by Susan Minot
• LISTEN •
—We were all so surprised.
—You were surprised? I wasn’t surprised.
—Shocked.
—It was surprising how unhappy.
—No one saw.
—No one could see.
—No one wanted to see.
—They saw.
—Didn’t really think about it.
—So they were right.
—Of course they were right.
—They were wrong.
—Who’s they?
—They were…
—They are.
—They were seeing what they weren’t.
—Feeling left.
—Who’re they?
—Wanted what everybody else…
—Left out.
—Who’s everybody?
—There were reasons for it.
—Can’t ignore the numbers.
—People want.
—The numbers say it all.
—People are hoping.
—What the numbers mean…
—It’s tribal.
—What the rich…
—People always want something.
—What the poor…
—People always want something new.
—Want something more.
—People always.
—Which people?
—The uncounted.
—They can’t really believe.
—The ignored.
—They won’t.
—They try.
—Just ignore it.
—They know who they are.
—They’re to blame.
—Who’s the problem?
—They’re corrupt.
—They’re the future.
—We’re the problem.
—Liar.
—They’re what’s happening now.
—They’re the heart.
—They won’t.
—Who’re they?
—Who’re we?
—They were never.
—They don’t care.
—They’re insane.
—Used to be great.
—Why can’t they get along?
—Clueless.
—Trying our best.
—Feeling forgotten.
—Just symbols of hate.
—Doesn’t work anymore.
—Symbol of hope?
—Used to be great.
—Not trying.
—Have to fix…
—Have no choice.
—Making it worse.
—Did our best.
—It’s human behavior.
—Must do better.
—It’s from having no choices.
—Too rich.
—Wrong of them.
—The poor.
—Can’t handle it.
—Leaving.
—Never leaving.
—Must do something.
—Time for a change!
—Our complacency.
—Not mine.
—Doesn’t work anymore.
—Time to act.
—Not theirs.
—Who’re they?
—We’ll show them.
—What they’re saying is—
—No one heard.
—They are…
—What they want to say.
—What they couldn’t say.
—What they’re thinking.
—What are they thinking?
—They couldn’t say.
—No one was listening.
—The rich always…
—Can’t be helped.
—Human nature.
—Can’t be changed.
—Must be saved.
—Must be changed.
—Weirder every day.
—It’s unreal.
—What I heard—
—Did something else happen?
—Can’t watch.
—Can’t listen.
—How can they?
—Can’t dismiss it.
—Can’t blame.
—So surprising.
—More and more each day.
—Less each day.
—Have to leave.
—I’m never leaving.
—What can we do?
—I thought we were—
—What will they do?
—Isn’t fair.
—We didn’t know.
—Seen it all.
—What about the kids?
—It’s never been.
—Truly insane.
—Lost his mind.
—Never had it.
—He was great.
—Never in my lifetime.
—Only the rich.
—Like it was before.
—Ninety-nine percent.
—Keep fighting.
—It’s no different.
—How do you like your meat done?
—Can’t listen anymore.
—What’re they saying?
—Can’t watch.
—Can’t stop watching.
—How can people?
—Can’t sleep.
—What do they want?
—Please hold.
—How can people not?
—Not again.
—Stop complaining.
—Feeling threatened.
—Can’t take it.
—Did something else happen?
—You mean Charlottesville?
—No, since then.
—Is there anyone better?
—Sorry. I’m late.
—Somebody must be able to—
—Who?
—She couldn’t.
—She could have.
—She didn’t.
—He did.
—He heard them.
—He was great.
—I miss him already.
—They hated him.
—We loved him.
—They love him.
—He heard them.
—Can’t believe this.
—Can’t be happening.
—Had to happen!
—They’ve finally gotten what—
—Can’t go on.
—Can’t stand to listen.
—Can’t bear to watch.
—Has to change.
—Message is clear.
—What’s the message?
—They’re insane.
—Who thinks that?
—Has to stop.
—Blame the rise on the—
—Feeling threatened.
—No one listening.
