by lawyers. A woman lawyer had said, “Was there any sexual activity that preceded this crash?” Rob hesitated, his lips were without color, and he said, “No.” And then he glanced at his father. And it was that glance that made Artie understand.

When the police had arrived at the crash scene, Rob had been found with the belt buckle of his jeans open. Heather had not been wearing a seatbelt and she had been crushed beneath the steering wheel. Rob had been saved by the airbags.

The accident, of course, had changed not just Rob but the family. It was as though the three of them had been walking on their lawn down by the water, peacefully, unknowingly, happily, and then the ocean itself had suddenly risen up, the whole world became an ocean overwhelming them with huge waves that swept over them and pulled them under, and they were all gasping and choking in the water. Within a year Evie started classes to become a family therapist—“I have to do something!”—and to Artie his wife became far more officious than she had been before the accident occurred; in his mind she had been a warmer person preceding this terrible event. It took years for them to reconfigure themselves, and they had.

But as these years went by, Rob—who had graduated from high school one month before the accident occurred—became a different person. Once a happy child filled with energy (he had often gone out on the sailboat with Artie), he had turned quiet, and at college in Cambridge—he had gone to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—he had not made many friends. He lived now in Somerville, about an hour away from his parents, working as a software engineer for a company that had contracts with the Department of Defense, and he made more than twice as much money as Artie made. Two years ago, he had married a woman named Francesca, a concert pianist who played throughout Europe; she was nine years his senior. While Evie loved their daughter-in-law, Artie found her to be a slightly odd woman, somehow unknowable, and his son, he thought, had become a person who remained deeply inside himself. But for Artie the worst thing of all had happened and it was this: Rob had distanced himself increasingly from his father. Artie kept trying to think when this had happened, and he felt that it was far more acute this past year. And all Artie could think of was the funny, happy child Rob had been.

Not a day went by that Artie did not think about this situation with his son. Was this an ongoing aftermath of the accident? Was it Rob’s marriage? What had caused this distance to increase? Artie was thinking about this now as he drove home from school. The streets had odd angles and there were many streetlights as he passed by large old wooden houses painted deep blue or maroon or off-white; these houses sat very close to the old sidewalks. He stopped at a stop sign in a neighborhood lined with smaller wooden houses, and then he carefully pulled out. He had a real fear of hitting a child coming home from school.

—

“Yelled at the class today,” he told his wife when she got home from work; she was a full-time family therapist these days. She took her coat off and looked at him with surprise. “You did?”

Evie had a beautiful head of white hair—it had turned white early because she had been a redhead, and it fell to the top of her shoulders, dipping down now slightly in the back as she reached into the closet for a hanger.

He told her about Danny Marino making fun of Rhonda Lazarre. Evie didn’t say anything at first, but then she smoothed down her pale green sweater and said, “Well, that’s good, Artie. I hope this Danny Marino fellow remembers it for the rest of his life.”

Artie sighed as he sat down in the living room. “I don’t know,” he said.

“What don’t you know?” Evie had followed him and sat now across from him in an old dark brown velvet chair.

“I never yell at the class. But it seemed—I don’t know—like I should. I couldn’t help it. That poor Rhonda.”

“Well, I support you.” Evie gave a nod and then told him about her last client, how the mother was impossible with her adolescent child. Artie nodded just slightly as he listened. Evie took her work very seriously, and he admired her for that. The tales of woe she often brought home seemed to him to require a distance that apparently came naturally to Evie. She was a professional, after all.

—