Teach Me

by R. A. Nelson

  That’s Britton Keller. Her place on the Evolutionary Scale? She has a henna bar code tattooed at the top of her butt.

  Boys?

  Don’t even mention it.

  Not one boy in this class interests me. Or any of my classes, for that matter. Too lazy. Too mean. Too cool. Too immature. Too dull.

  Too Harold.

  He just made a grunting noise deep in his throat. You can time them. He often smells faintly of chlorine.

  It’s no better with the teachers.

  Last semester was Mr. Fields. I know what brand of coffee he drinks. How many cups a day. What caused his divorce: credit cards and quite possibly the length of the fur in his ears.

  So now, today, right this minute, I’m really looking forward to something different.

  We’re startled when he comes through the door. Our new teacher.

  He doesn’t say hello, good morning, nothing.

  I don’t even get more than a peek at his face. He just blows through the door and immediately starts jabbing the blackboard with a piece of chalk.

  First observations:

  No gut, very trim, younger than most. Black Dockers, white, long-sleeved shirt. Mr. Mann is tall, broad back, arms long. Something about the way he slouches as he writes makes him approachable, friendly. Even vulnerable. I still haven’t seen his face.

  There’s something beautiful and wild in the sound of his slashing strokes. He’s writing so fast, the clicking of the chalk sounds aggressive:

  Kenny once pushed me off the monkey bars a couple of geologic epochs ago. He has a snarling mouth and hair the color of morning pee.

  There’s a sprinkling of embarrassed laughter. I wince, already worried for my new teacher.

  “Mr. Atkinson,” Mr. Mann says without turning around.

  Wow. His voice is strong and deep. Just the slightest trace of an accent. New England? He turns to face us, bringing audible gasps from the girls. His eyes are frostbite blue, his dark hair hangs partly across his face like Johnny Depp’s. How old is he? Twenty-five? Twenty-eight?

  “Would you tell us, please, Mr. Atkinson, what does a poem mean?”

  Kenny sits up straighter and glances from side to side as if searching for a brother or a cousin.

  “Huh? What poem?”

  “Any.”

  Kenny grins at nothing, puts his hands up helplessly.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  Mr. Mann pulls down the white screen in front of the blackboard and slaps a slide on the overhead projector. It’s a poem. We read:

  MY life closed twice before its close;

  It yet remains to see

  If Immortality unveil

  A third event to me,

  So huge, so hopeless to conceive,

  As these that twice befell.

  Parting is all we know of heaven,

  And all we need of hell.

  He claps chalk dust from his long hands and touches the poem with the tip of a finger. “How about this one? Tell the class what this poem means, Mr. Atkinson.”

  Kenny opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. The flies are getting confused.

  “I hate poetry,” he says finally.

  “I hate poetry,” Mr. Mann says. “Why?”

  “Because it’s freaking boring, you know.”

  “Why.”

  Kenny smirks and looks around for the affirmation he knows is there. “Because it doesn’t make any sense. It has nothing to do with nothing. It’s a great big waste of time.”

  “Mr. Atkinson,” Mr. Mann says, staring hard, “I fully agree.”

  “Huh?”

  Mr. Mann leans toward his desk, takes the back of his chair in his big hands. His hair is floating. “Poetry is boring,” he says. “A huge waste of time. Meaningless. Hardly relevant to today’s world. In fact, it sucks ass.”

  Whoosh.

  All the air rushes out of the room. Even the comatose are jolted into rousing. Mr. Mann sweeps his beautiful eyes over us, huge, blazing.

  “We’re doomed, you and I, to a semester of boring, ridiculous torture. An entire chunk of your lives will be lost forever. By May you’ll hate my guts. You’ll talk about me behind my back. Tell your friends Emily Dickinson is a brand of upscale furniture. Unless.”

  We wait, his luminescent gaze rapidly becoming unbearable.

  “Unless what?” a girl finally says.

  The girl is me.

