The Best American Essays 2012

by David Brooks

  I never missed the school musical in my earlier years of teaching, and I’m sure to be on hand for the one this year: a spirited vaudeville revue. Like all its precursors, it is performed in the town’s old auditorium, the school having no such place. There is that same magic I remember from previous shows—and some of the same teachers, still playing in the orchestra and doing makeup backstage, most of them gray-headed now—the magic of kids stepping out of their daytime roles and into new ones, the latter sometimes closer to their most authentic selves. Not always recognizable in their costumes, still less so when they sing, they seem charmed and immortal, happily lost in that thin place that is both school and not-school because it exists outside the scheduled day. As the audience files out of the theater, mothers of actresses identifiable by the bouquets in their hands, the vice principal calls me aside and says that the principal wants to speak to all the faculty in the basement under the stage. When we gather, the principal announces that a thirty-nine-year-old teacher on our staff, not at the play this evening, has died suddenly from heart failure. Obviously shaken, he wants us to be prepared. There is no mourning like mourning in a school.

  And there is nothing like a school to make one aware of mortality. You may be thinking of other professions where this is more the case, medicine or ministry for example, but I buried the dead and visited the dying for many years and do not recall ever leaving a hospital or a grave with a heightened awareness of my death; mostly what I felt was relief at being alive. But the relentless experience of finitude that is teaching, the angelus that rings—not three times a day, as in a monastery, but every forty-five minutes—remorselessly drives home one’s sense of limited time on the earth, of diminishing chances to do the work and get it right. The kids are probably too young to feel it this way, and one hopes so, but they know what a deadline is, and they can hear the word dead.

  If the bell schedule and the calendar are the body of a school, transcendence often comes as an out-of-body experience. When a classroom teacher can somehow manage to get kids “out of school,” either physically or psychologically, then school can begin. Sometimes that happens simply by inviting students to stay after school, which can be difficult, though it helps if you have refreshments and a few students with nothing better to do at home. I have both. Sometimes it happens through a special project, the more hands-on the better—paradoxically, “out of body” often translates in practice to contact with the physical world, to running, drawing, making something real.

  I hand out magic markers and invite students to deface enlarged photographs of my face, one blacked-out tooth or booger per part of speech accurately identified, and everybody wants to find a verb. I have them make a museum of projects based on the literature we have studied, and though I encourage the use of technology, their overwhelming preference is for projects made with tangible stuff, perhaps because more than one person can touch it at a time. Two boys team up and build a full-scale replica of the raft in Huckleberry Finn, using hand axes for authenticity, and cart it on a trailer to school. It seems the perfect symbol of our object: to get away from the prim Widow Douglas and float free for a while. Even so, we are no farther from the riverbank and its cruelties than Huck and Jim are, because not all the students have adults to help them with their projects or money to pay for materials; because one of the boys who builds the raft tells me he plans to join the marines after he graduates, and so mortality is still able to smirk at me over his tattooed shoulder.

  Not surprisingly, the literature brings its own transcendence, especially when we get to drama and poetry, which I have injudiciously put off until the spring. I discover how much the students enjoy reading aloud; girls vie for the part of Emily in Our Town; the unlikeliest boys take a shot at Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” I come to suspect that it is not reading they hate so much as reading in isolation. The same radical privacy that I seek in books, my mind’s way of eating its lunch alone, is what turns their stomachs. I learn of two girls in my class who got through Ethan Frome by reading aloud to each other over Skype, not unlike George Gibbs and Emily Webb chatting between their upstairs bedroom windows, just with different kinds of windows. They are acutely social creatures, these kids, and it is a slow learner indeed who fails to grasp that fact even as he prattles on about building a more social democracy.

  Spring break marks the first school vacation when I have not been ill, and I celebrate with a free-for-all of physical work. I stack firewood. I burn brush. I prune trees, including the crabapple tree my expository-writing students gave to me in 1985 as a housewarming gift. It was about twenty inches high then and now stands a good twelve feet, with a span of branches almost as wide. It will be awash with white blossoms by the time of final exams. Plant trees when you’re young, advised the Vermont poet James Hayford, so that when you’re old, “you can walk in shade/That you and time together made.” Several years ago I realized I had heard from no fewer than seven of my former students in a single month: a gay anarchist agitator, a hairdresser, a college professor, a guidance counselor, a dairy farmer, a Web designer, and a felon, three women and four men, all very different but all contributors to the shade that I and time together made. Sometimes I wonder how much richer my life might have been had I never left teaching. I wonder but I never ache with regret.

