“I’m looking for some friendly faces,” he says, popping the lid off his coffee and blowing on it. “Some students—former students, only the brightest ones, just to, you know—and I’m not saying you think one way or the other about my situation, but the idea—my lawyer’s really—was to have a few voices saying—not denying or defending, just saying—that okay, hey, is this guy perfect? No, not by a long shot, but what he also happens to be is a damn good high school physics teacher. So okay.” He takes a sip of the coffee. “So that’s what I’m asking.”
“Mr. Menninger—”
“Please,” he says, reaching across the table and touching my elbow. “Brian.”
“Brian,” I say, pulling back. “I don’t—”
“Listen, do I need to tell you this? You weren’t—I mean, I reached out to a bunch of other students before you. I guess I’m kind of desperate? Ha ha. Not many takers, is what I’m saying. So far it’s ah, let’s see. No one and possibly you. Of course my lawyer was thinking it would help if it were, you know, more recent students. Don’t think that because I asked other kids first that means you weren’t a top student because obviously you were. I mean, c’mon.” He points through the window to the car I arrived in, my mom’s new silver Audi. “Big shot. You know, I see so many kids and it’s always obvious who are the special ones. They’re just different. Destined for bigger things.”
I can tell by the way he’s talking that he’s waiting for me to cut him off or say thank you, but the thing is, I didn’t have Mr. Menninger for physics in high school. He didn’t coach any teams I was on and he didn’t run any of my extracurriculars. In fact, the only direct interaction I can recall having with him prior to meeting at this Starbucks was during my first week of high school, fifteen years ago.
Mr. Menninger was supervising the lunchroom. He stood guarding the doors that went out to the courtyard. He kept flipping his walkie talkie in the air and catching it behind his back.
I didn’t know his name, but I wanted to go home.
“Um, sir?” I said after dumping my tray in the garbage. “I’m feeling pretty nauseous, I think?”
Mr. Menninger glanced briefly my way and then kept flipping the walkie talkie. “No, you’re not,” he said.
“Um, I’m not?”
Mr. Menninger hooked the walkie on his belt. “Well, I suppose you could be, but I highly doubt it. You see, nauseous means you make others sick. Like, if I were to look at you and feel queasy, then yes, you would be nauseous. But here I am looking at you and I feel fine. So you might think you’re nauseous, but I suspect that you’re actually nauseated, is that right? Tummy hurts?”
“I guess so?”
“See?” he said. “I further suspect you’d like to visit the nurse. For that you will need a pass.” But then his walkie crackled and Mr. Menninger turned his back to answer. Still talking into the radio, he opened the door, walked across the courtyard, and disappeared around a corner. I waited in the doorway until another teacher asked what I was doing out of my seat.
It ends there, my memory. My only one of Mr. Menninger.
Best guess on why he’s tracked me down is that Mr. Menninger has mistaken me for Derek, my best friend in high school, who did have Mr. Menninger for physics and who did have a lot of trouble initially and who did receive a fair bit of personal attention from Mr. Menninger during our junior year and who ended up not just acing the AP exam, but unlocking something significant inside himself and for that reason, Derek pursued the sciences in college—computers, I’m pretty sure—and after graduating, when Derek joined the Navy, his zeal and discipline helped distinguish his service as a helicopter pilot attached to a squadron that went on top secret missions around the world.
The reason I know this is because his mom told my mom, and my mom told me. Dinner last Sunday. My first after moving back.
“What are you trying to say?” I asked her.
“Well, I’m just saying how funny it is how you boys turned out so different.”
“Not so different.”
“Pretty different, I would say. Especially considering how you two did basically everything the same for so long.”
“Okay, well, not everything.”
“Pretty much everything!”
“Our hair, you mean?”
“Oh my god, your hair!” My mom threw her head back and laughed.
