by Deborah Emin
A large gaggle of little people now gathered around us. I couldn’t get over how they smiled and smiled as if smiling were a constant activity. Not something you put on your face to show your feelings.
I looked down at them and asked this little boy who had been the boldest of them as he stood next to Lauren, “Hi there. How many of you are there?”
He looked at me as if I were speaking Greek. Another little boy came pushing close to me and answered with his fingers splayed in his face, “This many. And I am 3 years old.”
He lowered his hands and waited for me to say something.
The other children waited too.
I answered by saying, “There seem to be a whole lot more of you than this one of me.” I held up one finger. For some reason they found my raised finger funny and then as if a secret whistle had been blown, they ran off yelling and hollering all the way back to the sand box and swing set at the rear of the yard.
Lauren asked me to follow her inside the house.
The little school house had been built by the townspeople. Lauren told me the history of the grant writing and the design and the construction with a great deal of pride. The town needed a day care center and Lauren and Elise, the other woman at the day care, ran it.
The interior was just as I would have wanted it to be. Plants, fish tanks, gerbil cages, turtles in little pools, ant farms and the kids’s artwork all over the walls. In the center of the room, their little desks and chairs sat in rows surrounded by mats on the floor and blankets and pillows that looked used but clean. A small kitchen in one corner of the space emitted baking smells. It looked as if they had just finished their lunches. A stack of dirty dishes sat in the sink.
Behind me, as I turned to take in how all the space was used, was a music corner. All their instruments and a record player sat neatly waiting for the kids to sit down and play a song or listen to a record.
The interior was really one large room broken up into areas that had specific purposes.
Lauren directed me to the “office.” She sat down behind a metal desk that she had covered with huge stickers of flowers in crazy colors that flowers can’t be.
“How did you hear about us?” Lauren asked me.
I must have looked away as I tried to understand the question because she asked me another one. “You did come here for the job? Right?”
She took a deep breath and the temperature in the room changed. From warm and inviting it was now at that place where each person wonders what is really going on and why you are sitting with each other. It was indeed a case of mistaken identity.
“I just happened upon the school. I didn’t come here to apply for a job. I presume that’s what you thought? ”
The silence filled the entire space. I didn’t know what to say, so I said the first thing that came into my head, “But . . . here I am and if you have a job I could do, well, why not?”
“Are you serious? It’s a huge responsibility to work with children. It’s not like getting a job in a library where you put books on a shelf. It takes patience and understanding to work well with little kids. They have so many things on their minds.” Lauren looked at me as if I would understand her.
“Like what?”
She laughed at me as if I couldn’t be serious.
“What are they thinking about? I would like to know.”
I looked her in the eyes. Her big green eyes tried to factor in my knowledge versus my total inexperience with children to see if it was worth her time to explain to me what they thought about.
“I know what you’re thinking. You think I couldn’t possibly be the right person for the job. By the way, I don’t know what the job is. But I’m curious and maybe it wasn’t an accident that I walked in here.”
Still Lauren was thinking. I couldn’t wait any longer.
“I’ll leave,” I said, “and let you get back to work. Thanks.” I stood up.
“Why don’t you come back tomorrow afternoon around 4 and see what it’s like here? Maybe we’re getting off on the wrong foot. Let’s try again when you are coming for a job interview. Does that sound like a good offer? Oh, by the way, I don’t know if you know this, but the College offers credit for this job. So, you can earn a little and I mean a little pocket money and credits as well.”
“What is the job?” I still had no idea. “How did you know that I went to the College?”
She looked at me as if to say, even Helen Keller could see that much.
“We need a tutor for our after school program.”
We said good bye and I promised to return tomorrow.
I walked back to Charles’ apartment. Everything that happened today was due to me skipping classes and going for a walk. How odd life can be.
Date: Friday, 10/17/69
I’m imprisoned in the library for the weekend. I’m working on my paper for Dr. Fish’s class. I chose to write on the Coleridge poem, “Frost at Midnight.”
The day has been gray and nasty. Perfect weather for a long stay in the library.
If I don’t waste the time by writing in my diary, I should be able to complete my paper. How can I complain after all? I have such a fantastic life and so much to look forward to. I’m going to write in here in little bursts of freedom from work. Otherwise, I will waste this precious time.
(later)
Yesterday was a gray day too. I went back for my interview and then began work immediately.
(It’s nice having my diary next to me. Whenever I’m bored or need to think, I turn to it, write something down and get it out of my mind so I can focus better on my paper.)
My first tutee is Jason, a 5th grader, about the size of a 1st grader. We worked on his math homework. Lauren said her form of interviewing is to watch me working with a child. So she sat nearby while Jason and I tried to get to know each other while getting some work done.
