By this time you have made your stumbling way to the solitary elevator, which moves with maddening slowness, always there’s a disgruntled gathering of persons awaiting this elevator including at least one individual in a wheelchair; all wait in silence, resigned; but you are not resigned, for you are desperate to hear your husband’s voice; desperate to escape the subaqueous below-ground; and so losing patience, breathlessly ascending stairs to the first floor of Building H and through a revolving door into the filtered gray urban air of winter; hurrying now along a traffic-clogged street, breaking into a run, desperate to get to the park, running the last block to the park, threading your way past pedestrians who glance at you with expressions of surprise, annoyance, wonder that a mature woman is running in such a public place, glancing after you as you pass panting and determined, finally crossing into the small urban park that smells of damp chill earth mixed with acrid exhaust, where—suddenly, like a revelation—you feel the cell phone gripped so tightly in your hand vibrate with life like a resuscitated heart as a stream of emails floods in, you have returned to the grid, lifting the phone eagerly to call your husband even as the realization comes to you that your husband is no longer living, of course your husband has died, he is no more, in April of the previous year your husband died, in your arms he died, and now it is January of a New Year.
That is it. There is no mystery—why your husband has been silent, and why he has drifted from you. He has died, he is dead.
In the bleak little wintry park where you stand on a pathway with a useless cell phone in your hand the paralyzing knowledge sweeps through you from the tips of your toes to the crown of your head, a great wave that cauterizes even as it obliterates.
The Happy Place
Professor! Hello.
White winter days, sunshine on newly fallen snow. You have come to the happy place for it is Thursday afternoon.
Another week, and you are still alive. Your secret you carry everywhere and so into the happy place.
So close to the heart, no one will see.
* * *
Not a happy season. Not a happy time. Not in the history of the world and not in the personal lives of many.
You wonder how many are like you. Having come to prefer dark to daylight. Sweet oblivion of sleep to raw wakefulness.
Yet: in the wood-paneled seminar room on the fifth floor of North Hall. At the top of the smooth-worn wooden staircase where a leaded window overlooks a stand of juniper pines. In the wind, pine boughs shiver and flash with melting snow. The happy place.
Here is an atmosphere of optimism light as helium. You laugh often, you and the undergraduates spaced about the polished table.
Why do you laugh so much?—you have wondered.
Generally it seems: the more serious the subjects, the more likely some sort of laughter.
The more intensity, the more laughter.
The more at stake, the more laughter.
The happy place is the solace. The promise.
Waking in the morning stunned to be still alive. The profound fact of your life now.
* * *
Already at the first class meeting in September you’d noticed her: Ana.
Of the twelve students in the fiction writing workshop it is Ana who holds herself apart from the others. From you.
When they laugh, Ana does not laugh—not often.
When they answer questions you put to them, when in their enthusiasm they talk over one another like puppies tumbling together—Ana sits silent. Though Ana may look on with a faint (melancholy) smile.
Or, Ana may turn her gaze toward the wall of windows casting a ghostly reflected light onto her face and seem to be staring into space—oblivious of her surroundings.
Thinking her own thoughts. Private, not yours to know.
You feel an impulse to lean across the table, to touch Ana’s wrist. To smile at her, ask—Ana, is something wrong?
But what would you dare ask this girl who holds herself apart from her classmates? Are you troubled? Unhappy? Distracted? Bored?—not possible. One of the others in the seminar might take Ana aside to ask such questions but you, the adult in the room, the Professor, don’t have that right, nor would you exercise that right if indeed it were yours. Still less should you touch Ana’s wrist.
It is a very thin wrist. The wrist of a child. So easily snapped! The young woman’s face is delicately boned, pale, smooth as porcelain, her eyes are beautiful and thick-lashed but somewhat shadowed, evasive.
You have noticed, around Ana’s slender neck, a thin gold chain with a small gold cross.
The little cross must be positioned just so, in the hollow at the base of Ana’s throat, that is as pronounced and (once you have noticed it) conspicuous as your own.
(What is it called?—suprasternal notch. A physical feature aligned with thinness, generally conceded to be a genetic inheritance.)
Indeed, Ana is a very diminutive young woman. To the casual eye she would seem more likely fourteen than eighteen and hardly a woman at all.
Ana must weigh less than one hundred pounds. No more than five feet two. You see, without having actually noticed until now, that she wears loose-fitting clothing, a shapeless pullover several sizes too large, and the thought strikes you, unbidden, fleeting, that Ana may be acutely thin. Her diffident manner makes her appear even smaller. As if she might curl up, disappear. Cast no shadow.
