“You’re full of shit,” says Gerard. “He always loved you. I’ll bet he thought you were the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“Christ, Gerard. You don’t know anything about it.” Gerard has done this before, seemed to imply that my husband must have driven his car deliberately into the Fallen Rock Zone. I spin the coffee cup around on the saucer. “You never met him, even. I don’t know why you think you know what you’re talking about.”
“I don’t know what I’m talking about. But I am smart.”
“You’re smart. That’s rich.” The words hover in the air like helicopters. In graduate school Eleanor and I used to say, “If we’re so smart, how come we’re not rich?” Then I got the house in outer suburbia, and I sat in it and wondered, “If I’m so rich, how come I’m not smart?” There’s more and more tension between me and Gerard these days. I keep wishing it would go away. I try to wipe out the last five minutes in my mind. I try to switch eyes.
“Benna. Look. I’m sorry.” Gerard suddenly feels bad. He gets up, comes around next to me on my side of the table. He puts his arms around me.
“Gerard,” I say quietly, pulling away. “Believe me. You just don’t know.”
Gerard picks up a lock of my hair, brings it straight up toward the ceiling, then lets it drop. “Let’s go,” he says.
· · ·
“Okay, now I hope all of you have purchased or acquired by some legal and ethical means the poetry anthology for this course. It’s in the campus store under English 210.” Because the book seemed sexist to her, the teacher sometimes referred to it as “The Ralph and Norton Anthology” and supplemented it with handouts. A young woman in a pink cardigan raised her hand.
“Yes?” the teacher asked hesitantly, afraid of contradictions, reluctance, insubordination.
“I looked yesterday and it wasn’t there. So I asked somebody working in the store and they showed me. It’s under English 120, not 210.”
“Oh, really,” said the teacher. Was the world dyslexic or was it trying to demote her. “Well, you’ve all heard what … what is your name?”
“Sharon Humphrey.”
“What Sharon has said and should consider yourselves edified or redirected or born again or whatever. Now—”
“The course itself is still 210, though, right?” interrupted the boy sitting closest to her. “Cuz I need a 200-level.”
“Yes, no matter what the store has done to us, we are still what we are.” The teacher sounded disheartened.
“How was school, honey?” I call to George when I hear her push open the front door. I am stirring cookie batter, trying to get the shortening to blend with the brown sugar and flour, single-handedly, I’m sure, defying several important scientific laws.
Unlike last year I will be home before her every day now, her school day running from eight-fifteen to three-thirty. Last year she went to kindergarten in the morning, then stayed at Mrs. Kimball’s down the street in the afternoon. Mrs. Kimball showed George how to draw pictures of farms and lighthouses and let George watch news on the TV all day.
“Rick Riley’s in my class. He thinks he’s so great.”
In my first-grade class, too, I remember, there had been a Riley.
“Why does he think he’s so great?” I ask, hoping to encourage the rationalization of irrational responses—you should learn these things early in life.
“Feats me,” she says, something she has taken to saying.
“George, it’s ‘beats me,’ not ‘feats me.’ ”
“Beats me?”
· · ·
“Yeah. How do you like your teacher, Mrs. Whatsername?”
“Mrs. Turniphead.” George throws her sweater and pencil case on the kitchen table. She is wearing her babies dress.
“Geeze, George, you’re beginning to sound like one of my students. Quick, say: ‘That’s dumb, why do we have to do that?’ ”
“That’s dumb,” she says. “Why do we have to do that?”
“Very good,” I say, still stirring cookie dough, arm aching. “Now you can go to college.”
The teacher shuffled through stacks of papers, called the roll, then distributed Xeroxed copies of “The Song of Solomon.” “This is love poetry of the highest order: ‘The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s.’ It’s not in the anthology and pre-dates by many, many—”
“How many?” There was always one smartass, in the back playing with the window-shade pull.
