The Parent-Teacher Conference

The sky over Sedona on Tuesday is the kind of sky that does not commit. Cloud and not-cloud. A high white ceiling that makes the red rock look pinker than it has any business looking, like a stage set someone has been touching up between the matinee and the evening show. Helen stands at the window of Room 207 with a paper cup of break-room coffee and watches a school bus pull out of the lower lot, and she thinks, without meaning to, the light is wrong today. Then she thinks, the light is the light. Then she thinks, I have been here ten years and I still narrate the weather to myself like a person who just moved.

She has fifteen minutes before the Whitley conference. She uses them to lay out, on the folding table she has dragged into the middle of the classroom, three stapled copies of Aiden Whitley’s most recent essay, a printed copy of the rubric, and a pen with a fine point because it is harder to argue with a fine-pointed pen.

The essay is bad. That is not the problem. The essay is bad in a way that suggests Aiden, who is fifteen and has the long delicate face of a Florentine page boy, has decided that being bad at writing is one of the available shapes of being a person, and is trying it on. She has met Aiden’s mother twice. She has not met his father. The father has been, in Aiden’s essays, a presence by absence — a man who travels for something, a man whose home office Aiden is not supposed to enter, a man whose name comes up in a sentence and then the sentence ends.

The father is coming today. The mother called yesterday and said Brian will be there. He flew in. She said Brian the way you say a weather event.

Outside, the wind moves through the cottonwood at the edge of the lot and the leaves do their dry small clatter. Helen finishes the coffee.

—

They come in at 4:14. They are a minute early, which she notes, because parents in Sedona are rarely early; the town runs late by a soft consensus nobody discusses. Aiden’s mother — Joanna, a thin woman with a long graying braid and the kind of turquoise earrings that suggest a specific shop on 89A — comes in first and apologizes for being early. The father is behind her.

He is tall. He is in a charcoal suit, no tie, the collar of a white shirt open one button. He carries nothing. His hair is very short and very dark and he has the kind of clean-shaven face that suggests he shaved within the last hour. He smiles at Helen with what she registers, in the first half-second, as a very good smile, the kind of smile a person practices, and then he extends his hand and says, “Brian Whitley. Thank you for making the time.”

His hand is the temperature of a hand. She notes this and then notes that she has noted it, and she sits down.

Aiden is not with them. He is, his mother says, at robotics. He didn’t want to come, Joanna says, and laughs the small laugh women laugh when they are apologizing for their teenagers, and Brian does not laugh. Brian sits down across from Helen with his hands folded on the table, both hands, flat, the thumbs not touching, and he looks at her with the steady polite attention of a man at a deposition.

She begins. She has done this many times. She says: Aiden is bright, Aiden is reading at grade level and above, Aiden is not turning in the work that requires sustained attention, the last three essays have been late, the most recent one is in front of you, please take a moment.

Joanna takes the essay. Brian does not.

Brian says, “Tell me what you think the issue is.”

His voice is calibrated. It is, she thinks, an oddly specific word to come into her head — calibrated — but it is the word. He has the voice of a man who has been on a lot of phone calls and has learned to take the question down to its bones before answering it. He is looking at her. He is not looking at the essay.

She says what she thinks the issue is. She says Aiden is testing what happens when he does not perform, that this is developmentally appropriate, and that he is at an age where the habits he sets now will be the habits he carries, and that she is not worried in a clinical way but is worried in the way a teacher is worried. She uses the word worried twice and watches his face for what it does on the second one.

His face does nothing on the second one. His face has done nothing on the first one. His face is, she registers, doing nothing in a way that is faintly off — not blank, exactly, because his eyes are tracking her and the small muscles at the corner of his mouth move in the small ways small muscles move when a person is listening — but the doing-nothing has the quality of a translation. As if he is hearing her in one language and the face is happening in another, and the lag between them is short but is not zero.

She thinks: I am tired. I have had two students cry this week.

Joanna is talking now, about the home office, about how she has tried to make Aiden a space, about how Brian’s work means Brian is gone, and the way she says Brian’s work is the way you say a weather event. Brian listens to his wife with the same calibrated attention he gave Helen. When Joanna is done he says, “Thank you, Jo,” and Joanna’s shoulders come down half an inch, and Helen notes that too.

