Violation

by Sallie Tisdale

  At first, I don’t call Steve. I call another friend, a novelist who’s writing for money these days, magazine stuff, anything cool and nonchalant she can find. The raw memoir that makes her cry at the dining table is buried in a drawer. “I’m in deadline hell,” she says. “I’m having a breakdown,” she says. “Did you know Baudelaire died of caffeine poisoning?” she asks. We hang up at the same time, and I stare at my desk and leave the room.

  Finally, Steve and I have coffee and slices of gooey day-old pie in the middle of the day, surrounded by the other unemployed, the students, the rootless, the old. I cuss at the restaurant and all that surrounds me, distracts me, reminds me. Steve is solicitous, full of advice. The oblivious waitress cleans the carpet, and the vacuum cleaner roars in the narrow room. She runs the hose right beneath our table and I find myself shouting through the noise at Steve, who has just told me he’s started writing again. “Don’t you dare!” I yell, but he can’t hear me.

  I have to leave town, go teach for six weeks at a giant university where no one knows I’m an impostor. It turns out no one, in fact, wants to know me at all. Budgets are tight, jobs threatened; visiting writers are not welcome here. Most of the required writing classes here are taught by computer programs. I pass classrooms cluttered with silent students facing screens and hear only the clacking of keys and the occasional reedy beep when the Macintosh issues praise.

  I am given half a borrowed office heaped with dusty books and Xeroxed syllabi from 1989. The office belongs to Professor Baxter. Professor Baxter teaches Classics of English Literature once a week for the ten-week term; three of the nights are spent watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. He shuffles in and out, calls me a different name each time he sees me. He is the only professor who speaks to me. There are no welcoming notes in my box, no handshake from the dean. No map, no roster, no syllabus. The department secretary tells me to stop making so many copies.

  I move into a blank apartment by a shimmering pool no one uses, the land in all directions flat and fallow and dry. The students are my only hope.

  I don’t know where to begin, exactly; I have clearly been mistaken for someone else. The only writing I’ve been doing myself is in my journal late at night, brief fits of irritation and quavering Dutch courage. But the students don’t know this, and I decide they don’t need to know.

  I talk about what holds us back—the ungentle voices in our heads, the secrets waiting to trip us up. You must have no morals, I tell them. You must use everything. You must be quiescent, patient, willing. I stride the room, cheerful and firm; they watch me and take dutiful notes. Most of them are writing majors, and at first all they give me are commonplace essays and short stories about the tribulations of earnest college writing students. They want to know how to get published, and how I grade.

  What are you afraid of? I ask one day. After a silence, a young woman says, “Sentimentality.” And another says, “Being thought young.” Mariano, my oldest student, almost middle-aged, names anger and Catholicism, not necessarily in that order. Anna, a pale young woman with short blond hair who wears men’s neckties, tells us wearily that her father is a well-known writer. When she was raped, he wrote a poem about it. She writes about cooking.

  A tall boy in the campus uniform of shorts and tank top and baseball cap comes in for office hours. Like many of the students, he wants me to tell him what to do, what to write, who to be. Their days are filled with fords of choice, little wavelets in a surging sea, running forward much too fast. “I don’t think I want to be a writer because I don’t want to think too much,” he says. “I want to stay normal.”

  I have them do timed exercises, and write about each other, spy on strangers, invent sex scenes, violent scenes, stories about things they don’t believe in. Phoenix wears very short shorts and stretches out her long thin legs covered with thick, feathery, golden hair. She is thoughtlessly athletic, and wears a Dallas Cowboys cap squashed down on her long blond hair. Her scenes of southern California girlhood are devastating and sad. “Last term I was, like, I’m going to be a writer because it was all I was doing all the time,” she tells the class. “But now I’m, like, there’s a lot of stuff out there, and I’m not ready to settle down.” She draws stick figures on her stories, petroglyphs bending, running, jumping high.

