The Uncoupling Read Online Free PDF Page A

SPECIALTY ITEMS, Main Street was quaint and New Englandy, with a cosmopolitan slant. There was an excellent bookstore, Chapter and Verse, at a moment when bookstores around the country were making way for cell-phone stores. (“ Make Way for Cell-Phone Stores, a children’s book by Robert McCloskey,” said the wary owner.)
    Everyone in town went out for dinner once in a while to Peppercorns. When the economy began to sputter and tank, the restaurant turned quiet, nearly empty, and Dory worried that it would close. She couldn’t bear to lose Peppercorns, with its baskets of snowy, soft rolls and its long, looming salad bar that made you remember that there were choices in life. But then business picked up a bit, and everyone came to Peppercorns a little more frequently, sitting with tall, sturdy menus in front of their faces once again. Being a teacher at a restaurant in the town where you lived was a little like being a TV star, as opposed to a movie star, at a restaurant. A tenth-grade lacrosse player from Elro sitting with his parents might raise a hand from the next table, and his parents would glance over with shy smiles, and maybe the father would lift his glass of beer and say, “Here’s to a teacher who deserves an A!” The son would be humiliated by his father’s weird and pointless remark. But it had no doubt sprung from true emotion, for all that parents ever wanted, really, was for you to love their child the way they did.
    Robby, Dory, and Willa Lang sometimes sat in the restaurant near the wood-burning oven in the back, and while the heat warmed their necks a little too strongly, and kitchen workers shoved flatbreads in and out on paddles, they traded anecdotes from the day at school. All around them, other families did the same. Later on, after they came home again, Robby and Dory would get undressed for the night. Every so often, maybe once or twice a week—not that Dory ever counted back then—one of them would turn to the other with sudden interest, or with the wish to create interest.
    “You,” Robby would say, “are just who I was looking for.”
    “Oh yeah. A wiped-out English teacher who’s headed for perimenopause in a bullet train.”
    Sometimes, if he was standing in his untucked work shirt and pants, she might grab his belt by its buckle and pull it through the loops. Then they’d find themselves on the bed with the light blazing and their daughter awake but preoccupied down the hall—doing her homework or in touch with friends, though rarely on e-mail, for that was too slow; and less and less frequently on the phone, for that form of communication was apparently fading away. Or maybe she was sending a text message or going to some random website or was off once again into the depths of good old Farrest, all the while floating in her ergonomic desk chair like a dental patient in space.
    The new drama teacher Fran Heller had apparently come to Stellar Plains from a high school in the more conventional, malldefined suburb of Cobalt, about twenty miles away. “I can’t even get a new language lab,” Señor Mandelbaum had complained when they first learned about the new hire, “and they bring in a drama teacher? I mean, come on.”
    “Oh, Mandelbaum, stop,” said Leanne Bannerjee.
    “Leanne, aren’t you supposed to want to hear my problems? Isn’t that your job?”
    “If you were an adolescent I would,” she said. “But you’re not. And don’t you like being in a school that cares about the arts? Or do you want this place to be like so many other places in America? Do you want everybody here to be the same as they are all over the country?”
    No one said what they were thinking, which was that, of course, despite the semi-specialness of the town, you couldn’t make people more unusual than they actually were. The teenagers here had a sameness about them that seemed universal. For one thing, this whole generation of kids had fully integrated sex into their lives. Until it was