Either Side of Winter Read Online Free

surprised her to be each of their best friends or never to see them again. By eleven thirty she was utterly beat. She sat in a stall in the teachers’ WC and cried. Then composed her face, and walked out across the baseball field on a bright clear September day whose sunshine it seemed couldn’t touch her as she shivered in it regardless, heading for the cafeteria. The sight of all those children talking at once and eating appalled her. Already she suffered from a kind of persistent stage fright, convinced she would be called upon to remember a name or chastise a delinquent. So she held her head up in a blind way, certain that everyone could see what a miserable fraud she was. Filled a tray with food she was too nervous to eat, and sat in the far corner at an empty table by a window overlooking the concrete balcony on which she had first kissed Charles Conway, the famous son, two nights before.
    Other teachers joined her, muttering do you mind if we? as they sat down. Amy sipped a mug of black coffee while picking indiscriminately from a paper plate heaped with tuna-fish salad, cottage cheese, carrot sticks and chocolate doughnuts. A headache danced circles around her eyes, but she began totalk in spite of it. ‘My throat’s so dry, I can’t spit enough to eat,’ she said.
    ‘After day one I always feel like I’ve been to a rock concert,’ declared a bulldog-faced man with his elbows on the table. And added, ‘I’m in computers.’
    Mr Peasbody, stroking his tie, looked round elaborately and said, ‘At this point, my dear, you’re closer to their age than ours.’ They shared a table in the Biology office and had already been introduced. He had made a point of explaining that he was far too old for her, being gay besides, and that he intended to call her from the first what she clearly was: a dear, a darling, etc. If she didn’t mind. She couldn’t read him one bit, and at first she attributed this to the fact that she couldn’t read anybody in this strange new world, anybody at all. Add to that, his being gay, a Connecticut blue-blood, and so on. Most of her relations with older men were driven by the worries over whether or not they wanted to get her into bed. Later, she decided that he was odd; a deliberately closed book.
    ‘It doesn’t feel that way,’ she said.
    ‘Not to you, perhaps. Not yet. They’ll grow on you. They are not as strange as they first appear.’
    ‘Look at them. Eating.’ She gestured at the children through the glass partition between the students’ hall and the faculty dining room. The teachers were outnumbered and some basic quality of that fact could not be ignored: the mass of vital energy was on the other side of the glass wall, and against them.
    ‘Growing, I often think, brings out terrible manners.’ This from a gentleman in a bow-tie, a pleasantly filled-out figure, with silky cheeks. ‘Stuart Englander.’ She had seen him in the hallways outside the English department; a stack of leather books between elbow and rib, a couple of girls in tow. He had a reputation for being particularly patient with girls. Amy was young enough to feel his charm: the charm of an old man’s contented curiosity, directed at you. Just a half-smilesuggesting that not much changes over time, after all. He took her hand.
    ‘I’m Charles,’ she replied; blushed and added, ‘but you can call me Amy.’
    So the thought of him hovered over her first day, but rarely alighted: a slip of the tongue waiting to happen. She had decided over the summer to finish her grading and her preps in the office before going home; but when the last bell rang she filed out with the rest of the students into the baseball field and walked along the row of yellow buses towards her apartment. A backpack hanging off her shoulder, sandals over her feet: a figure indistinguishable from the students pushing their way past, apart from her loneliness and silence, and the slight respect they accorded her, making way, for