Election. Tom Perrotta

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      TAMMY WARREN

      I WATCHED PAUL and Lisa outside the auditorium. She was talking in a low voice; he was nodding. She smiled and touched him on the shoulder. He looked at his feet, shook his head. In two seconds, a total stranger would have known they were in love.

      She held out her hand, a jewel-like crystal—her good luck charm—sparkling on her open palm. I ducked into the girls' room, found an empty stall, and stood inside it for five, maybe ten minutes, wondering if I would always feel this bad, every day for the rest of my life.

      MR. M.

      THE WHITE PAPER fluttered in Paul's trembling hands. He stared down at the words with that troubled, mildly pained expression of his and spoke in a barely audible monotone, forgetting to look at the audience.

      “When you think about it,” he whispered, “a school is more than just a school it's our second home the place where we spend most of our time and grow as individuals a community but is our school everything it could be let me suggest to you that it is not…”

      He stuttered, lost his place, omitted key words, went back and read entire paragraphs over again. By the time he reached the conclusion, even his most ardent supporters were stupefied. Sound effect snores sawed through the thick air, but Paul read on, undaunted.

      “I want our school to reach its true potential a radiant city … uh, citadel of learning and serving I mean service to humanity that is why I am running for President.”

      The applause that followed expressed relief rather than approval, but I'm not sure Paul was up to making that sort of distinction as he stood frozen at the podium in a post-oratorical daze, a grin of pure panic inching across his face as he tried to remember what to do next. The outgoing President, Larry DiBono, had to direct him back to his seat.

      You had to feel for Tammy as she approached the microphone in a pretty flowered dress. The mob had grown surly after Paul's speech and was now eager for sport.

      “Tammy! Tammy! Tammy!” they chanted, their wolf whistles and catcalls only serving to emphasize her plainness and obscurity. She had to climb onto a footstool just to see the audience.

      LISA FLANAGAN

      TAMMY DIDN'T SPEAK right away. She scanned the rows of seats spread out below her, as if trying to make eye contact with every single voter. I felt funny when she picked me out of the crowd and smiled. Suddenly there were only two of us present in that enormous room. I hated her for that, the way she still had of making everyone else disappear.

      MR. M.

      SHE MUST HAVE STOOD there for two solid minutes, letting the idiots have their fun. It was an extraordinary display of patience, something you might have expected from a veteran public speaker. When she finally opened her mouth, she had the undivided attention of everyone in the auditorium.

      “Who cares about this stupid election?”

      There was another eruption from the crowd, only this time it was spontaneous, cleansed of sarcasm. She had put her finger on the pulse of the event, uttered the unspoken truth that was hovering in a giant cartoon balloon over the entire gathering.

      From his post by the emergency exit, the Vice-Principal, Walt Hendricks, shot me a startled glance. All I could do was shrug. She wasn't reading from the prepared text.

      “You think it really matters who gets elected President of Winwood? You think it will change anything around here, make one single person happier or smarter or nicer? You think the food will taste any better in the cafeteria?”

      The audience was quiet now, but it was a charged silence, the kind you'd get at a wedding if someone rose to tell the assembled guests exactly why this couple shouldn't be joined in holy matrimony. Walt flushed a bright dyspeptic pink and made frantic throat-slitting motions with his index finger, my signal to intervene. I rose from my aisle seat in the front row and began moving slowly toward the stage. I didn't want to pull the plug on the microphone, but didn't see much of an alternative.

      “My opponents have a lot more experience than me,” she continued. “But since it doesn't really matter, you might as well vote for me. Your lives won't be affected one way or the other.”

      I had my hand on the plug when she stepped down off her stool, crossed her ankles, and signed off, to a huge ovation, with a breathtakingly cynical little curtsy.

      Walt's initial impulse was to banish her from the election, but I convinced him not to do it. I said it would turn her into a martyr for free speech and shake our students’ faith in democracy. He was furious, though. Nothing bugs him more than insubordination from one of the “good” kids.

      “The little bitch made a fool of us, Jim. We can't let her get away with it.”

      He suspended her for three days.

       4

      MR. M.

      THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN a happy time in my life. I had a good job, an apparently solid marriage, and an easy, unthinking faith in my own good judgment and moral integrity. Right now, that seems like more than enough to ask for.

      I was restless, though. I thought about going back to school, earning a master's and maybe even a doctorate in Education, retooling myself for the administrative track. With all the ferment going on in the field, all the talk about the decline of America's schools and the need for a bold new generation of leadership, I sensed a golden opportunity for the transformation of my life.

      After nearly a decade of classroom teaching, interacting with maybe a hundred kids a day, I was itching for a chance to apply my skills on a larger scale—writing curriculum, formulating policy, developing innovative programs that would help reshape secondary education. I had visions of myself as a Principal, a respected authority on school reform, perhaps even a politician one day.

      Measured against my dreams—which, admittedly, I'd done nothing to implement—my day-to-day life seemed a bit lacking. There were times when I nearly hypnotized myself with the drone of my own voice, the all-too-predictable trajectory of my classroom thoughts. I'd walk out at the end of the day feeling underutilized, like the best parts of me hadn't been engaged, and were turning rusty from disuse.

      It's probably not surprising that this vague discontent spilled over into my marriage. There was nothing particularly wrong with it. For the most part, Diane and I got along well enough and enjoyed each other's company. We just felt stagnant, like a TV series that had run a couple of seasons too long. Part of it was that we were stuck in a holding pattern, trying to conceive our first child, but the problem ran deeper than that.

      Diane has an enormous number of good qualities. She's attractive, well-read, politically aware, and good at her work (she does PR for St. Elizabeth's Hospital). People who know her consider her a loyal and caring friend, the kind of person you can count on in hard times and emergencies. After five years of marriage, her virtues were so familiar to me that I hardly even noticed them.

      What I noticed more and more in the months СКАЧАТЬ