Read Hummingbirds for Free Online Page B

for Ted Hughes.
    These women. These girls and their bodies—all buttons and snaps. And their minds, all zippers and hidden pockets.
    He went looking for Ted Hughes after the conversation in the teachers’ lounge among the women who had seen the newteacher’s wide jaw and his nice hair and his ringless finger. He went from room to room, peeking in through the windowed doors and glancing at his colleagues who variously sat or stood or paced at the front of their classrooms, preaching with dictatorial passion or droning on and on with what they believed to be patience. He hated to see these things. Normally he would avert his gaze, avoid feeling that voyeuristic intrusion into the intimate dynamic between teacher and students, especially with the male faculty. It is the same policy he has in the bathroom. Look straight ahead. What happens between a man and a porcelain bowl is none of his business.
    So each time he glanced into a room, he cringed.
    But he loved to see the girls, see them all lined up, their faces lit with choreographed grins. These girls, these women white as marble. What will they ask of him now?
    And it was at the end of the hall on the fourth floor that he finally found Ted Hughes. There he was, standing at the front of the class. There he—
    Now in the window there is a fourth woman, a window dresser, and she begins taking the clothes off one of the mannequins. She’s middle-aged, this window dresser—her hands wrinkled, her knuckles like wooden beads. As he watches her, she handles the garments with the efficiency of a doctor, tossing the old ones over the back of a chair and pulling on the new ones over the inhumanly smooth skin. Skin like an eggshell.
    Finally she notices him standing there and gives him a compassionate look. She seems to be saying something to him through the glass, but he can’t hear her. She tries one more time to communicate and then gives up and settles for a gesture, empathetically rubbing her arms and shivering. Her fingernails are painted red, and her hands are all bone and tendon.
    She has the foreign quality that he finds in all women—a violent landscape of warm flesh. And he suddenly feels the impulse to celebrate her as you would the discovery of a new world, to march his fingers in extravagant parades across her stomach.
    There he was, Binhammer recalls, Ted Hughes, standing at the front of his class. And he was no scarf-clad, pipe-smoking poet laureate, and he did not ripple the air with his complex aura—and there were no girls already slitting their wrists in the front row. But there was something about this Ted Hughes, and for a moment Binhammer did not know what it was. Something familiar moved in him—a shifting in his guts that he had felt before. A daylight sickness that lingers in the head and the throat and the hands and twists itself into a ball.
    Now, on the street behind him, there is the shattering honk of a car horn and then voices—shrill, laughing voices. “Mr. Binhammer! Mr. Binhammer!”
    It’s Dixie Doyle and her friends—Andie, Beth…he doesn’t know all of them. Their faces are framed in the windows of a black town car belonging to one of the girls’ families. Binhammer can see the driver—a man of stolid patience, like a Great Dane enduring the paws of a litter of playful kittens.
    “Mr. Binhammer, do you want a ride?”
    “I’m fine,” he calls to them. A taxi behind the girls’ car begins honking.
    “Are you sure? You’ll get wet.”
    “Really,” he says, and the taxi issues another loud, angry honk. “I’m fine. Thanks anyway….” But the car full of girls is already pulling away from the curb.
    When he turns back the window dresser is gone, and one of the three eyeless witches is dressed in an entirely different outfit.
    Before, when he was standing outside the classroom door, there he was, Ted Hughes. And it was a while before Binhammer recognized him—it wasn’t until the man smiled, a peculiar kind of half smile