Daddy's Going To Buy You A Diamond Ring

I am sixteen. He is thirty-four, tall and thin, a dynamic instructor who has been known to jump on his desk when acting out the murder of Polonius in Hamlet, a man whose narrow ties against his starched white shirts look like stained-glass windows. A man who just this year returned from teaching English in Orleans (which, until he says it, I don’t know is pronounced without the s), France and Frankfurt, Germany. A man who drives a two-seater with the steering wheel on the right-hand side. My high school English teacher.

I’m going to write a novel about a young woman whose older lover adopts her…

Our first test is open book because it’s about what we think, he says, not what we can look up. I give five solid answers to five questions and am shocked to see a seventy-five out of one hundred written on my paper. Somehow, I muster the nerve to approach his desk after class and ask what I did wrong. What I really mean is that I am an achiever, that good grades make me feel loved, and that good grades in English make me feel especially loved.

“You just answered the questions,” he tells me. “I already know what happens in these plays. I want to know how you feel.”

And with that, I hate him.

The next test is on Shakespeare, and he asks one question: “Would Macbeth go to hell?” I write five pages, pondering how much blame Lady Macbeth deserves, wondering if weakness is sinful enough to send someone to hell. If scheming is. When the school bell rings, I have to force myself to stop writing. He gives that paper 100. This man has taught me how to think.

And with that, I love him.

In the novel, I’ll make him a teacher, and I’ll make her an orphan.

***

While I was in junior high school, I found a family bible hidden at the bottom of an old trunk in the garage and discovered that the gruff, successful man I’d been told was my father was not. When I managed to locate the first husband, he told me, “Honey, I’m not your daddy. That was some G.I.” I had been betrayed not once, but twice.

***

We read Pygmalion in class. We read Jane Eyre. The last line in the book: “Reader, I married him.”

My high school friends call it a crush. He has a wife after all.

By now, I’m nearing high school graduation. I fantasize about finding my father. I fantasize about my English teacher and the novel I’ll write.

But I won’t have him marry her in the book. He’ll adopt her.

I learn from a friend that Frank, my high school boyfriend, went out with someone else. Before English class starts, I head for his desk in the first row. I confront him, he calls me a bitch, and I slap his face.

“Frank!” our teacher says. “One more word out of you, and you’re going straight to the office.”

He defended me, perhaps the first time someone has. I sense an open door and contemplate how I can nudge it farther. Yes, I am scheming, and I don’t know for what.

That Friday morning before his 8:30 class, I climb the stairs to the second floor and walk inside. He looks up and then seems to freeze.

“I want to apologize for what happened yesterday.” I take a breath and add a truth I’ve just realized. “I did it in here because I knew you would take my side.”

“If you did it,” he says, and I feel the acceptance, the kindness in his voice, “I’m sure you had a good reason for it.”

I leave the room with my heart pounding. Something has just happened, something beyond anything I had planned when I entered that room.

Then graduation arrives, and I lose hope.

***

“He’s getting a divorce.” A friend of mine working in the high school office calls me at Fresno State, forty miles north, to share the news. “He just came in to change his address. And he’s bringing a bus of students up there to see that play at the college.” Shakespeare. Twelfth Night.

I attend the play. I make sure he sees me. We hug, and then he steps back as if realizing I’m barely eighteen. I mumble something about what a wonderful teacher he was, and then I lie and say I’m thinking of teaching as well.

A few days later, he calls, telling me he’d like to talk to me “regarding your ideas about teaching.” He also says that he’ll be attending a stage play about the queens and kings of England at Fresno Community Theatre. “And why alone?”

It’s happening.

On the way to the theater, I’m nervous, but the classical music on his car radio eases me into the rhythm of the drive, and we talk most of the way there.

After the play, he tells me he was married only two years to his former wife and that he had two wives before her. He seems bewildered by this admission.

In the driveway of my home, he turns off the headlights of his car. Then he kisses me, and I feel that I’ve somehow achieved whatever I’ve been seeking my entire life.

“When I feel like this,” he tells me, “I can think of only one thing.”

Sex, I think.

“Marriage,” he says.

He doesn’t want children. I must understand that. It’s what ended his first marriage.

“That’s okay,” I tell him.

“You won’t change your mind? Because if you do…”

“I won’t,” I say.

My family doesn’t fight our union. Everyone is accepting, perhaps relieved, to welcome him into our pretense of blood and biology. They approve of the marriage and my move into the home he’s purchased for us, a mid-century modern with a bathroom of black-and-white basket-weave tile and his king-size bed I occupy as if I own it.

