I laid my bike on the sand, rolled up my jeans, and waded shin-deep into the surf. The water that pooled around my ankles had been part of the ocean before I was born and would be part of that same ocean after I was dead. I wasn’t sure what to do with this information.
“Professor Anderson?”
I turned and saw Kayla, walking hand in hand with a broad-shouldered and crew-cut man. He had brown forearms and a white chest that looked like parts from two separate action figures. Kayla wore a bathing-suit top and jean shorts and looked like she was trying to reconcile what she was seeing in front of her with what she knew. I couldn’t tell whether her surprise came from catching me wading in the ocean by myself or from seeing me outside the classroom.
“It’s a little tradition of mine.” I trudged out of the water. “After I turn in final grades, I go for a dip. You got an A.”
She smiled. “Professor Anderson, this is my fiancé, Hank.”
“Nice to meet you, sir,” Hank said.
I braced for an alpha-male handshake, but Hank’s grip was gentle. Up close, I saw that he had the face of a boy. It dawned on me that I was the adult in the situation.
“Have you two made any plans for after graduation?”
“I have another year left,” Kayla said. “But I’m going to be a flight attendant.”
“She’s going to see the world,” Hank said.
“How exciting. Any particular part of the world?”
“All of it, hopefully,” Kayla said.
“And when’s the wedding?”
“Next month—right before I ship out.” Hank looked over at Kayla with his big young eyes. “I can hardly wait.”
Kayla ran her fingers over her ring, which looked more like an earring than an engagement ring—a skinny band with a tiny diamond.
I took the $300 from my wallet, folded the fifteen bills over once, and held them out to Hank. “Happy wedding.”
Hank froze.
“Please. I insist. You make a lovely couple.”
Kayla took the money from my hand. “Thank you, Professor Anderson.”
Hank stared at his feet.
“It’s our first wedding present, babe,” Kayla said, handing him the bills.
Hank lit up as if he had just realized she was going to marry him. He put the twenties in the pocket of his shorts and shook my hand again, harder this time. “Thank you, sir. That’s extremely generous of you.”
“Maybe you can buy a dog,” I said.
Kayla hugged me. I gave her a quick one-handed pat on the back—my hand stuck to her skin for a moment—and wished them both good luck.
They walked along the water’s edge, and I watched their footprints disappear in the wet sand until their bodies had disappeared, too. Out past the breakers, a jellyfish bobbed along with the tide, with nothing to do but live forever.
IN THE FALL, ONCE I settled into my sobriety, I learned that I was a far better teacher when I wasn’t high. Even if I had been a decent teacher under the influence—prepared and reliable and often funny—I always addressed a general audience rather than unique groups of students. It was the same audience I addressed when I paced around my apartment late at night, giving speeches because I was too wound up to sleep. I would have talked the same no matter who was listening. Back when I was using, I would call Stella, my best friend from college, to just talk talk talk, to the point where she stopped picking up unless she was drunk enough to want to jump in with her own rambles. Now I was the one avoiding her calls. I couldn’t pick up without explaining about the drug problem I’d kept from her, and I couldn’t imagine any reaction to that news that I’d like to hear.
That summer, when Norman failed to renew my contract and I left Wilmington after three years of grad-student TA-ing and one year of adjuncting, I had taken a temporary position, with the possibility of renewal, at a little state college in Eugene, a green and rainy city where a white guy in a monk’s robe stood on Pearl Street yelling Dalai Lama quotes at passersby. I began to imitate the female colleagues I’d watched work so hard to earn the respect that the students offered any half-competent male teacher. I focused on teaching individuals. I made office-hour meetings mandatory before and after every paper. I assigned difficult theoretical texts that I spent every evening rereading, filtering them down until I could distill their ideas into easily understandable examples. I gave low grades with heaps of comments and offered the students opportunities to revise as many times as they wished. I took up smoking in the quad between classes. I had no pedagogical reason for this last decision, but I thought it might be good for the students to see me unprotected by the podium—to see me, at least temporarily, as a person in need of a break, rather than a teacher they wanted to please, punch, or fuck.
Also: I liked to smoke. More than the nicotine itself, there was the joy of looking forward to the cigarette as the break approached. Then there was the joy of standing outside, holding the cigarette, raising it to my mouth, and inhaling—this totally automatized and consuming set of actions that left no question about what you were supposed to do.
I often smoked with Louise, a middle-aged English lit professor. She had such great advice that when I didn’t have real problems to ask about, I would make one up. One October afternoon, as the Oregon rain politely tapped on the awning under which Louise and I stood, I told her that my comp courses were going well, but that I was struggling to get my creative writing students to talk.
“Put them in groups.” Louise let out a long trail of smoke. “Assign them a scene to interpret and perform. If it’s just you standing at the front of the classroom, their tolerance for silence is infinite. But if it’s three or four of them looking at each other, with no mediator to blame, silence makes them nervous. They worry that it makes them look weak. Especially the boys.”