How vulnerable Ana appears!—to gaze upon her is to feel that you must protect her.
Yet, you suppose that there are many who would wish to take advantage of her.
When the others speak of “religious belief”—“Superstition”—with the heedlessness of bright adolescents wielding their wits like blades Ana sits very still at her end of the table, eyes downcast. Touching the cross around her neck.
Why doesn’t Ana speak, intervene? Defend her beliefs, if indeed she has beliefs?
Yes. This is a superstitious symbol I am wearing. What is it to you?
The discussion has risen out of the week’s assignment, a short story by Flannery O’Connor saturated with Christian imagery and the mystery of the Eucharist, and Ana, like the others, has written an analysis of the story.
But Ana remains silent, stiff until at last the discussion veers in another direction. Glancing at you, an expression of—is it reproach? hurt?—for just an instant.
* * *
The insomniac night is the antithesis of the happy place.
Unlike the happy place which is specifically set, and unfortunately finite, as an academic class invariably comes to an end, the insomniac night has no natural end.
If you cannot sleep in the night, the night will simply continue into the next, sun-blinding day.
* * *
You have thought Is she a refugee for her spoken English is hesitant, imperfect. You have not wanted to think Is she a victim. Has she been hurt. What is the sorrow in her face. Why is she so unlike the others.
Ana’s face, that seems wise beyond her years. (You are certain you are not misinterpreting.)
Oh, why does Ana not smile? Why is it Ana who alone resists the happy place?
In twenty-seven years of teaching you have encountered a number of Anas—surely.
Yet, you don’t recall. Not one. And why should you, students are impermanent in the lives of teachers. There is nothing profound in this situation. Ana has done adequate work for the course, she has never failed to hand in her work on time. You have no reason to ask her to come and speak with you, no reason at all.
Ana’s reluctance (refusal?) to smile on cue, as others so easily smile—this is a small mystery.
Is it your pride that is hurt? But how little pride means to you, frankly.
You are conscious of the (unwitting) tyranny of the group. Of any group no matter how congenial, well-intentioned.
That all in the group laugh, smile, agree with the others, or “disagree” politely, or flirtatiously. The (unwitting) tyranny of the classroom that even the most liberal
-minded instructor cannot fail to exert. Pay attention to me. Pay attention to the forward-motion of the class. No silences! No inward-turning—this is not a Zen meditation. A small class is a sort of skiff, we are all paddling. We are all responsible for paddling. We are aiming for the same destination. We are aware (some of us keenly) of those who are not paddling. Those who have set their paddles aside.
Perhaps Ana has not clearly understood that enrollment in a small seminar brings with it a degree of responsibility for participation. Answering questions, asking questions. “Discussing.” The workshop is not a lecture course: students are not expected to take notes. Perhaps it was an error in judgment for Ana to enroll in a course in which (it seems apparent) she has so little interest as, you are thinking, it was an error in judgment for you to accept her application, out of seventy applications for a workshop of twelve.
Why had you chosen Ana Fallas? A first-year student, with no background in creative writing? Something in the writing sample Ana had provided must have appealed to you, a glimpse of Hispanic domestic life perhaps, that set it aside from others that were merely good, conventional.
Though now, as it has turned out, Ana’s work has seemed less exceptional. Careful, circumspect. Nothing grammatically wrong but—nothing to call attention to itself.
As if Ana is trying to make herself into one of them—the Caucasian majority.
It is likely that Ana is intimidated by the university—its size, its reputation. By the other students in the writing class. She is but one of only two first-year students, and the other is Shan from Beijing, a dazzling prodigy intending to major in neuroscience.
The others are older than Ana, more experienced. Three are seniors, immersed in original research—senior theses. Most of them are Americans and those who are not, like Shan, and Ansar (Pakistan), and Colin (U.K.), have studied in the United States previously and seem to have traveled widely. Ana is the only Hispanic student in the class and (you are guessing) she might be the first in her family to have enrolled in college.
Is Ana aware of you, your concern for her? Sometimes you think yes. More often you think no. Not at all.
I CAN’T.
Or, I don’t think that I can . . .
At the age of twenty-two you were terrified at the prospect of teaching your first class.
English composition. A large urban university. An evening class.
More than a quarter-century ago and yet—vivid in memory!
