by Nick Stokes
If you want economic stimulation, lock a 17-year-old boy and girl in a windowless room for 24 hours with nothing but a copy of anything ever written by D.H. Lawrence, or Another Country by Baldwin, or even Cohen’s Beautiful Losers – she never went in for that sort of business, but Dave … the modern saleable consciousness stream and the post-modern derivative heated his hot plate, cooked his Ramen, and boiled his blood. But that was back when they were poor grad students and every little movement was a ramrod loading a charge. They lived on water and noodles and smokes and sex and wanted for nothing. She wouldn’t sell that now for the world.
The primary reason she has no desire to teach AP is that the exam is in essay format and she doesn’t want to be judged by her ability to teach writing.
The students, in small groups, are learning about leadership, compromise, decision-making, and Hamlet. They are choosing a scene to perform for the class, and discussing concept, style, and intent for the scene. If time remains, they are to begin blocking.
She feels brilliant. They’ll rehearse; they’ll perform; they’ll murder it, over and over, and it will kill weeks.
The idea came to her as she entered the classroom and Dominique – whose original parents divorced and remarried the exes of another divorced couple, the male of which, being Dominique’s stepfather, is Sandy’s uncle – ogled Sandy as she bent to put her iPod in her bag, and as she then held the position, rummaging, because she was learning. Dominique is smart but doesn’t work hard. Sandy works hard but isn’t smart.
She put Dominique and Sandy in the same group against her teacherly instincts, and with her instinctual instincts. Sure enough, they pick Get Thee to a Nunnery. She is excited, and a little frightened. Playing God has its plusses and minuses.
She has forbidden her students from cutting a word from their edition. Any sane modern director would cut, cut, cut. She loves Shakespeare, but he uses too many words. All she’s figured out that writing is, is caring enough to make a reader care. She doesn’t know how you teach that. She doesn’t know how you do that. Except that it’s something more than the logic of an argument, the structure of a narrative arc, the choice of a word, or the advanced placement of a comma.
She walks from group to group and acts like a teacher so they can all play the illusion that she is keeping them on task. She invented a performance date, at which point they will be evaluated, but it is distant yet and this is now.
One group chooses the Graveyard scene. She wants to kiss them, or rather one unruly-haired boy in particular, James, who is fired up about the project in a very non-linear and mostly unproductive way, but she doesn’t because she’d get fired. There’d be nothing sexual in it. She wouldn’t use her tongue, only her lips and his cheek, and she wouldn’t linger, but she’d be publicly stoned, and she has a son, and for some reason this job and others’ viewpoints are more important to her than random displays of honest and sincere affection.
She wonders if she can inspire him to write a paper with a pet thesis, “The concept of the ‘Sea Change’ in ‘Hamlet’ is ‘bunk.’” Look at the text, she implores him, there is no evidence for his change, and even if there is, it’s just a cheap dramatic move to ship him off to England for a few scenes, have him supposedly metamorphose off-stage, murder a few ex-friends, and then suddenly return one with his fate – which is to have a finger in everyone’s death. Besides, look at the graveyard scene, she talks faster in her thinking. You’ve held the skull in your hand and asked why, you know why it’s funny, you know he’s still the same old Hamlet asking a skull why.
She stops whispering to him in her head.
She wonders if she can inspire.
Perhaps inspiration is inappropriate.
James fervently interrupts her thoughts and theorizes that class is over, citing a clutched printout of today’s schedule. She was waiting for the bell. She becomes a bell and rings. They all look at her, some surprised, some confused, some stirred. They love her for a moment and lunge doorward.
The class was a success, over before she knew it, before it began. They enjoyed Hamlet; she enjoyed them; she enjoyed herself.
Homework: Continue on, more of the same.
***
She checks her e-mail. She calls DSHS, listens to a dumbed-down electronic version of The Rite of Spring. Baby Stravinsky: a ball floats across her screen and changes colors, moving much slower than the music and improving her math skills. Improved math skills only dumbfound her more as to why the state hasn’t paid her for her son’s healthcare.
