by Diane Zinna
“Are you even a Christian?” he asked as I was walking out. “That’s the question you need to be asking yourself.”
I hadn’t even said that I wanted to kill myself. Only that I’d wanted to be with my parents again. If I could have only admitted to myself that those were the depths of my feelings, the seriousness of it all, maybe I would have sought more help.
Alone in the campus chapel without Siri, I found myself feeling that same sense of desperation. I watched the altar candles, which burned without movement—there were no doors opening, no one passing through this place to make a breeze. It was just me, sitting still. Before leaving, I went up to look at the candles, to make sure they were real.
* * *
—
ON OPENING DAY, I decided to go to the Mass held on the bottom level of the pit that all the students and faculty were encouraged to attend. I looked over the top-level railing and saw Dorothy Wisch down below, directing volunteers as they set out white folding chairs. A girl was passing out free hot dogs under a rainbow-striped umbrella. I took one for Dorothy and went down the stairs to see her. She was wearing a Miss America–style ribbon across her body with the word English on it and rolled her eyes when she saw me smile.
“We all look like a bunch of suckers.” She nodded toward her colleagues, who were standing in a group, all wearing similar sashes with their department names printed on them. She tugged at the sash and tried to smooth a wrinkle from it with red, arthritic fingers. “What happened to your arm?”
My wrist had been in a purple cast since my last day in Sweden. “Oh, I fell. It’s just a fracture. Nothing serious.”
“Did you hear about the lit job?” She took a bite of her hot dog. “I hope you’re going to interview?”
The names of the writers I’d studied flooded back. Sui Sin Far. Onoto Watanna. They were tick marks on a timeline wadded up in a pocket of my brain.
“I don’t think I know enough about Asian American literature,” I said softly.
“Listen. You’re a good teacher, Lauren. Remember—I write your evaluations. Don’t take any shit.”
“The kids are so great. They never give me problems.”
“You really enjoy teaching in the international program?”
“Dorothy, you’re talking like you gave me the worst possible assignment. I love it. I probably wouldn’t have been happy in the lit job anyway.”
“You enjoy giving grammar lessons all day?”
“The students are always interesting,” I said. “They make it interesting.”
I felt a pang of missing Siri.
Her colleagues were beginning to congregate on the stage. She reached into her bag and drew out her gold-edged day planner. It was stuck with tasseled bookmarks and Post-its. She flipped it open to check something. “Hey—I never saw your syllabus for this semester.”
“It’s the same as last semester’s.”
“Don’t say shit like that to me. You have to at least pretend like you prepared.” She laughed and straightened her jacket. “What did you do this summer? Anything?”
“No, not really. I visited my parents in Michigan. They were doing some work on their house, so I supervised their antics.”
I had lied about my parents being alive many times before, but not since Siri. I bit my tongue. I could feel more lies in my mouth.
There was the traditional striking of the big brass gong that had been wheeled from the music room, and everyone stood up. “That’s my cue,” she said. “Take it easy.”
She walked away to join the line of academics and march affably to the stage. “Take it easy,” I said, though she was out of earshot. I could feel my smile fade. The president stood at the podium and instructed us to take our seats.
Paper programs were passed down the line. The school’s symbol, a lighted oil lamp, was embossed upon the cover, and I traced it with my fingertip. Some music was played. A trumpeter. A house in Michigan. I had never been to Michigan. I knew it was in the shape of a mitten—little else.
Tentatively, I looked around for Siri in the crowd.
Her hair could have been Kool-Aid red, brown, blond, blue. She dyed it a lot. It could have been longer now; it had been two months. I scanned the assembly for a girl with her mannerisms, her speed of movement. Part of me thought that if I did see her, I’d see myself beside her, the two of us talking softly amid the commotion.
If there were a house in Michigan, she’d have been there, too.
Her friendship was like that. All my old memories were woven through with her. When I think back on the day my parents’ bodies sat in the morgue while I feverishly sold what I could from our Long Island house to afford a funeral, Siri is inside that memory, too.
The idea of my parents’ possessions going all at once had terrified me. Someone told me to advertise an estate sale, where people could leave after bidding on the larger items and I’d have some time to think about their offers before deciding whether to sell at all.
After the ad went out in the Pennysaver, a man called, saying he and his brother would be at my house at six a.m. sharp with a van, and they planned to load it up. When the two men arrived, they were twins in matching clothes, impatient. I tried to explain to them how the bidding would work, but they didn’t want anything they saw. They picked over things, saying this is cheap; this is fake sterling, all but daring me to keep bringing things out to impress them.
There was a beautiful, middle-aged woman who came in a minivan covered with bumper stickers. She asked me what my parents had looked like, trying to remember them from anywhere in town. As people milled around touching things, I showed her their pictures. She said she was interested in our dark wood dining table, the one my mother had loved and bought the year prior. I told her to write down how much she’d be willing to pay for it, and I’d get back to her.
