The Crane Wife Read Online Free Page B

coming in here and telling me how their little Timmy or Stephanie or
Frederico
’ – she said the name so scornfully even George knew she was talking about Freddie Gomez, the only other boy who’d gone up to higher-grade reading groups with him and who smelled eye-wateringly of soap – ‘is special and talented and God’s gift to third grade knowledge.’
    His father cleared his throat. ‘We’re not the ones saying it, though,’ he said. ‘The
school
–’
    ‘Oh, the
school
, is it?’ Miss Jones leaned forward, coming nearly all the way across her desk. ‘Let me tell you something,
Mister
Duncan,’ she said. ‘These boys and girls are six and seven and eight years old. What do they know about anything except how to tie their shoes and not wet themselves when the bell goes? And not that all of them are so great at
that
, I can tell you.’
    ‘Well, what does that have to do with the price of milk?’ his mother said, in a tense, strangled tone that made George’s ears prick. She was a nervous lady, his mother. She’d clearly been thrown off balance by Miss Jones’s forthrightness, her volume, her – let’s face it – blackness, and already he could see that things weren’t going to go well. He went back to colouring every quadrant of Snoopy the same shade of green.
    It was just this moment when Miss Jones made her mistake. ‘Now, you listen to me, Mrs Duncan,’ she said, and she stuck out her finger and shook it in George’s mother’s face. ‘Just because your boy doesn’t eat paste doesn’t mean he’s gifted.’
    George’s mother’s eyes never left the end of the dark brown finger wagging so close to her nose, following it as it bobbed up and down in righteous instruction, invading George’s mother’s space in a way that even George found obscurely upsetting, and just as George’s father said, ‘Now, you listen here,’ in his authoritative, construction foreman voice-of-doom, George’s mother leaned forward and bit the end of Miss Jones’s finger, snapping it hard between her teeth and hanging on for a surprising second or two before all the screaming started.
    Now this story, when George told it, always made him nervous in that it gave slightly the wrong impression of his mother. Biting an obnoxious teacher’s finger – though not drawing blood and not quite so painfully that Miss Jones couldn’t be talked out of an assault charge by a principal who acted for all the world as if this wasn’t the first biting-of-Miss-Jones incident to come across his desk – could easily be read as a heroic action. His mother was the star of this story, and why shouldn’t she be? As family anecdotes went, it was a corker, retold with gales of laughter and at frequent request.
    ‘And I thought,’ his mother would say, blushing with horror and delight that every eye in the room was on her, ‘someone’s gonna bite that finger one of these days. So why not today?’
    But George knew, really knew in his heart, that the biting wasn’t the act of someone mastering a situation and bringing it to a close with the perfect outrageous resolution. His mother had
actually
bitten Miss Jones because of a certain detachment from reality, a certain panicky falling-away from things. She was anxious to the point of brittle, like a champagne flute – when, age nineteen, George finally saw his first champagne flute – that needed wrapping and packing away. His father performed this function, taking care of every emergency, handling every possible crisis. His love of his wife – and George was quite certain that he loved her – took the form of ongoing protection that perhaps, in the end, did her more harm than good.
    When Miss Jones waggled the finger, George was pretty sure his mother hadn’t felt insulted, she’d felt
attacked
, as if the world was tipping beneath her, and she’d bitten Miss Jones not as an act of triumphant assertion, but because she was trying to
hold on
. By her literal teeth. Life was