Deflower

Through the paneled window of the classroom door, the gentle curve of Miss Lily’s forearm could be seen, and her slender wrist, poised at the chalkboard, and her willowy fingers, grasping a piece of fresh chalk. A silver bangle slid off her wrist like an unsuccessful manacle and rested half way down her forearm where the sleek line of the limb broadened, just before soft angle of the elbow. Chalk dust powdered her delicate fingers with white, making them ashen, pale in contrast with the smooth, sun-bronzed flesh on the back of her tiny, almost infantile hands.

Her rouged lips parted slightly, like a small child’s in anticipation of a lollipop, forming a perfect “O.” A sea of first graders gazed in awe as Miss Lily drew circles on the chalkboard.

“Looonely,” said Miss Lily, reminding her students of the letters and sounds that they had learned in kindergarten, but had left behind in the languid summer days. “Moooan. Ooown. Can anyone tell me another word that has an ‘O’ sound in it?” She pursed her red lollipop lips into another circle.

Five fingers appeared sheepishly in the air from the back row.

“Yes, Michael?”

“Umm . . . nooo?”

The freckle on Miss Lily’s left cheek disappeared into a dimple as a smile blossomed across her face. “Yes! Very good. Any other ideas?”

The first graders fed off of Miss Lily’s enthusiasm, and were excited now too, spewing word confetti from jabbering mouths.

“Go!” “Home!” “Don’t!” “Show!”

Miss Lily drew the long, straight line of an “I” next to the white circles on the board.

“What about ‘I’ sounds? For example, spyyy. Miiine.”

“Bye!” “Cry!” “Die!” “Eye!”

It was only Miss Lily’s second week at Kidron Elementary School, but her students fawned over her already. They stared at her with wide, amorous eyes, absorbing her with a sycophantic gaze. At recess, the girls tried to braid her long, auburn hair while the boys tugged at her skirts for her attention.

From the hallway, through the window in the door, Principal Richard watched as first graders clambered from their miniature desks and rushed to the front of the room as Miss Lily announced the end of the day’s phonetics lesson. Groping at her feet and ankles, they encircled her, like bees on the open face of a sunflower or moths swarming around a candle at night. Crouching on their knees before her stool, the first graders looked on as Miss Lily cracked open Snow White and they clapped their hands and all chanted in unison when she got to the good parts.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall . . . “

* * *

At lunch, Jan Donnelly, the school’s secretary, sought out Miss Lily in the library. She peaked her deflated puff hairdo out from behind the stack of Hardy Boy mysteries and Miss Lily nearly choked on her carrot in surprise. Jan was a purple nails and hair spray type, with a mouth as big as her fist that she always crammed full of tic-tacs and mentos. She hated children, but had adored Principal Richard since they graduated together thirteen years back; she kept her position as the elementary school’s secretary simply so she could watch which students’ mothers he kept suspiciously long in his locked, windowless office. She marked them down in a notebook that she kept in her desk drawer, under her mints.

“He likes you, ya know,” Jan announced, flopping into the chair opposite Miss Lily’s.

Miss Lily looked up bashfully, blushing. Jan forged on despite the rosy tint blooming on the young teacher’s cheek. Miss Lily huddled a little, feeling fragile.

“I’m not sure I understand. To whom are you referring?”

“Well, Dick, dummy,” snapped Jan. She puckered her glossed lips and violently sucked her mentos. “Principal Richard! You must have noticed the way he looks at you. He comes back to the office after hallway rounds drooling so much that I swear I’ll have to mop one of these days!”

Jan leaned forward on the table and her cleavage spilled out of her v-neck blouse. Miss Lily slumped and shifted uncomfortably under Jan’s covetous stare, and she averted her eyes, examining instead the collection of Berenstain Bears books.

Undeterred, Jan launched ahead, her lecherous eyes widening. “And whenever he gets back from staff meetings he locks himself in his office for, like, twenty minutes. And we all know what that means.” She snorted and kept on sucking.

Miss Lily wasn’t sure what to make of Jan’s assertive declaration, but she felt threatened by it, and crossed her legs and pulled her cardigan a bit tighter around her shoulders, instinctively covering her protruding collarbones and the tender skin at the nape of her neck.

Principal Richard, though barely thirty, hadn’t aged well. His facial fat puddled around his chin, and grizzly bushes of chest hair poked their frizzled heads out of the top button of his dress shirts. When he wore a tie, he used it solely to wipe his armpits of their forever expanding sweat stains.