* * *
The following week, I broke my creative writing students into groups and assigned each group a classic short story that they were to adapt into a dramatic scene.
The first group was to perform Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” which anyone who’d dealt with creative writing in the academy would know by heart. The story was essentially already a play—there was minimal exposition and lots of unexplained dialogue. The two characters, a young man and a young woman, sit in a train station café drinking while the man tries to talk the woman into getting an abortion. I didn’t enjoy teaching the story. Since the word abortion was never mentioned, many students would have no idea what was going on and would assume the couple were discussing an appendectomy or boob job. Even the students who understood the story ended up writing horribly because they did not yet realize the difference between knowing all the details and sharing only a tenth of them, and not knowing any of the details and just writing cryptic sentences.
The “Hills” group came to the front of the class, and Drew, a strong-chinned business major, positioned two desks facing each other. I rolled my chair to the side of the room to watch.
“These desks will serve as the restaurant table,” said Jonathan, a boy who was surely bullied in high school. Round-faced and frowning and always wearing a black T-shirt that was at once too big and too small, he had narrowly missed being born in a time when he could’ve grown up Goth. Instead he was stuck with whatever subculture the bullied used for armor these days. Even though he spoke with a tone of teenage annoyance, I could tell that he’d spend hours on twenty-minute assignments. I wanted to tell him that he was doing well. That it was okay. That people would probably always want to punch him in the face, regardless of whether he acted superior or disinterested, so he might as well be nice. But that seemed like the kind of speech that might lead to another nonrenewal of my contract.
Alyssa sat down at the restaurant table. She was in both my creative writing and composition courses. Her papers were generally on the C+ level, but she was enthusiastic and responded gratefully to criticism. She was also black—which might not have been relevant if it hadn’t affected the way I
treated her. She was the only black student in my creative writing course, and one of only three students of color in my comp course. When she had explained her difficulty in making it to the mandatory office-hour meetings due to work obligations, I had agreed to correspond via email instead, which I’d refused to do for the two white students who had asked. If she was a day late on a paper, I would sternly tell her that I’d let it slide this time, and she would thank me profusely, knowing that I would let it slide next time, too.
She took a pair of sunglasses from her purse and handed them to Jonathan. They were of the white-framed, bug-eyed variety. I found it hard to imagine why he would need these sunglasses, or any sunglasses, for “Hills Like White Elephants.” Jonathan pulled a black trench coat from his backpack and put it on, and with sunglasses on face, he retreated to stage left of the classroom, while Alyssa and Drew sat down at the restaurant table. Alyssa stretched out her neck a few times. She nodded at Drew.
“Action!” Jonathan yelled.
Alyssa and Drew mimed drinking.
“Those hills out there look like white elephants,” Alyssa said.
Drew paused. “Those are white elephants.”
Alyssa squinted at the imaginary hills, then down into her glass. “God, I’m drunk.”
Drew looked at Alyssa sadly, convincingly, as if this wasn’t the first girl he’d tried to talk into an abortion. “It’s a simple procedure, you know.”
Alyssa said nothing.
“It won’t hurt at all.”
“I wish you would shut up,” Alyssa said.
“Ahh!” Jonathan kicked in an imaginary door and burst into the restaurant. “Stop what you’re doing!”
“What’s the meaning of this?” Drew yelled.
“I have been sent from the future. I’ve come to warn you about your baby.”
“My baby?” Alyssa said.
“I’m afraid it’s no ordinary baby.” Jonathan removed his sunglasses dramatically. “It’s . . . Satan!”
I leaned forward.
“My God,” Alyssa said. “What should we do?”
“What do you mean?” Drew said.
“Can we keep it?”
“Did you hear what he just said?” Drew asked.
“We could have all this”—Alyssa motioned out the window—“and every day we—”
“That man from the future just said that Satan is growing in your belly!”
“I’m afraid there’s only one thing to do.” Jonathan reached into his coat and pulled out a coat hanger.
The class gasped.
I saw whatever was left of my teaching career flash before my eyes.
Then Jonathan took off his coat, hung it on the hanger, and laid it on my desk. “Sorry, I was getting a little hot there.”
“Ha ha ha!” I said.
“But as I was saying”—Jonathan’s voice rose a little out of control, thriving on the energy of the audience—“there’s only one thing to do!” He pulled a ruler out from his waistband and pointed it at Alyssa’s stomach like a gun.
“Over my dead body,” Drew yelled, and pulled out a ruler from his waistband.
“Those hills are white elephants,” Alyssa yelled. She took out her own ruler from her jeans and yelled, “Pow pow pow!”
All three of them began to shoot. Drew fell quickly. Jonathan’s death was more dramatic; he lay out on my desk and expired in a long, stuttering fit. Every time I raised my hands to start the applause, Jonathan’s corpse started shaking again. Finally, he settled and died, and Alyssa, the only one still alive, took a bow. I stood up to cheer. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that I spent more time with these students than with my friends and family combined. Which, at the moment, felt just fine.
