The Uncoupling Read Online Free PDF

called to the attention of the principal, Leanne’s secret lover Gavin McCleary, two girls had been wearing T-shirts to school that read SLUT I and SLUT II. When brought into McCleary’s office, the girls insisted that the administration had failed to see the irony embedded in the word “slut.” The principal asked them to explain it to him, but neither girl could. “No offense, Mr. McCleary, but why do you wear that tie?” asked one of them. “It has little boxes inside boxes on it,” she pointed out. “What do you mean to say by that?”
    He dismissed them quickly; the T-shirts never reappeared at school, and neither did the tie. Young people today, everyone was told, hooked up with one another—“ hooking up ,” a phrase that, if put into quotation marks, made the person referring to it seem like an old, tragic loser whom the world had left behind—but if not put into quotation marks, made the person seem to have accepted the concept of hooking up fully and completely.
    Bev Cutler, the fifty-two-year-old guidance counselor with the well-tended honeyed hair, expensive linen jackets, and appealing face, but, over time, the very large body, sometimes held court around the faculty cafeteria table. She discussed the subject of hooking up in a voice meant to impart something sorrowful, and several teachers would have much to add about “the way the world is now.” This conversation usually was accompanied by meditative chewing, and a shaking of heads.
    “In the past,” Bev had said at lunch recently, “sex just seemed like it was so much more extracurricular. It was almost like Model U.N.—something that a number of them signed up to do after the school day was over. It served no actual purpose, but they enjoyed it: ‘I’m Burma, and I object!’ And that was fine, of course, except for the occasional pregnancy—remember Cami Fennig and Jason Manousis?”
    Everyone nodded solemnly, including Dory. “God, them,” said Mandelbaum. “I would never have thought of them again in my life if you hadn’t mentioned them. It’s been what, four years? Five? What happened to them?”
    “They broke up after the baby was born,” Bev Cutler said. “Jason Manousis joined the military and went to Afghanistan. He was blinded in one eye and sent home.”
    “Oh my God, that’s right,” said Dory.
    “There was a fund for him,” said Bev. “Ed and I contributed.”
    “I do remember this now. It’s so sad,” Mandelbaum said. “And what about the baby?”
    “Joint custody, I heard,” said Bev. “And I swear to you that this next part is true: they named the baby Trivet.”
    “Oh, they did not,” said the music teacher, Ron di Canzio. “You are making it up, Bev. You are embellishing.”
    “Yes, they did,” the guidance counselor insisted. “They apparently thought they were naming it Trevor, or Travis, but they got confused.”
    The teachers often talked in such a free-floating way about their teenaged charges. The students alternately compelled and appalled and bored them. Right now, on the first day of classes in September, there was nothing that needed to be said or done about any particular students, at least not yet. Class lists had been handed out, and all the teachers were busy with the clerical tasks of the new year. The spell would not hit any of the women until December. They went about their business during the day without knowing that at some point in the next couple of months, their sexual lives, their love lives, would be upended. They were as happy as they ever were, happy and preoccupied, simply doing what they were meant to do and not at all anxious or fearful that something important would be stolen from them.
    When the new drama teacher appeared in the doorway of the teachers’ room, Dory Lang got a good, long look at her. There had never been an actual drama teacher at Elro before; in the past, when Robby directed the play, he tended to choose works by Sam Shepard or David Mamet or