“But I shouldn’t say that, it makes him sound perverse,” Jan continued, punctuating Miss Lily’s awkward silence. “He coaches youth softball and supports the booster club and all that. He’s harmless— he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Really. He stopped fishing the way normal folks do it because he hated skewering maggots and worms, and now he just fly fishes. Cuz they don’t use real flies, you know.”

Miss Lily didn’t know. She was preoccupied with the horrific image of Principal Richard’s characteristically sweaty personage guiding a young girl’s hand on a wooden bat, teaching her how to swing strong and hit the ball.

Jan extended her pudgy fingers and plucked a carrot from Miss Lily’s plate. Between crunches, she asked, “What’s a Saratoga city slicker doing in bumblefuck Kidron, Ohio anyhow? I mean, there’s nothing here except for two hardware stores and three Mennonite churches. Hell, if you want alcohol or sex or anything you have to go the whole way to Akron, or ravage the Amish kids on rumspringa, and that’s just a drag.”

Miss Lily sighed, and looked away ruefully. “Well, there was a small situation that I felt that I needed to get away from, and Kidron seemed like a nice place to escape and relax out of the public eye for a while.”

Jan pounced. “I bet it was a man, wasn’t it? Oh, this is good. I’ve heard about those big-time horse race gamblers up in Saratoga. They treat their women like their horses. If ya don’t put out, you’re out the door like a horse with a stitch in its calf on the backstretch. Yeah, this is real good stuff.”

Silently, Miss Lily moved on from her carrots to her celery. Jan looked beyond Miss Lily’s right ear as a stocky shadow darkened the doorway.

Leaping up from the table, Jan exclaimed, “Honey, now’s your chance!” She bounded to the young teacher’s side, and whispered in her ear: “The fastest way to his heart is jelly beans. I know it. I’ll tell him to give you a call tonight.” Miss Lily crumpled, like a morning glory at the approach of the noontime sun, folding its petals into itself. Then, leaving her half-finished lunch on the table and Jan amongst the National Geographics, Miss Lily pushed wordlessly past Principal Richard’s gut in the doorway and tumbled into the hallway, then fled to her classroom.

At the end of the school day, Miss Lily bustled out the door before the last echoes of the bell had dissipated, narrowly avoiding Principal Richard’s bug-eyed attempts to flag her down to invite her to that evening’s softball tournament game. She had grown accustomed to taking the two-mile journey home by foot, but now she regretted it. The walk took Miss Lily by the ballpark, down to the crossroads that served as the village square, and past the Town and Country store where crotchety old men sat gathering dust in rickety rocking chairs in the afternoons, smoking pipes, talking about the year’s corn harvest, and jeering at children as they walked home from school. The old men whooped and hollered at Miss Lily’s smooth, lean calves that peaked out from under her sundress as she scuttled past, but went back to grumbling about the uppity New Yawker once she had gone by. Miss Lily had paid a dying farmer an exorbitant sum for an old farmhouse at the top of Emerson Hill, and allowed prime soybean soil to degenerate into a field of wildflowers.

Beyond the farmhouse’s westward facing front porch, Kidron valley stretched out in a patchwork quilt of fields. On clear evenings, the crack of a bat punctuated the sticky early September air as little legs sprinted in diamonds to the cheers of parents and Principal Richard. But Miss Lily sat inside, where the air was still and damp, behind closed doors and thick window glass, and slowly took the phone off the hook. From the softball field, where Mr. Richard’s team jumped into each other’s arms and clapped hands, celebrating that evening’s victory, Miss Lily’s house could be seen, blazing in the already darkened Eastern sky, then suddenly, like a candle, the lights snuffed out.

* * *

When Miss Lily arrived at the school the next morning, she successfully snuck past the office, but found Jan lurking by her classroom door. She followed the young teacher into the empty classroom.

“I tried to call ya last night but the phone was busy for hours. Who were you talking to for so long, huh?” Jan didn’t skip a beat to wait for a response. “No doubt that New York man. Is he gonna come down here and try to find you or what? Don’t tell Dick about him, by the way. He’s a nice guy but he’s a bit of a jealous type and it’s the envious ones that make the most trouble.”

“There’s no New York man, Miss Donnelly.”