She e-mails back parents, counselors, advisers, grandparents, administrators, aunts, deans. She has multiple struggling students in her advisory and classes. Every year, struggling students. Not everybody gets an A. Everybody wants one, or has learned not to. She should call the parents because they are worried about their kid and they deserve it, but she doesn’t, because she is a parent on hold with DSHS to drum up money for her son’s healthcare.
“That’s not true,” she tells herself. “You wouldn’t call them anyway. You’d send an e-mail, and it’d take ten times as long as picking up the phone because you’d worry the words like a rosary.”
“Fine, but look who’s on the phone getting her money, smarty pants.”
“There’s nothing smart in pants.”
One of her advisees was caught buying a dime bag on campus and expelled two weeks ago. He dropped it, left it in front of the school, and somebody found it. She had liked him; he’d never given her any trouble, good student, wasn’t struggling. She’d lost sleep over it, cried about it with his mom on the phone, thinking about how bad she must feel for her son, cried about it alone, imagining how he must feel, incapacitated, shackled by the stomach to a boulder creeping down a mountain. Before being expelled, the dean had asked him how he could prove to them that they could trust him again. “I can’t,” he said. “You can’t,” he said. He did not elaborate. It was not what the dean wanted to hear. The dean wanted the boy to use words to illuminate his wrongdoing, express his remorse, explain how he’d redeem himself. But she knew this wasn’t that kind of boy. He was the kind of boy who swallowed words. Words were a letdown. Words were not strong enough for his freight. He had given the honest answer, if not the right one.
The last time she saw him, he stared at his hands, waiting for his father. She wanted to console him, to hold him. All she could say was, “Look, it was stupid. Feel bad about it and move on. There are other schools. And in the end, it’s only school.” It was not what a teacher was supposed to say, but it was what she said.
Some division of her wants to call him and see how he’s holding up, but he’s gone, along with the legitimacy of their relationship.
That has all blown over, a cloud on memory. Nobody talks about him anymore.
She sends e-mails about Johnny, Sara, Sam, Jane, Rafael, Ishmael. More boys than girls. Girls are better self-motivators. Girls meet or exceed expectations.
She writes the same thing over and over again. So and so is doing better at this, worse at this. So and so is missing that assignment. So and so tells you they are trying harder, but when I see them during free periods, they are socializing or texting or playing Frisbee on the green, sun-drenched or puddle-splashed lawn, not far from the strawberry tree. When I see them during lunch they are eating.
She clicks “Send,” defeating the urge to P.S. – Your kid is fine if he gets a C. Playing guitar makes him happy, not reading, and that’s okay. There are more things in heaven and earth. I myself hope Max turns out different than I and has an ear for music. I wish I played an instrument, but I don’t, so I hope he will. It seems doubtful, considering the example I set.
She sneezes and drips a little.
She imagines the urge to write something like that is what makes her a bad teacher.
She imagines, having written the postscript, her good drunk friend Razumhin telling her, “You almost convinced him again of the truth of all that hideous nonsense, and then you suddenly – put
out your tongue at him! He is crushed, annihilated now! It was masterly by Jove, it’s what they deserve!”
To annihilate and be annihilated. Razumhin was a good man, and good men are hard to find.
When the writing becomes too painful, she uncrooks her neck and sets the receiver on the desk to play its digital Prokofiev into plastic-coated particleboard. She knows the DSHS case worker will pick up while she’s gone and talk to the desk, which in its self-centeredness will not lend her a hand and ask about her money. The caseworker will hang up, and all the time on hold will be wasted. She knows this, but she can’t vacate herself from the pain anymore.
She scurries to the bathroom, pees, and scurries back, avoiding eye contact with a few students sitting in the hall.
The desk listens to a dial tone.
She wants to cry, but she doesn’t do that in school.
She goes to class. In spite of the math, it feels no shorter. She does the Dostoyevsky dance again. It turns out somewhat different with different people.
