“Was it good, Lillian?” she asked me.
“It was amazing,” I said.
“I think I like basketball,” she said, not smiling, a little angry, like she was accepting some kind of ancient curse.
“I don’t like it so much,” Roland admitted, “but it’s okay.”
“Let’s go back home,” I said. “We have lessons.”
The kids groaned, but I could tell that they weren’t that upset, that they’d let me take care of them, that I’d make them do stuff they hated, but they’d let it happen. Because who else did they have but me?
Eight
The next day, still no fires, deep breathing, a little yoga from a tape that Carl had left on our doorstep, we sat in the living room, class in session. They had their notebooks open, pencils ready, and I felt like a small animal about to be run over by a tractor, or like a meteor was about to hit Earth and I was the only person who knew and I was trying to be real cool about it so no one panicked. I had assumed that if I had been a good student, it wouldn’t be that hard to be a good teacher. But teaching required preparation. You had to learn it first, and then you taught it. I didn’t have that kind of time. At night, the children slept in my arms, bashing me with their limbs while they dreamed of manageable terrors. When would I study? They were always with me. So I was winging it.
The night before, my eye had swollen completely shut from Madison’s errant elbow, the skin angry and purple. And I rued the fact that the other side of my face, where Bessie had clawed me in the pool, was just starting to heal and scab over. The kids kept asking if they could touch the new bruise, if I wanted to put more ice on it, like I hadn’t spent the last few hours holding a bag of ice to my face. They seemed intrigued by my pain, the way I seemed to bear it without complaining. I think they appreciated this about me, that I wouldn’t cry. I had battle scars, and their skin could not be marked, not even by fire.
That morning, when I looked in the mirror, it was gruesome, radiating nearly to my hairline. During our breathing exercises I would occasionally steal a glance at the kids, and they were openly staring at the injury, the whole time taking cleansing breaths of air into their lungs.
We were doing Tennessee history, since I wanted their learning to be connected to their lives, to feel like we weren’t rigidly adhering to whatever “the man” said we needed to learn. But now, I kind of missed “the man.” He was always so confident, even when—especially when—he was fucking things up left and right.
“So,” I said, tapping the cool little chalkboard, like something from a one-room schoolhouse on the prairie, “let’s think of famous Tennesseans and then we can go to the library and find out more about them.” I want to say that, yes, the Internet existed. Madison had it in the mansion. But I didn’t really know anything about it. The one time I’d been on it, at the house of a guy who sometimes invited me over to smoke weed, I’d waited for, like, thirty minutes to print off Wu-Tang Clan lyrics. I honestly had no idea what else the Internet might be used for.
So what we had was the library, and I used that, a trip out in public, as a way to get them to focus. “Who are famous people from Tennessee?” I asked them. They just shrugged.
“You don’t know anyone famous who was born in Tennessee?” I asked again, then I tried to think if I knew anyone famous from Tennessee. I knew the professional wrestler Jimmy Valiant was from a town near my own, because some guy at the Save-A-Lot talked about it all the time. But he didn’t seem famous enough.
“Our dad, I guess,” Roland offered.
I blanched, visibly. “Somebody else,” I said.
“We don’t know,” Bessie said, again frustrated to have to admit what she didn’t know. I watched her stop, take deep breaths. I was proud of her. She looked at her notebook, thinking. “Ooh,” she suddenly exclaimed. “I know!”
“Who?” Roland asked, genuinely curious.
“Dolly Parton!” she said.
“Holy shit,” I said. “Oops, okay, sorry, but, yeah, that’s perfect. Dolly Parton is perfect.”
“Mom played some of her records for us,” Roland admitted. “Jolene.”
“Nine to Five,” Bessie said.
I thought it over. Dollywood. “Islands in the Stream.” That body. She was the best thing that had ever come out of Tennessee. Jesus Christ, it wasn’t even close. Bessie had got it on the first try.
“She’s the greatest,” I said. “So let’s write that down. We’ll see if we can find a biography of her at the library.”
“Who else?” Roland said, now excited, like it was a game.
“Well,” I said, “Daniel Boone, maybe? No, wait, Davy Crockett.”
“With the coonskin cap?” Bessie asked. “Our mom had a record about him, too.”
“That’s him. I think he’s from Tennessee. We’ll look it up.” There was a row of encyclopedias, so I grabbed the third volume (Ceara through Deluc) and looked it up. “Okay, yes, he was born in Greene County, Tennessee,” I told them. “Add that to the list.”
“Who else?” Roland asked, a black hole, wanting everything. But I was confident now. I was rolling.
“Oh, I think, um, Alvin York?” I offered. I knew he had a hospital or something named after him near Nashville. There was a movie one of my mom’s boyfriends made us watch that starred Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper, someone handsome like a dad should be. “He was in one of the world wars, maybe World War Two. He killed, like, a lot of Germans. I think that’s right. He killed a ridiculous amount all by himself.”
“Ooh, I’ll do my report on him,” Roland said.
“Okay, that’s perfect,” I told them. “Bessie, you’ll write a report on Dolly Parton, I’ll do some research on Davy Crockett, and, Roland, you’ll do Sergeant York. Is that cool?”
“Super cool,” Bessie said. It was weird to realize that, for all the ways that they’d been neglected, they were intelligent, so quick to figure things out. You only had to tell them once, and then they knew what to do.
“So can we go to the library?” Roland asked.
“And get ice cream?” Bessie asked.
“Well, let me check with Carl,” I said, and both kids groaned, fell dramatically across the sofa.
I went over to the phone and dialed his number. He answered before the first ring had ended.
“Yes?” he said.
“It’s Lillian,” I said.
“Yes, I know. What’s going on?”
“Oh, not much. Just wanted to hear the sound of your voice,” I said, just to fuck with him.
“Lillian, what do you need?”
“Are you busy?” I asked.
“Obviously this isn’t an emergency, so I’m going to hang—”
“We need to go into town,” I finally told him. “To the library.”
“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” he replied.
“So we’ll never leave the estate?” I asked. “We can’t live like this, okay?”
“Jesus,” he said, his voice rising and then, with crazy self-control, lowering before he finished the sentence, “they haven’t even been there a week. You act like it’s the Iran hostage crisis or something.”