—Accept the differences.
—Deliberate strategy.
—I can’t talk about it.
—No one listening.
—He heard.
—No one heard.
—They heard him.
—Which them? Which him?
—Across the aisle.
—This is how I like my meat.
—Great again.
—Really worried now.
—Like the world has never seen.
—Not the way I like it.
—Lies.
—Getting what they want.
—Human behavior.
—I don’t eat anything with eyes.
—Hell yeah.
—Must ignore it.
—All lies.
—Has to
change.
—Nothing new.
—Never before.
—Once again.
—Haven’t a clue.
—Pay attention.
—This is where I work.
—Not anymore.
—I never did, before…
—Can’t stand it.
—Have to for my family.
—Still can’t believe it.
—Can’t imagine.
—Can’t bear it.
—Can’t look.
—Can’t take another word.
—Are you listening?
• THE LANGUAGE OF CATS AND DOGS •
“Let’s speak in a language any cat or dog could understand,” said the man.
* * *
—
She sat in the passenger seat, facing forward, unmoving.
Through the dust-mottled windshield she saw a newly constructed park with squared-off areas of light green grass. She did not look to her left at the man behind the wheel. To look would somehow be to accept the ridiculous and yet rattling thing he’d just said. She was twenty then, a young woman, though she still thought of herself as, and called herself, a girl. Her heart was hammering her chest.
* * *
—
This happened a long time ago.
The image of her frozen in the fish tank of his littered car would remain intact for forty years.
* * *
—
It was her final week of college, the man was her professor. But how had they gotten in the car?
* * *
—
Years later when she looked back with more than a cursory glance, she couldn’t remember many of the details. She and the professor must have walked after class to his car parked nearby. She could however pinpoint the time. It had been the last class of the semester. She would be graduating in a week. Four months before, her mother had been killed in a car accident, leaving behind seven children and a husband.
* * *
—
You think you are done with an experience once it is over and it is set into some version in a story. And there it will sit. But if you return to the experience many years later, because you are, say, urged by a movement in the culture to re-examine the treatment of women, an examination which seems to come every fifty years or so before it fades away again, then go, you might discover new details waiting for you, unnoticed.
What you do not know when you’re young is that you may, as your life goes on, return to things that happened, and that the more you visit a thing, the more time you spend experiencing it—in reflection, in memory—so that an event which took, say, an hour in your life may afterward be recalled and visited by you fifty times over, each time you remember it. Moments of happiness, such as the period one fell in love, may be remembered again and again, weeks’ worth if it was a really compelling thing to think about. And moments when one was shocked might be similarly preserved, not voluntarily, and exist as a freeze-frame.
* * *
—
When the last class ended the students in R. M. Tower’s graduate writing workshop would have stood up from the long wooden table, scraping their chairs. Sophie did retain over the years the impression of the professor sort of ignoring a male student attempting to say goodbye to him and instead calling to her as she reached the door.
Miss Vincent, he had said. Please wait. He had something to ask her. And she’d waited by the exit, feeling the gaze of a few students slide knowingly over her. Well, she said to herself, she had nothing to be secretive about. Honestly. So what if Merlon Tower was an old-school somewhat lecherous nut? She couldn’t help that.
Once the classroom was empty, he asked her if she’d like a ride home.
That’s okay, she said. I’m not far.
He persisted as they began down the stairs. Had she seen the new park by the river?
What river? she said.
No? he said, throwing up his hands. He was like a conductor when he taught, using his body and sweeping gestures to accentuate his points. She was about to graduate, he said in his gravelly voice, and she had not even seen the river?
* * *
—
Though an undergraduate, Sophie had been allowed into the graduate class on Mr. Tower’s special say-so. She had taken his writing workshop the year before, sitting in kidney-shaped desk-and-chair sets, listening to him rant and rave—against the administration, against a culture that didn’t appreciate good writing, against the pressure to conform.
Think! Think! he told his students. Don’t accept what is presented to you!
Question it all!
The messages they have been giving you are wrong!