***
Lunch. Burger and fries. In line, she apologizes to the drama teacher for missing the performance. He understands. She tells him something of her Hamlet project. He talks for a bit about Shakespeare and high school students. She spaces. She doesn’t think of anything else. She has always found that dialogue does not easily hold her present. She re-enters the moment and the conversation is over and there is a burger and fries and ketchup squirted on her pea-green tray. Two-handed, she carries it to her office, where it’s not raining, where she will eat ground cow while she wikipedias a certain breed of dog – labradoodle, a Frankenstein of a name, though the post advertised “docile, social, playful, cute, easily trained, and perfect for kids!” – where she will close the door to muzzle the din and where the little molecules of burger and fry that constitute smell will soak into the walls, permeate her clothes, absorb into her flaking epithelial tissue, and be actively transported into the live cells beneath her skin.
***
She has one class in the afternoon today, last period. “Easy day,” she reminds herself, “Three-quarters bagged, thank God.”
After she discovers labradoodles are the best thing since gene splicing and commodity futures speculation, she stares at the wall. A picture of Max hangs there, on a tricycle. The picture is on a nail, not a trike. Misplaced participles, dangling modifiers. She’d throw mechanics out the window if she had one. The picture hangs from the nail, and therefore so does Max, squeezing the trike between his legs so it doesn’t fall to her feet, a framed moment of time holding for dear life to a little boy and a little string and a little nail spiked inexpertly into a slab of drywall, gravity slowly untying, eroding the will, wearing out curled, pudgy fingers; forearms scream and weaken and gravity strengthens by the inverse square of distance; gravity gains power as the picture descends through floor and dirt and rock and magma; gravity pulls the dead moment toward its center to crush it into itself.
Gravity is not a thing but a force, she dismisses herself.
This picture replaced the picture of Max and Dave, Max in a pack, atop a mountain, which she took down so some poor student didn’t ask. That picture had replaced the close-up of Max as an infant that she hung to help her letdown for pumping. It never helped. Mostly it made her sad.
March. Time for new leaves.
She wishes she could pump. The machine is still in its professional-looking black case on the shelf, sheened in two years of dust. The blackout paper is still over the window in the door. She hated pumping. She pumped three times a day to produce two bottles worth. She held the collection cups to her breasts so they wouldn’t lose suction. While she was being pumped she couldn’t do anything but stare at Max’s picture or at a static screen or watch her nipples react to changes of pressure: grow, extend, spit milk through skin, and then retreat to collect another mouthful. Handless, she could also pray that she locked the door, that a tech worker or maintenance man wouldn’t just knock and unlock and come in, that she’d brought extra storage bottles for the faculty fridge so she didn’t have to pour the milk in a glass and label it hers with a strip of masking tape.
But now she wouldn't mind feeling like a cow. A cow produces. As a cow, she kept her son alive several times a day. As a cow, she saved his life and saved his life and saved his life.
She still prays the door won’t open, every minute of every day, not to anyone, not with words, but as a longing she is so used to she doesn’t often think about it.
She could plug in, help the machine’s mouths achieve suction, whisper to them “there,” and let them work both sides of her at the same time. She wonders what that would feel like. Would it feel good? Would it ache? Would it feel like nothing? Would she produce milk, or something else, or nothing?
She is strong. She fights curiosity. She turns out the light so she won’t be disturbed. Instead of milk in High-Flow Mother Pro, she inputs numbers in Gradebook Pro and straps on headphones and cranks up “Evenflow.” Data entry, grade computation, number crunching, plug and chug, monkey work by monitor glow. She switches to the next album, and then the next, Vitalogy, because she can’t listen to the same music she listened to in high school. She can’t. “Bugs,” “Satan’s Bed,” “Hey Foxymophandlemama, That's Me,” and lastly “Immortality” on repeat. She rocks to old Pearl Jam in a dark box with no windows while her fingers work keys and her mind releases.
She is a conduit for numbers. Time passes quickly.
***
It doesn’t take nearly as long as she’d like.