“—many years the poems that are. In the anthology.” The teacher glanced apprehensively at the boy in the back by the window. His name was Steven. His soul was a ghost with a mustache. His favorite poet was Pink Floyd. “You can read this religiously, if you want, as a metaphor for the church or whatever, but that’s really more for institutional purposes, like those huge jars of mayonnaise you see in cafeterias.” She glanced at her notes. “As with all love poems, this is also a despair poem. I like to read it as the most powerful articulation available of a hormone-induced consciousness. How many people have read this before?”
One person raised his hand.
“How many people have read the Bible?”
The same person raised his hand, plus Sharon in pink again.
“Only two?” The teacher murmured to herself, weighing various diatribes. “Well, let’s at least read this. Would someone like to volunteer his or her voice?”
The boy in the front volunteered, stumbling through some of the lines because some of the photocopying was faint or smeared illegibly. At the line “I am a Rose of Sharon” someone nudged Sharon-in-pink and there were a few giggles. Christ, thought the teacher. I’m teaching congenital morons and savages.
“They haven’t read the Bible,” I say later to Gerard at breakfast at Hank’s. Hank is at the grill today, a bald, impish man, plowing homefries to one side with a huge spatula, making room for eggs. “Only two of them have.”
“Have you read it?”
“What is this, a quiz? Of course. Well, most of it. Have you?”
“Four times.”
“Oh come off it. Four whole times?”
“I camped in the Smoky Mountains one summer when I was nineteen. I only brought one book and that was it. I read it three times.”
“That’s only three.”
“I’ve read it once through since, as well.”
“Liar. Tell me. What is your favorite book in the Old Testament.”
“Habakkuk.”
“You’re just being cute.” That is Gerard’s way, cuteness. Also drunkenness.
“No, really. The first line of Habakkuk is ‘O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and thou will not hear?’ The last line is the standard note to the choirmaster: ‘with stringed instruments.’ ”
“A thousand violins.”
“Yeah. It pretends to be about violence, but it’s really only about violins. I’ve met people like that.”
“It sounds like a disease. He’s in advanced stages of Habakkuk. Or a casserole: Ham Habakkuk. Or a rock band: just plain Habakkuk. Live. Tonight.” I do my imitation of a badass guitarist.
“Had a rough morning, Benna?”
“God, I guess.”
I try to calm down. Gerard wants to quote some more. “ ‘Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, awake; to a dumb storm, arise!’ ”
“Now you know what teaching’s all about. Like Saint Francis preaching to the birds.”
“But Benna, dearie, sweet, you used to love teaching,” Gerard says in his put-on smarmy voice. It’s also his Aunt Emmadine’s voice and his impression of certain dental assistants.
I cross my eyes and tear off corners of napkin, shove them in my mouth, and chew on them to amuse Gerard, and Hank, who looks over at me from behind the counter and shakes his head. “She teaches college, this woman,” says Gerard, pointing at me.
“What is this?”
The teacher cleared her throat. “It’s ‘The Song of Songs.’ A sort of play, really, a—” She looked at her notes. “A passio
nate dialogue that reaches an emotional pitch so intense that if it were to continue for even one more stanza it would tumble out of itself and collapse. Its sharpest points are its most fragile.” She looked quickly around at the class, the little marble eyes, the tucked chins, the temples angled onto fists. “It dips in and out of an erotic despair, which it’s lifted finally out of by the very hope imparted by its sensuousness.” She looked out the window and winced.
The minutes were long highways. The teacher began to pace, three steps each way, back and forth in front of the blackboard, which was really a greenboard; she remembered when they all had been black, not too long ago though long enough. These kids had probably never seen a blackboard, probably wouldn’t know who Jim Morrison was, or Huey Newton, or the song “Cherish.” They probably wouldn’t remember Colleen Corby, a fashion model whose career barely made it into midis. They probably had no idea that greenboards had once been black, that Mia Farrow had once been married to Frank Sinatra, that life had not always been like this. “For Friday I want you to bring in one of your own love or despair poems. If you don’t have one already, I want you to write one.”
