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For Peter, Isabel, and Luisa
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Kerry Cullen and Sarah Bowlin, who believed so surely in this thing.
To early readers, talkers, thinkers: Miranda Popkey, Marcy Dermansky, Lindsay Hatton, Adrienne Celt, Lucas Knipscher, Bryant Musgrove, Robin Wasserman, Rebecca Taylor, and always and especially, Rumaan Alam.
To writer dinner ladies: Elena Megalos, Eliza Schraeder, Yurina Ko, Sanaë Lemoine.
To Karen and Sam Steger, Cristina de la Vega and Kenny Strong, Kayleen Hartman and Emily Bender, and families born into, married, and chosen.
To Zipporah Wiseman, for that conversation in the car about what to make and why.
To all my students past and present, for your investment, excitement, generosity, and care.
To Peter, Isabel, and Luisa, for everything you are.
2000
I’M SIXTEEN AND Sasha’s seventeen and we go out to the beach at night and no one’s there. We’ve thrown a party at her house and I have fallen, scraped my knee, getting a piggyback ride from a boy I know only offered it to me to impress her.
You tired, runner girl? he said.
They all call me runner girl.
We’ve freed ourselves of all the other people. We’ve gotten drunk and already sobered up and after emptying the keg, after cleaning up her parents’ house, after putting people in their cars, we’ve brought the trash out to this dumpster by the beach and run out to put our bare feet in the sand. The water’s quiet, moon reflected off the top and sharp and tinny, as the waves roll up; dark blues and blacks, as they dip down.
We each carried a large bag filled with empty cans and bottles, plastic cups, leftovers from the store-bought box cake we cooked too long and the big bowl of pasta that we mixed with garlic, oil, cheese, and diced tomatoes. We both smell of sweat and beer.
We’ve thrown a sort of week-late birthday party for her, while her mom and sister are traveling with her dad for work. No one except us knew it was a birthday party, and before the older kids arrived, from the larger public school ten miles from ours, we set out plates and napkins, knives and forks, and pretended we were grown. We poured glasses of wine and we dressed up and people looked confused when they came in and we told them to sit down, when later we brought the cake out and no one really knew what it was for.
We each did keg stands and our shirts rolled down our fronts, showing our bellies and our bras. I grabbed at my shirt, pushed back as it rolled down; she let hers sit around her neck. For a while, she went into her sister’s room with some guy I run track with, about whom other girls at practice talk, to whom I’ve never said a word.
* * *
That wasn’t fun, I say to Sasha now.
Which is maybe wrong, but also, she’s the only person in the world to whom I say these things out loud.
They’re all so dumb, she says.
She takes off her shirt and pants and I try not to stare.
Happy birthday, I say, thinking, Why did we invite those people we don’t like when we could have spent the whole night just like this.
She laughs and nods down at my clothes.
You going in? she says.
It’s January, but it’s Florida, so it’s warm, and I take off my shirt and pants.
We’re both strong and swim out far and though the water shocks at first, it feels better, safer; I feel surer than I ever feel on land.
* * *
Back at her house, an hour later, we take hot showers and then wrap our hair up in towels and we sit on her big floral duvet and she talks and I half listen to the words she says, but also, I lie back and let her talk pour out overtop me until my eyes are closed. I don’t sleep well most nights—I wander the high-ceilinged, too-still, too-big upstairs of my parents’ house, talk online to older men, pretending that I’m someone else—but I sleep hours, ten or twelve, halfway through the next day, these nights that I’m with her.
2017
1
MY ALARM GOES off at 4:30 every weekday morning, and I keep my phone lodged between the slatted stairs that lead up to the lofted bed my husband built us in the closet we use as a bedroom, so that I’m not able to press Snooze. I climb down in the dark and find the phone, which has often fallen. I turn off the alarm and put on my bra and tights and shirt and shoes and gloves and headband, grab my keys and phone, and lock the door behind me; I run miles and miles before anyone wakes up.
By 6:15, I’ve showered and dressed and started to make breakfast. Sometimes my husband slips into the shower while the children are still asleep and we have sex. It’s cold in the bathroom. He bends me over the railing of the back ledge. He pushes me up against the grimy tiles, holds my leg up. My body is outside the halo of hot water and my skin mottles and I shiver and am cold as I wait for him to come.
* * *
I take two trains to get to work and neither of them runs well. I wait sometimes three minutes for the first, sometimes fifteen. Sometimes, the train’s right there, doors already open, as I pass through the turnstile, and I run, my bags flapping against my hip and back, up the stairs and through the crowd of people, slipping through the closing doors. I often get no seat and stand, trying not to grab hold of close-by arms or shoulders as the train turns hard, stops short. I try to read a book but fall asleep if I’m sitting and almost fall over if I stand. I hold it open, not turning any pages, both my bags clutched between by my calves and ankles, planting my feet firmly on the ground.