  I can’t believe it. I generally never speak in class; I absorb. Mr. Mann swivels his head, eyes pumping blue fire into my face.

  “Unless you help me kill it,” he says.

  “What? Kill it?”

  “Yes. One poem at a time. It’s the only way.” He takes a couple of steps toward me. I squirm. My personal space is big— at least a couple of meters, and most people can quickly tell. But Mr. Mann doesn’t seem to notice he is penetrating it. “But poems are tough to kill,” he says. “I can’t do it alone. Are you with me?”

  Sandra Williams leaks a string of compressed giggles behind me—I can tell who it is even without twisting my neck. Has any teacher ever talked like this?

  “But how do you kill a poem?” I say, unable to keep my own laugh from squeaking out around the edges.

  He cuts his eyes to the door and back, hard, conspiratorial. “The bad ones are easy. You just leave ‘em alone; they eventually fall over and die. The good ones are tough. The harder you try, the stronger they get.”

  “Okay, but how?”

  “You start by deciding if the author is insane.” He straightens up and steps away from me, looks at the whole class. I can start breathing again. “Well?”

  Silence.

  “She’s definitely messed up,” Kenny says, sneering.

  Other boys join in, emboldened.

  “A whack job.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean, her life closed twice?”

  Snickers over the language.

  “You may be right,” Mr. Mann says. “Emily lived with her sick father in Amherst, Massachusetts. After the late 1860s, she never again traveled beyond the boundaries of her little town. But she managed to fall in love at least once, so bitterly she wore a bridal gown the rest of her life.”

  “Miss Havisham!” a plump girl named Kelly Wunderlich almost shouts, startling herself. “Like in Great Expectations. I mean, the wedding dress, she was nuts.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Mann says. “Like Miss Havisham, Emily never married. In fact, some believe the love of her life was a woman.”

  A communal “ooh” rises from the class. “Lesbo,” Kenny says.

  “That makes you crazy?” Havisham-Kelly says.

  “Crazy like you.”

  Mr. Mann is enjoying this. He jerks the first slide away, slaps down another:

  Her breast is fit for pearls, But I was not a “Diver”

  The class erupts.

  Havisham is waving her arm when the place finally settles down. “But that means she wasn’t a lesbian. She wasn’t a diver.”

  Mr. Mann puts down another slide.

  “Different poem.”

  TO see her is a picture, To hear her is a tune, To know her an intemperance As innocent as June

  “To know her,” a voice says from the back.

  We’re shocked. It’s Matt. His hair is Rust-Oleum black. He wears a button every day that says JESUS PHREAK and prays by the flagpole every morning with his friends. I’ve rarely heard him speak. “That’s from the Bible,” Matt says. “To know somebody means—it’s physical.”

  Mr. Mann smiles. “Interesting. Damned interesting. So, was she insane?” He pauses, glaring, puts both hands on his desk with a seismic thump. “Emily Dickinson wrote over eighteen hundred poems. Only eight were published during her lifetime. Now that’s what I call insane.”

  An appreciative “ah.”

  He slams the first poem back up on the screen, points at it. The shadow of his finger looks like a gun.

  “Okay. Who’s ready to help me
murder this one?”

  I adore him already.

  golden ticket

  Black coat.

  It comes past his knees. Not Regulation Issue for Alabama, even in January.

  Mr. Mann’s standing in just about the last place I would expect a teacher to stand: outside the gym, where two intimidatingly huge chunks of school wall come together. Kids smoke here. The concrete is a painter’s palette of gum. His presence is a force field driving leering boys away.

  The wind is weaving pieces of his hair. He’s waiting for someone.

  “Thank you,” he says when I come out.

  I don’t know if he’s talking to me or Schuyler.

  “You, Carolina.” Mr. Mann comes closer, pulling his coat around his legs. We’re exactly the same height. He’s inside my sphere again, making me feel electrically charged.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi. I wanted to thank you for rescuing me.”

  I’m not sure what I should say. “What?”