You had never taught before. You had a master’s degree in English but had never been (like most of your graduate student friends, and your husband) a teaching assistant. Amazing to you now, that the chairman of an English Department in a quite reputable private university had hired you to teach though you’d had no experience teaching at all—had not once stood in front of a classroom. (He’d said afterward that he had been impressed by the written work of yours he’d seen, in national publications. He’d said that, in his experience, teaching was best picked up on the fly, like learning to ride a bicycle, or like sex.)
It had been thrilling to you, to be so selected over numerous others with experience, older than you. But it had not been so thrilling to contemplate the actual teaching. At twenty-two you would not be much older, in fact you would be younger, than many of your students enrolled in the university’s night school division.
English composition! The most commonly taught of university courses, along with remedial English and math.
Your husband, young himself at the time, just thirty, had tried to dispel your terror. He’d tried to encourage you, tease you. Saying—Don’t be afraid, I can walk you into the classroom on my shoes.
Such a silly notion, you’d laughed. Tears of apprehension in your eyes and yet you’d laughed, your husband had that power, to calm you.
Between your young husband and you, in those years. Much laughter.
You think you will live forever. Always it will be like this. You don’t think—well, you don’t think.
Your husband had a Ph.D. in English. He was an assistant professor at another, nearby university, he’d been a very successful teacher for several years. Gently he reasoned with you: What could possibly go wrong, once you’d prepared for the first class?
What could go wrong? Everything!
They won’t pay attention to me. They will see that I am too young—inexperienced. They will laugh in derision. Some of them will walk out . . .
Your husband convinced you that such fears were groundless. Ridiculous. University students would not walk out of a class. Especially older students would not walk out of a class for which they’d paid tuition—it was a serious business to them, not a lark.
In this class, so long ago, were thirty students. Thirty! Over-large for a composition class.
To you, thirty strangers. You broke into actual sweat, contemplating them. The prospect of entering the classroom was dazzling. A nightmare.
For days beforehand you rehearsed your first words—Hello! This is English one-oh-one and my name is—which you hoped would not be stammered, and would be audible. For days you pondered—what should you wear?
On that crucial evening your husband drove you to the university. Your husband did not walk you into the room on his shoes but he did accompany you to the assigned classroom in the ground floor of an old redbrick building. (Did your husband kiss you, for good luck? A brush of his lips on your cheek?) How breathless you were by this time, seeing your prospective students pass you oblivious of you.
Wish me luck.
I love you!
And so it happened when you stepped into the classroom, and took your place behind a podium in front of a blackboard, and introduced yourself to rows of strangers gazing at you with the most rapt interest you’d ever drawn from any strangers in your life—an unexpected and astonishing conviction flooded over you of happiness.
Knowing you were in the right place, at just the right time.
YOU FEEL HER absence keenly.
This day, a particularly wet, cold day Ana is absent from the workshop.
Reluctant to begin class you wait for several minutes. (For other students are arriving late.) Then, when it is evident that Ana will not be coming, you begin.
You have noticed that Ana sits in the same place at the table each week. She will arrive early, to assure this. Such (rigid?) behavior is the sign of a shy person; a person who has had enough upset in her life, and now wants a predictable routine; a person who chooses to rein in her emotions; a person who knows that, like internal hemorrhaging, emotions are not infinite, and can be fatal.
Tacitly the others have conceded Ana’s place at the (farther) end of the table. No one would take Ana’s chair, just as no one would take the Professor’s usual seat.
Yet, no one mentions Ana’s absence. So little impression has she made on the class, no one thinks to wonder aloud—Hey, where is Ana?
You ask for a volunteer, to provide Ana with the assignment for the following week. At first no one responds. Then a young woman raises her hand—Sure! She’s in my residence hall, I think.
You might email or text Ana yourself. But you are thinking you would like someone from the workshop to volunteer, to forge a connection with Ana however slight.
* * *
That evening Ana sends you an email, apologizing for her absence. Flu, infirmary sorry to miss class. Will make up missing work.
* * *
Ridiculous, you are so relieved.
Smiling, your heart suffused with—what? Hope like a helium-filled balloon.
When Ana returns to the workshop you tell her—We missed you, Ana.
True, to a degree. You missed her.
Naturally Ana has completed the assignment: the reading in the anthology, and the weekly prose piece. Though Ana is not one of the more imaginative writers Ana is the most diligent of students.
Hers has been good work, acceptable work so far this semester. It is careful work, precisely written English, surprisingly free of errors for one
whose speech is uncertain. Is this the utterance of clenched jaws?—you wonder. Maybe Ana would like to scream.
The (Other) You Page 17