* * *
Good morning, team! says the Google chat they made me install on my phone when I started at this job six months ago. Looking forward to a joyfully driven professional day!
On Twitter, the world is ending. A nuclear war is threatening, ice caps are melting, kids at school are shooting other kids at school. At work, I wear collared shirts and cardigans and black wool dress pants and clip a set of keys around my neck and no one makes much mention of the world outside.
* * *
Once a week, more sometimes, when I get a seat on the train and am tired enough not to acknowledge what I’m doing, I check Sasha’s mostly dormant Facebook—she has college photos and a handful from right after. A girl with whom she roomed her sophomore year, whom I knew vaguely, reposts the same handful of old photos every couple years; We were so young! this girl says, every time that it comes up, look at us. Twenty-year-old Sasha stares at me, over and over, too much how I remember: defiant, careless posture, perfect face, her too-big eyes.
I check her hardly active Twitter. Three years ago, she retweeted a New Yorker article on Miami Beach and climate change.
I check her sister’s and her mother’s Facebooks—sometimes she’s in their pictures—to be sure that she’s still there.
* * *
At work, two blocks north of the subway, in a big brick building, through two large, heavy doors, I walk past the scanners where the kids stand in line to have their bodies and their books checked. I tip my coffee to the securit
y guards and the kids I know.
A handful of them call out my last name.
I take attendance on the live attendance tracker and talk to my two co–homeroom teachers, who are my only friends at work. They are black women, and I’m white; for a long time they didn’t trust me, until one day they decided they could trust me, and still sometimes it seems like they might not. We are all older than our other colleagues; one of my two co–homeroom teachers is the only other person in this building with a kid. They didn’t trust me because they shouldn’t trust me, because there’s so much I don’t know or understand about them, because sometimes I lie to them about my upbringing to make my life seem more like theirs.
I think they trust me mostly because we love the kids we teach.
We check the various apps and Google calendars where the deliverables for the day are laid out and we post the morning PowerPoint about the new lateness policy, about the new rules concerning the dress code: only black socks are permitted, shirts must be tucked in at all times and belts worn, shoes must be black and sneakers aren’t allowed.
* * *
I teach two classes in the morning, both Junior Literature and Language, and my job’s completely fine as long as I am with my students. We read Hamlet and they raise their hands. I’ve been given a curriculum, rote and predictable, test-prep focused, but I ignore it. We read and we have conversations. They do group work, stand up together and give presentations on chart paper. My students are all black and brown kids, underserved, reduced- or free-lunch charter-school kids. They are still daily—by the shoddy, half-assed education that they’re getting every day at this place, from grown-ups who mostly look like me—being underserved.
* * *
I catch a kid on his phone in my first class of the day and he smiles at me and looks five so I don’t reprimand him. Put it away, I say, trying to look angry. There is a system that we’re meant to use for discipline. Infractions: majors, minors. I have not installed this system on my phone. I have not, in the five months so far that I’ve been teaching at this institution—we spent one month before that training—given out one of these infractions.
* * *
My coteacher is twenty-four and does not know how to be a teacher. He also does not know how to interact with other humans or how to define the word “soliloquy.” He stands in the back of the room and tries to give kids infractions and I tell him not to or take them away later, logging on to the system on my computer and disappearing the detentions he’s doled out. He crosses his arms over his chest and tells kids to sit up or push their chairs in. Mr. D, they call him, instead of his full name, and he shakes his head. That’s not my name, he says. And the kids laugh and, halfhearted, say they’re sorry; a few minutes later, they call him Mr. D again.
Mr. D, they say, I have to pee this minute.
He clenches his fists.
But really, they say, it’s an emergency, Mr. D.
Not now, he says.
I pop my head up from the student paper that I’m reading, trying to tell whoever said this without talking that they should stop it, but also, if they don’t stop it, I will understand.
Go, I say, to the kid who still has to use the bathroom.
Mr. D stands quiet, his jaw tighter, eyes set on me, and no one speaks to him for the rest of class.
* * *
At lunch, my two co–homeroom teachers sit with me and we talk shit about our coworkers instead of reminding the kids to clean up after themselves and not swear, like we’ve been asked to do. We talk about the twenty-four-year-olds, my coteacher and the others: twenty-three, or twenty-six, but all the same. The young ones, almost all white, anxious, energetic; their sentences sound like questions at the end. They seem scared of their own students; they don’t know how to teach and no one’s tried to help them. They’re held to standards they can’t meet—based on test scores and class averages—and they panic and dole out the material in the exact rote way that we’re meant not to. If and when their methods do not work, they blame the kids.