In high school, Derek had piles and piles of curly brown hair—whereas I did not—and at the time, for whatever reason, one of the critical yet unspoken conditions of our best friendship was to endeavor to look as similar as possible. We had the same American flag t-shirt and the same clunky skate shoes and the same braided belt and the same single-strap black backpack and I begged my mom for a solid summer to let me get a perm so we could have the same hair too and against her better judgment—to hear her tell it now—she let me. Looking back, I can see that okay, sure, I looked completely insane, but more importantly to me—at least to the tenth grade version of me—the day after the salon, at the mall with Derek, someone at the food court mistook us for brothers.
Mr. Menninger continues to ramble in front of me and rips his napkin into little shreds. The more he talks about what it would mean if I spoke on his behalf, the more certain I am that he has me confused for Derek. “Before we get too far along,” I say, stopping him mid-sentence. “I think I should—”
“What, you too?” Mr. Menninger crosses his arms. “You want the gossip column version of events? Well, that’s not happening. Sorry. It’s my personal life, dammit. That’s what this whole thing is about. My personal life. And I get it. I do. I get why Mary Anne is gone and why my kids are—well, who knows. But all that is my personal life. I mean, why should it matter to the school board that the person I’m sleeping with isn’t necessarily the same person I’m married to?”
“Well,” I say. “When it’s a student—”
“Former student! Former student!” Mr. Menninger looks over his shoulder and then points at me. “And here’s something that’s not in that article on STLtoday dot com or wherever you’ve read about this. Do you know how I met Mary Anne, my wife? No? Well, she was my teacher back in Berkeley. Not a professor. A TA, I guess they call them. This was the early eighties too. Quite the scandal. Now, I’m not saying this gives me a psychological predisposition or anything—except, hang on, maybe I am. Maybe that’s something I need to be drawing more attention to. Context.”
“I don’t think—”
“No, you’re absolutely right,” Mr. Menninger says, rubbing his chin. “What happened with Shannon is something I regret, really I do. I need you to know that. It was a mistake. It was inappropriate. That’s the word everyone keeps using, by the way. You know why? Because they can’t say illegal. Because it’s not. In this state, an individual who reaches the age of consent may choose to sleep with her old physics teacher if she so wishes. Not that I’m so—well. You get it.”
“I just don’t know if I’m—”
“Look, Patrick, you wanna know the truth? They’ve got torches and pitchforks ready. I’m serious. Parents are revolting.” Mr. Menninger drinks the last of his coffee and makes a face. “I know it’s not a hearing. I know it’s an execution. I just thought someone would say something. That someone would want to.”
“I would, Mr. Menninger, really—”
“You would? Do you mean that? Because—God. I just. Oh man. That’s great. That’s just great, Patrick. So you’re gonna go right before me, okay? The board president will ask if anyone has a statement or something to that effect and you’ll just go up to the mic and say your thing, cool? Doesn’t have to be more than a few sentences. Obviously the more detail and emotion you use the better, I think. Up to you, of course. Just—just thank you, okay? You don’t know—well, I told you how much it means. So okay. Thank you.”
He puts out his hand to seal the deal and there are these cold tingles near the base of my skull that I recognize as the unique combination of pity and shame and I know shaking his hand will make me complicit somehow but there I am, shaking it anyway, feeling Mr. Menninger’s dry paper palm against my own and the only thing left to do is ask him where I should be, on what day, and what time he needs me to be there.
◆
I’ve been gone too long with the Audi and my mom is waiting for me in the driveway.
“Here’s my deal,” she says, taking the keys. “I don’t want to have a big thing every time you take the car. Let’s not go back to that. So here’s some growth. It occurred to me as I was waiting and texting and calling you that I didn’t mention I was showing the Wilshire Terrace place to the Gaffneys today, did I? No, I didn’t. No, of course not. Because it’s been a pretty long time since I’ve had to tell someone else what my plans are, right? Same as you. Know what? I think this is one of our classic adjustment periods. So I’m in a rush now and maybe it looks like I’m frustrated or maybe I am just a little, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not very, very happy that you’re here with me now, okay?”
In the drawer with the stamps and paper clips and packs of gum, I find my mom’s old address book. Derek’s mom answers on the second ring and gives me his email. I use the old computer in the living room to send him a quick message and he responds before my mom is back from her appointment with the Gaffneys.
