The Crazy School by Cornelia Read Read Free Book Online Page A

the United States . . .”
    Dean looked at me. “Bunny?”
    I held up a hand for quiet.
    “. . . have reported unbelievable damage to infrastructure, with collapsed bridges and freeways, fi res, shattered buildings, gaping cracks in roads, and landslides . . .”
    Dean’s guy at the Southern Pacifi c called the next morning.
    Damage reports were still coming in, but word was there’d be no budget for any new purchase orders.
    “A year, at least,” he’d said, “maybe two. Awful damn sorry to leave you swinging.”
    Dean was stoic about it. “I can always work construction.”
    The next week General Electric shut down their Pittsfi eld transformer plant, cutting loose some nine thousand factory workers who all decided to work construction.
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    Dean looked for work every day, telling me each night how many hundreds of people had showed up for the same jobs he’d circled in the want ads: welder, mechanic, Sheetrock hanger.
    He’d graduated summa cum laude from Syracuse and had experience as a stockbroker, too, but the competition for white-collar work was even fi ercer. The other guys were local, he wasn’t.
    “Look,” I said, “we’re okay. Our rent’s not much. I’m making decent money at the school.”
    But I’d married a man who started working twelve-hour shifts the summer he was fi ve years old. He could build or fi x just about anything, from cars to train engines to houses. Now Dean was stuck pacing around our apartment while I freaked out at Santangelo. He’d rebuilt the vacuum cleaner three times already. The suction was fantastic.
    A month into his search for work, stoic was giving way to cranky, with scattered showers of bitter. He’d start rattling the Berkshire Eagle ’s employment pages every day at dawn. “Bunch of listings for goddamn boutiques . . . part-time goddamn real estate . . .”
    I kept waiting for the ax-fall moment when he’d fi nally come right out and say it was all my fault for dragging him to the Berkshires, that we had to go back to Syracuse.
    But so far he’d just look up from the paper and apologize for being whiny. “I go nuts with nothing to do, Bunny. I’m not wired for leisure.”
    “Maybe a temp agency,” I’d said last week. “Get your foot in the door somewhere?”
    “Sure,” he said. “I’ll start making calls.”
    Please God, let his interview today have garnered something. I can’t go back to that place, to freezing in the dark.
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    The ground was cold under the grapevines. I shivered and turned toward Lulu.
    She took another deep drag off her Camel. Blew it out slowly.
    “So. Any idea what all that was about with Mooney and the window?”
    “Actually, yeah. But we can’t tell anyone for a few days. They made me promise.”
    “I give you my word of honor,” she said. “Spill.”
    “Fay’s knocked up.”
    “Oh, those poor kids. Jesus Christ ,” said Lulu, stubbing out her smoke and burying it next to an arbor post.
    I did the same, then lit us two more.
    The faculty meeting was in Dhumavati’s apartment, long after dark.
    Lots of decaf. A platter of carob brownies.
    We’d been there two hours already, what with everyone feeling compelled to weigh in on Mooney before we could get to the business part.
    Thursday-night summary: how classes had gone this week, which kids were struggling, which kids each of us wanted to give a gold-star commendation in the next morning’s announcements.
    When it came around the circle to me, I said Wiesner was really pulling his weight.
    “I’m very encouraged,” I said. “He’s polite, he’s on time, he’s pitching in after class.”
    I left out the part about his comments on the view of my ass.
    Mindy giggled, her hand up coyly to her mouth.
    “ What? ” I said.
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    She glanced across the circle to Gerald.
    There was an air of prissiness about