* * *
I was smoking in the quad with Louise. I told her that her exercise had been a success (which was true), but that I was now having trouble with a disruptive student (which wasn’t true).
“Before I went back to do my PhD, I taught high school English.” Back then, Louise said, she’d had a student who was always disrupting class, correcting her, making jokes, smirking. “You get one of these boys in almost every class, especially if you’re a woman. But this one was different from the others.”
She said that this boy wasn’t just arrogant and resentful—he was malicious. He didn’t just want attention or to show that he was smarter than the teacher—he wanted to dominate.
“One day, he was mouthing off as usual, commenting under his breath after everything I said, flicking balled-up papers at this poor girl, and I said that I’d had enough. I wrote a note and told him to take it to the principal. He said, oh, no, that wasn’t necessary. He was only kidding and he’d stop. But I told him it was too late for that now. He had made his decision. And now he had to go to the principal’s office.” Louise took another drag off her cigarette and exhaled. “His face turned red and he got all worked up, saying I had no right and he hadn’t done anything wrong and so on. But when he saw that I wasn’t going to budge, this calmness spread over him. He smiled, looked me in the eyes, and said, ‘You’re such a cunt.’ ”
“He didn’t.”
“He did. In front of the whole class.”
“What did you do?”
“It threw me at first. I’d already been called every name you can think of and probably a few that you can’t. But usually the name-callers were boys in the hall who didn’t see me coming up behind them. Or someone who’d scribbled that I was a bitch on a note I intercepted. Or someone writing in Sharpie on a bathroom wall. But it had never happened like this before. No one had ever intentionally said it to my face like that before. But I gathered myself. My mentor had told me that whenever you’re in doubt, you should ask the student a question. Turn it around. Put them in the position of answering. I looked at the boy. I said, ‘Do you know what a cunt is?’ He smiled that little superior smile of his and said that, yeah, he knew what a cunt was. That smile of his said that not only did he know what it was—he’d seen his fair share, too. So I said, ‘Then why don’t you draw one on the board?’ He stared at me. ‘What?’ he said. I said, ‘Please draw a cunt on the board for the class.’ ”
“Ha! What did he do?”
She put out her cigarette. “He marched his ass down to the principal’s office.”
I laughed, long and sincere, not even faking it. “When I grow up, I want to be just like you, Louise.”
She shook her head with a smile. “Now, why on earth would you want that?”
* * *
My loft was a nice spot with big windows that offered a sedating view of the rain, but it was priced at just $525 a month—cheap enough for me to put away some savings, seeing as I wasn’t paying for drugs, nights out, or pretty much any expenses except groceries—because it was directly across from the Amtrak station. The whole unit shook with each passing train.
That weekend, a parade of late-night horn-blowing Union Pacific freight trains kept me up. In the mornings, the NA meetings were obnoxious. In the afternoons, the new novel refused to be written. In the evenings, I longed for pills. By Monday, I had accomplished nothing besides not getting high, and by the time class started, I was feeling irritable. But I was determined to teach a good class anyway.
“What were our first impressions?” I said with as much pep as I could manage.
The students were supposed to have read a story by a black writer that dealt with race. There was a quiet shuffling, as the kids who always talked waited their customary five seconds before they began talking.
Drew turned his perfect chin in my direction. “It was fine, I guess. I’m just so tired of reading about race.”
I felt a sudden urge to ask him to draw a cunt on the board. But it seemed tricky to work that into the discussion.
“What have you read lately about race?”
Drew thought about it. “That story about school integration.”
“Okay, what else?”
He was quiet.
“It’s just that, if you’re saying that you’re so tired of reading about race, you must have read about it a lot.”
Drew rolled his eyes.
“We’ve hardly read anything about race in this class. And I can’t imagine you’re overwhelmed with the topic in your other classes. Is it possible that you’re not tired of reading about race, but that you simply don’t want to read about it at all?”
“I liked the story,” Alyssa said.
Everyone turned and waited for the representative for blackness to speak. I wanted to get them not to look at her like that—but I also looked at her like that.
“What did you like about it?”
“There were black characters.”
“I’m sorry. We should read more stories with black protagonists.”
“No—I didn’t mean it like that! I wasn’t criticizing. I just meant that in this story, it was nice. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry! I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry! I’m sorry.”
Once I was convinced that I hadn’t offended Alyssa and that she understood that she hadn’t offended me, I found that I no longer knew what to ask about the story.
“So,” I said. “What did we think of the structure?”
* * *
Once, in college in San Luis Obispo, waiting in line to get into a bar, I saw the black guy in front of me turned away because the dress code forbade plain white T’s. I was wearing a plain white T, but my shirt was V-necked and fitted, rather than crew-necked and baggy, and the bouncer didn’t hesitate before letting me in.
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