Hey man, he writes. What are you doing right now?
◆
On the phone, Derek explains that The Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center—or AUTEC as Derek says everyone calls it—is located on Andros Island, which is somewhere in the Bahamas, about 300 miles south of Florida’s coast and the Department of Defense chose the spot due to its proximity to a two thousand-meter deep flat-bottomed trench that’s surrounded on most sides by shoals and reefs and other smaller islands, making it the perfect sonar environment for submarines to practice good-guy-vs-bad-guy scenarios which would otherwise be disturbed by ambient ocean noise. Derek asks me to guess the name of the trench, but before I can think of anything he tells me it’s called The Tongue of the Ocean.
“And it’s called that because of—well, you can probably guess that too,” Derek says.
“Um,” I say. “Maybe—uh, salt content?”
There is a pause and then some noises on Derek’s end. “It’s just shaped like a tongue, man.”
“Ah.”
“The shape of the trench. Looks like a tongue. I mean, topographically.”
“Right, right.”
“Salt content. That’s just too—hey, what should I expect? Mom said you’re some writer now.”
I shift position and try to find my place among the decorative pillows on the living room couch. “No, that’s—that’s not correct. I’m an underwriter. Or used to be. For loans. Banks. It’s pretty boring.”
“You wanna talk boring? We were only supposed to be out here for a week on this training thing with the submarine folks but something happened mechanically on those big—hey you ever see those big suckers? C130s? You know the aircraft? Well, something broke—hard down, they call it—and now we’re just stuck out here. And yeah, they’ll fix it eventually, but it’s been ten days since we were supposed to be home and this is a small island. Like, there’s nothing to do here but get fucked up—and Patrick, I mean fucked up.”
I am back in the food court the day after my perm. The Sbarro’s cashier points at me: What does he want? Him, your brother. Yeah, ain’t y’all brothers?
“Like, there’s just the one bar here, right? Normal base you’d have one for officers and one for enlisted. But here there’s just this old dancehall. Cheap booze. Right on the beach. And every day—starting around 16 or 17 hundred—that’s where everyone goes. Everyone, man. And that’s the trouble, really.” Derek stops. “Hey, that’s my beer. Hey Anderson. No. Yours is over there. Yeah. Asshole.” A pause. “Okay, what was I saying?”
Him, your brother. “The trouble,” I say.
“Right,” Derek says. “This thing last night. One of the new pilots—Danny O, we call him, because there’s so many Dannys. Anyway, we’re all at the bar and it’s late and everyone is blackout or on their way. And then this young girl, an aircrewman, starts dancing. I guess you’d call it a strip tease or whatever. Everyone is watching her. Even me. Everyone, that is, except Danny O. He comes over to a bunch of us and starts on about how someone should take charge, put a stop to it. That as officers we should be repulsed by this kind of thing. Can you believe that? He says that we evolved as a species to find this display of promiscuity repellent—and Patrick? That is about when I stopped listening. I grab him by the shoulders and say, ‘Danny O, goddamnit, pull yourself together.’ You know what he says? He’s almost crying and he looks at me and goes, ‘I think I love her, bro.’ I know—I know! So I just go, ‘Sorry man,’ and punch him straight in the face.”
“You what?”
“There’s worse stuff going on, I promise you. Hang on, Patrick.” He pauses. “What? Yeah, a buddy of mine.” Another pause. “Huh? No, high school.” Derek laughs. “Yeah, big time. Okay sorry about that. So what’s up man? Don’t even know how long it’s been.”
I tell him that however long it’s been, it’s been too long. I say that I’m back home for a little without saying why and then adding it quickly like I almost forgot, ask if he remembers a teacher from our high school named Mr. Menninger.
“Remember him? I know about that whole thing. I mean, I’ve heard from him. No, really. Found me online a couple weeks ago. He’s going around begging people to say he was this great teacher or whatever so he doesn’t lose his pension.”
“Oh right.” The smell of the mall lingers from my memory. Yeah, ain’t y’all brothers? “What did you say?”
