You will encourage her to write more freely. From the heart.
You will tell her—in fact, you will tell the class—Write what feels like life to you. It need not be “true”—your writing will make it “true.”
Ana frowns distractedly, staring down at the table. She knows that you are (obliquely) criticizing her work, which the others have discussed politely, without much to say about it. For all her pose of indifference Ana is highly sensitive.
You have encouraged your students to write, not memoir, but memoir-like fiction. You do not (truly!) want these young people to open their veins and pour out their life’s blood for the diversion of others but neither do you want them to attempt arch, artificial fiction derivative of work by the most-read fiction writers of the era—for that they cannot do, and certainly they cannot do well.
Others in the class take up the challenge, excited. Write what feels like life to you.
Ana takes back her prose piece from you. Ana’s eyes slide away from yours and will not engage.
You had written—Promising! But something that anyone might have written. What does “Ana” have to say?
Away from the seminar room which is the happy place you ponder your obsession with this student. For the first time acknowledging the word—obsession.
Telling yourself that now you’ve made the acknowledgment, the obsession will begin to fade.
* * *
And then, in the seventh week of the semester, long past the time when you’d have thought that any undergraduate could surprise you, Ana hands in something very different from the cautious prose she has been writing.
The assignment is a dramatic monologue. Just a page or two. In the “memoirist” mode.
Here is urgent, intense work by Ana. Not cautious at all—a bold plunge into stream-of-consciousness speech uttered (seemingly) by an adolescent daughter of (Guatemalan?) (illegal?) immigrants stranded in a nightmare detention center at the Texas border in Laredo.
The other young writers take notice. It is requested that Ana read the monologue aloud.
Oh, I—I can’t. . . .
Stammering no, blushing fiercely but the others insist.
* * *
From a prose poem of Ana’s:
I thought the eucalyptus had burst into flame, I’d seen it and ran away screaming. And then—years later they laugh at me and told me no, that had not happened to me but to my little sister.
And when I remember my brother beaten by our father with his fists they tell me no, not just my brother but me, as well. But they are not laughing.
In the foster home there are three girls named Mya.
Those acts perpetrated upon one of the Myas are perpetrated upon the others.
We do not know your name but your face will always be known to us.
* * *
Astonishing and wonderful—Ana is writing with such passion now.
Less guardedly, and less circumspectly. Wonderful too, how others in the seminar take up her work with excitement and admiration.
This is not conventional “fiction”—there are few “characters”—minimal “description”—“Settings.” All is dreamlike, rapid-fire.
In fragments it is revealed that a girl named “Mya” has lived in one or more foster homes in the Southwest. Albuquerque, Tucson. In the home are (illegal?) Central American immigrants. There are bribes to be paid. There are hopes for visas, green cards. There are knives, guns. Brutal beatings when debts are not repaid. Shootings, woundings, blood-soaked mattresses. A ghastly scene in an emergency room where an eighteen-year-old Guatemalan hemorrhages to death, and a laconic scene in a morgue in which a drug-addled woman attempts to identify an estranged and badly mutilated husband. Hiding from law enforcement officers, rummaging Dumpsters for food. Shoplifting. Unexpected cruelty in the foster home, and unexpected kindness.
Homeless children, adolescents. A girl seeking out a younger sister who has been sent to live in a foster home.
There was no choice. My mother believed our father would kill her if she did not leave.
. . . first there were three Myas in the foster home. Then there were two Myas. Then there was one Mya.
Then, none.
* * *
You are filled with dread, you have gone too far. Your shy, unassertive student has begun writing what feels like life—she has thrown off restraint.
It is true, you have triumphed—as a writing instructor. But this is a precarious triumph—(maybe). As if you have prized open a shell, the pulsing life of the defenseless mollusk within is exposed.
One of the most imaginative writers in the class, whose name is Philip, whose major is astrophysics and whose favored writers are Borges, Calvino, Cortázar, declares that Ana’s prose poetry is beautiful and terrible as a Möbius strip.
Ana is deeply moved to hear these words. You have seen how Philip has been casting sidelong glances at Ana, over the weeks; now Ana lifts her eyes to his face.
Much attention is paid in the workshop to Ana’s prose. Her sentences, paragraphs—headlong plunges of language. There is praise for Ana’s spare, elliptical dialogue which is buried in the text as if it might be interior and not uttered aloud at all.
No one cares to address Ana’s powerful subject matter. Desperate persons, domestic violence, a hint of sexual assault. Three girls named Mya in the foster home.
Amid their admiration the others are uneasy. It is considered bad manners—the violation of an implicit taboo—to ask if anyone’s work is based upon her experiences, at least when the work is so extreme. And you have taken care to instruct the students, memoirist writing is not memoir. Even memoir is not “autobiography” but understood to be more poetic and impressionistic, less literal and complete.
At the end of the discussion Ana is flushed with pleasure. Unless it’s an excited sort of dread. Never have you seen Ana so intense, so involved in the workshop.
You would not dare reach out to touch her wrist now, her burning-hot skin would scald your fingers.
* * *
The following Thursday Ana is not in the seminar room when you arrive.
