During the many revisions of The P.S. Wars, I had to cut out a number of scenes in order to streamline the novel. Here are a few that I particularly hated to see go.
Ethel Benjamin: Quiet Time.
The scrapbooks, nearly all of them, lay sprawled out on the kitchen table. Family, work, school, all exposed to the light again, like newly born spiders. And the yearbooks. All they way back to nineteen seventy-two. She ran her hand gently down the row of spines, forty-four of them, then reached over for the pot and poured herself another cup of tea. Her hand shook slightly but that was only because of the caffeine. Nothing more. Not tonight.
They were all here in front of her. All her children and all of her students. It was odd to think that some of the students from her first year were now old enough to retire. She hadn’t been much older than them when she had first started. Graduated at eighteen forty-four years ago would make them sixty-two years old. My, she thought. And she was only seventy. I might have taught some of their grandchildren. She opened one of the yearbooks, nineteen seventy-nine, and turned to the little section with the senior pictures. There was Alisa Holyfield on the first page she’d turned to. What a beautiful girl. And sweet. She was dead now. Cancer. Cervical cancer. A few years ago. And there was Roscoe Dantoni. That kid had been a royal shit from the first. Not malicious or mean, just full of beans all day long. Was he the one who had put a condom full of water on Principal Vicker’s desk? She couldn’t remember, but she had enjoyed that one; it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. And there was Alex Schwartz, trying to look tough. He’d been a rotten little son of a bitch. Mean. A punk. He’d bully anyone he could, girl or boy, and tried to intimidate everyone he couldn’t beat up.
She always tried to find some redeeming quality in a student and was rarely disappointed. Alex was one of the few that had disappointed her. There was nothing good about him. Nothing. He’d disappeared from school one day during his junior year. No one was quite sure what had become of him, whether he’d moved or been arrested or was a victim of foul play. Sad to say, no one cared too awfully much.
“Ethel?”
She had thought Eric had gone to sleep. He rarely made it past the ten o’clock news anymore.
“I’m in here, Eric.” He came hobbling into the kitchen, favoring that right leg again. He was wearing those pajamas she hated, the ones with the little golf clubs all over it.
“What in God’s name are you still doing up, Ethel? It’s nearly twelve o’clock.”
“Is your arthritis bothering you, dear?”
“A little,” he said, sitting down. He was still a trim man and in good shape for someone his age. You didn’t see too many seventy-four year olds running three miles a day. But his age was finally catching up to him. As it does for all of us, she thought. He had the sciatica, a little bit of the arthritis. Both their memories were nothing like they used to be. But Eric still took good care of himself. Not like some of their friends and ex-colleagues who let themselves go to hell in their respective hand baskets. No, Eric still kept his mustache, now a silky white—very attractive, she thought—neatly trimmed and had his hair cut every other week. He looked better than many men half his age. Like Dave Bell. That boy had better be careful; if he looks like shit now, she thought, where’s he going to be in ten years?
“What are you up to, Ethel?” he asked, pulling a book off the pile.
“Just looking at some of the old scrapbooks and such,” she said, “and a few of the yearbooks.”
“Look at Emily in this picture,” he said, pointing at a photo of their youngest daughter. “What was she here, four?”
“Four or five,” said Ethel. “I remember that little jumper. My mother gave it to us for Christmas.”
“Yes,” he said, pushing his glasses up, “I remember that Christmas. Molly was collecting those American Girl dolls.”
Ethel nodded, smiling. “She loved those dolls, didn’t she?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “We kept them, didn’t we?”
“She took them for Olivia.” Olivia was the first, and most spoiled, of Molly’s three girls.
“Isn’t she a little old to be playing with dolls?”
“Let me think,” said Ethel, taking a sip of tea. “She would be sixteen now. Yes, that is a little old to be playing with dolls.”
Eric chuckled and then picked up the picture of Emily.
“Was that about the time she was diagnosed?”
“She was five and the doctors found out in March, so, yes, it was shortly after that picture was taken.”
He nodded, rubbing his thumb on the photograph.
“Those were tough times. I thought we were going to lose her, Ethel.” There was a catch in his voice. She reached over and grasped his hand.
It was funny; most sorrow and grief faded with time, but whenever she remembered the ordeal with Emily, the doctor, the surgeries, the chemo—that was the worst—it was like it had happened yesterday. Sometimes she dreamed it was still happening and would wake up gasping. Cancer was bad enough for an adult, but how do you explain any of that to a five-year old? And her sisters. Molly had been ten and was able to understand, but Debby had only had been seven and resented all the extra attention Emily was getting. She had started acting out in school.
