Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay

fell on his hands. He wore a wedding band, he always had.
    “I learned that children want to forgive us. They’re eager to forgive.”
    “If you’re pretty,” he said.
    “I don’t think that matters.” She looked into his playful, deep-set eyes. He was minimizing her point, missing her point.
“You’re
not pretty. No one would ever accuse you of being pretty. But we forgave you.”
    He laughed, and they started back towards town. She knew that his people were Jewish and that they had been bookbinders in Glasgow before moving to Winnipeg. He had talked about it in geography class. How they came out of Galicia, which was now a part of Poland. How maps may look stationary, but boundaries shift, worlds open up, other worlds and civilizations pass away. And none of us is stuck or alone, because coursing through us is everything that brought us to where we are.
    She told him she was learning French from an old gentleman who kept peppermints in a bowl and schnapps hidden behind his books, and as she talked she was thinking that being an inspector meant not being at home for long stretches of time. You wouldn’t see your wife all that much, you might not even like her.
    “Do you have children?” she ventured.
    He shook his head. They slowed their pace. In another month it would be hot and the absence of trees would hurt, but now the light itself was like gold leaf. She took off her jacket and folded it over her arm.
    “Plants are so grateful,” he said, looking around him. “You give them water and they say thank you. You can hear them.” He spread his hands wide. “The earth is offering us its beauty.”
    She was wearing a dress and she was wearing it for him - a dark-blue dress with a pale-blue collar, and a very deep waist.
    Michael’s eyes were on her all day. He loved to watch her at her desk - how fast she wrote, how determined and intent and slightly comical she looked when she concentrated hard. He took her anger in stride. It was her lack of attention that caused him anguish.
    “Michael?” She was at the blackboard now, her back to the class, her mind full of Syd’s departure. “Have you finished your work?”
    She could read him from a distance and with her eyes closed.
    That afternoon, Parley Burns walked her home. His eyes were dark and his face was white from lack of sleep. He looked more like a prisoner than a principal.
    “I heard you typing,” she said, curious to see his reaction. But his eyes were on the ground. “This morning.”
    “Then you were up early.”
    “I could hazard a guess about what you’re writing.”
    “You won’t guess.”
    “You’re writing a play.”
    He gave her a surprised and bitter look.
    She said, “I’d write one too, if I knew how.”
    Her gift for difficult men came from being able to see around their belligerent corners to the mud puddlebehind. I’ve seen her with my father and I know. Rudeness that would reduce anyone else to blistered agony seemed to smooth her skin like some all-knowing cream.
    He said, “You got on well with the inspector.”
    She had noticed his own efforts to please. He was more than ingratiating, he was grovelling - smiling, smiling, and pretending to be interested in birds.
    “Since you’re so good at guessing,” he said, “guess what I’m writing the play about.”
    “Wait, let me think.” She considered for a moment. “Ghosts.”
    “Wrong.”
    “School?”
    “Wrong again.”
    “Thomas Hardy. Thomas Hardy and his wives.”
    “You,” he said.
    And her mind swung to all those occasions when he had sat at the back observing her.
    “It’s not about me. Why would it be about me?”
    He clicked his teeth; he had her. They walked on without speaking until he said, “There’s a book you should read. If you’ll allow me.”
    So she continued on with him past her own lodgings to Mrs. Wilson’s and they entered the geranium-filled house. She waited while he went upstairs and came back with his copy of
Jude the