  One of the more remarkable and, I think, telling things about the teaching trade is the number of people who need to believe that you love it. Ever since leaving the classroom in the mid-1990s and throughout the past year, I’ve found people asking if I missed teaching or had plans to take it up again. They didn’t want to know; they wanted to hear me say yes. Some didn’t bother to ask. “I know the pay is not the greatest, but you’re doing what you love”—a sentiment that puts me in mind of the trope of the happy slave. In fact, our word pedagogue derives from a Greek word for a type of slave who led children to school. Jim is Huck Finn’s teacher not only in spirit but in accordance with an ancient tradition. This is not to suggest that contemporary teachers are slaves or that I was ever treated like one, only that I am inclined to distrust people who expect me to work for love, or who need a sentimental mythology to gloss over the impossibilities of my job and the daily injustices it lays bare.

  My principal, Mr. Messier, or Mr. Mess as the kids call him, never asks me if I love my job. He does say he hopes I am enjoying my year at Lake Region. He tells me that I was important to him when he was a high school student and that I am having a similar impact on students this year. He says that he thinks of me as the school’s “artist in residence”; apparently he does not think the artisan teacher needs to die. He never hovers, yet I often feel him beside me, sometimes because he actually is, strolling nearby in the bustling halls until one of us notices the other and says hello, an effect that on certain days and in certain fragile states of mind can feel almost numinous. Well over six feet, with a halogen smile and the broadest shoulders I have ever seen on a human being, he is deferential, resolute, and charismatic to such a degree that he trumps my usual suspicions of charisma. At the close of every day, he walks the students to the buses, his figure unmistakable even with the hood of his Windbreaker up. He walks back into the building when the last bus is gone, and I feel that I know exactly what he is thinking, that he has seen his kids off for another day, only wishing he could see every one of them safely home, especially the ones who dread going.

  Though my role in his formation is hypothetical at best—I first knew him as a fifteen-year-old farm boy and he would have made a fine principal then—I am unabashedly proud of him. I can’t say with any conviction that I love teaching. But I do love him, and others I have taught who are very different from him. And I know I am not suited to be a teacher because even with that love and its incomparable satisfactions, I am counting off the days until I can go home for good.

  Scores of days and hundreds of “teachable moments” remain before that can happen, however; every week something new. Babies in car seats begin to appear in the hal
lways, life-size baby dolls as it turns out, a project for a class in parenting. I recall a similar assignment from my previous teaching stint, though then it was done with a swaddled egg in a cigar box. The symbolism was obvious, emphasizing the fragility of a newborn. In the updated, higher-tech version, the students, all girls as far as I can tell, are expected to attend to the artificial infant’s simulated needs, responding promptly whenever it cries and keeping close watch over it, though the dolls don’t break as easily as the eggs did.

  The parenting class is offered only to juniors and seniors, but lo and behold a sophomore girl shows up in my last-period class with baby and bucket in hand. It seems the “mother” has absented herself from school for a day or two in order to handle her prodigious prom arrangements and has left the baby with a round-the-clock sitter, teasing out the simulation, to say nothing of the irony, more than she probably knows. But I have to say, her choice of a sitter is impeccable, a girl I’d surely have chosen were I needing one for any child of mine. Meredith already has the experience for one thing, routinely caring for her little niece, who lives with her on the family farm. She also works part-time at McDonald’s, competes as an amateur wrestler (a pursuit I find hard to reconcile with her diminutive height and demure behavior, though I’ve been told she can “beat the shit out of any boy in this school”), reads her drowsy big brother’s English assignments aloud to him as he drives her to school in his truck (he’s up at 2:00 A.M. doing barn chores and occasionally nods off in my first-period class), and can always be counted on to bring a pan of home-baked cookies for afterschool study sessions (even when she herself can’t stay) and to deliver A+ speaking assignments, like the one on historical infatuation entitled “How I Stalked JFK.” A pearl of a girl, in other words, so I’m glad she has charge of the “baby,” not only because she’ll see it gets the right care but also because I hope she’ll see, if she hasn’t already, that this is a burden she doesn’t need for a good long time.

  Midway through the period the doll erupts in a fit of wailing. My first thought is to ask who has their blasted cell phone on and whatever possessed them to chose such a perverse ringtone. Then I notice Meredith, clearly mortified by the outburst—this is a kid who waits patiently by the electric pencil sharpener until everyone has finished speaking. Smiling, I offer to rock the doll for her while I teach. “No,” she says, “I’ll take care of it,” and hurries from the room.

  Five minutes later I am still doing my teach-on-the-Titanic routine and the baby is still screaming out in the hall. Finally, one of the students says, “Mr. Keizer, I think maybe you better go out there.”

  When I do, I find Meredith frantically trying to turn a black plastic key into the control box at the back of the doll. She is visibly distressed. I feel a bit rattled myself at this point—the cry is “fake” but up close it arouses a very real and even primal response. I also try the key to no avail, noticing that there are written directions (and we know how much good they do) to turn the key clockwise. What I also discover is that the lady wrestler or some caretaker before her has succeeded in twisting the key into a worthless corkscrew of plastic. It turns only on itself. Can you get in touch with the student who gave this to you? I ask, raising my voice to be heard. She can’t. She adds that if the crying is deactivated without turning the key it could compromise the other student’s grade. I couldn’t give a fig, I want to say, but instead ask if she knows the teacher in charge of the parenting class. No, she’s somebody up at the career center ten miles to the north. The doll keeps wailing, louder it seems. I am indignant on behalf of Meredith and on my own behalf as well. We have been handed “a situation” for which we have not been prepared. Somewhat beyond what the assignment intends, we are feeling what every parent feels at one time or another: overwhelmed, clueless, and (needlessly) alone.