The night before our wedding, a good friend tells me, “You can’t build a marriage on gratitude.”

“Watch me,” I say.

***

“I married my high school English teacher.” I enjoy watching the reactions people have, the way they pause to reassess me when I tell them that. I’m not just a little girl who never found her father. I have power, great power over a brilliant man, a man much older than I.

On Sunday nights, I get to watch two TV shows, “The French Chef,” with Julia Child, and William Buckley’s “Firing Line.” Sometimes, I get to watch some of the scary stuff I like if I tell him it’s an educational show. That’s the joke between us. “Educational.” Even though he doesn’t like me to watch too much TV.

We frequent the library, and he picks out books he knows I’ll like. We drive to Berkeley and San Francisco to see live performances. He lands the role as King Henry in our local playhouse. I get to work on the program. I still have the newspaper photograph of me. I’m sitting in the back row of the playhouse, dark bangs hiding my eyebrows as I glance down at the scrapbook of programs in my lap. I look like a child.

“I don’t like the way he talks to you sometimes,” my mother tells me, “the bossy way he says your name, like he’s…” Her voice trails off.

In the novel, I’ll have her finally leave the husband for someone else, and they’ll be okay because he really is like a father to her. That’s the only way it can end, right?

In a way, I am Pygmalion; he brought me to life, the child he never wanted to have.

The days, weeks, plays, books all melt into time. I don’t want to have sex with him. When he touches me, I recoil. I can’t stand his smell. Maybe it’s just the cigarettes, the pipe. Or maybe it’s something else about him or about us that sickens me.

The ring feels too heavy for my hand, too tight. I start taking it off when I’m with my friends. One morning, I look for it in my purse, and it’s gone. I panic, and then I am resigned, knowing that regardless of how diligently I search, it’s too late.

Maybe have some final hug or something between them in front of the fireplace at the end of the book. I don’t want him to hate her.

After the divorce, I have to learn how to rent an apartment, pay a PG&E bill, balance a checkbook, clean a toilet, and other necessities of living I’m encountering for the first time. I blame myself and feel as if I have hit bottom. That’s when I figure out that many of us don’t really hit bottom. We wander around on it, trying to find our bearings and a way out. I eventually do both, and even after I think I have forgiven myself, I continue to carry the weight of the past.

The blame story: I seduced my high school English teacher. I forced him to marry me and after fifteen years, cheated on him and agreed to divorce him, which he was willing to do because, as it turns out, he already had Wife number five lined up.

The reality: I was sixteen years old when I was his student. He was thirty-four. I’d had one boyfriend. He’d had three wives.

I often wonder who I would have been if I hadn’t married him. How could I have read the books, watched the plays, had the discussions that made me who I am today? Would I have married someone my age? No. I probably would have found another older man looking for whatever I appeared to offer, a man I believed was more than I would ever be or deserve.

Joan Didion writes, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4:00 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”

I think we have to be careful of those people we used to be, even at a distance. We can’t trust their version of history and events, and we’re in danger of accepting their version if only because they were here first.

It’s 2023. For the first time, I tell my story to a journalist, a younger woman who is becoming a close friend. She listens unblinking. Her gaze is naturally intense, and tonight, as the sun sets outside, and we sit drinking tea at what feels like the safest and most secluded table at the French bakery we frequent, she seems to see something in me she hasn’t before.

“Well,” she finally says. “That was probably cool back then, telling people about your teacher and all. But as we know today, it was rape.”

The word is its own punctuation mark.

“Except…”

I can’t go farther. I think about it, about the grooming, although he and certainly I would not have called it that. I think about that day in his classroom when I slapped my boyfriend across the face, and my teacher supported me. How he claimed me seconds after kissing me for the first time, speaking of marriage, no children, just the two of us. I think about how much I’ve punished myself for not fitting into that marriage and for not being able to leave it.

“Rape,” my friend says again, and I nod, still wordless, trying to reconstruct a story I’ve told myself for most of my life.

So, maybe it’s not a novel I’m writing after all. Maybe it’s something else.

-Bonnie Hearn Hill

Bonnie Hearn Hill is the author of sixteen novels. Her most recent story appeared in the 2024 Anthony-winning anthology Crime Hits Home: A Collection of Stories by Crime Fiction’s Top Authors, edited by S.J. Rozan, and her essays have appeared in Publishers Weekly, Writer’s Digest, The Writer (first-place essay, Writers on Writing), as well as Herstry and other publications. Bonnie has co-hosted a monthly book segment on a major Central California television news network since 2002. She holds an MFA degree in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles.