(LB2) Shakespeare's Landlord (8 page)

For maybe a quarter of an hour, I straightened the kitchen. It was a good advertisement to do a little extra work and it kept me from being bored. Then I went out into the fellowship hall. The fellowship hall is about forty by twenty, and has tables set up all the way around the sides, with folding chairs pushed under them. The preschool uses the tables all week, and they get dirty, the chairs not evenly aligned, though the teachers carefully train the children to pick up after themselves. I neatened things to my satisfaction, and if I ended up close to the door where the meeting was taking place, well, I was bored. I told myself that like the things I happen to see in people’s homes when I clean, the things I might happen to hear would never be told to another person.

The door to the meeting room had been left ajar to help the air circulation. This time of year, in a windowless room, the air tends to be close. Since I hadn’t brought a book, this would help to amuse me till it was time to clean up.

One of the preschool teachers had mentioned evolution in her class during the course of Dinosaur Week, I gathered after a moment. I tried hard to imagine that as being important, but I just couldn’t. However, the members of the board certainly thought it was just dreadful. I began wondering what enterprising child had turned in the teacher, what message it would send that child if the adult was fired. Brother McCorkindale, as they all addressed him, was for having the teacher in for a dialogue (his term) and proceeding from there; he felt strongly that the woman, whom he described as “God-fearing and dedicated to the children,” should be given a chance to explain and repent.

Board member Lacey Dean Knopp, Deedra Dean’s widowed and remarried mother, felt likewise, though she said sadly that just mentioning evolution had been a bad mistake on the teacher’s part. The six other board members present were all for firing the woman summarily.

“If this is typical of the people we’re hiring, we need to screen our employees more carefully,” said a nasal female voice.

I recognized that voice: It belonged to Jenny O’Hagen, half of a husband-and-wife Yuppie team who managed the local outlet of a nationally franchised restaurant called Bippy’s. Jenny and Tom O’Hagen manage to pack their lives so full of work, appointments, church functions, and phone calling connected to the various civic organizations they join (and they join any that will have them) that they’ve found a perfect way to avoid free time and conversation with each other.

Jenny and Tom live in the ground-floor front apartment at the Shakespeare Garden Apartments, the one right by Pardon Albee’s. Naturally, they don’t have a minute to clean their own apartment, so they are clients of mine. I’m always glad when neither one is home when I’m working. But most often, whichever one has been on the night shift is just getting up when I arrive.

I hadn’t known the O’Hagens belonged to SCC, much less held a position on the board, but I might have figured. It was typical of the O’Hagen philosophy that childless Jenny had managed to finagle her way onto the preschool board, since the preschool is the most important one in Shakespeare and the waiting list for it is long. Jenny had probably made an appointment with Tom to conceive a child on October fifteenth, and was putting in her time on the board to ensure that infant a place in the preschool.

Since my clients were involved, I began listening with heightened attention to the heated words flying around the boardroom. Everyone got so excited, I wondered if I should have made decaf instead of regular coffee.

Finally, the board agreed to censure, not fire, the hapless young woman. I lost interest as the agenda moved to more mundane things like the church school’s budget, the medical forms the children had to fill out…yawn. But then I was glad I hadn’t drifted away to clean some more, because another name came up that I knew.

“Now I have to bring up an equally serious matter. And I want to preface it by asking you tonight, in your prayers, to remember our sister Thea Sedaka, who’s under a lot of strain at home right now.”

There was dead silence in the boardroom as the members (and I) waited in breathless anticipation to find out what was happening in the Sedaka household. I felt a curious pang that something important had happened to Marshall and I was having to find out this way.

Brother McCorkindale certainly knew how to use his pauses to good effect. “Thea’s husband is no longer—they have separated. Now, I’m telling you this very personal thing because I want you to take it into account when I tell you that Thea was accused by one of the mothers of one of the little girls in the preschool of slapping that child.”

I sorted through the sentence to arrive at its gist. My eyebrows arched. Slapping children was a great taboo at this preschool—at any preschool, I hoped.

There was a communal gasp of dismay that I could hear clearly.

“That’s much, much worse than mentioning evolution,” Lacey Dean Knopp said sadly. “We just can’t let that go, Joel.”

“Of course not. The welfare of the children in our care has to be our prime concern,” the Reverend McCorkindale said. Though he spoke as though he’d memorized a passage from the school manual, I thought he meant it. “But I have to tell you, fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, that Thea is deeply repentent of having even given the child cause to think she was slapping her.”

“She denies it?” Jenny O’Hagen had thought that through before anyone else.

“What Thea says is that the child spoke back to her, not for the first time, but for the seventh or eighth time in one morning. Now, Thea knows part of her job is to endure and correct behavior like that, but since she is under such a particular strain, she lost some of her self-control and tapped the child on the cheek to get her to pay attention. Like this, is how she showed me.”

Of course, I couldn’t see or hear the Reverend McCorkindale’s demonstration.

“Were there any witnesses?” Jenny asked.

I decided Jenny had potential as an interrogator.

“No, unfortunately, Jenny. Thea and the child were alone in the room at the time. Thea had kept the child in from recess to discuss improving her behavior.”

There was a silence while presumably the board members mulled this over.

“I think we have to call her on the carpet, Joel,” rumbled the voice of one of the older men on the board. “Corporal punishment is a choice for the parents, not for the teachers at this school.”

I nodded.

“So you want her to keep her job?” Joel McCorkindale inquired pointedly. “We have to reach a decision; she’s waiting to hear. I must remind you that Thea is a steady churchgoer and she is in a very stressful situation. The parents of the little girl have said they would abide by our decision.”

They practically begged McCorkindale to drive directly over to Thea’s house and tell her all was forgiven—provided she didn’t repeat the offense.

The minister didn’t have any more bombshells to drop, and the meeting was clearly winding down. I took care to be out of sight in the kitchen when the board members emerged. It crossed my mind that Joel McCorkindale would come in the kitchen to ask more about my confrontation with Norvel, but after the board members had gone, I heard his steps ascend to his office on the second floor.

As I washed the dishes and sealed the plastic bags containing the leftover cookies, I found myself wishing that I’d stayed in the kitchen during the whole meeting. I would see Marshall Sedaka in minutes, and knowing something about his private life that he himself had not chosen to tell me made me uncomfortable. I glanced down at my big waterproof watch, then hurriedly wrung out the washcloth and folded it neatly over the sink divider. It was already 6:40.

Since I had only minutes to change into my gi, I was less than pleased to see Claude Friedrich leaning against his official car, apparently waiting for me. He’d pulled the car right up to the curb in front of my house. Was that supposed to fluster me?

“Hello, Miss Bard,” he rumbled. His arms were crossed over his chest in a relaxed way. He was out of uniform, dressed casually in a green-and-brown-striped shirt and khakis.

“I’m in a real hurry now,” I said, trying not to sound snappy, since that would imply he had succeeded in upsetting me.

“Isn’t one of the advantages of a small town supposed to be the slower pace?” he asked lazily.

I stopped in my tracks. Something bad was coming.

“Shakespeare is quieter than, say, Memphis,” he said.

I felt a sharp pain in my head. Though I knew it was emotional, it hurt as much as a migraine. Then I felt a wave of rage so strong that it kept me up straight.

“Don’t you talk about that,” I said, meaning it so much, my voice sounded strange.
“Don’t bring it up.”

I went into my house without looking at him again, and I thought if he knocked on the door, he would have to arrest me, since I would do my best to hurt him badly. I leaned against the door, my heart pounding in my chest. I heard his car pull away. My hands were sweating. I had to wash them over and over before I pulled off my cleaning clothes and put on my spotless white gi pants. The top and belt were already rolled up in a little bag; I would just wear a white sleeveless T-shirt to Body Time and then put on the rest of my gi. I put my hand in the bag and touched the belt, the green belt that meant more to me than anything. Then I looked at the clock and went out the kitchen door to the carport.