We sat on the couch together while she scribbled onto a yellow card and I looked into space with a fixed smile. I almost didn’t care what she wanted to pay for it; I just wanted her to take it before those men decided it was worth something and loaded it into their van. I wanted it to go to someone who might love it the way my mother had.
A sudden shout from my parents’ bedroom. “What size are these?”
The woman and I looked at each other. I ran upstairs and found the men crouched on the floor of my mother’s closet before her prettily-lined-up shoes. One wore a pair on his hands. “You should at least mark what size these are!” he said.
I asked him and his brother to leave. I walked out into the front room and told everyone to go. When people dawdled, I stood in the middle of the room and yelled. I was thankful that the kind woman had already left before seeing me that way. I closed and locked the doors and turned around to the picked-over house, returned to my parents’ bedroom, and started straightening my mother’s small shoes.
After I got myself together, I went out to the living room and saw the kind woman had left her yellow card on the dining table. It was almost like having a friend in that moment. I turned the card over. She hadn’t left me her first name. Just: MORRIS. Her phone number. Her bid: fifteen dollars.
And then Siri, sitting at the dark wood table, shaking her head at the idea that the woman could have been so hurtful, Annie’s white face peering up from her lap, the brown spots at the inner corners of her eyes like the stain of tears.
The professors were asked to stand and everyone in the pit applauded. I turned forward quickly and clapped along, unsure if I was supposed to stand up. Onstage, Dorothy chatted with someone beside her. She seemed like a teenager at her high school graduation. The air was crisp, and the hill’s big trees were dropping red leaves down into the pit, upon the crowd.
At the end of the service, the college president delivered his message with his hand over his heart. The school’s two old priests stood and blessed the student body. There
was the swinging out of incense, then a hymn, for which we all stood up to sing. Then there was the dismissal of the students, the announcement of an ice-cream social later that evening, and the gong again. When we rose to leave, everyone sang the doxology, which floated all the way up out of the pit.
As the professors and priests left the stage, I filed back up the stairs of the pit with the students. Someone brushed past me, and I had to grip the railing to keep from falling. I looked down at the purple cast on my left arm. It was supposed to have been cut off at the beginning of August, but I kept missing the appointment. I think I wanted to be able to show it to Siri. Just one time—as though it could serve as proof of something about that last night. I looked over my shoulder at the sea of people filing back up the stairs. Surely she was in this crowd. I could feel her. People pushed past me. I was holding up the line. I turned around and tried to keep myself from searching for her.
Rock music blared from the stage speakers just as I reached the top of the stairs. I turned to see a performance artist arranging paint cans in front of him like drums. I stood beside the railing to watch. Beneath me I could see the other levels of the pit and the artist on the stage. He was painting with his fists, splashing buckets of color onto the immense canvases in time with the blaring music.
I could see now there was a girl standing on one of the giant speakers. I felt a pang of longing. The girl’s hair was blond. She had Siri’s same way of moving, and she was dancing to the music despite the chaos around her. I could feel the sheer number of bodies and the pit like an arena.
There was now something electric and watery about the crowd, and a feeling that the tall speakers near the stage were about to be pushed into the human current rippling in the pit, and the girl would fall. I couldn’t help myself. I brandished my cast, waved my arms, tried to push my way back down the stairs.
“Come on, now!” I yelled. “Stop it, all of you!”
The crowd packed the stairs. I couldn’t get down.
I thrust my backpack onto the concrete and started to climb over the metal railing that separated me from the three-story drop. I could feel the height. I felt my legs saying no, their muscles freezing, the muscles in my one good arm saying Yes, do it, pulling me up and over. Now I was sitting on the railing. I could see the girl better. It wasn’t Siri. I hated myself for thinking it was her—I hated myself. Now I felt off balance. It would be so easy to let myself drop. I heard a siren; it was the sound of people below howling up at me, all their mouths long O’s.
At the last second, an arm caught me around the waist and I tumbled backward.
I pulled away from the man who’d stopped me. He had silver hair and short sleeves. He seemed nervous about having touched me, and angry, and compassionate.
“Were you going to jump?” he said.
I looked around for my backpack. “No. No.”
Over his shoulder, I saw the girl again. She was laughing and practically charging up the stairs. She was taller than Siri, and older in the face, and dressed all in brown, which would never be her.
“Are you okay?” the man asked, handing me my backpack.
I slid my hand along the metal railing, gazed down at the people below, remembering their expressions when it looked like I might jump. “I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. I have to go. I have class.”
“Which way are you heading? Let me walk you.”
I walked away before he had a chance to ask me anything else. I lifted the strap of my backpack higher on my shoulder and made my way through the crowd.
I tried to think through my first-day notes. I would touch on the importance of twelve-point font, Times New Roman, and all the due dates stretching deep into the wintertime. I would go over their names on the roster and write the phonetic spellings in the margins of my grade book. I would show a video of a man talking about Arthur Rimbaud’s fondness for pissing on critics who disliked his poetry, which would make them laugh, and then break them into small groups to practice describing pictures using rich language. I would tell a story about how I stole my first thesaurus and dismiss them early to get on their good side. As I walked, I stretched the muscles in my legs, trying to lose the sensation that I was still standing on a high railing about to jump.
