Bridge of Clay

Tommy’s primary school teacher kept an eye on him.

She reported he was doing okay.

For the three of them in high school, they each had to see a teacher, who doubled as a kind of psychologist. There’d also been one previous to this, but that guy had since moved on, replaced by a total sweetheart; the warm-armed Claudia Kirkby. Back then, she was still just twenty-one. She was brown-haired, and quite tall. Not too much makeup, but always wore high heels. In her classroom there were the posters—Jane Austen and her barbell, and MINERVA MCGONAGALL IS GOD. On her desk there were books and projects, in various stages of marking.

Often, at home, after they’d seen her, they had the sort of talks boys seem to have: talks but not talks at all.

Henry: “Good old Claudia, ay?”

Rory: “She’s got a good pair of legs.”

Boxing gloves, legs and breasts.

That’s all they ever bonded with.

Me: “Shut up, for Christ’s sake.”

But I imagined those legs, I had to.

As for Claudia herself, up closer: She had an endearing sunspot on her cheek, right in the middle. Her eyes were kind and brown. She taught a hell of an English unit on Island of the Blue Dolphins and Romeo and Juliet. As a counselor, she smiled a lot, but didn’t have much idea; at university, she’d done one small unit of psychology, which made her qualified for disasters like these. Most likely, she was the newest teacher at the school, and handed the extra work—and probably more out of hope than anything else, if the boys said they were fine, she wanted quite badly to believe them; and two of them actually were fine, given the circumstance, and one was nowhere near it.

* * *

—

And maybe it’s the little things that kill you in the end—as the months dropped down to winter. It was seeing him arrive home from work.

Sitting in his car, sometimes for hours.

His powdery hands at the wheel:

No more Anticols.

Not a single Tic Tac left.

It was me paying the water bill, instead of him.

Then the electricity.

It was the sideline at weekend football games:

He watched but didn’t see, then didn’t show up at all.

His arms became uncharged; they were limp and starved of meaning. His concrete stomach mortared. It was death by becoming not him.

He forgot our birthdays; even my eighteenth.

The gateway into adulthood.

He ate with us sometimes, he always did the dishes, but then he’d go outside, back to the garage, or stand below the clothesline, and Clay would go there with him—because Clay knew something we didn’t. It was Clay our father feared.

On one of the rare nights he was home, the boy found him at the piano, staring at the handwritten keys, and he stood there, close behind him. His fingers were stalled, mid-MARRY.

“Dad?”

Nothing.

He wanted to tell him—Dad, it’s okay, it’s okay what happened, it’s okay, it’s okay, I won’t tell anyone. Anything. Ever. I won’t tell them.