  I make them write letters to their writer’s block, draw pictures of it. Lori makes a cartoon of herself whacking her children and husband on their heads with a book titled Me. One boy draws a monster with gleaming red eyes. Carol, alone in a corner, spends an hour covering a page in black crayon and then writes across it in red ink: “I will be judged and found wanting, and jettisoned from the circle of warmth.”

  Stephanie, gawky and disheveled, is easily the best writer in the class. After a few weeks I realize I’m half in love with her, with her scary ideas, her absolute fearlessness, and I come to class hungry and ashamed, wanting to hear her read, wanting her to ask me for advice. She is only dimly aware of her talent. She’s not a writer, she tells me one day. She’s a painter. She likes big canvases with solid blocks of color, and writes only “for fun.” Her wild stories, her willingness to say anything, anything at all, are the blessing of not being a writer, of having nothing to lose. The other students, the rule-bound ones who want to be writers very much, are startled into attention.

  Over the weeks, the stories get better and better, softer, unpredictable, surprising. Anna stops being polite. Mariano gets mad. Phoenix throws her gorgeous legs across the table, and writes a story about her mother’s affair. One of the handsome fraternity boys reads a masturbatory fantasy involving corn on the cob and the students applaud and cheer. I begin to wonder if I’ll be fired, but the fact is no one but my students and I care what we do or say. No one ever asks, no one ever comes to see what happens between us here. But I realize that what happens is enough for me.

  Outside class, I’m God’s own forgotten gimcrack, sitting alone by the sparkling pool. The story in front of me is as light as the wind, it means nothing, it flies away from my hands. I’m fighting panic, the fear of having nothing to say, praying, Please, and lie all night with nothing but the steady tick of the clock and the murmuring seashell roar of my ear against the pillow. All I want to convey is what happens to ordinary things, the journey of grime and wonder through the world, that’s all. And I can’t. At the end of the term, so soon, I leave my students and the blank apartment and go home.

  STEVE GIVES ME his manuscript, at last, with an air of grand tragedy. It’s badly typed, full of punctuation errors and missing words. He hasn’t put his name on it. I read it, and call him up to say: “It’s good. It’s good, but it’s not enough. You need to put more of yourself in there, you need to give us more.”

  If I have one good day, a good hour, even a single good sentence, I turn into a world-beater, the ice queen. Make my day. I lie in bed and imagine waking from a worthless sleep, crawling to the study, starting in the middle of the sentence that ended in exhaustion the night before, typing until the electricity goes off because I forgot to pay the bill. I imagine being a famous narcissist who abandons her children and dies for the holy flaming book, who gets her face on a postage stamp and doesn’t live to regret it. Then I fall asleep, and waking up, I don’t know how.

  I’ve been told what I told Steve: this isn’t the story you meant to write, this isn’t how your story really ends, this isn’t what you mean to say. I know what a childish grief this is: I don’t know how. I know the rage, the rising cry, How dare you, I know the terror, I can’t, I know that often nothing matters the way this matters. He listens to me and then he says, “It’s all I’ve got, the whispering demons filling the air.”

  I tentatively begin again, circling the desk like a boxer pacing a ring. One night, after two glasses of wine, I get up at midnight to scribble in pencil on a sheet torn out of a yellow legal pad because the pressure is so strong I don’t want to take time to sit down and type, the words are big and cockeyed on the page, veer
ing sideways, getting smaller toward the bottom where I run out of space and turn the page on its end to write in the margins. This is the half-heard, faraway roar, the mumble of voices too low to distinguish the words. I can suddenly hear language—the rise and fall of conversation, the fading in and out of whispers and confidences and narration, and oh, this is how it begins, how I start to be allowed to be able to write. This pressure of words coming, words coming, like a train in the distance, the first hint of the whistle. The chuffing roar. I’m unsettled and restless, all I know is words coming and no idea what the words might be and now it’s just a matter of time, getting ready, ready to pounce.

  Steve isn’t writing. We can’t have coffee because he won’t leave his apartment, won’t even answer the phone. The last time we talked he said he was too small for all his big ideas. I had said to him, brutally, “It’s not enough,” and he replied, “It’s all I’ve got,” and the words bounced off his work, his walls, his world. How could I ask him for more?