Amos White, his name emblazoned across his t-shirt, shot up his hand, grinning wildly. “What if we’re virgins, man, and we’ve never known no real love or no despair?”
The teacher had taught community college too long. “See me after class,” she said.
The teacher’s last class of the day was in another building on the opposite side of the Fitchville Community College campus. It was a five-minute walk. This particular day she noticed that signs had been spray-painted: DO NOT ENTER at the truck-loading drive by the administration building had become DO NOT ENTER U.S. WARS; DEAD END had been cleverly transmogrified to read GRATEFUL DEAD HEAD; one STOP sign now read STOP IN THE NAME OF LOVE; another read simply STOP, YOU BITCH.
· · ·
“ ‘Thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Mount Gilead’? Who is this asshole?” Somebody else in the back, dressed all in orange burlap, frowned.
The teacher had already passed out the photocopies and given the assignment. “It’s God,” she said. “Would someone like to read this aloud for us?” She looked around the classroom. Twenty faces with the personalities of cheeses and dial tones. “Well, then,” she continued. “I’ll read it.” And she began, dangerously: “ ‘The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth / For your love is better than wine …’ ” The teacher raised her eyes slightly to note any squirming, any gasps. They looked inert, frozen as fish sticks.
It took a long time to read, though people did seem finally to be listening, silently reading along.
“ ‘Make haste, my beloved, and be like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountains of spices.’ ” The bell rang on “stag.” “Okay,” she commanded, damp with perspiration. “Don’t forget: Your poems next time.” There was a clumping and galumphing, a sliding of chairs across the floor. The teacher looked down, shuffled papers. A black student named Darrel Erni paused by her side as everyone drifted past him.
“Ms. Carpenter?” he said.
The teacher looked up. The student was smiling. She had noticed him before, on Monday. He seemed older or wiser or was it merely that he was more battered and less worried about it. It was all the same, she guessed.
“I just wanted to say that I liked the poem very much. And I liked the way you read it.”
The teacher knew asskissers from way back. They lingered after the period was over, they separated themselves from the rest of the huge cryogenic experiment that was the class, they cooed, they beamed, they twinkled. They wanted you to make them your assistant. Yet something was different here. He nodded. She liked nodders. His eyes were slightly pink, slightly shiny. Had he really been moved? Or was he on drugs like the rest of the class? “Well,” she said, all helpful teacherliness. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
“It’s beautiful, you know, just beautiful.” He had an old fatigue jacket on and the anthology tucked up under one arm. He hunched up his shoulders, put his hands in his pockets, and sauntered backwards toward the door. He winked and gestured with his head. “This is a neat class.”
“Glad you’re enjoying it,” she said, something almost happy rushing to her face. She liked this Darrel Erni. But then he turned and was off down the hall with a quick padding and bounce of sneakers.
George and I send out for pizza. When it arrives, we eat in front of the TV, watching the news. “So what did you talk about in class today, George?” Cheese stretches like delicate tusks from bitten wedge to mouth.
She sighs. “We did reading groups—redsies and greensies. Then we talked about going to a dairy farm to see the cows.” George picks off the bits of green pepper and anchovies. “No cat food pizza for me,” she says. The commercial is Oil of Olay and everyone in it, though old, is happy and smooth.
“You should eat the peppers, George. They have vitamin A in them. They help you get A’s.”
She ignores me, continues vegetableless through her piece.
“I get it. You’re a redsie not a greensie, is that it?”
“Redsies are the dumb ones,” she says. “I’m a green for green light. That’s what Mrs. Turners said.”
“What’s the red? Red for red light?” How unsubtle of Mrs. Turniphead. How meanly self-fulfilling, like a churlish fortune cookie.
“No. They’re red for tulips.” And she puts her two lips together and makes a joke, a big pizza kiss in the air.
Dan Rather speaks of a volcano in the Dutch Antilles. Two-thousand-degree lava flows and bubbles thick as chowder across our TV screen.