Jan’s nose scrunched up into her closely set eyes and her bottom lip sagged stupidly. She jutted out her chin, perplexed. Then, like a baby doll whose plastic eyelids open and close when you shake it, Jan’s eyes bulged suddenly.

“You cheated on him, didn’t you? And you’re escaping his horrific, erotic wrath! That’s obviously it. No one comes to Kidron because they actually like it here.” She snickered in the falsetto of a sixth grade boy who has just learned the word “fuck,” and giggled at her own risqué fantasy. She was lingering in the doorframe where the first graders had taped up fall leaf cutouts, and looked like a floozy in a toy store. Miss Lily was becoming nauseous with disdain, and slumped into her desk chair, feeling faint.

“You feelin’ alright honey? And what’s up with the snowsuit?” Jan breached the threshold of the doorway, penetrating into the classroom, and reached out to tug on the sleeve of Miss Lily’s modest sweater. “It’s hot as blazes in here! You’re going to melt like a popsicle on the sidewalk by lunch unless you strip that heavy thing off.”

“I think I’m getting sick. I woke up this morning with the chills, and I’m afraid it might be terribly contagious,” said Miss Lily meekly, and she feigned a delicate cough.

Jan scoffed but moved a step away. “I’ll get Dick to fix something up for you,” she insisted. “He’d just love to show his sympathetic side.” She slunk out of the classroom with a wink.

Halfway through math class, Jan’s animated face appeared in the window of the classroom door, and she knocked with the enthusiasm of a carpetbagger selling cosmetics in rich suburbs. Miss Lily begrudgingly opened the door, and Jan thrust in, a mug of tea in hand.

“From Dick,” she whispered in Miss Lily’s ear as she swept past, placing the steaming mug on her desk and producing honey packets from her pocket. “And he sent some cough drops too. You’re lucky to have a sweet guy like him after you.”

Miss Lily said nothing in response but ushered the secretary out the door, claiming the pressing importance of basic addition. She let the chamomile tea set until it was too cold to drink and gave out cough drops as prizes for correct math.

On her walk home that afternoon, the rusty men stationed outside Kidron Town & Country didn’t hoot at Miss Lily as she hurried past their chairs and into the store. She was looking wet from the humidity, dripping almost, and her shiny hair was deflated, and her wide legged pants hid her sculpted legs. They shook their heads and wagged their drooping chins and commiserated, “They must not have humidity up there in Sar’toga.” When Miss Lily emerged from the store a few minutes later with a full bolt of dark blue calico fabric, they wondered if a city girl would know how to sew.

* * *

When softball season ended, the panel of old men on Kidron Town & Country’s front porch noticed the abrupt absence of their favorite object of observation. Miss Lily had stopped walking to work, knowing that Principal Richard would no longer be occupied directly after school with little girls, bats, and balls, and the walk left her feeling exposed, vulnerable. Principal Richard’s team had cleaned up the tournament season victoriously, but Miss Lily hadn’t heard the cheers from the ballpark. Instead, she was holed up in her house, sewing dark blue curtains in the pantry, the only room that didn’t have windows. The farmhouse’s wide-eyed front windows stared vacantly into the sultry night, and inside, Miss Lily pricked her fingers on needles in the dark.

Below, in the valley, the ballpark’s lights flickered then went out, and in the sticky Indian summer night little girls were treated to post-game hot dogs. Miss Lily’s phone rang and rang after the victory, and her caller ID lit up with the elementary school’s office number. She called the phone company to have them disconnect her home phone, and waited on the line until she heard the dull beep of solitude.

Miss Lily searched for Principal Richard’s address in the staff directory, and wrote it on a slip of paper that she taped to her bathroom mirror, along with his phone number and email address and the names of his closest friends and family. She poured over maps of the little village, marking streets that the man would likely be on, and at what times. With operative diligence, Miss Lily shadowed Principal Richard’s routine, from his 6:45 cup of coffee and cinnamon toast at the downtown Bliss Café, to his afternoon pit stop at Kidron Town & Country to jabber with the men in their rocking chairs, and to the houses of his friends, where he played and lost at poker. On Tuesday, it was Doug’s, where the wife served chip dip and didn’t let them stay past ten-thirty. Thursday’s Bud Light and football explained the lack of Friday morning meetings. On Sundays, he fished. Miss Lily tracked his movements, and put ostensible stars on the map to demarcate his stomping ground.