Then Brian says, to Helen, “What would you like from us.”

It is not phrased as a question. There is no question mark in his mouth. It is the sentence of a man asking for the deliverable.

Helen opens her own mouth to answer and the room changes.

—

It is not a large change. It is the change of a photograph held at one angle for a long time and now held at a slightly different angle, and the gloss on the surface moves, and what you can see through the gloss is different by a degree.

The folding table is the wrong size. That is the first thing. It is the table she has used for ten years of conferences, the cheap one with the laminate top and the metal apron, and it is the wrong size by perhaps an inch in one direction. The window behind Brian — the window that should show the lower lot and the cottonwood and the slice of red rock above the gym roof — shows the lower lot, but the cottonwood is in the wrong place. It is two trees to the left of where it should be. There is a cottonwood there, in the new place; she is looking at a cottonwood; she has never seen this cottonwood before.

The light in the room is the light of an hour earlier. The shadows under the desks fall toward the back of the room instead of toward the door.

Brian is the same. Brian is exactly the same. Brian is more the same than a person is normally the same. The lapel of his charcoal suit has no lint on it. His shirt is white in the way a shirt is white in a catalog. His hands on the table are at rest in the way the hands of a wax figure are at rest, and she thinks — for the first time in her life she thinks this sentence — he does not have a smell. She has been sitting across from him for nine minutes. The room should have, by now, the small particular smell of a man who flew in this morning. There is nothing. There is the smell of the classroom, which is dry-erase marker and old carpet and the faint sweet rot of an apple core in the trash can by the door, and into that smell Brian Whitley has been placed without contributing to it.

Joanna is talking. Joanna’s mouth is moving. Helen can hear the words but they arrive on a delay of perhaps a quarter second, like a satellite call, and she thinks the audio is not synced, and the thought is so absurd and so specific that she almost laughs.

She does not laugh. She holds still the way she held still when she was nine and a rattlesnake was on the path and her father put his hand on her arm and said do not move.

She looks at Brian. Brian is looking at her. He is, she thinks, aware that she is looking at him in a new way. The polite attention of his face has not changed but something underneath the attention has changed — has registered her — and for one half of one second the eyes that have been tracking her become eyes that see her, and they are not unkind, and they are not kind, and they are not the eyes of Brian Whitley of charcoal suits and deposition voice. They are the eyes of something that has been looking through the eyeholes of Brian Whitley the way she, as a child, looked through the eyeholes of a paper bag at Halloween.

The half-second ends. The light in the room comes back to 4:15. The cottonwood is in the right place. The folding table is the right size. Brian’s face does the very small movement of a face that has just become a face again, the way a screen does the very small flicker of a screen that has just refreshed.

Joanna has asked her a question. Joanna is waiting.

Helen says, “I’m sorry, could you repeat that,” and her voice is her voice, and Joanna repeats the question, which is a question about summer reading, and Helen answers it. She answers it well. She is, on the outside, a competent woman doing a competent thing on a Tuesday afternoon.

On the inside she is counting. She counts to thirty before she lets herself look at Brian again. When she looks at him he is Brian. He is fully Brian. The lapel of his suit has, she notes, a small piece of lint on it now, near the third button. She thinks that is new, and then she thinks I am losing it, and then she thinks, with a precision that surprises her, no, I am not. I am not losing it. I just saw a thing.

—

The conference ends at 4:42. They shake her hand. Brian’s hand is warm now, slightly. Joanna says thank you, Helen, really, thank you, and means it, and Brian says we appreciate your time in his calibrated voice, and they go. Helen watches them through the window of 207. They walk to a black SUV in the lower lot. Brian opens the passenger door for Joanna. He goes around to the driver’s side. He looks up, once, at the window of 207, and she steps back from the glass without deciding to.

She sits down in her chair. She puts both hands flat on the folding table, the way Brian had his hands flat. The table is, she confirms, the right size. The cottonwood is in the right place. The shadows on the floor are the shadows of 4:42.

