Free The English Teacher by Lily King Page A

but again her gaze fell on Peter’s. Why was he looking at her like that? Briefly, unwillingly, Vida saw herself at sixteen reading a book on a porch, and felt for an instant that lost intoxication of youth, that faith in life. Then Peter looked away.
“What about those?” Karen asked, pointing. She was not a strong student, but she was highly organized and didn’t like to leave class with any loose ends.
Vida glanced at the board behind her. “Okay, good. I was just getting to that.” She’d completely forgotten about the three terms she’d put up there. “Let’s start with Sir John. Anyone?” She watched how students like Helen and Danny didn’t bother with easy ones like this, waiting instead for the more intricate puzzles only they could solve. “Peter?” She needed to establish to the class that she would not play favorites, even if it meant humiliating him.
“It’s Tess’s father. He’s walking along and that guy”—he quickly corrected himself before she could—“that parson”—(clearly he had no idea what the word meant but pushed on—“passes by and says, ‘Good-night, Sir John.’”
“And?”
“And?”
“How does Tess’s father respond?”
“I’m not sure.” He hadn’t even read the whole of the first page.
Without looking at her book, Vida said, “‘Then what might your meaning be in calling me “Sir John” these different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield the haggler?’” To a group of tenth graders in New England, her nineteenth-century Dorset accent was quite authentic. Even Peter laughed.
Lindsey raised her hand. “Once he finds out he’s a d’Urberville, he starts acting differently, even though he doesn’t have any more money than he had before.”
“So by simply calling out ‘Good-night, Sir John,’ instead of ‘Jack,’ the parson sets the whole novel in motion.” She watched them scribble. That sentence would appear on nearly every essay next week. “Okay, moving on. Blighted star.”
“But what about ‘green malt in floor’?” Karen said in alarm.
“Anyone?” She had hoped to skip over that one. She didn’t feel like discussing sex and its repercussions now that Peter was in the classroom.
They all turned to the page and pretended to think.
“Why would someone say that Tess is so pretty her mother should mind she doesn’t get green malt in floor?” Let’s just say it and be done with it, she thought. But they kept their heads tucked down into their chests like sleeping pigeons. “What would make people in the late nineteenth century worry about a sixteen-year-old girl with a mouth like peony? What was the one thing that could ruin her?”
“If she got knocked up?” Kristina blurted.
Knocked up. The expression startled her, and she only managed a nod.
“What would happen to an unmarried girl if she got pregnant back then?” Jennifer asked.
The whole room began speaking at once, including Lydia’s students, who’d been so quiet up to now.
“She’d be a total outcast.”
“She’d be like an untouchable.”
“She’d never be able to marry.”
The class was galvanized by the subject, by its proximity to sex. Peter wasn’t looking at her now. Nor was he speaking. He was wagging his pencil between two fingers, making it thump like a tail on his notebook. He was smirking at Kristina. It was something in the smirk that brought it on, or in the steady, nearly hostile whacks of the yellow pencil on the page.
“And the guy? What happened to the guy?”
“Nothing would happen to the guy. He was a stud.”
“Just like nowadays.”
It began so small, small as a pinprick, in her chest. It was the familiar sting of fear but then it spread, its great wings opening all at once, her breath gone, her mind seized like an animal caught in a trap. It was the terror of the mornings and the terror of dream—a terror that had never ever visited her in her classroom before.
She was only partially aware of a new boy from Lydia’s class saying