When Miss Lily knocked on Jan’s door while Principal Richard was away at an administrative meeting, the secretary was delighted to usher her in. Autumn parent-teacher conferences were fast approaching, and Miss Lily had become morbidly obsessed with the contents of the notebook that Jan kept in her desk drawer. Miss Lily could no longer stand to look at her first graders without knowing which of their mothers had grasped the worn leatherette of Principal Richard’s belt, or burrowed their lips into his glutinous neck.

“Getting jealous, huh?” said Jan with a wink and a nudge.

Miss Lily flipped open the notebook, and read aloud with a trembling voice. “January 28th, meatball sub day, Ms. Hampshire (formerly Mrs. Withrich), suspicious scraping chairs sounds and a misplaced woman’s watch. April 17th, English as a Second Language testing, Miss Ruiz (mother of Amber Ruiz), candle-induced fire alarm, blamed on faulty microwave popcorn. June 3rd, Field Day, Mrs. Wilson (head of PTO Classroom Mothers Committee), missing order of popsicles, whipped cream, and waterslide lubricant.” Miss Lily flicked through the pages with the voracity of a teenage boy peeping at a stolen porn magazine in a gas station bathroom. She simply couldn’t stop reading. Jan looked on with pride, and her lips twisted into
a proprietary smirk.

* * *

When Miss Lily’s Honda pulled into Lehman’s Hardware’s parking lot across the square from Kidron Town & Country, the white heads nearly spilled out of their rocking chairs with surprise. For weeks, they had only seen her car zoom through the intersection and head up Emerson Hill even before the busses had come by. They missed her cleavage and sundresses and calves and small hands. Although the autumn weather was still warm, Miss Lily appeared wearing black dress pants and a turtleneck, and her hair was tied back in a bun. Bug-eyed sunglasses hid most of her face. Miss Lily emerged from the hardware staggering under the weight of a stack of square-cut mirrors, and drove off again, leaving the old men rocking and wondering and watching as her car snaked up Emerson Road to her house on the hill.

The hoary old men had been right—Miss Lily couldn’t sew. The unfinished curtains lay crumpled in a pile in the pantry, where she had sat for nights on end, bleeding on the fabric as she clumsily attempted to make neat stitches in the calico. Miss Lily was beginning to feel claustrophobic in the pantry amongst her dwindling supply of canned vegetables and now nearly empty stock of fresh fruit. If she couldn’t block out the penetrating night and its peering eyes, she need some way to ensure her security within her own house. Miss Lily banished dark alcoves and blind corners, and set up mirrors to illuminate every nook. While standing at the sink, she could now see into the shower, and from the kitchen table she had a view of the back porch. She lined the baseboard of her bedroom with mirrors, so she could chase monsters out from under her bed without even having to get down on her knees.

With a simple trick of light, Miss Lily was replicated a hundred times over. She caught a glimpse of her facial profile while turning a corner, and her own reflection followed her up the stairs to her bedroom. In this new house of mirrors, she was fascinated by curves of her body that she had never seen before. Pulling off her turtleneck, Miss Lily found an indentation in the small of her back, where her spine met her slender hips. Undressing in the mirror, she examined her hamstrings, the backs of her kneecaps, the curvature of her neck. Miss Lily wondered at the translucency of her skin, now pale and powdery, ashen from the abrupt lack of exposure to sunlight. Her limbs, once lean, were now skeletal, and her elbows jutted out at broken angles. Miss Lily pursed her unglossed lips, and watched herself unsuccessfully flirt with her reflection, but was afraid to touch her fragile skin with fingers now coarse and worn.

Miss Lily’s bedroom window framed her body as she turned, around and around, on tiptoe like a ballerina in a music box. A newly born Narcissus on a pedestal, Miss Lily was absorbed in scrutiny and examination. Although the black night thrust licentiously against her closed windows, Miss Lily could not see out into the night. The stars blinked, unseen in the velvety sky, and the season’s last fireflies flashed invisibly in the dark. From an anonymous tree, an owl peered through the darkness, searching for his prey, and hooted mournfully in the midnight stillness. Night crawlers slithered through the field of wildflowers and poked their serpentine heads out from under the front porch. Moths with dusty wings flew kamikaze missions into the closed windows and fell with soft thuds onto the roof. The vine of a moonflower crept up the columns of the porch, and unfolded its petals, opening like a full-mouthed snowy kiss to the moon, and invited the thousand eyes of the night to the glowing house on the hill, to watch.