I taught my class in Dominican. The building had a gleaming blue and white patterned floor that reminded me of a Delft porcelain plate. I could see the janitor, an old man named John Sled, pushing a mop at the far end of the hallway, sliding the pattern of the tiles toward me, all its Netherlandish blue ribbons, its diamonds and swirls, its shine.
I sometimes dreamed about walking across that floor, the click of my boots, my silhouette reflected in the glass of the display cases I passed. When I was just working in the library, I wore my same black-pants outfit every day. I’d go the whole day without noticing the tiny knots of hair and lint on my clothes. A boyfriend once picked one off and asked me why I couldn’t take better care of myself. Now having to get up in front of people, to be prepared, to be on time, helped—but I only looked more put together on the outside.
I passed John Sled, and he looked up at me. “You,” he said as though he’d been waiting for me to return all summer. “You have a great class today. God bless you.”
His skin was covered with tags, his beard patchy, scabs showing through his white whiskers. His cart was overhung with bags and bore his name on the back like a license plate. Markered Styrofoam cups along the top were filled with things he found, and a small white stuffed bear with a red bow tie rode near the bottom, by the Lysol canisters. I knew that people avoided making eye contact with him because of his intensity at even the slightest opening. I had once heard a professor warn her students to stay away from him while he was still in earshot.
“God bless you,” I said back to him, and he tipped an imaginary hat at me. I sometimes felt relief that he could see through my outer appearance, recognize that I was just as lonesome and on the outside of this world as he was.
I passed the other first-day doorways and looked into the rooms where professors sat with their backs to their whiteboards, blond wooden crucifixes hanging above their heads. Straight lines of desks. Everything quiet, quiet.
Around the bend, Gwendolyn Shoales stood in her doorway. She was an esteemed professor who liked to pick fights with other professors on behalf of the school. She always laughed as you approached her, like you were doing something foolish just by walking. She had been a well-known poet, and she often bragged about being on a panel once with Toni Cade Bambara. She wore a dress with two pockets in the front, each with a pack of cigarettes inside. It was as though she sewed pockets on the front of all her dresses for just that purpose.
“Lauren,” she said in her low, gravelly voice. “You look exhausted. Aren’t you sleeping.” She didn’t say it like a question. The ends of her sentences always went down.
“I just have a headache,” I lied.
Some students passed her to enter her classroom and she laughed at them, too. “Mr. Andrews, I get to have you again, I see. Adonis, Adonis, stop, what are you doing entering my room.” She addressed them all by name, her voice a spill of rocks. She had a cadre of repeats, all young men.
I walked to my classroom, the same one I’d taught in the previous spring. I felt a rush to be inside of it again. I kicked away the rubber stopper to shut the door.
My room was the only one with an old-fashioned chalkboard. I loved to write in chalk. I pulled my chair around to the side of the desk and sat down, tugged my roster out of my bag. I looked at the front seat in the first row. It was the desk with the uneven legs that Siri had occupied last semester. A young, skinny Korean man sat there now, looking afraid of me. I smiled at him. He glanced down at his book quickly.
Few of these students would continue on at Stella Maris after one year. The program had become something of a stopover for kids looking to live in the United Sta
tes. They came because they said they wanted to study the visual arts, but they were eighteen-year-olds on their own in a new country, and soon they all wanted to be fashion designers and go to FIT in New York, or they realized how quickly people could get well-paying jobs with a certificate in graphic design and left to pursue that. But now they were shy. When kids ran in late, I made a point of smiling at each one of them.
I went into my first-day speech and felt my teaching joy start to come back into my chest. I played the Rimbaud video and everyone laughed, even the young man who was so hesitant before. I went around and asked people to tell me something about themselves. They all seemed to be opening up.
I liked them all so much already. I went to the wall and shut off the overhead lights. I asked them to move their desks into a circle, and they shuffled around the darkened room, the desks groaning.
“One last thing before you go. I need a writing sample from each of you. We’ll talk something through first. I want you to watch the others’ faces as you talk. Notice how the words you choose matter. I thought we could make it fun and tell scary stories.”
I wasn’t sure how it would go over, but they loved it. I, on the other hand, regretted it immediately. I expected standard spookiness, the kind that would make us jump and laugh, but they enthusiastically derailed into horror. A woman named Cecile talked about her father’s losing his arm to marauders in the Congo. She told the tale with a storyteller’s wide-smiling glee, but I was so shaken I wanted to snap on the lights again.
A middle-aged woman named Linda, from Scotland—why was she in my class?—told us how her dog had predicted her miscarriage. A girl named Ana who spoke with a fierce, deep voice told a story of her village’s plague and how the beautiful white lace veils its women made for the dead contributed to its spread. They were all enthralled with one another’s tales and rushed to raise their hands and offer new ones.