Want

by Lynn Steger Strong

  The twenty-four-year-old stands quietly in back. I think maybe he’s transcribing in his head the case he’ll make when he goes to our boss to get me fired. I think if I get fired I won’t mind. And then one of my students stands close to me, pointing to a moment in the text she thinks will help her team, and I think I will go over to the twenty-four-year-old and threaten to harm him bodily if he takes this job from me.

  * * *

  While the kids prep their closing arguments, I check my email. I’m so honored, the Chilean writer writes back to me, I can’t wait.

  * * *

  Third-floor hall duty. I’m reading: Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero. All my life I have been searching for something that would fill me with pride, make me feel superior to everyone else, including kings, princes, and rulers, says Firdaus, as she sits in a cell, sentenced to death.

  I get a message about a girl, a tenth grader, who walks out of class because of anxiety. She has a disorder, we were told at a staff meeting—amplified flight reflex. If she feels anxious, she walks out of class, sometimes out of school, and she walks often. Regularly, on the Google chat, we get messages saying that she’s gone.

  Can someone check the third-floor bathroom? says the chat.

  Got it, I message back.

  Kayla? I say, looking under the stall doors.

  Another student, who is in my class and is standing at the mirror, motions to me. Last stall, she mouths.

  I knock and Kayla opens the stall door slowly. I don’t know you, she says.

  I don’t teach the tenth graders. I introduce myself, tell her what I teach.

  I still have to pee, she says, closing the door.

  I message the Google chat. Minutes pass and no sound comes from the stall. I watch the toes of her black lace-up shoes turn in.

  She comes out and the toilet hasn’t flushed. She turns the water on and washes and rewashes and rewashes her hands.

  Come on, Kayla, I say. We have to get you back to class.

  She doesn’t look at me. She washes one more time and grabs a paper towel, placing it in between her fingers, folding it into a tiny dark-brown square before placing it into the trash.

  We come out of the bathroom and I’m not sure if I’m allowed to touch her. I’m not sure how to make sure she doesn’t run away without my touching her. I try to keep my voice calm and not to scold her. I have to chat the counselor to find out where to take her and I type with one finger, keeping one hand free in case she runs. She’s taller than me but she stays half a step behind. Twice, she tries to turn back toward the bathroom and I grab hold of her backpack and half nudge, half lead her up the stairs.

  What’s your favorite subject? I say, suddenly dumb and bad at conversation.

  Science, she says.

  Cool, I say. I like science.

  She tries to take a sharp left when we get up the stairs and I turn right and once again I have to grab her backpack to keep her with me. She’s wily and she’s fast, they told us in the meeting. I loop my arm around hers.

  Come back, Kayla, I say as I let go of her to knock on the counselor’s office door and she disappears down the hall.

  She was just here, I say when the counselor comes out and Kayla’s gone.

  * * *

  I leave after my hall duty is over. I pass the twenty-four-year-old on the escalator. He goes up and I go down and I look him in the eye and do not smile and he finally looks away.

  * * *

  The shift in register between my day job and my night job usually takes half an hour. The students that I teach at night are grad students. They’re so much older, paying to be there. It is both more intellectually rigorous and not as hard for me because I don’t have to convince them they should care. Because their lives up until now have all been more like mine. I’m less careful with them maybe; their out-of-class demands feel both less important to me and easier to solve.

  I sit in whatever office I am given and I disappear for an hour, as long as students haven’t asked to meet with me, and I read the book I’m meant to teach or I scroll through Twitter or text my husband and ask him to send me videos of our girls. I take off my blazer if I’ve been wearing a blazer. I have, twice this year, bought a T-shirt on the magic credit card after I looked in the mirror on my way uptown and felt too professionally dressed to teach literature to graduate students.

  The Chilean writer is in her fifties, I learned from the link embedded in the earlier email form the school administration office, and has written five novels, three of them translated into English. She is on her second marriage, has one grown son. She sits next to me at the seminar table as we discuss Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H., a novel that has attempted to absence words of their meaning. Before I entered the room, what was I? G. H. asks. Most of the students did not like it. I have told them that like and dislike are not pertinent but they are incapable of not telling everybody whether or not they liked each book we read. It’s a hard novel and it doesn’t give much space for the reader to feel grounded, to get inside it, I say. Why does it do this, though? I ask. I gesture too much when I teach. In the novel, a woman stands at the edge of a room and watches the slow death of the cockroach she’s decapitated with a door, talking with it, before ingesting its entrails.

  A female student who wears dark eyeliner and has long curly hair raises her hand close to the end of class and says, of the experience of reading the novel, I felt hit by a truck. Some students laugh, and I say, So, then, she made you feel something. So, then, I say, did she succeed in that?

  The Chilean writer stays quiet the whole time. She takes notes. She smiles and nods whenever I look toward her and when the student says the thing about the truck she laughs.

  I’m so grateful, she says, after.

  I smile at her, not sure how to tell her that she shouldn’t be.