  And finally, I start writing by just writing, putting one word after the other on the page, and then all at once I’m writing like a rabbit going to ground, with a sudden leap.

  I remember Baudelaire, dead of too little time, and Flaubert, who paced his studio weeping at the beauty of his own words. The sky is a dark dark blue, powdered lightly with thin high clouds, and the moon is a pearly chip thrust into fine blue sand. From that direction I hear no sounds. Shadowed by the world, by the stubborn focus of the words, it seems I can see everything, I can see the lines of gravity holding the moon against the sky, I can see its spinning and resistance and the correct position of the most ordinary things, against the spotlight of our ordinary lives.

  I call Steve to tell him that all our ideas are big ideas. Everything is too much. He doesn’t answer the phone, and I imagine him standing in the center of the room, alone, watching it shiver with every ring.

  Antioch Review, Summer 1997

  What is there to write about writing? In a way, there is nothing to say—and yet writers talk and think and write about writing all the time. Steve Tyler and I have been friends for a very long time and have talked a lot about writing—and about not writing—over the years. Long after he’d quit, done, never going to try that again, he was surprised by words. He recently published a book of good poems called A Hole in the Sun.

  The Hounds of Spring

  MONTHS AGO, WHEN IT WAS DANK AND COLD, THREE weeks teaching writing to high school students seemed a short enough commitment. In April, it’s not so easy. Not on fragrant, mild mornings and warm afternoons full of light. I am the fourth writer in this experimental program funded by a distant foundation, the last visiting writer for the year. I follow a playwright, a poet, and a novelist. Each of us took over the same four classes, the same 110 students, divided between regular freshmen and sophomore honors.

  I run into the poet at a party a few weeks after his session ends, and he is sly and self-satisfied. “They’re going to eat you up,” he says, with enthusiasm. “You’ve gotta get right in their faces,” he adds, getting right in my face, “and show them what’s what.”

  So I call the novelist who preceded me, a mild man with a grown daughter and years of classroom experience. “It’s the hardest teaching I’ve ever done,” he tells me. “And I’ll never do it again.”

  I’m confident, even in my spring fever. I’ve taught only adults for several years, but I have three teenagers of my own. I’ve been rearing children for almost twenty breathless years, and for much of that time I’ve lived and worked half a block from the big inner-city high school where I’ll teach. It’s a huge campus, a handsome brick complex covering almost two square blocks next to a city park strewn with the teens’ discarded cigarette butts. The campus is “open,” and every day several hundred of the 1,800 students walk by my house on the way to their fast-food lunches and return a short time later, tossing Burger King and McDonald’s wrappers on my lawn. I think I know teenagers and their animal energy—their explosive pleasures, their dark grief, their eternal restlessness, their springs.

  The two freshmen classes are full of loud boys and inattentive girls, daring me to interest them. Several set themselves distinctly apart. Anna, heavy and plain, surrounds herself with yards of empty space, crouches behind purple lips and raccoon eyes. Damon is seventeen, making his third and last attempt to pass freshmen English. He is tall and coolly handsome and self-conscious. “I’ve got a big penis,” he tells me on the first day, when we’re doing introductions. Most of the freshmen disappear in the crowd. Pairs and trios huddle together in the back. They call me “Yo!”; they blend together, mouths hanging open when I speak.

  The sophomores are calm, obedient, tranquil. Whether this is a difference between freshmen and sophomores, or bonehead English and honors, I’m never quite sure. The sophomores worry about my grading system and call me “Ms. Tisdale.” The young men are lanky out of all proportion, taller than me and quick to blush, easy to praise. Josie and Sandra (“that’s Sondra”) have wild hair and long skirts and sit together, self-consciously mature and outspoken. There are dozens of slim, button-nose girls with shoulder-length brown hair and schoolgirl skirts and short-sleeved sweaters. They are all tediously polite.