Everyone waits for Ana’s arrival. The chair in which she usually sits is left unoccupied. But she does not appear.
Your heart is seized with dismay. You are sure it’s as you’d feared—Ana regrets what she revealed to the class, she regrets being led to such openness.
Having written what she has written, that cannot now be retracted.
I am so sorry, Ana. Forgive me.
You don’t write such an email. Never!
From your husband you learned never to impose your emotions upon students. Never to assume to know what they are thinking and feeling, that is (but) what you imagine they are thinking and feeling, unless they tell you; and it would be rare indeed for them to tell you.
You are the adult. You are the professional. You must prevail.
* * *
And then: by chance you encounter Ana in a store near the university.
Indeed it is but by chance. Indeed you have not been following Ana.
Seeing too, another time—how alone Ana appears. How small, vulnerable.
Inside an oversized winter coat falling nearly to her ankles, that looks like a hand-me-down.
Her face is flushed from the cold, her eyes startled and damp. Faint shadows like bruises in her perfect skin, beneath her eyes.
Though you can see that Ana would (probably) prefer not to say hello it is not possible for you to avoid each other. You greet Ana with a friendly smile as you would any student, ignoring her nervousness; she stammers Hello Professor. . . .
Ana is embarrassed, awkward. Still, Ana manages to smile at her professor.
Telling you apologetically that she’d meant to write to you, to explain why she’d had to miss another class: there’d been a family emergency, she’d had to spend time on the phone with several relatives. Ana speaks so rapidly, in faltering English, you halfway wonder if she is telling the truth. Yet in h
er face an expression of such genuine dismay you are sure that she must be telling some part of the truth.
You are thinking If this were a story . . . You would invite Ana to have coffee with you, perhaps you would walk together in the lightly falling snow, and talk. Ana would confide in you at last, directly; as, it has seemed to you, she is confiding in you indirectly, in her writing. Ana would reveal herself the survivor of abuse, a broken and devastated household. A traumatized child in need of advice, protection . . .
But that does not happen. Will not happen. For this is not a story, and not a fiction. This is actual life, that does not bend easily to your fantasies.
The moment passes. You move on. You do not glance after Ana, as, you are sure, Ana does not glance after you.
It is true, you are desperately lonely. But you understand that yours is an adult loneliness that no adolescent stranger can assuage.
RECALLING YOUR SHOCK, and subsequently melancholy, when the first class of your teaching career came to an end.
How you’d actually wept . . . I will never have such wonderful students again.
For they had come to seem like family to you. Even those at the margins, not so fully engaged as others, the distracted ones, the annoying ones, the ones with quirky mannerisms, yet you’d come to love them all—their final smiles, their handshakes at the end of the final class, devastating to you, such loss.
Your husband had not laughed at you, not exactly. But assuring you, Yes. You will.
Twenty-seven years ago.
* * *
As abruptly as it began, the semester has ended.
The final workshop in the wood-paneled seminar room at the top of the smooth-worn staircase in North Hall.
And then, “reading week”—between the end of classes and the start of exams. Through this week you will see students in your office, individually.
Following these conferences, which are sometimes intense, it is not likely that you will see most of the students again.
After such intimacy, abrupt detachment. The way of teaching—semester following semester.
Professor! Hello . . .
There is Ana, in the doorway of your office. Accompanied by two tensely smiling adults—parents?
You don’t expect this. You are totally surprised. You’d thought—what had you thought?
A lost girl, an abused girl. An orphan.
Though Ana appears to be virtually quivering with nerves, or with excitement, she has brought her parents to meet you—Elena and Carlos Fallas. Ana’s pride in the situation, her thrilled face, shining eyes, the way she clasps her parents’ hands in hers, urging them to enter your office—it is very touching, you are moved nearly to tears.
Ana’s parents are so young. Especially the mother who is Ana’s height, small-boned, with beautiful dark eyes. Haltingly the parents speak to you in heavily accented English. They are visiting from San Diego, they say. They have heard much about you.
Through a roaring in your ears you hear Ana speaking of her favorite class, her writing class, how you helped her to write as if your life depended upon it.
How you’d told her—It need not be true, your writing will make it true.
Ana is breathless, daring. What an achievement it has been for your shyest student to have brought her parents to meet you! How long has Ana been practicing these words, this encounter . . .
The scene seems impossible to you. Unreal. How had you so misread Ana Fallas? Her seeming lack of interest in the seminar, and in you . . . Her sorrowful expression, her isolation . . .
Had you misinterpreted, and Ana is not telling the fullest truth now? But rather, performing for her parents? And for you?
The melancholy was not feigned, you are sure. The sorrow in her eyes. Yet—here is a very different Ana, laughing as she discreetly corrects her parents’ English, vivacious and sparkling, happy.
Ana has plaited her hair into a sleekly black braid. She has painted her fingernails coral. She is wearing, not baggy clothes, but attractive bright-colored clothing that is a perfect size for her small body. The little gold cross glitters around her neck. Ana is very pretty, and she is adored by her parents. She is not an abused child, she is certainly not an orphan.