  Can I buy you dinner? she says.

  I haven’t eaten, and the kids are already in bed sleeping.

  Sure, I say.

  * * *

  We agree to split a cheeseburger. She says she can never finish one all by herself and, though I’m starving, haven’t eaten all day, I’m too thrilled by the suggested intimacy to refuse. She serves me, in a clutch, from her plate to mine, half of the French fries and we eat almost all of the food, not saying much, in not very long a time.

  We talk at first about books and about teaching. I tell her I wanted to be an academic because books always made more sense to me than people, because words written down couldn’t be refuted later on. I’m always shocked, I tell her, when I see students outside of class and have to talk to them about anything but whatever we’ve read together, when I have to make up the ideas and the questions from scratch.

  She says she became a writer because it was the only space in which she ever had control.

  I wrote about real people, she tells me. Except I could do things to them, with them; I wasn’t ineffectual in the face of whatever wants or needs they had.

  I forgot, she says, that the actual people would still be there, and the same, when I was done.

  I like looking at her as she talks. We sit at a small table, in chairs with caned backs and thin red cushions. I want to take my shoes off, to pull my knees up to my chest. The tables are close to one another and when people get up on either side of us they have to hold their coats and bags up over their heads so they don’t brush against us as they walk past. The lighting’s dim and the walls are red to match the cushions. There are booths along both back walls and worn movie posters hung behind the bar, the titles of which are all in French.

  I used to listen to my drunk sister, she says, on the phone for hours.

  She talked about her awful life, she says, her bipolar, perennially out-of-work husband, her insane, drug-addled, Asperger’s, ADHD kids.

  She chews a fry and smiles at me. I took notes, she says.

  I eat the last bite of my cheeseburger. It’s too big a bite and I hold my hand over my mouth as she wait
s for me to speak and then goes on.

  I always asked her, she says, if I could use it. Carla, I said, I’m going to use this in my work; is that okay?

  The Chilean writer looks past me through the window to the street, where students walk past in clusters, where cabs and large, dark SUVs drive by.

  She said yes every time, but she was drunk.

  The waiter brings a second round of beers and I hold my thumb over the lip, not eager to drink it. I don’t like beer, really, but when she mentioned that the beer list looked good, I wanted to be like her, so I ordered what she got.

  She killed herself, says the Chilean writer.

  She sips her beer then and I sip mine right after.

  I haven’t written about it yet, she says.

  * * *

  That weekend, I sleep past six. I lie up in bed as my husband makes the children breakfast, reminds them to use the bathroom, asks them if they want to help him knead the biscuits. I’m awake, but I pretend that I’m asleep so I can stay in bed a while longer and just listen. I climb down when he calls to me to say that breakfast is ready and we eat together before he leaves for work.

  Don’t forget the birthday party, he says before he leaves, and I say, Oh, fuck before realizing the kids are right there watching and both of them look up and smile at me. The four-year-old whispers something to her sister and they laugh and run into their room.

  * * *

  We have no present for the birthday party and we have no time to buy one, so I have the children pick two books that they don’t like much and a toy they haven’t played with in a while and we make wrapping paper out of computer paper by drawing pictures on it and we wrap all of it up using a stapler because we don’t have tape.

  * * *

  As soon as we walk into the ground floor of the brownstone, the four-year-old says loudly to the mother of the child whose birthday we’re attending, My mom didn’t have time to get a gift so she made us wrap up our own toys.

  I look down and smile and walk past this woman toward the back of the house while the kids head into the main room, where a TV that covers almost the whole wall plays a loud cartoon and children climb overtop piles of toys and squeal and scream.

  There are bloody marys in the kitchen, says another mother.

  It’s eleven in the morning.

  Great, I say.

  In the kitchen sit seven other mothers and the father of the child whose party this is. He mixes bloody marys, all the ingredients set before him, half-empty jars of olives and tiny onions. He pours one out for each of us, taste-testing, dipping a finger in each glass and licking before handing us our drinks.

  There’s this Korean place, though, says one of the women. I’ve come in midconversation and they seem to be comparing places where they go to seek self-care. They cover you in this thick, salty mud, then spray it off of you with this incredibly strong hose.

  It doesn’t hurt, though?

  It feels amazing. I mean, it sort of hurts, but, like, good hurts, she says. Like waterboarding the dead skin.

  I go to the Russian baths in Queens, another woman says.

  There’s a sensory deprivation tank in Carroll Gardens, says a woman who wears the softest-looking turtleneck I’ve ever seen. It’s, like, two hundred dollars for forty minutes, but you leave feeling like you’ve come fresh from someone’s womb.

  Botox, says another woman, reddening a little. I’m almost forty, she says. I got this chemical peel a couple of weeks ago. She makes a high-pitched sound that might be meant to be a laugh and reaches her hand up to her cheek. I feel better when I like the way I look, she says.

  This fucking world, though, says another woman. We have to do what we can.