I pulled into the Body Time parking lot just at seven-thirty, the latest I’d ever been. I pushed through the glass doors and hurried through the main room, the weights room. At this hour of the evening, only a few diehards were still working with the free weights or machines. I knew them enough to nod to.

I went quickly through the door at the back of the weights room, passing through a corridor along which doors lead to the office, the bathrooms, the massage room, the tanning-bed room, and a storage closet. At the end of the corridor are closed double doors, and I felt a pang of dismay. If the doors were closed, class had begun.

I turned the knob carefully, trying to be quiet. On the threshold, I bowed, my bag tucked under my arm. When I straightened, I saw the class was already in shiko dachi—legs spraddled, faces calm, arms crossed over their chests. A few eyes rolled in my direction. I went to one of the chairs by the wall, pulled off my shoes and socks, and faced the wall to finish putting on my gi, as was proper. I wound the obi around my waist and managed the knot in record time, then ran silently to my place in line, second. Raphael Roundtree and Janet Shook had unobtrusively shifted sideways to make room when they saw me enter, and I was grateful.

I bowed briefly to Marshall without meeting his eyes, then sank into position. After a few seconds of regulating my breathing, I peeked up at Marshall. He raised his dark eyebrows slightly. Marshall always makes the most of his quarter-Oriental heritage by working hard on inscrutability; his triangular face, its complexion somewhere between the pink of Caucasian and the ivory of Asian, remained calm. But the bird-wing eyebrows said volumes—surprise, disappointment, disapproval.

Shiko dachi is a position very like sitting on air, and it is painful and demanding even after long practice. The best way to get through it is to concentrate on something else, at least for me. But I was too upset to go into meditation. Instead, I scanned the line of fellow sufferers reflected in the mirror lining the opposite wall.

Newcomers are always at the end of the line. The newest man’s head was bowed, his legs trembling—so probably the class had been in position for a minute and a half or two minutes. I hadn’t missed much.

After a few seconds, I began to relax. The pain required my attention and the anxiety of my encounter with the policeman began to fade. I started my meditation on the kata we would practice later. Ignoring the ache in my quadriceps, I visualized the various moves that made up geiki sei ni bon, I reminded myself of mistakes I habitually made, and I anticipated further refining the grace and power of the kata, a series of martial arts strikes, blocks, and kicks woven together in what becomes almost a dance.

“Three minutes,” said the first-in-line student, a huge black man named Raphael Roundtree. His watch was strapped to his obi.

“Another minute,” said Marshall, and I could feel the dismay, though no one made a sound. “Be sure your thighs are parallel with the floor.”

There was a general ripple of movement down the line as students corrected their stance. I stayed rock-still; my shiko dachi was as perfect as I could make it. My feet were the correct distance apart, pointing outward at the correct angle; my back was straight.

I emerged from my reverie for a moment to glance down the line in the mirror. The last-in-line man was in serious trouble. Though he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, sweat was streaming down his face. His legs were trembling violently. With some amazement, I recognized my next-door neighbor, Carlton Cockroft, who had so generously let me know he’d seen me out walking in the night.

I shut my eyes and tried to refocus on the kata, but I was too full of surprise and conjecture.

When Raphael called, “Four minutes,” it was as much relief to me as it was to the rest of the class.

We all stood, shifting from leg to leg to shake off the pain.

“Lily! Stretches!” Marshall said, his gaze just grazing me as it swept down the line. He retreated to a corner, where he watched us all for the slightest sign of slacking.

I bowed and ran to face the rest of the class. There were only eight that night. Janet and I were the only women, and we were much of an age, though I thought Janet might be thirty to my thirty-one. The men ranged from twenty to perhaps fifty-five.

“Kiotske!” I said sharply to bring them to attention. “Rai,” I instructed, bowing to them. They bowed to me in return, Carlton only a beat behind. He was keeping a sharp eye on the man in line next to him, picking up on his cues. I wondered again why he was here. But the class was waiting for my directions, and I extended my right leg, balancing carefully on my left. “Big toe up…and down…” I said. A few minutes later, I was concluding with lunges to alternating sides, my hands extended to the front for balance.