Take nothing on faith.
* * *
—
He was a published author—essays, articles, even books—impressive to an undergraduate. Sophie had first signed up for his class aware he also had a reputation for being one of those guys. He’d written a famous article in a prominent men’s magazine called “Up the Down Coed” in which he highlighted what he saw as the inevitable dynamic between a red-blooded professor and his nubile female students. She had not read the essay—in fact, she didn’t know anyone who actually had—but his point apparently was that people shouldn’t expect people not to be human! In a time when females were seizing rights long-oppressed for the equality they deserved—something which was so obvious to Sophie she was surprised it needed pointing out—Tower’s renegade attitude was outrageous and even radical, in its way.
No, it wasn’t his finest hour, but he turned out to be an inspiring teacher—one who didn’t care what anyone thought. In fact, that’s what he banged on about. Be yourself! Your voice is the only one you’ve got! No one’s going to stick up for your work but you! So if Sophie recognized something creepy, she ignored it—that wasn’t the part of R. M. Tower that she experienced.
* * *
—
In class he had roamed the front of the classroom in a tattered tweed jacket and rumpled unbuttoned shirt, his head like that of a scarred lion, with jowls and pockmarked skin, a rubbery mouth and popping eyes and tobacco-stained teeth, ranting against the “expected ways” and the deadening “educational factory lines.” He sang the praises of the beautiful sentence and the original stylist.
Tell us what you see! he bellowed.
He radiated radical sparks in a number of directions—from challenging narrative convention to boycotting faculty meetings for the small percentage of black colleagues. In class, he had been encouraging to Sophie about her writing—stream-of-consciousness stories both playful and melancholy—and at the end of her junior year suggested rather offhandedly that she take his graduate workshop; her work was good enough.
* * *
—
In the graduate class they sat at a long table in a room on an upper floor with a large paned window, like a solarium.
One winter day he’d come into class with a long arrow from a bow under his arm. It wasn’t quite a child’s arrow, but it wasn’t a hardy real arrow either. Tower began talking about Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry” with the famous line of “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”
He lifted the arrow, speaking with mounting enthusiasm of the poetic “bow,” representing the imagination, and to demonstrate the realness of the arrow (like the toad?) he snapped the arrowhead off its stem. The class watched as he slid the triangular arrowhead like a shuffleboard disk down the wooden table rather deliberately to where Sophie sat in front of her open notebook. She touched the arrow as if to complete the demonstration that it was indeed real, and left it sitting there. The whole class seemed to wince a little, even as they smiled.
They moved on to the discussion of the story that week, a story about a woman who accidentally kills an old man sleeping under
her car, the tragedy of which registered weakly with Sophie. Her state of mind was so steeped in thoughts of loss and death that any depiction of its being remarkable or upsetting were tin in her ear.
Next to her at the table, a long-armed student named Keith Ferris who wrote stories about buffoonish fellows in improbable situations had idly picked up the arrow and throughout the class jiggled it in his shaky fingers, used it as a drumstick, tossed it like a cat playing with a mouse.
When class was over and everyone rose, Mr. Tower barked out from the end of the table. Mr. Ferris! Have you taken the arrow intended for Miss Vincent?
A few leaving students glanced back with interest.
Keith Ferris stammered, Ah, ah…no.
Students now looked away, not wanting to witness someone having his knuckles rapped. Sophie saw Keith blush, and felt mortified.
Here, Keith said, not meeting Sophie’s eye, and deposited the arrow on top of the notebook she had just closed. She slid notebook and arrow into her black canvas bag.
As she made for the door she noticed Mr. Tower, under the guise of observing the filing out of students, shoot her a bland but meaningful look which she pretended she did not see, and therefore did not have to acknowledge.
* * *
•
The May afternoon was bright and cool with a low breeze as she and Merlon Tower walked on the uneven brick sidewalk past brittle lilacs gone brown in their rich green hedges.
A fine green net was thrown over the upper branches of spreading trees; pink petals rolled in the gutters.
* * *
—