Jason’s rather shy, mostly because he is so small, I imagine. He has a brilliant smile that when he trusted me enough to put it on his face made everything around him look much brighter. One of his treasures, as he calls it, is his imaginary trumpet. We made up a game to help him learn his multiplication tables. I play in an imaginary rhythm section. The challenge is for him to answer the math question on the correct beat. When he gets five correct, he can play his pretend trumpet and march around the room blowing out his favorite tune, which only he can hear.
That was my first day at work. I made the team. I now will work with Jason after school. I walked back to Charles’ apartment and for some reason didn’t tell him about the job or how good it made me feel. I didn’t even write about it in here until right now.
(Later)
I love working in the library and playing my games. Today’s game involved me randomly pulling a book from the shelves and then finding something inside it that had a message just for me. This game is called, let the library book tell your fortune. So easy to play, all it takes is a library card.
I walked into the stacks and pulled down a book. I cheat a bit and find a book title that is worth the game. It has to make me curious and excited to be exploring between its covers. The game is supposed to feel as suspenseful as any game of chance would. I’m supposed to feel as if my life could change based on the outcome.
I found something that made me laugh the way I laugh in a library—that behind the hand clamped to my mouth so no sound escapes laugh:
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
Two things made this book a winner for me—its title, “A Coney Island of the Mind”—and those lines that made me think of Keats. It didn’t hurt that the author’s name was Ferlinghetti. What a great name that is.
I don’t know anything about Coney Island but the sound of the words were
so playful that I had to pull it off the shelf. When we read Keats I didn’t think about about the particulars of those two figures on the vase. It never occurred to me they were lovers or that they might be running anywhere. I never saw them in my mind at all. What always captured my attention were the lines about truth and beauty. I was seduced by the abstract nouns. They said, “Baby if you don’t understand what we mean, don’t bother with anything else.”
The game is helpful. I see I’m having a similar problem in my paper.
I’m having trouble with one section. A similar kind of problem. One of those spots where the poem says things so much better than I could ever say it.
I feel like such an “idjit” when I can’t think of a way to paraphrase what the writer has written. This isn’t a stop sign but a train wreck.
(later)
I went outside to clear my head and to read the poem out loud. The trees heard me go over and over the poem as if I had lost something in it.
The light was going fast. Like the leaves, it diminishes quickly. The crunch of the dead leaves on the ground below our hovering library sounds as rich as the words pouring out of the Coleridge poem. The whole poem is rich.
Taking it apart to explain how it has affected me is really the point of this paper. Somehow I have to be able to explain why this final stanza takes my breath away:
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.
To have spent the whole night with Coleridge as he muses on his life’s experiences while worrying over his young son’s crib was a unique experience. The night went on and on for me too as I tried to figure out what was going on in this poem. I felt like Coleridge was telling himself a ghost story. His past sounds like that kind of tale—cramped, unhappy, waiting for someone to rescue him. Then he ends with a prayer that his son’s life won’t be like his. He will grow up in the countryside where circumstances will be richer and better.
I can dive back into my work now because I have recovered my passion for this poem.
[later]
I took a longer break to go for a run. My head cleared up but now I’m tired. I know what that means. Time to force myself to work, because this is the best time to work. Work will come out of me as if I am in a dream. Insights will appear that won’t come to me any other way. It’s okay if I actually fall asleep. Something gets released in sleep. It tears down walls that stand in the way of me seeing more clearly the problems I have to solve.
I could never make Mama understand how this works. She would come into my room and find me asleep at my desk. She’d close my books and pull my pen out of my hand. I’d wake up, screaming at her to go away and leave me alone, I was thinking. Later, I apologized. She never got it or why it was such an important part of my study routine.
(later)
I fell asleep and dreamed I had control of time. Not that I had the control levers but just had this ultimate ability to control its flow—to go backward and forward and to speed it up or slow it down. Also to go into the time frames of other people so that I knew what they were doing and when they were doing it so I could calibrate it to what I was doing at the same time. I have no idea why that dream got me so turned on, but it’s a good thing Charles is away this weekend or I would be running out of here and all the way to his apartment to jump into bed with him.
Inside my head I hear wheels moving, gears shifting as if this were the sound of the rolling forward of the hours and the days and the seasons. The rolling wheels. Inside the wheels are corn and cotton and all the things we do with them. My dream was more like what Charles and Tony describe when they take acid.
I know that Coleridge was a drug addict and that Charles got kicked out of the College because of his drug use. I don’t know what to think of it. I hated it when Pops drank too much but he drank too much because he was so unhappy.