Light. Door, desk, computer, phone, phone, phone. Not today. Tomorrow she’ll collect. In class she’ll have everyone pull out their cell phones and call DSHS. First one through gets a cut of the money, which they’ll pay back to her for a good grade.
She can’t plan for tomorrow because she can’t imagine tomorrow. Or rather, she thinks in the third person about herself, she can’t imagine tomorrow being different than today. She can’t plan for tomorrow because she has yet to accomplish today’s goal, which is to survive today.
By default, she lives day-to-day, kneeling to today and not tomorrow.
Tomorrow, they’ll discuss Crime and Punishment and rehearse Hamlet.
She picks up a stack of papers. Once a week, her students claw out an in-class essay. Once a book, they skewer a full-fledged paper. They earn bonus points for maintaining a field journal with thoughts, responses, and ideas inspired by the book. The idea is for them to learn to think critically.
She’s never had time to read the journals; she flips the pages like old-fashioned moving picture books, takes a snapshot of a quantity of words, and awards a subjective number of bonus points.
She rarely finishes grading the short weekly essays in a week. Add on the analytical reports, and paper accumulates exponentially. Linearly, she corrects, though exponentially is a better word, if tired. If the papers reproduced of their own accord, producing more than two of themselves in one rut, that would be exponential.
She is glad, for once, that all these papers are merely verbal masturbation.
She recently dumped four classes’ worth of three weekly sets of dirtied sheets in the recycling dumpster to destroy the evidence.
She disappears slurries of stupid thoughts daily. Slews of thoughts daily. Lewds of thought.
She fingers the top paper and reads the first sentence. “Both Dickens and Dostoyevsky write about death and poverty during the Russian Industrial Revolution.”
No spelling mistakes. The student had copied Dostoyevsky from the board without transposing or omitting or making up letters, no small feat. It helps that the student wears large shoes. The essay is in response to the question, “Contrast and compare the styles of Dickens and Dostoyevsky.” Who thought of such a fecal question, she interrogates feebly. The advanced class had just read A Tale of Two Cities because she had been looking for something easier. The course: Literature of the World Throughout History. It is an arrogant course. They’d read ex
cerpts of Genji and Heike and The Monkey and Don Quixote and Canterbury Tales, but had read all of nothing, until Dickens, and now Dostoyevsky. There isn’t time, or comprehension. It’s a life’s work. She still wants to fit in something American, and European, and Latin American, and modern. Walden or Slaughterhouse-Five, Camus, some Borges or Marquez, a story from Dubliners (written when Joyce was 25), or A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man if she wants to throw two shits to the wind and let their heads hit the fan.
When she had proposed the course, she had been excited, as had the administration, probably because it was her first sign of ambition in five years. Let’s jump around the globe and progress through history! But she discovered students were no fun to travel with. She wants to go home.
This is far from the worst answer to the question. It was a bad question. A bad question omits the possibility of a good answer. She prefers textual analysis questions, but the woman she was that particular day, who thankfully no longer exists, had to think up a question on the spot, with the class staring at her, pens poised poetically.
If she applied the same kind of textual analysis to this young woman’s sentence as she expects from her students, she might appreciate the metaphorical implication of death and poverty, or explore the intentional choice of “Russian Industrial Revolution” – how it implies that England is like Russia, how Dickens was in a way Russian, how we are all Russian, how Russia is still undergoing an industrial revolution, how the Cold War was a war with ourselves, how we are still warring with the industrial revolution in ourselves. But authors who merit textual analysis are dead, and this student is only dead in the eyes. She marks it wrong like she’s a Math teacher.
Wrong question, wrong answer. Wrong place, wrong time.
She watches the clock. She kills time waiting for it to get better. She kills time to give it substance. She kills time to love it. She murders one second after the other, this one an ear-poisoned father, that one a wine-poisoned mother, an uncle skewered, a brother bit by his poisoned tip, a friend betrayed, a lover driven insane, an idiot interfering with another blade, a greedy woman axed, an innocent woman axed, herself axed. She does nothing. She does it all.