  “The hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,” for me as well as them, and I’m surprised at how difficult it is to stand under fluorescent lights in front of this sea of staring faces all day long, these 110 faces all seemingly called Megan or Tyler or K’Shanti. I’m surprised at how difficult it is for me to see each one separate from the others, to meet each one, to simply remember names in the institutional havoc of high school.

  Before I started, the classroom teacher gave me a paper listing the six separate schedules used, and a schedule for the schedules; every day before I walk the half-block here, I have to consult my schedule to find out which schedule we’re on that day. Sometimes there are forty-eight-minute periods, and sometimes there are thirty-one-minute periods. Sometimes there are assemblies or faculty meetings, and sometimes the entire school opens two hours late. I can’t get used to the giant hive’s obeisance to the chaos. It is all so far from the day I keep at home, the long silences and self-determined hours in which I write.

  The bells ring and ring, two before and after every class. Bells ring, and the empty halls fill with 1,800 handsome, healthy young people wearing a variety of fashion mistakes, the air thick with sweat, pheromones, and a hundred kinds of tension, like some three-dimensional model of chaos theory. They appear, a human tsunami, and disappear a few minutes later. During class, the phone rings. Unspecified “warning” bells ring. Staff walk in and out of the room, other students walk in and out of the room, carrying messages, asking questions. The daily announcement sheet is delivered. Almost every day, a half-dozen students stand suddenly in the midst of a period and grab their packs. “Where are you going?” I ask, and they say, “Field trip,” or “Track meet,” or “Yearbook meeting,” and leave.

  The starting bell rings and they are still wandering in, to find their way into the semicircle of desks, chatting, yelling, shoving each other; they put on makeup, draw cartoons, sleep. Every day Jessica spends sixth period patiently scraping the silver lining out of pieces of chewing gum and rubbing it on to her binder cover, filling her mouth with a wad the size of a baby’s fist. When the second bell rings, I walk to the front and they turn mercilessly upon me, like a crowd awaiting the verdict, ready for anything.

  My focus for these three weeks is a twisted autobiography, a memoir of their futures, looking back. For the final assignment, I want them to do a short scene from the book they might write when they are old—and it takes days for me to explain this.

  First, imagine your future, I tell them on the first day. Any possible future. Outline it. The freshmen stare at me. “How am I supposed to know what’s going to happen?” one pretty girl asks, all innocent stupidity. The sophomores want to know how it will be graded. “What’s an outline?” ask several freshmen. �
�When’s it due?” ask the sophomores.

  I start again. Imagine your future. From where you sit, I tell them, almost anything could happen. Almost anything. You could be rich or poor, happy or sad. You could become an interstellar traveler, a bum, an inventor, a criminal. What might happen that will affect you? Who will enter your life? What will you choose?

  Make an outline, I say, drawing a form on the blackboard, my hands sticky with yellow chalk—events on one side and your feelings about them on the other. Think of love, wisdom, terrible mistakes, illness, luck, learning.

  “You mean two outlines?” asks a freshman boy.

  “Is this legal?” asks a sophomore girl in the next period.

  “Legal?” I ask.

  “I mean,” she says, “is it legal to write about something we don’t know anything about?”

  The next day, a dozen freshmen scratch their heads in bemusement when I mention the outline. “What outline?” goes the chorus—that day, every day that week.

  Meanwhile, I have to fill thirty-one minutes, forty-two minutes, forty-eight minutes, four times a day. We do free writing (“What am I supposed to write about?”) and make lists of people who have influenced them, places they’ve been, things they’ve learned, and what people and places and skills might come in the future. Quickly I find another surprise. The boys are wilder writers—less careful of convention, more willing to leap into the new. I start watching the dozens of vaguely familiar girls, who seem to have shaved off all distinguishing characteristics. They are so careful. Careful about their appearance, what they say and how they say it, how they sit, what they write. Even in the five-minute free writes, they are less willing to go out from where they are—to go out there, where you have to go, to write. They are reluctant to show me rough work, imperfect work, anything I might criticize; they are very careful to write down my instructions word by word.