“Emily called the day before yesterday,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Eric shrugged. “You were working. I would’ve told you, but it slipped my mind.” He stood and limped over to the liquor cart. He picked up a bottle of scotch and poured himself a generous portion. Ethel watched him but said nothing.
“How is she?” she asked as Eric sat back down.
“Good. She’s the lead chair for a litigation that’s coming up.” He shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “Some product liability case.”
Ethel smiled. She knew that Eric knew every detail of every one of Emily’s cases. What she didn’t tell him, he would research. She rarely asked for advice anymore—she had been practicing ten years—but he still wanted to keep his counsel available. She had always been his favorite. The cancer had made him—and her—overprotective for a time, but Emily had asserted her independence in middle school. She talked them into getting a special prosthetic so she could join the swimming team. Her back fin, she had called it. Eric had been bursting with pride at her first meet.
“So,” he asked, “what’s with the yearbooks? You taking a stroll down memory lane before they shut down the school?”
“I guess,” she said. “I just got to thinking about some of my old students. It’s a shame those assholes are going to close it down.”
He grunted and took a sip of scotch. “You sure it’s a done deal?”
“I don’t see how we can stop them, Eric.” She reached over grabbed his glass and took a sip of scotch.
“Hey,” he said. “Pour your own.”
“You need to learn how to share, Eric. Sometimes you’re a bigger asshole than they are.”
“They? Who is the undefined they? Students? Colleagues?”
“EduNet,” she said. “That company and all the other corporate predators out there chipping away at our rights and privileges. And all for money.” She shook her head. “We’re selling our souls, Eric.”
“I didn’t know you had a soul.”
“Fuck you, old man,” she said gently, and hoisted up the scotch glass again.
“The mouth on you,” he said. “I can hardly believe you’re a role model for our young people today. No wonder the world’s in the shape it is.”
She took another sip, feeling the warm liquid seep through her. It had a real caramel taste. Very nice.
“So,” he said, getting up to replenish the glass, “what’s in store for you if the school does get taken over?”
He took out another glass and poured scotch in both. She sighed.
“I’ve been giving that a lot of thought, Eric. If EduNet does take over the school, I have no idea what administration or the school will look like. It’s a total wild card.” She took the glass of scotch he handed her. “I don’t even know if they would offer me a job.”
“I can’t imagine they wouldn’t,” he said, easing himself into his chair. “You’ve been there forty-four years.”
“Well,” she said, “the rumor is they clean house and hire only youngsters to keep the costs down. I might be too expensive for them. Plus benefits will probably be reduced, if they’re there at all.”
“Could you transfer to a different school? Central?”
“Maybe,” she said, looking up at him. Ethel was surprised that her eyes had suddenly started to fill up. She dried them quickly with the side of her hands and cleared her throat. What was wrong with her? She had nothing to cry about. It had to be the scotch. Eric reached across the table and she grasped his hand.
“I know you’ve been there a long time,” he said. “I can’t imagine your feelings for that place. It must be like a second home.”
Second home, she thought, gripping his hand. Or my first home. The tears started coming again. Ethel couldn’t help herself; she ducked her head. She loved that place. The kids, the staff, even the very bricks and stone and metal that made up the walls. She knew that school as completely and intimately as she knew her own body. And now it looked as if it might be removed from her, cut out of her life like a sickness. She knew in her heart of hearts she was going to have to say goodbye to it. All the evidence pointed to that.
“You know,” Eric said, after giving her time to get it out of her system, “retirement is not so bad. You might get used to it.”
She nodded and smiled.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I feel like a baby.”
“Well, it’s not easy,” he said. “I know when I left it was hard at first. You feel empty, useless, like the part they throw away, and then you begin to realize that you’re too old to contribute to society anymore, and that you’ll be a burden to everyone you love for the rest of your life. However long that may be.”
He smiled over his glass.
“Fuck you,” she said. “You lazy old fart.”
“But I’m having the time of my life,” he said, raising his glass.
“Maybe I will retire,” she said. “Maybe I will.”
“What was that?”
“Turn up your goddamned hearing aid,” she said. “I said that maybe I will retire. I’ll talk to Bell tomorrow. He’s been through it; he can give me a roadmap of the whole process.”
“It’s hard to imagine you not working,” he said. “Not teaching.”
“I’ll get over it,” she said, standing up and starting to pack up the photos and the yearbooks.
“You could always volunteer,” he said, picking up a stack of yearbooks, “or even teach at the college. You might as well put that PhD to work. Start earning your own way for once.”