“What did I say? Nothing. I didn’t say anything. Oh you know what I did do though? I went and blocked him. Makes me sick to my stomach. I mean, I used to go to him after school—yeah, you remember—and we’d be in his classroom alone. Like, no one coming in. I want to say that he’d close the door too. I think I definitely remember that. Who knows, man. Who knows what could’ve happened if—you know what? I don’t even want to think about it.”
“I heard—”
“I heard lots of things. Boys, girls, babysitters—some sick stuff. Are you in the—actually, be grateful you’re not in this Facebook group. You’ll sleep easier at night. Because if a fraction of this stuff is—well, let’s just say they may have caught him with a student but—”
“Former student though, right?”
“Former, yeah. By about six weeks.” Derek’s tone shifts gear. “It was the summer after she graduated. He was grooming her. Jesus, Patrick.”
I pull out the sticky note where I’ve written the details of Mr. Menninger’s hearing. “Devil’s advocate, I guess.”
“Hang on,” Derek says. “Okay, you’re off speaker. Listen man, I gotta go but hey. I wanted to say something. I’m not gonna pretend like I don’t know about your situation. My mom told me. Sounds like some dirty business. I don’t know what I’d do if my wife—I mean, I know you’ve never met them, but Diana and the twins, they’re why I do what I do, you know? What I’m saying is that I understand. And then Mom said you had a freak out at work or freaked someone out at work, or whatever. I just want to say that I get it, okay? You probably have other folks to talk to, but I was thinking, you know? If you ever wanted to, you could talk to me. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to say. That I’m here for you.”
I’ve been unfolding and refolding the sticky note. My hands are damp and the ink is smeared. Derek’s voice glitches and warps. “Sorry, you cut out,” Derek says after a few seconds, now sounding like he’s at the end of a long hallway. “What did you say?”
The lights from my mom’s new Audi flash through the bay windows of the living room. “Nothing,” I say, putting the sticky note back in my pocket. “I didn’t say anything.”
◆
Across the escalators from the arcade and down the corridor from the movie theater is the food court of Crestwood Mall. The pizza they serve disgusts my mom. She refuses to be within the radius of its smell. As a result, Sbarro’s occupies a near occult fascination in my teenage mind. Whenever possible, I am compelled by a force I do not understand to eat there.
Standing in line the day after the salon, the chemicals from my new perm mix with the grease in the air in front of me. Derek orders pepperoni.
“What does your brother want?” the Sbarro’s cashier asks him.
“Who?” Derek says.
“Him, your brother.” She points to me.
“My brother?” Derek says, confused.
“Yeah,” the cashier says. “Ain’t y’all brothers?”
Derek turns around to look at me and for an instant, I see it. The same face my mom reserves for the pizza we’re about to eat. There and then gone. A nanosecond, if that long. I lay awake at night as an adult man in the bed I grew up in and ask myself if it was there at all.
Derek punches my shoulder in the memory and laughs. “Yeah, sure,” he tells the Sbarro’s employee. “Course we’re brothers.”
◆
On the day of the hearing, I am sitting next to Mr. Menninger on the chairs outside the conference room. The school board is inside but his lawyer is running late. Mr. Menninger is hunched over, elbows on his knees, typing something on his phone. He occasionally mutters goddamnit.
When the lawyer finally arrives, she’s followed by a wobbly child hidden inside a big puffy coat. The lawyer takes off her gloves and sets down her briefcase and tote bag and backpack. She apologizes to Mr. Menninger. There appears to be a pen mark on her cheek. She shakes my hand. Her name is Paula.
“And this,” she says, putting a hand on the head of the boy in the puffy coat, “is Lionel. Say hello, Lionel. Oh, c’mon buddy. No? Ah, that’s okay. He’s not—well, that’s why we’re a little late this morning. Not feeling so great, huh bud? No, we’re a little under the weather.” She turns to me. “You can keep an eye on him, right? For just a second?” Lionel slumps against the wall, playing with a toy banana. “Lionel, this is Mr. Stenhouse and he’s—uh, he’s going to tell you a story, okay? But Mommy’s coming right back. Mommy’s just going right in there, okay sweetie?” Paula takes a deep breath. “I will explain the delay,” she says to Mr. Menninger, straightening her blazer. “Don’t say a thing.”
The click of the door closing echoes down the hallway.
I watch Lionel bend the arms and legs of his toy banana. “Who’s your friend?”
He scrunches up his mouth and looks down. “Um,” he says. “Bananaman.”
“Hi Bananaman.”
“Mr. Bananaman.”
“Oh right,” I say. “Mr. Bananaman.”
Lionel tries to get the toy to stand on its own. It teeters then falls over.
“What can Mr. Bananaman do?”
He holds the toy out and shakes it around. “He can dance.”
“Wow. You’re right. He can.”
Lionel looks at me and then back at Mr. Bananaman. He gets up and holds out the toy.
“You want me to have it?”
“Hold it.”
I take the toy. He sits in front of me. “Can you say me a story on him?”
“About Mr. Bananaman?”
Lionel nods.
I look at the door to the conference room. “Okay, well. Maybe just a short one. So uh Bananaman—right, okay. Mr. Bananaman. He’s dancing—he’s a dancer, okay?” I hold the toy out and shake it like he did. “And he does such a good job dancing that he gets to dance in the, uh, the world championship of dancing, right?”
Lionel nods. “But then he gots in trouble.”
“He did? Oh right. That’s right. He did.” I look the toy in the eye. “Mr. Bananaman got in very big trouble. Because, well. Hm.”
Lionel raises his hand. “Maybe because Mr. Bananaman is sick and no sick kids can come to school sometimes?”
There is an exchange of muffled voices coming from the conference room. “Is that why he had to come with your mom today?”
Lionel nods.
“How does he feel now?”
“Um, he feels okay now, I think,” Lionel says. His arms retreat into the sleeves of his big puffy coat. “But sometimes? At school? He gets really feeling very sick sometimes.” He pulls his knees inside the coat too. He ducks his head so the collar covers half his face.
“That used to kind of happen to me too,” I say.
Lionel sinks further into his coat so all that’s sticking out is his hair at the top and his sneakers at the bottom. “Does it still?” he asks from inside.
Mr. Bananaman is made from a kind of light foam plastic, one that can bend in all ways, be compressed into any shape, and then, upon release, slowly returns to its original form. I give it a squeeze. “Not really.”
The door to the conference room opens. Paula sticks her head out. “We’re ready to start,” she says.
“I thought—do you want to talk first?”
She shakes her head. “No time.”
“Should someone maybe be out here for—”
“He’s fine. Lionel, baby, are you okay out here alone for two seconds? Let’s go Mr. Stenhouse.”
I stand up. I follow Paula into the conference room and sit down where she points. The school board president explains why we’re here. They call my name. Mr. Menninger turns around and gives me a thumbs up. I walk to the spot where they’ve set up a microphone and everyone’s looking at me, except not like how I pictured it, not like that at all. They’re whispering and pointing to something by my waist. I follow their eyes to discover I’m still holding Mr. Bananaman. Really squeezing him. Face bulging. Limbs twisted.
“Ha ha,” I say.
Paula comes to take it from me, but I can’t let go for some reason. She’s saying, Mr. Stenhouse, please. I’m trying to relax my grip but it just won’t work. Paula snatches Mr. Bananaman away. Everyone’s saying my name. This is what I was waiting for. A moment to turn it all around. To prove them all wrong. I put a finger up and smile to let them know that I’m okay, that I just need two seconds. My eyes connect with Mr. Menninger’s from across the conference room for the briefest of moments and what surfaces in my mind is the memory of him in the cafeteria, flipping the walkie talkie and catching it behind his back. But here I am looking at you and I feel fine, he says to the boy in front of him who just wants to go home.
I take a step back from the microphone, put my hands on my hips, and bend slightly at the waist. With my eyes closed, I take a deep breath in, and, as quietly as possible, vomit a column of gray slime onto the patterned carpet of the conference room.