The Last First Day Read Free Page B

last long. And the very rich and the very poor were rarely good bedfellows, Ruth thought, no matter what notions Peter cherished about empathy and civic duty.
    Peter was now seventy-six years old, Ruth just a couple of months behind him.
    He had so far resisted retiring, but it was only a matter of time, Ruth knew, before something unpleasant happened. She felt that time fast approaching.
    And then where would they go?
    What would Peter, who had worked every day, his whole adult life, for this school,
do
with himself?
    He was old—they were
both
old—and she saw that the boys were not as impressed by him as they had been back in the day. He still loped around the classroom firing questions at the students, though now hobbled by his bad knees and much changed in appearance from his younger self, worn down by age and disease. But his enthusiasm was more performance than it once had been, she knew. He’d been uncannily good with names when he was younger—amazing really, Ruth had thought—but more often now he relied on old-fashioned endearments: Sport, Champ, Buster, Pal. Peter’s reputation—a thing separate from Peter himself, she thought, like the story of a great king—held him aloft in the minds of most boys. But one day last year she had seen a boy walking behind Peter and imitating him, swinginghis arms ape-like and lurching like Quasimodo. The impression had not been inaccurate, and Ruth had felt sick with pain and anger. It had taken all her restraint not to go up and grab the boy by the arm and slap his cheek.
    That night, she and Peter had quarreled—her fault, as usual. She had picked a fight over something inconsequential, her anger easier to bear than her grief.
    She hated that he gave off a whiff of injury, like a weakened animal being tracked in the woods. She hated the complicated misery of her pity.
    Still he wouldn’t agree to retire.
    He could not even talk about it.
    And she, because she loved him, could not talk about it, either.
    After her lunch, she went outside to weed the flower bed in front of the house. It was warm for September, the air still and the birds quiet in the trees. It was as if the storms to the west were attracting all the energy in the atmosphere, creating around them a perimeter of unnatural calm. She realized that she had spoken to no one all morning. The telephone had not rung.
    When she struggled to her feet at last following two hours on her knees, her back was so stiff she could scarcely stand upright.
    It seemed an indulgence in the daylight hours, but she went indoors and ran a hot bath anyway. She had time before dinner, she thought. The day’s long silence had made her uneasy,and the evening ahead would be tiring. There was no harm in a quick bath.
    Yet she soaked in the tub for a long while, trickling water over the chilled atolls of her knees. Big, doleful things her kneecaps appeared from that perspective, her chin held just above the water. Six feet tall once, her legs powerful from years of regular walking, she had lost height as she had aged. After going through menopause, she had shrunk a quarter-inch or more every year, and she had grown heavier, too, pounds now apparently impossible to shed. When she folded laundry, she hurried to put away her underclothes, so distressingly large.
    Addressing her image in the mirror directly was all right; it was odd, how one could look without seeing. But it was unpleasant to accidentally glimpse her reflection in mirrors or store windows, like a creature stumbling into civilization from the wilderness.
Hulking
was the word that came to mind
    Her old friend Dr. Wenning, a doctor and a professor of psychiatry for whom Ruth had worked part-time while Peter was at Yale, had despaired over Ruth’s posture.
    Ruth, her back rounded, had sat at a wobbly three-legged table, typing Dr. Wenning’s lecture and patient notes from yellow sheets covered with her illegible scrawl.
    Do not
slump
so, Ruth! Dr. Wenning would cry. In her