They’re not awful, these young white teachers. I talk about them because I’m manipulative and unfair, because I’ve learned the best way to bond with colleagues is to be galvanized against other colleagues, against bosses, and I’m desperate to ally myself with my two co–homeroom teachers instead. These twenty-four-year-olds: I’ve sat with some of them, in one of the classrooms we use as an office when no one’s using it for teaching; they’re so young, and if they were my students, they’d be some of my favorites. We’ve had coffee, sat together during training. They’re sweet and talk earnestly about social justice, but they’re my colleagues, not my students, and they can’t see and don’t seem to want to see all the ways their good intentions aren’t worth much.
Some days, I move to the tables with the kids from my class, kids I caught sleeping or who didn’t turn in their homework. You want to eat lunch with me, I say. And they shake their heads but smile. They tell jokes mostly, making fun of one another. Miz, they say, and then they say my last name, you know Jalen has a crush on Aminata; you know Razaq didn’t even read that shit you thought he talked about so well last class; you know Ananda posted a Snap about Nashya’s man and now they ain’t talking and Nashya’s going to go find her after school.
Man, huh? I say, and they laugh at me.
You got a man, Miz, they say, and I nod, smiling at them, and they laugh again.
* * *
After lunch there is a break and I download and print out all my pay stubs because I need them to finish filing for bankruptcy.
How’s it going? asks one of the math teachers as I use the printer in the teacher workroom. The math teacher is also twenty-four and wears a tie, a dark-blue jacket, and a crisp white shirt with the collar buttoned every day. He has bright-white teeth and perfect posture, too much facial hair. I check to make sure I have all of my pay stubs as he looks over my shoulder, and I turn my body so I know he knows I don’t want him to look.
Joyfully driven, I say.
We share the building with five other schools and the track team has nowhere to practice so they practice in the hallways during the last four periods of the day. I leave the teacher workroom and wait, pressed against the hall wall, as kids fly by over hurdles. A girl’s toe catches on the bottom of a hurdle and it bangs against the hard, dark floor and she falls, hands flat on the cold tile, and she doesn’t scream. I check in my bag for my pay stubs over and over. I check Twitter, check and recheck email, half read student work, and input grades. I’m not as good a teacher as I wish I were. I’m inconsistent, get distracted. I give fifty-seven comments on every three-page paper, and the next day I skim through to make sure everybody turned in their work, fix a few grammar or comprehension errors, and give almost everyone a B. No one reads my comments, and the work feels most productive when I’m one-on-one with students, checking in before and after class and making time for conferences. Most of the writing is difficult to track and the reading of it, hour after hour, wears on my brain.
* * *
Our older daughter’s school calls three hours before the workday’s over. They never remember that they’re supposed to call my husband, who is home during the week and takes care of them while I’m at work. Our daughter got a bead stuck in her nose. I must come pick her up and take her to a doctor who can get it out. I almost tell the nurse to call my husband, then instead I say I’ll be right there and message my boss that I have to leave. My co–homeroom teacher and I are the only people on the staff with kids and usually, when I say “kids” to any of my other coworkers, people’s eyes glaze over and they get antsy and uncomfortable and I get out of things.
* * *
I’m not yet on the subway platform when our daughter’s school calls back to say they got the bead out. The other nurse, who had been on her lunch break, held her hand over our daughter’s face, her thumb pressed hard against her unobstructed nostril, and blew into our daughter’s mouth until the bead popped out.
So
we don’t need you, says the woman. She’s back in class, she says, all good.
But I’m already out, and my coat’s on and I keep walking. I skip the subway. When I was very young and single, without children, I used to walk the city for days. I head north then west and walk into the Guggenheim. There is a retrospective of stark lines and colors. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been in a museum on a weekday, and I walk very slowly up the corkscrewing path and am alone and quiet. I look a long time at each painting. It feels like what I imagine people feel like when they imagine whatever god they might believe in standing close to them.
* * *
I walk from the museum to the train and take it downtown, where I get off and go to a coffee shop I used to go to before I worked full time. I was in grad school for six years—English literature, mid- to late twentieth century, British and American, forgotten or actively discarded female writers: Penelope Fitzgerald, Anita Brookner, Jean Rhys, Nella Larsen, Lucia Berlin. There was a time when I thought giving books to other people—showing them their richness, their quiet, secret, temporary safety—could be a useful way to spend one’s life. I spent another five years as a part-time adjunct, waitress, admin assistant. Once, for six months, I wrote quizzes to accompany the bad books put out by an education corporation, but I was fired because I couldn’t keep my sentences short enough.
This—the school, at thirty-four—is the first full-time job of my whole life.
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