  I tell Meredith what I think we should do and reluctantly she nods her head. I pop the voice box from the doll’s plastic back. Like an image out of Poe, the box continues wailing in my hand as I stare at it dumbfounded. Wanting to stomp the thing under my boot, I pull the ribbon that expels the batteries and the noise finally stops.

  But the simulation continues, at least for one deathly moment. In real life, in a predicament not too far removed from the experience of many of my students, I would not have been this girl’s teacher. I would have been her boyfriend, perhaps the baby’s father, perhaps not. I couldn’t have pulled out the batteries, because there wouldn’t have been any batteries to pull out. Instead, I would have taken up the infant in a fit of frustration and shaken it until it either died or became permanently eligible for special services. I, in turn, would have become eligible to have my deer-in-the-headlights mug shot appear in the police blotter of the local paper. Another stupid redneck bastard gets his. Or, if you prefer, another shaken, stunned, and stunted baby boy comes of age in the richest nation in the world.

  I do not have to wonder if any of my students are thinking these same thoughts. I do not have to wonder because, when I step back into the classroom, I tell them exactly what I think.

  Usually I was not so moralistic, believing as I still do that it was my duty to teach the curriculum and not to pontificate, to inspire debates, not to weigh in with verdicts. I did on one or two occasions tell my students they were living in a society that valued people of their age, region, and class primarily as cannon fodder, cheap labor, and gullible consumers, and that education could give them some of the weapons necessary to fight back. That I did say. I wish, though, that I had had a simple refrain, some terse slogan I could have repeated day after day, like the Roman senator Cato, who is supposed to have ended every speech by saying, “Carthage must be destroyed.”

  In fact, Cato’s refrain would have done nicely. As it happens, the people of Carthage worshiped the same god their Phoenician ancestors had, a god they called Moloch. When the Romans eventually took Cato’s advice, they found within the walls of the doomed city a multitude of clay urns containing the tiny charred bones of children. The Romans worshiped their own version of Moloch, needless to say, as do we if our poets are to be believed. “Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!” A man named Allen Ginsberg wrote those lines decades before you were born, when your English teacher was a mere three years old. You see, my loves, I am still talking to you in my head, and though I rather hope you’re reading something else these days, reading anything actually, here is what I wish I’d said before I said goodbye: Carthage must be destroyed—and you, for your part, must learn everything you can about Carthage.

  DAVID J. LAWLESS

  My Father/My Husband

  FROM Prism

  HE IS PREPARING the evening meal. Fried pork chops, rice, carrots from the garden, and a salad. A couple of rolls from the supermarket.

  “Is my father coming for dinner?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because your father died forty-six years ago.” He has given this answer several times a day for the past two or three years. He can’t remember exactly how many times today, but he knows it is becoming more frequent.

  “I know. I don’t mean that father. I mean my other father.”

  “You, like anyone else, can have only one father. Your father died.” He always answers her questions quietly.

  “I mean my father-in-law.”

  “Your father-in-law is my father, and he died twenty-three years ago.”

  “Don’t be stupid!” she says. “I mean the man who runs this house. That’s my father! Where is he?”

  “I run this house and I am not your father. I am your husband,” he says calmly.

  “My husband! You fool! I don’t have a husband.”

  “I am your husband. You are my wife,” he continues without looking up from the cooking. “We’ve been married for more than fifty years.”

  “Ha! You wish! I’ve never been married. And I certainly wouldn’t marry an old man like you. Look at you. Gray h
air. Big belly. Who would marry you?”

  “Come and sit down and have something to eat,” he says.

  “I’m not going to eat with you. You pig!”

  “Then I’ll bring it over to you and you can eat while you watch TV.”

  “I’m not going to eat this garbage!”

  “Then at least take your pills. I’ll bring a glass of water. You can eat later or I’ll save the supper till morning.”

  “I’ve already had my pills. You’re trying to poison me. Do you know how many pills I’ve taken today?”

  “Yes. And you have to take these and a couple more before you go to bed.”

  She requires medication on a regular daily schedule for a number of disabilities.

  She accepts them, under protest.

  “Come up to bed,” she calls from the top of the stairs.

  “No. It’s too early for me,” he calls back. “It’s only ten after eight. You go to bed. I’ll catch up with you later.” He continues to read news and articles on the Internet.

  A few minutes later she comes out again. “I can’t sleep by myself. I need you with me. I can’t sleep alone. Come up.”

  “No. Not yet. Try to go to sleep. I’ll come up in a while.”