  Klonopin, says another woman. Xanax and weed.

  What I really want, though, says the only woman who has not spoken up until now. She sits on a stool in the corner of the room and has already sucked down to just the ice of her bloody mary. She is very thin and wears a blue silk shirt and her dark hair is pulled back from her face. I don’t want to talk, she says, or think. I want to stay standing with my shirt and shoes on and my pants around my ankles and a curtain held in front of my face and I want a strange man that I have never met and never have to meet to fuck me hard and then I want to leave.

  * * *

  The next morning, which is the morning before we go to court to declare ourselves bankrupt, I wake up early, even though it’s still the weekend, and I run fifteen miles into Manhattan and back home over the bridge. The sidewalks are still covered in ice and I fall three times and scrape my palms through my gloves and when my husband sees them, bruised and bloody, as I peel off all my clothes and climb into the shower, I look at him and say, Self-care, and he laughs.

  * * *

  I dress up for bankruptcy court and then wonder if I shouldn’t wear something cheaper looking. Just before the magic credit card stopped working I went to the store I like the most in the West Village, a store I had never been inside of because it looked too expensive, and bought the shirt and pants I’m wearing now. We are, the lawyer told us, when we met with him the first time—when we finally had the two thousand dollars cash we had to pay him to declare officially that we had no money—great candidates for bankruptcy.

  What is this supposed to feel like? I ask my husband.

  Relief? he says.

  He stands close to me in our bedroom, halfway beneath our bed, before we leave, and he is big and tall and I feel better.

  Failure? he says. An end?

  We drop the kids at school together for the first time in a long time. I feel grateful to get to do this. I kiss them, hold them. I let each of them lead me around the rooms where I have never been and where they spend every day.

  We should go to court more often, I whisper to my husband.

  He smiles at me, tired looking. He kisses each girl on the cheek.

  It’s mostly mothers, waving, saying goodbye. My husband waves or nods to all the mothers; they smile at him, hands reaching for their hair or clothes or for their children if they’re close to them. They look at me warily.

  * * *

  While we wait for my husband to come back from the bathroom, on a bench outside the room that we will soon enter, where we will sit and wait again in different chairs, the bankruptcy lawyer mentions quietly to me that he majored in literature.

  I wanted to be a writer, he says. An academic. He says this last word like it’s magic, like this is not really a thing a person is.

  I smile, my thumb rubbing the soft corner of this shirt that I won’t ever pay for.

  Dodged a bullet there, I say.

  * * *

  The first time I got pregnant it was an accident. I didn’t believe that it was real until I took a digital test, alone, in the bathroom of a coffee shop I used to go to when I was twenty-one. I didn’t believe it before I saw the word, but, though I’d imagined maybe I’d at least float the idea that we not have her, though I’d never before that been sure I wanted kids—I knew we were too broke to have her; I was still in grad school—I ached for her as soon as I saw that word form. I had an emergency C-section, and my student health insurance didn’t cover C-sections—or, it covered C-sections, but only partially. We owed the hospital thirty thousand dollars, and then I was up all night nursing and walking the baby up and down the hallway and eating handfuls of chocolate chips to stay awake and then never remembering to rebrush my teeth. I got two root canals and one of them abscessed and the tooth had to be removed and they said that if I didn’t get the tooth replaced my jaw would slowly collapse and I got a ten-thousand-dollar manmade tooth and another crown. We got too much takeout because we were both working and trying not to pay for childcare. My husband still owed more than a hundred grand in student loans from undergrad. I kept buying things: another breast pump because of the chafing with the first one, creams and ointments and sleep sacks and a noise machine and different types of swaddling blankets and a dehumidifier, in hopes that I could get the baby�
��the first baby, and then the second baby less than two years later—to finally go to sleep.

  My body almost single-handedly bankrupted us. It also, with a little bit of help, made and then sustained the two best things in our lives. We were just privileged enough to think that we could live outside the systems and the structures and survive it, but we failed.

  * * *

  I think that there will be court but there is not court. There is a small, windowless room and those sad not-fold-out-but-also-not-quite-sturdy-or-comfortable industrial rows of chairs. There are eight of us there for the 10:30 am appointment. Six of us are clients of the same lawyer. Before we’re brought into that room that is the main room, he brings us into a similar room and prepares us all at once. The lawyer is Korean and three of his other clients are Korean, so he tells us the directions once in English, then he says them again in Korean.

  We all nod, and then, one by one, he talks to us about our case. He ushers us all out, then calls us back in one by one.

  You guys will be fine, he says, looking at us, smiling. He’s forty-something. He has this boyish, thick, dark hair that he has to sweep out of his face as he speaks. I wonder if he thinks it’s somehow cool or if he just never remembers that he needs to get it cut.

  You sure you don’t stand to inherit any money in the next year? he says.

  We look at one another, my husband and I; we shake our heads. This is not the first time he’s asked this question. We’re sure, I say.