She makes herself finish the day. There is one more conference at 5:00, a sweet boy named Devon and his sweet mother, and Helen does it on autopilot and does it well, and at 5:38 she locks her classroom door and walks to her car.

—

The drive home is twelve minutes on a good day. She lives on the west side of town, in a small adobe-style rental at the end of a road that does not, like all the good roads in Sedona, go anywhere else. The sky is doing the late-afternoon thing it does in June, the high white ceiling burning off into a hard clean blue with the red rock under it like the rock is a thing the sky is embarrassed by. The light is the light. She watches it the way a person watches the road.

She thinks about Phoenix. She lived in Phoenix for eleven years, married, the wife of a man who taught at ASU and who left her in a Whole Foods parking lot in a conversation that took six minutes. In Phoenix and in Tucson, she thinks, I did not, ever, look at a tree and have it be two trees to the left of where it should be.

She thinks: I have been tired before. I have been sad before. Grief does things to a person, and ten years is not so long after a divorce.

She thinks all of this in the calm orderly way of a woman who teaches Toni Morrison to juniors, who has the vocabulary for what the mind does to itself. The vocabulary is doing, she notices, a kind of work on her behalf. It is laying down a soft thick covering over the thing she saw, like a tarp over a piece of furniture in a basement, and the tarp is the right size, and the furniture is becoming, under the tarp, just a shape.

By the time she pulls into her gravel drive she has, she realizes, almost forgotten the cottonwood.

—

The house is cool. She turns on one lamp in the living room and one in the kitchen and she does not turn on the overhead anywhere. She makes herself the dinner she makes herself on Tuesdays, which is a piece of salmon and a salad, and she eats it standing at the counter looking out at the small back patio where her one good lemon tree is doing its slow patient work. The sun goes down behind the rock and the rock takes the last of it and holds it the way the rock does, glowing a little after the sky has stopped.

She washes the dish. She pours a glass of the white wine she keeps in the door of the fridge and she takes it out to the patio chair and she sits.

The night comes down. The crickets start. A coyote, somewhere west, makes the one yip that is the announcement, and another coyote, somewhere south, answers, and then they are quiet again. The stars come out the way stars come out in Sedona, which is gradually, and then suddenly, and then a great deal of them.

She sits in the chair with the wine and she thinks, for the first time since 4:15, about what she saw. She lets herself think about it. She thinks: the room was the wrong shape for forty-five seconds. The man across the table was not the man across the table, for half of one second. She tests the sentences. She holds them up against the night.

The sentences are, she finds, fragile. They are the sentences of a dream you are telling someone at breakfast and you can hear yourself losing them as you say them. The cottonwood, in memory, is in the right place. The light in the room, in memory, is 4:15. Brian’s face, in memory, is the face of a tired father who flew in this morning to deal with his son. She tries to hold the eyes — the half-second of the eyes — and the eyes will not hold. They slide off the inside of her head like a fish off a wet rock.

She thinks: if I called Joanna right now and asked her if anything seemed off in that meeting, Joanna would say no. If I wrote it down, I would not believe what I had written. There is no one to tell.

This last thought is not, she discovers, sad. It is plain. It is the plain fact of her life on a Tuesday in June, ten years into Sedona, and it sits in the chair beside her and drinks its own glass of wine.

The wind moves the lemon tree. Somewhere up on the rock above the road, a single light goes on in a house she cannot see, and she watches it, and after a while it goes off again.

She thinks, finally, the thought she has been moving toward all evening without letting herself name it, which is: I have been in this town a long time and the town has been, the whole time, doing something to me that I have a feeling for and do not have a word for. The thought arrives and she lets it arrive. She does not, having let it arrive, do anything with it. She does not stand up. She does not go inside and write it down. She does not call anyone.

She sits in the chair until the cold of the patio stone comes up through the soles of her sandals, and then she gets up, and she carries the half-glass of wine inside, and she rinses it and puts it on the drying rack upside down, and she goes to bed with the window open, and she listens to the desert make its small night sounds, and she does not sleep for a while, and then she sleeps.