Astonishingly, you hear—My favorite professor.
You are determined not to betray this astonishment. You are determined to speak despite the roaring in your ears. Assuring Ana’s eager parents that Ana has been an excellent student. A very promising writer. Like few young writers, Ana can learn from criticism—constructive criticism. Ana’s imagination is fertile, seemingly boundless. You are giddy as a drunkard. Words tumble from your mouth, you are shameless. You will say anything to please these people, you want only to make them happy, to make them less ill-at-ease in your professorial presence.
You will not confess—I have been so mistaken about your daughter. I am ashamed . . .
She is not the person I had imagined. You are not the people. Forgive me!
Ana’s parents have brought you a beautifully wrapped little gift. Your heart sinks, you hope it isn’t expensive. (That size? Could be a small clock. A watch.) You have not the heart to decline their generosity but it is considered a breach of academic ethics, at least at this university, to accept gifts from the parents of students, even small gifts.
The card from Ana you will accept, with thanks. The gift you will pass to the departmental secretary.
Ana’s parents are less nervous now. They tell you how proud they are of their daughter, the first in the family to attend a four-year college. How grateful for the scholarship that brought her here—though it is so far from home. How honored to meet you.
When they leave you stand in the doorway of your office staring after them, still disbelieving, dazed. So mistaken. How possible . . .
The little gift you leave on your desk for the time being. The card from Ana you open: Thank you, Professor, for giving me the key to my life.
* * *
And then, returning home later that evening.
A mild shock—the door is unlocked.
Turn the knob, and the door opens. Not for the first time since your husband has died. It is a careless habit, away for hours and the house unlocked and darkened.
You have become careless with your life. Indifferent.
Entering an empty house from which all meaning has fled.
Once, this was a happy place. That seems like a bad joke now.
Each room in this house is a kind of exile. You avoid most of the rooms, you keep in motion. Difficult to find a place to sit, a place where you are comfortable sitting. Almost at once you feel restless, anxious. Your fingers clutch at the hollow in your throat, you have difficulty breathing.
He has been gone how many months. Still you cannot—quite—acknowledge the word dead.
Once, you’d known precisely how many weeks, days. Down to the hour.
But the house is still as deserted. This place from which happiness has drained like water seeping into earth.
You have tried to explain to your husband, as you try to explain to him so many things, for he is patient, unjudging—how you were mistaken about Ana, for so long. The stubbornness in your misperception, the hurt. You have tried, and failed, to explain to him why Ana has meant so much to you. And why it has all ended, as it has ended.
It is frightening to you, in this empty and darkened house—What else has eluded you, that is staring you in the face? About what else have you been mistaken?
Nightgrief
No need to speak of it. By mutual consent, no words, no speech, no language and scarcely the complicity of touch, instinctively they began to shun the day, which is to say light—day-light. For there was, for them, the solace, balm, oblivion of night that coursed through their parched arteries and quickened their hearts grown wizened as prunes.
As in a reverse tropism each began to shrink from the glare of day-light. Independent of the other each began to crave, with an almost sensual appetite, night.
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During the day, too much noise, commotion. You could see much too clearly, and too far in any direction. Day-light was blunt, raw, vulgar. Day-light was exhausting.
Too many children in day-light. Kids on bicycles. Shouts, laughter. At the 7-Eleven, in the drugstore parking lot, on the steps of the branch library—loitering teenagers. The wife hurried past them eyes averted like a tightrope walker on a high wire, no net below.
And afterward, collapsed in her car, sobbing, choking in a rage at herself—No. Stop. You will be seen, pitied. Just—stop.
Anywhere in the vicinity of sprawling Englewood Park and particularly the southeastern corner which was the softball field—sinkholes to be avoided. In day-light it had become treacherous to drive on certain streets, roadways. Past the beige-brick Florence Howe Middle School on Riverdale and past the redbrick Mt. Olive High School on North Main. In day-light these (ordinary, terrible) buildings loomed freakish-large, blotting out the sky. Never (again) Northway Mall including the streets leading to it. Without needing to confer each understood: none of these routes was possible any longer by day-light.
By night, one might drive anywhere. Or nowhere.
Day-light in any part of the urban landscape had begun to cause eye strain, aching eyes, squinting eyes, visual malformations caused by an excess of (stinging) tears. Fugues of near-blindness in bright sunshine, and then in not-bright sunshine, and then in dull-opaque daylight, finally in any degree of day-light at all.
Debilitating headaches—cluster headaches, migraine. As if the very skull had been struck by an ax baring the moist quivering vulnerable brain.
Sunglasses helped temporarily, at the start. The wife purchased stylish new prescription grayish-pink lenses of the kind called “progressive”—meaning that the lenses darken with the brightness of the sun. The husband purchased new prescription olive-tinted glasses, also “progressive.”
Yet even with “progressive” lenses their eyes grew ever more sensitive to light. And so each began to wear lenses so dark that their eyes were hidden completely, like the eyes of the blind; and the frames of these glasses were large, masking one-third of their faces, like the faces of the guilty who wish to pass among us incognito.
The (Other) You Page 18