  “The first class is always the most dangerous. Thanks for helping me out like that. I was afraid nobody would answer and I might be thrown to the wolves.”

  I smile, embarrassed. Glance nervously at Schuyler, who is frowning, confused.

  Mr. Mann sticks his hand out. “And you are?” Schuyler pushes at thick hair self-consciously—today it looks like a thatched Elizabethan roof—but shakes anyway.

  My thinking apparatus is temporarily short-circuited.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “This is my friend, Schuyler Green.”

  Mom would bust her buttons: Textbook Introduction. But why did I feel it necessary to throw in the playground qualifier? Mr. Mann turns to me again and glares beatifically.

  “You spoke up when nobody else would,” he says.

  “Except for Kenny.”

  “Mr. Atkinson?”

  “How did you know who he was?”

  “Teachers talk. They always tell you about the worst kids first. I wish they would start with the best.”

  The crooked way he smiles somehow communicates that by best he means students just like me. His voice is soothing, his eyes hypnotic. It would be so easy to fall into them. In fact, that’s just what I’m doing.

  “You were amazing in there,” I say, instantly horrified at my own words. I scramble to recover. “How you got everybody thinking, I mean. I’ve always been heavy into science. I’ve never read much poetry.”

  “People in fear for their lives do desperate things,” he says. I wonder, is this supposed to have a double meaning?

  “Desperate?”

  “It’s a goddamn trick,” Mr. Mann says. “Pardon my French.”

  “Actually, it’s Middle English,” I say automatically, immediately wishing I would shut up. It’s a habit from hanging around with Schuyler. Sometimes his only entry into a conversation is a chance to quietly show off.

  “But originally from the Old French,” Schuyler says. See what I mean? “Dampner. To condemn, inflict loss upon.”

  Mr. Mann laughs. “I’ll remember you two the next time I’m on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” I like his laugh. It’s genuine, trusting. Schuyler doesn’t. His ears sink.

  “You said something about a trick?” I say.

  “Yeah.” Mr. Mann cups a hand to his mouth in an exaggerated, stagy gesture. “Can you keep a secret? He’s made up.”

  “Who?”

  “The person you saw in class today. It’s funny—even when you’ve been doing this for years, it never gets any easier. That’s how I survive it. I become Him. So mostly it’s all an act. I’m an INFP—”

  “Sure,” I say. “Myers-Briggs. The personality sorter.”

  “Right. So you know about it?”

  “Yeah. We took the test a couple of years ago. INFP is one of the rarest personalities of all. It means you’re introverted, intuitive. You don’t mind things being open ended.”

  “Right. We’re supposed to be loners. Writers. Actors. Artists.”

  “Saints. Idealists. Dreamers.”

  He grimaces. “Ha. I wouldn’t go that far.”

  I can’t believe I’m having a conversation with this man. Normally his looks alone would send me into overload so bad, I’d be unintelligible. “So why do you do it if it bothers you so much?” I say.

  “You mean, teach? Because I love it. It’s my second-greatest passion.”

  “Second greatest?”

  Mr. Mann doesn’t say anything. I’m not sure he heard me. In fact, I’m not even sure I actually said the words. For the first time I notice Schuyler is gone. Force field got him.

  “Well, I guess I’d better be going—”

  “Wait,” Mr. Mann says.

  He reaches into his coat, pulls out a golden envelope, and hands it to me. I blink. My mind is still trying to unhitch itself from the word passion.

  “I wanted to give this to you,” he says.

  “What is it?”

  “Your reward for rescuing me. Someone had to.”

  I open the envelope and pull out a piece of stiff, formal-looking paper. A gift certificate for twenty-five dollars to Books-a-Million. It’s made out to Carolina Livingston in black Sharpie.

  “Oh! Thanks. But I don’t know if—”

  Mr. Mann shrugs with his forehead. “I know. Probably against sixteen different school policies. Please accept it anyway. It’s kind of a tradition. I do it every time I start a new class. Besides, I can’t be fired until I see how things turn out.”

