The jackhammer of the rain just would not let up. The girls were nauseous, the boys were gloomy, and the air was unrelentingly damp, heavy with pencilshavings, chalkdust, and the spores of all the toadstools that had overrun the school after the great storm came to town. The young widow’s students glared at her, as if she had brought all this down on them. She pivoted towards the chalkboard, swallowed a sob (trying to pass it off as a sigh), ran her fingers over the welts of skin beneath her eyes. This is what I wanted, she said to herself.
Two Hills was known far and wide for its beautiful, symmetrical topography, its Commons surrounded by a colonnade of ancestral oaks, its storybook main street stretching through the vale between its long, eponymous hills. At daybreak, the eastern hill stretched out in an erotic silhouette; at nightfall, the other took its turn. A deep but idle river wound its way through the Commons, interrupted by the admirable masonry of a dozen arched footbridges. Two Hills produced the kind of postcards that hooked you in, that made you wonder if such a place still existed.
But it was all underwater, now, except the upper reaches of the hills. The town was cloven by a wild raging snake, the oaks were sheared open like butterflies and scattered like mice.
“Some day, you’re gonna be crying” was the last thing he’d said to her, before he drowned himself in her wedding dress. He’d barely fit into it, and when they dredged him up, his bloated body looked like a sausage burst from a frilly casing. Even in death, everyone remarked, he was an artist.
“Some day, you’re gonna be crying” was the last thing he’d said to her, before he drowned himself in her wedding dress. He’d barely fit into it, and when they dredged him up, his bloated body looked like a sausage burst from a frilly casing. Even in death, everyone remarked, he was an artist.
Lisa Spengler had her hand up. “I think. . . I’m gonna barf.” She was sloshed sideways and looked green. No one tittered. The other girls were hunched over, too, every bit as green.
After the first week, it had become clear that the storm would have no end. The sky grew thicker each week, until day and night were scarcely distinguishable. The streets were a network of black canals, the bottoms of the clouds threatened to engulf the taller buildings. The hills grew crowded with refugees; they slept in the halls of the school, pitched tents on its wooded lawn.
What hurt her most was that she hadn’t had a chance to leave. There had been a fire in her belly, she would have been out of there with a full tank of gas. He was one step ahead of her, as always, and when the final dirt was on his grave and it began to rain, she was suddenly a widow, and she didn’t know how to be a widow. And there were questions, everywhere she went, insinuations, placid but unrelenting. Why she could not cry until afterwards. Why it seemed like she’d seen it coming. Why she laughed, when her husband was dead.
“I need to go, Ms. . . ” For some reason, Lisa couldn’t remember her teacher’s name. She was just “the widow,” the word “widow” filled her head and crowded out the grammar of her thoughts. Widow, widow, widow. Widow, widow, widow. Something rolled in her stomach. Half an inch of rain had seeped in; her feet were wet.
When the widow threw herself in the river, no one was surprised that the rain immediately ceased. But when her young students, all virgins, gave birth to watery infants with her exact features (the same buttoned eye, the same fugitive smile), the identity of the father was hotly debated.
summer 2011
Tucson, Ariz.
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