“Poor Beruba people,” mispronounces George. Then she switches the subject. “We do fire drills next week. Lauren says there’s never any fire and all you do’s get yelled at by teachers for talking in line.”
“Didn’t you have fire drills last year in kindergarten?”
“Uh-uh.”
“No fire drills?”
“Nope.” She shakes her head then stops. “Opes. That’s right, I forgot.”
An ant is checking out the oil stains on the pizza box. I pinch it between a napkin and the cardboard.
“Can we go to Beruba someday?” asks George with her mouth full. I have taken George on two vacations—once to Toronto, a city of manufactured whimsey suited only to shoppers, and once to Cape Cod to see the ocean, at which she was much astonished and at the age of three raced exuberantly up and down the beach, arms spread, shouting at the water, “Juice! Juice! Look at all the juice!”
To me the ocean, so loaded with seafood, is more like a loud and giant bouillabaisse.
“To all that lava? Into the eye of the potato? You want to?”
“Yeah. We could be hula girls.”
“That’s Hawaii, George. We would have to be Beruba girls.” I stand up to throw the ant napkin away but instead wave my arms and wiggle my hips. George stands up and pulls the bottom of her shirt up through the neck so that her belly button and midriff are bare. She sways and rimples and giggles around the pizza box. Dan Rather is signing off, getting the hell out of our living room, a living room of Beruba girls. Sometimes I wonder if I try too hard to be George’s playmate, or if it comes naturally to me, if it comes like the easiest thing in the world.
“They’ll never learn that a lot is two words,” mutters Eleanor. “Or no one. Or another time. I had three students spell another time as if it were a season. Give me Gym class any day.”
“Anothertime and the living is easy.”
“Yeah. That’s for when Harry the Dean of Sophomores calls you up to go to the movies. ‘Thanks—anothertime.’” I had gone to the movies once with Harry, Dean of Sophomores. Afterward we ate chocolate sundaes and he told me about the Baltimore medical student he was engaged to. “She works hard,” he said. When Harry first came to FVCC, he was a music professor. “I teach Canon and Fugue,” he had said, and all I could think of was detectives, a TV show like Star
sky and Hutch. Then he became Dean of Sophomores. Eleanor had gone out with him once, too, to a poetry reading. “Medicine is a fascinating profession nowadays,” he had said three times in the car on the way home. When she got out at her house, so did he, following her, attempting to kiss her. She didn’t know what to do, so she made some crack about the Taco Bell Canon and then electronically lowered the garage door onto one of his shoulders. Though he wasn’t seriously hurt, he never called her again. “A damn poor sport,” said Eleanor.
“By the way, didya hear we might get fired?” Eleanor’s expression is a cross between urgency and marijuana.
“Huh?” She’s switched subjects too quickly for me.
“Budget cuts. Distribution changes. Curriculum overhaul. They’re looking around at all of us non-tenured folk. They’re looking at the courses we’re teaching. They got cyanide in their eyes, sugar shoes.”
“Sugar shoes? When’s this supposed to happen?” I ask it wearily. A woman named Phillie McCabe has put a poem in my department mailbox. It is about losing weight. “Oh diet, diet, they said / and I looked at the bread / trembling with dread / and said, ‘What color?’ / and then went to bed.” “Dye-it—get it?” she has scribbled at the bottom.
“Shortly before Christmas I guess they’re supposed to have it all squared away. Or us all squared away.” Her eyes are all bruisey turquoise. She can inhale a cigarette like no one I know. If Cleopatra had smoked Winstons she would have smoked them exactly like Eleanor. “Listen to this sentence,” she says. “ ‘They decided to go sledding on their rear ends where the incline was less steep. Then an audible burp sent a shudder from her pleated and powdered chin down to her buttocks, which hung inertly over the struggling and baffled chair.’ ”
“Is that Stacy or Tracy?”
“No, that’s Howard.”
“Eleanor, what are we going to do?”