He hobbled off to put them in the library. She followed with another stack, her padded slippers sliding a little on the hardwood floor. When she got there, he was already up on the stepladder, putting them back on the top shelf.
“Careful,” she said. “You’re an old man. Remember that.”
“I can’t remember anything anymore,” he said.
He finished and stepped down the ladder. She handed him her own stack and went back to get another. She started to stack up the photographs and looked over to see Emily’s picture staring up at her from the kitchen table. Emily and the cancer: what a horrible time. Ethel had prayed for God to take her rather than her little girl, had tried to bargain, offering anything to preserve her little girl’s life. The thought of losing her had nearly driven her mad. She remembered thinking of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and the character of Martha—that’s who she related to at the time. The bitter, ironic, and cynical Martha, spewing venom and hate everywhere. She understood Martha. But she hadn’t allowed herself to become Martha. It would have been easy to lash out at the world, but that wasn’t her way. No. And it wasn’t going to be her way this time. No more crying. No more grieving. It never did anyone any good. It was best to buckle up and ride it out. And no matter what—if she stayed at the same Custer, if she worked for EduNet, or if she retired, she would still be Ethel Benjamin, and she would still be proud of herself, proud of her children, her husband, her students, and her life.
Ethel picked up the last of the yearbooks and went in the library to put away. She wasn’t going to need them again.
Violet’s Story: All about Dave Bell’s best student.
Violet Adams raised her hand. Violet was, by leaps and bounds, Dave’s finest student. She had first been his student as a freshman when she had come in fresh, eager, ready to learn, and was, arguably probably one of the brightest students he’d ever taught. Not only was her retention phenomenal, but she was also a hard worker, a very good writer, and a pleasant child, very well mannered. And she could think; sometimes her academic insights were remarkable. She was a straight-A student first year and was still on track to be her class valedictorian.
The first year had not been easy for her, however; her classmates had not appreciated her skills and made fun of her in and out of class. Dave put a stop to it whenever he saw it, but sometimes the other girls especially were beyond mean: subtle, jabbing, and poisonous, always making snide comments about her clothes, boys she liked, and even her sexual preferences. There were rumors about her being a lesbian floating around the school. Sometimes he would see Violet in the hall, books held up to her chest and her head bent down over them, obviously crying.
Dave had spoken to Mr. Ricks and the counselors, who took some of the girls causing the problems aside, but they simply denied it. And nothing improved, until one day in his freshman Citizenship class, when Malisha Raymonds, who sat behind her in class and was one of Violet’s worst tormentors, began leaning forward and whispering in Violet’s ear. They had been discussing the Bill of Rights that day; Dave had noticed Malisha passing notes with the girl in the row next to her and giggling. Violet was sitting very still, especially stony-faced, which Dave knew meant she was upset. He was about to tell Malisha to be quiet when Violet suddenly stood up, turned around, grasped Malisha’s desk and flipped it over. Malisha went flying to the floor amidst her books, papers, phone, and whatnot. She sat up, open-mouthed, staring at Violet. A couple other students stood up, poised to pull them apart if necessary. Dave didn’t think it would be; not this time. He put a hand up to keep them where they were.
“If you ever,” said Violet, standing over her with clenched fists, “ever talk about me like that again, I swear I’ll kill you.”
Malisha scrambled backwards from under her overturned desk like a crab. Violet followed her.
“Every single day,” she said, her voice calm and deliberate, “I come into this school and you and your friends talk about me like I’m some sort of sub-human creature or stinking animal or worse. Well, I’m not. I’m not a dog. I’m not a worm, and I’m not a bitch.”
Malisha kept scrambling back away from her until she came up against the wall.
“Now,” said Violet, leaning over into the other girl’s face. “Now. It stops now. Today. If you ever talk to me like that again, I will find you and kill you and then destroy your entire family.”
“Man,” said someone from the back of the room. “Don’t mess with that.”
Violet stood up, gathered up her books and left the classroom. Before following her out, Dave turned to Malisha, who was still sitting on the floor, and said, “You had it coming, young lady.”
He caught Violet in the hall; she was already crying. Dave took her next door to Ethel’s classroom; she had a prep that hour and said she’d be glad to escort Violet down to the office. Dave spoke to Mr. Ricks afterwards, explained the situation, and they both agreed that no disciplinary action was warranted. Violet showed up the next day and acted like nothing had happened. The staff had been alerted and everyone was keeping an eye out for retaliation from Malisha or her crew. Dave had been worried there would be retribution, but—as far as he could tell—nobody bothered Violet again.