I won’t condemn Charles because I don’t know why he takes drugs or why Tony does either. To me it is one of those mysteries that at first was just way too frightening because I saw what drinking did to Pops. When I fell in love with Charles, and in a way with Tony, it became harder to think about their drug use, so I don’t think about it. I mean, even as silly and stupid as they are on drugs, they get their work done. Why should I worry?
I think I don’t want to think about it. That’s my answer to that question.
The sound of the wheels rolling though me means I must get back to work. My paper is already too long. Tonight when I revise it and type it, it’ll come together in a shorter version because I hate typing. My plan worked. The paper will be on time.
[later]
Paper completed. Now all I have to do is wait for Charles to return. I can’t wait. I feel like I did when we went on our first date.
I missed him, I really did.
Date: Tuesday, 10/21/69
Charles’ return from his weekend in New York City set off a wave of jealousy in me. No matter how often he tells me he loves me, there is that spot inside me that is suspicious of him and everyone.
Truly, I am getting to know people better and to like them more. Even Kit, my neighbor is no longer such a thorn in my side. My roommate, Sylvie, is sweet, although we’ll never be best friends like Eileen and I are. Lauren is special too.
But this jealousy rises up and makes me see the world in a blackness that makes all these people my enemy. If I can pinpoint a moment when the blackness returned it was when Charles began talking about his Halloween Party. He sat with me in the kitchen, smoking a joint and telling me about the previous parties. My jealousy boiled so high that it arrived in my throat. I had to put a frozen smile on my face. I watched Charles and said to myself, “He’s having all the fun.”
He jumped out of his chair and ran to the hall closet. He pulled out an old gorilla costume and put the head on.
“Tony wears this every year. He’s the butler, hands out the drinks and the drugs, whatever the guest desires. He writes down the guest’s name and the costume title. We vote at the end of the night for the best costume. I really love these parties, Scags, and now you’ll be here with me.”
He lunged for me with that stupid gorilla head on, trying to pick me up like he was King Kong. I refused to play along.
Charles asked me what was wrong.
“I’m thinking Charles.”
He stood in front of me with his hands on his hips but with that stupid gorilla mask on and asked me about what.
“I’m thinking what I’m going to be.”
He liked that answer and without playing with me more, he left me alone to conjure up the appropriate costume for his yearly Halloween Party.
On days like this, I think he has fallen in love with the person he wants me to be and not with who I am. That’s probably typical with lovers. I don’t know.
Where’s my Aunt Money when I need her?
I’m going to write her a letter about this. I know she will laugh at me and maybe what I need is to hear someone laughing at how stupid all this is. She’ll say, “Really Scags, just have some fun. Okay kiddo?”
Is that what she will say? I’m going to find out. I’m going to send her a letter tonight.
As far as Charles’ party—I’m going to be my nice self and go along with all the plans. He will tell me what to do. I will do it, no matter what. He’ll make his lists of things to get at the store and we will go together. Though, I heard him aski
ng Tony to take me with him in the van. It holds more than his Jeep.
Tony laughed at him and said, “And it starts faster and doesn’t stall at the most inconvenient moments. Really Charles, get the damn thing looked at will you?”
They drove to New York in Charles’ car and had some problems somewhere with his car stalling out in unfortunate places. The two of them have been arguing about that since they returned. Guy talk.
Halloween is on a Friday night. We’ll have the entire weekend after the party to clean up the apartment and for Charles to recover. I’ll have my work completed for my classes through that following Tuesday. I’ll have to make sure to give Jason his time too. I’ll write to Aunt Money and tell her what a silly person I am and ask for advice.
Date: Wednesday, 10/22/69
This was a good day. A long day one too. I’m upset with Charles but I don’t want to only write about that because so much good happened today that I want to keep that in mind.
So, Jason and I got along well today. In fact, I now believe we’ve broken through the new teacher syndrome. I found that very gratifying.
Like most Wednesdays, I ran the whole course with the men and women teams. I love the sound of the whole team out for a run—of our breathing, the placing of so many feet on the paths. It’s an exciting sound, makes my blood race in time with my feet.
An early morning run like that is the best way to start the day. I feel invincible. As if nothing can go wrong in my life. When my body works that hard love comes pouring out of every pore. I know that no matter what happens, I will survive. Even if I don’t like what is happening, I will be fine.
Alex set a faster pace than usual today. We all met the challenge and worked harder. When we finished, most of us were so “up” that we could have done anything we wanted to do—created world peace, found the cure for the common cold or cancer, been our own rocket to the moon.
The best part of running isn’t the way my body looks but the way it feels. I’m often asked if I’ve read the short story, “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.”