It started off innocently enough, really it did. Sometimes I would stay after class to get help with a homework assignment or other times he would call me in during homeroom to work on the semester paper. There was always an excuse, in that early September beginning, to justify what we were doing.

Our excuses grew more flimsy and eventually disappeared altogether by mid-October, though. I knew the line would be crossed at some point, but of course I wasn’t expecting it when it happened.

I came in during my lunch period one afternoon and he told me to sit down. I leaned against a desk in the front row and he walked over and put his hands on my hips, then leaned in to kiss me gently on the mouth. I brushed my hand across his chest, but I don’t remember now if I was pulling him closer or pushing him away. I do remember, though, that he was the one who said we should stop, even though he had started it and I was just there, wavering and confused. I left the room with my cheeks flaming and my head down, but that didn’t stop me from coming back after school that day, and the day after, and every day from then on for months and months.

#

He had moved from St. Louis that summer, and, in our small town, or at least to me, that meant something. He wasn’t young, exactly, but he did have a newness about him that was intriguing, to say the least. He taught American Western History and coached baseball, and I told him I loved him in November after we had had sex in his minivan for the first time.

I didn’t love him, not really, and I knew it even then. I said it because I thought I was supposed to, I guess. That’s not true either, though, not exactly. In those days I usually did things because I wasn’t supposed to, so none of my actions were very coherent. I guess I really said it because I was thinking about manifest destiny and the western frontier, which is what he had lectured on in class that afternoon. I was imagining being Lewis or Clark or a Spanish conquistador, but I couldn’t tell him that. Instead I said I loved him while pretending that the blanket under which we were lying was covered in smallpox and that the sounds of the passing cars, distance and sporadic, were the beginning rumbles of an earthquake originating somewhere deep within the San Andreas Fault.

#

My mom asked me about him only once, after he’d dropped me off at my house in the gray light of a December evening.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time with that new teacher, haven’t you?” she asked, opening the oven and checking the casserole to avoid looking at me.

Yes, I wanted to say, Yes I have and please don’t talk to me about it. Instead I told her that he had been helping me with a paper and that he’d offered to give me a ride home because of the snow.

“Well we’re eating in ten minutes,” she said, sounding more old and tired than I’d ever heard her, “Please set the table and call your brother.”

And I’d do it, too. I’d set the table, I’d walk the dog, I’d get my homework done, I’d show up for all my shifts at the grocery store a couple blocks down the road. I covered it all up, or at least I thought I did. I didn’t let anyone know how I felt, how bewildered I was. I didn’t let them see me thinking about him, and his minivan, and the smell of chalk on his hands, and on me. I kept it all hidden so sometimes I wasn’t even sure it was real. I’d be sitting in class and he’d be talking about mining camps or the significance of the Golden Gate Bridge, and everyone would be taking notes and I would wonder, for just a second, if any of it had ever really happened. I’d go to my next class or to lunch feeling like I was going to throw-up, but then he’d call me into his room as I walked past when the bell rang, and I’d feel, not better, but more numb, like I was on the top of Mount Elbert, the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains.

#

Of course I couldn’t explain to anyone what I was doing with the new teacher. And, even if I had tried, they wouldn’t have understood. I wasn’t doing it because my dad died the past spring in a car wreck that left me, my brother, and my mom with a total of twelve broken bones and nearly 200 stitches between us, I swear I wasn’t. No, that wasn’t the reason, even though it almost would have made sense if it was. The real reason I did it, the reason I had an affair with my high school history teacher, was because I’m a cowgirl in the Missouri Bootheel: I needed the excitement. Or, maybe that’s not entirely true, but my dad had nothing to do with it.

I liked having someone pay attention to me, even though it sometimes made me sick and shaky. For the most part, though, it was a relief to be with him, at first anyway. He seemed younger than most of my classmates, and it was nice to be able to laugh with someone again. We’d drive past the Walmart, or the trailer park, or the strip mall that’s mostly empty and shut-down, but I wouldn’t even look out the window. I’d look at him, his face, his five-o-clock shadow, his knuckles on the steering wheel, his eyes, and I would think about the Grand Canyon or the Black Hills or the redwood forests. I’d think about the Pacific Ocean, waves crashing on a rocky coastline, and I’d just know, in my heart, that someday I’d see it all for real, that someday I’d get out. Maybe, if I were completely honest with myself, I’d admit that that’s why I did it: because he hinted at the possibility of an escape. Because he reminded me of someplace far away.

#

Of course, eventually, that all changed. By the time April rolled around and he started coaching baseball, he had lost that Western connotation for me. I no longer saw the horizon line of the Pacific Coastal Range in the faint wrinkles on his forehead, nor did I feel the expansiveness of the Great Plains in his touch.

The last day, the day that ended it, was the day that he left the car seat strapped in his minivan. Usually, after he took his son to daycare in the mornings, before driving to the high school, he would move the car seat to the trunk. When I’d get in after school it would be, not hidden, but at least out of sight. He’d drive somewhere remote and park the car, and we would stretch out in the back seat. When I concentrated on the patterns of light through the windshield, or the warmth of his hands on my body, I would hardly remember that what I was doing was wrong, or inappropriate, or stupid. One day, though, he left the car seat in.

It shouldn’t have been a big deal. He was able to move it out pretty fast after he realized the mistake, and I could have just crawled right in, laid down as he took off my shirt, and forgotten all about it. Something about watching him unbuckle that stupid car seat, though, the expert maneuvering of his hands, automatic, as if he’d done it a thousand times before, made me sick. Watching him take out the car seat, I felt sadder than if my mom died, too, and I became an orphan at seventeen. I thought about my brother, still using crutches even though the doctors had taken off his cast months ago, even though his leg was healed. Far away, through the still-bare treetops and electrical lines, the wind sounded achingly hollow.

“I need to go home,” I said, louder than I had meant to. He turned around, and it was as if I was seeing him for the first time. Whatever had made him different or special was gone. St. Louis was a distant memory; the Gateway to The West had been replaced by this: the car seat, the wind, me, a dad, a dad, a dad.

To my credit it really did end that afternoon, even though he called me crying several nights later, saying he wanted me back. I hung up without saying anything.

I told the school registrar that I needed to drop his class, told her that the stress of an honors course was just too much for me now that it was nearing the anniversary of my father’s death. She didn’t pressure me; I knew she wouldn’t if I brought up the accident, and I was able to avoid him surprisingly well for the last month and a half of the school year.

#

I graduated in May and I found out a couple weeks later that he was leaving, going back to St. Louis where the future was less bleak and the students were better at baseball. I didn’t blame him; no one wants to stay here. We’d all probably be happier in St. Louis, to tell the truth. Maybe we’d be happier anywhere further west, where the world can be made new. We’d breather easier if we could sense the possibility conveyed by a vast expanse stretching on and on to the Pacific.

I sometimes think that I’m never getting out; I think that now. Or, maybe, even if I do leave, it will be too late. I will carry this with me somehow, in my eyes, and face, and heart. Like my dad flying through the windshield or the Indians performing Ghost Shirt Dances during the final waves of white settlement, I won’t make it out alive. I guess that’s what teacher taught me, and maybe it’s an important lesson to learn: the frontier is long gone, and I know it now, for sure.