Hummingbirds Read Online Free Page A

here.”
    Mrs. Mayhew nods.
    For three more long minutes the two women sit in silence. Mrs. Mayhew is one of the matriarchs of the school—not only the chair of the English department, but also one of the three headmistresses, one of the triumvirate of broad-shouldered and hefty women who watch like perched carrion birds over the school. The three women are of the industrial age, their spines girded by steel and their faces ferrous with the ash and grime of harder generations.
    No one is comfortable around Mrs. Mayhew, who, indeed, seems like an algebraic counterfunction to the theorem of comfort. The only exception to this rule is Binhammer. Many people have said that Binhammer is able to evoke, alchemist-like, whatever half-smiling affection remains unincinerated in the furnace of her heart.
    At this moment, therefore, Lonnie Abramson is beginning to wish she had not been so eager to be on time for this meeting.
    “They’re quite some students I have this year,” she says, fixing her hair. When Mrs. Mayhew doesn’t respond, she repeats, as if remembering a distant dream, “Some students…”
    Finally Pepper Carmichael shows up, and even though the two are not the most intimate of friends, Lonnie wants to get up and hug her. Pepper is the one who, after Lonnie told her about a student who had the nerve to characterize her earrings as “grandmother jewelry,” said, “Oh, let the girl vent. The poor thing—already feeling the fingers of age, no doubt. Creeping along her skin, like they do.” Pepper’s specialty is empathy. She grew up in California. That’s the way people are out there. Lonnie can never entirely clear her mind of the image of a young Pepper sitting on a beach at night, in a circle of long-haired boys and bead-wearing girls, passing some narcotic cigarette to the person next to her. For Lonnie, Pepper is one person who represents many—she stands in for hundreds of people whom Lonnie will never meet.
    Right away the two fall to talking in hushed tones, as though they themselves are students and Mrs. Mayhew is the teacher waiting to begin class. They pull out their class lists and start comparing students.
    “Oh, her,” Lonnie says. “You’re going to have a time with her.”
    “Needy?”
    “If you can call it that.” Lonnie herself would call it being a melodramatic little overachiever. But she suspects that Mrs. Mayhew favors the grade-grubbers, that Mrs. Mayhew sees them as industriously pounding away at the door of the American dream—and so she keeps her mouth shut.
    Then she puts a finger on another name in Pepper’s class list and has begun to frown expressively—as though this one, well, this one needs no comment—when Sibyl appears in thedoorway and starts apologizing in a way that makes everyone look at her at once.
    “Sorry I’m late,” she says. “I wish I could say that it’s not my fault. But I’m just such a goddamn mess today….”
    “What’s the matter, honey?” Pepper says.
    “Oh, it’s nothing, really.” Sibyl lets her handbag drop on the table, and it sounds like it’s filled with marbles. Her colleagues imagine that the inside of her purse must look like a cosmetics counter when you bring it all out into the open—even though Sibyl never seems to have a moment to put any of it on. Lonnie has observed her applying lipstick as though it were a timed event. Especially now that Sibyl has been separated for half a year and her divorce is imminent, as her colleagues know, she sometimes looks at the makeup in her purse with a smirk of resentment, as though the rouges and eyeliners themselves are responsible, at least in part, for the elaborate masquerade her marriage has been for ten years. “I’m just being silly. That’s all. The first day always sneaks up on me.”
    “Sure, of course,” Pepper says, shifting into demonstrative concern. “But you’re okay, right? I mean, it’s nothing to do with…”
    This is the first time that Mrs. Mayhew raises