  I tuck the certificate under my arm, a little afraid somebody else might see. “Turn out?”

  “At the risk of triggering your gag reflex, I like to think each class is a book. Full of characters. Twists, surprises, heroes, villains. Growth. That’s the best part. I want to see how they turn out, Carolina. How they grow. Or not, as the case may be.”

  “Nine. Everybody calls me Nine.”

  “Oh. Where’d you get that?”

  “From my dad. He’s an engineer out at NASA. Insane about numbers.”

  He smiles. His bottom teeth are slightly crooked too.

  “Integer chic,” Mr. Mann says. “It fits you.” I can feel him watching me, thinking. “Also the auditory suggestion of a Teutonic refusal. Who knows, might start a trend.”

  I’m afraid I’m actually blushing. I decide to risk it.

  “How’d you know where to find me?”

  He puts a finger to his lips. “Shhh. Trade secret. I looked up your schedule on the school LAN. So which do you prefer? Carolina or Nine?”

  I think about it, feeling a ridiculous warmth rising through my chest. “I don’t know. Either is fine. Anything but Amazon Woman. Hair Girl. Basketball Chick.”

  “Do you play basketball?”

  “Nope.”

  “Teachers really call you those things?”

  “Some. The ones who think they’re funny.”

  “No shit. What about the other ones?”

  “Other who?” Did Mr. Mann just say shit?

  “Teachers.”

  I think about it. “They don’t notice me.”

  He puts his thumb to his chin, fingers resting on his full lips.

  “Which is worse.”

  I’m not sure it’s a question. “You mean being noticed or not being noticed?”

  He doesn’t say anything, just looks at me.

  I think about my answer for a week.

  sound crazy

  Masterful.

  Each minute in his class is a sanctuary.

  There is no suction today. There may never be again.

  Even Harold’s neck is suddenly more interesting. As if I could look at anything else but Him.

  Mr. Mann.

  As the days go by, I’m opening like a bud. Just in time for spring.

  In spite of ourselves, we cram Emily’s new science into our heads complete with a foreign vocabulary: variable feet, assonant rhyme, negative capability.

  This morning he pounds his fist so hard, the transparency on the projector jumps, th
rowing the image out of square.

  He straightens the slide and we read:

  BECAUSE I could not stop for Death,

  He kindly stopped for me;

  The carriage held but just ourselves

  And Immortality.

  We slowly drove, he knew no haste,

  And I had put away

  My labor, and my leisure too,

  For his civility.

  We passed the school where children played,

  Their lessons scarcely done;

  We passed the fields of gazing grain,

  We passed the setting sun.

  We paused before a house that seemed

  A swelling of the ground;

  The roof was scarcely visible,

  The cornice but a mound.

  Since then ’t is centuries; but each

  Feels shorter than the day

  I first surmised the horses’ heads

  Were toward eternity.

  But everything is quiet.

  Britton shifts in her seat. The henna bar code has given way to a metal crack ring. Ouch. “What are we supposed to hear?” she says.

  “Read it again. Do you hear the hooves galloping to the beat of her words?”

  Mr. Mann slaps his hands rhythmically on his desk, making a drumming sound: Tuddlelump, tuddlelump. He attacks the blackboard:

  Havisham is waving her arm.

  “Kelly?”

  “Mr. Mann! My book is different.” She holds up a white paperback with a subluxated spine. “It doesn’t say lessons; it’s talking about wrestling.”

  Fiendish smile.

  “There are different versions of many of Emily’s poems, depending on how old your book is, who did the editing, even the punctuation. Some of the multiple versions came from Emily herself. She was complex, changeable, amazingly ahead of her time.” He glances at me. I’m sure of it.

  “So.” He moves fluidly across the room, hands clasped behind him. I’m stone drunk on his every gesture. Watching him walk does something supernatural to me. “What does the speaker figure out by the time she gets to the end of the poem?”

  “That her ass is dead, man.” Kenny laughs.

  “Bingo. And doesn’t that just make you want to scream?”