Like many authors, I\u2019m accustomed to \u2018killing my darlings\u2019 \u2013 i.e., deleting those beloved descriptions that don\u2019t propel my story forward. Like many authors, I also do all my writing electronically, which means that when I kill my darlings, they\u2019re dead for good.<\/p>\n
\u2018The Homewrecker\u2019 is a rare exception. Written while I was still getting to know the characters of Beautiful Revolutionary<\/em>, and while I was unsure how many perspectives I wanted to describe them from, it stands alone as a study in character (Evelyn Lynden) and perspective (a rural high school French class). The character survived. The perspective was absorbed by others, more central to the action of Beautiful Revolutionary. <\/em><\/p>\n As part of the 2015 Melbourne Writers Festival, I was asked to submit a story for publication across Melbourne\u2019s tram network, Yarra Trams. This story, alas, was deemed \u2018inappropriate\u2019, and never made it into the hands of commuters. The festival did agree to publish it on their website, however. My sincerest thanks to Melbourne Writers Festival and the jonestown report <\/em>for giving this murdered darling an afterlife.<\/p>\n The Homewrecker<\/strong><\/p>\n She comes to us fresh out of college in the September of \u201968 to teach French and girls\u2019 P.E., and we notice she\u2019s pretty. Pretty in a way teachers aren\u2019t, or not in our town anyway. We speculate that she\u2019s maybe actually French, on account of her dark hair and the way certain words like \u2018haughty\u2019 and \u2018chic\u2019 and \u2018petite\u2019 seem to fit her. But when she talks, it\u2019s with a California accent, and she wants to be called \u2018Madame Lynden\u2019.<\/p>\n From the first, we want to figure out Madame Lynden, and vaguely to impress her. In bad French, we tell her we like The Beatles,\u00a0The Stones,\u00a0Jefferson Airplane,\u00a0but she doesn\u2019t react, except to correct our pronunciation. She writes things like John aime jouer au base-ball <\/em>in neat cursive on the blackboard, and gets us to make simple alterations. Often she stands by the blackboard with her arms crossed and holds the chalk between her fingers like a cigarette.<\/p>\n Madame Lynden isn\u2019t a teacher who will laugh with us, joke with us, encourage laughter in the room, we soon learn. Sometimes she smiles when we\u2019re good and her smile surprises us, makes her seem more normal and young, innocent in the neatly contained way of a family photo album. So far as we can detect, she doesn\u2019t have a sense of humor, though there\u2019s something sarcastic about the way she raises one eyebrow to ask, \u2018C\u2019est vrai?\u2019\u00a0and twists her lips to say, \u2018Mais oui.\u2019<\/p>\n When inconvenienced, Madame Lynden is frail and vexed. \u2018C\u2019est pas possible,\u2019\u00a0she hisses mournfully, the morning a lawnmower repeatedly drowns out the sound of her teaching. Another time, she sighs over a box of flashcards that\u2019s on a shelf out of her reach, before clicking her fingers at Adam Loganberry, the tallest boy, and telling him, \u2018Viens.\u2019<\/p>\n The girls in Madame Lynden\u2019s P.E. class get to see her in shorts and a t-shirt, but even then she\u2019s never casual. She stands with her hands on her hips a lot. Her posture is poor for a gym teacher, her skin pale, her collarbones hollow, her breasts small. She wears a whistle on a string between her breasts and blows on it rather than straining her voice. Yet her voice giving instructions is as clear and sharp as the whistle\u2019s burst, a voice to listen to.<\/p>\n Madame Lynden favours kids who listen, who participate, \u2018team players\u2019, regardless of skill. She calls on girls more often than boys, gives them more opportunities to shine, but isn\u2019t otherwise soft on them. When Nancy Wick uses the excuse of menstrual cramps twice in one month, Madame Lynden gazes at her steadily and says, \u2018I don\u2019t believe you.\u2019 When Jan Mundy spends most of a volleyball game examining her cuticles, Madame Lynden makes her stay after school to dismantle the net. When a few girls, friendly as puppies, make the mistake of asking about Mr. Lynden \u2013 who he is and what he does \u2013 she coldly tells them, \u2018I don\u2019t see why that should concern you.\u2019<\/p>\n There\u2019s talk that Madame Lynden is \u2018sort of a bitch\u2019, but mostly we like her. We like to see what she wears to school, though she dresses more like a teacher than a bohemian: long skirts, blouses, cardigans, sometimes a pair of slacks. She always wears her hair in a bun. Half-consciously, we nurture the hope that she will someday wear it loose. We hope to see her do something subversive, but we don\u2019t really get it when she talks about students protesting in Paris, the French Resistance, underground poets with names like \u00c9luard and Aragon.<\/p>\n Sometimes Madame Lynden seems old-fashioned to us, too prim and proper, like a governess from the nineteenth century. Sometimes we try to imagine a Mr Lynden, but we can\u2019t; she seems unlikely to be married somehow, too strange and deeply alone. Some of us find her sexy, yet in a way that\u2019s cold and forbidding compared with the familiar girls bouncing up and down the hallways, like we might get in trouble just for thinking it.<\/p>\n Some of us have smoked grass and some of us have felt each other up, and some of us haven\u2019t. We\u2019re united by the smallness of our worlds. After school and on weekends we have chores, little brothers and sisters, farm work, homework \u2013 including Madame Lynden\u2019s French. We have no use for her delicate conjugations and pearl-like words, and probably won\u2019t see them again after high school, except on menus at fancy restaurants on our wedding anniversaries. None of us has ever been on an airplane and half of us probably never will. We belong to churches and can even quote the Bible when we want to say why certain things are wrong, like killing or homosexuality. But there are many more things we have trouble articulating, like why we hate our parents or how the sunlight falling at certain times of day makes us feel both sad and immortal, or why it would be nice to speak French like Madame Lynden.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t know Madame Lynden\u2019s first name\u2019 only that it starts with an \u2018E\u2019. We don\u2019t know how old she is or where she lives, and can\u2019t even say for sure what kind of car she drives. There\u2019s a yellow station wagon that she shows up in sometimes, bright with anti-Vietnam stickers, but that disappears by the new year. Some of us see her coming to school on a bike, looking more French than ever, one hand in her lap to keep her skirt from flying up. Other times, she has someone pick her up. If any of us see her sitting in a blue Pontiac beside a man with black hair and sunglasses, we have no way of knowing who the man is \u2013 if he\u2019s her husband or her father, or even somebody else\u2019s.<\/p>\n (Laura Elizabeth Woollett is an Australian writer. Her other piece in this edition of <\/em>the jonestown report is So I Wrote a Cult Novel<\/a>. Her collection of articles and stories for the site is here<\/a>.\u00a0Visit her website at\u00a0http:\/\/lauraelizabethwoollett.com<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Like many authors, I\u2019m accustomed to \u2018killing my darlings\u2019 \u2013 i.e., deleting those beloved descriptions that don\u2019t propel my story forward. Like many authors, I also do all my writing electronically, which means that when I kill my darlings, they\u2019re dead for good. \u2018The Homewrecker\u2019 is a rare exception. Written while I was still getting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":80734,"menu_order":14,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-81490","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/81490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81490"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/81490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":119575,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/81490\/revisions\/119575"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/80734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}