Tough Day for the Army

by John Warner

  “No estas en amor,” I said, wondering why she wasn’t speaking Spanish, but I figured sticking with it gave me some plausible deni-ability as to what we were talking about.

  Señora Nuborgen sighed and tapped her fingers softly over the grade book like she was picking out notes on a piano. “Estoy, not es-tas. No estoy en amor. I am not in love. You said to me, ‘You are not in love,’ which is true enough, but not what you meant.”

  “No comprende?”

  “No, I suppose you don’t,” she said. She lowered her head, like she was praying over the grade book. I knew you weren’t supposed to walk away from a teacher until they were done talking to you, but I eased out the door before she could look up again.

  I haven’t thought of Jennifer Mecklenberg in a long time, years, not until the other night in bed, when my wife turned toward me and placed her hand on the book I was reading, lowering it from my gaze so I would look at her. Her face was sleepy, in that last moment of evening consciousness. “Do you love me?” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “Don’t answer that way,” she replied. Her blinks were slow and heavy.

  “What way?” I said, lifting the book back up, but still looking at her.

  “Unthinking, like it’s some sort of reflex.”

  “Why can’t my love for you be a reflex?”

  Her eyes closed fully.

  “Because that’s not how love is,” she said softly, almost sighing. She breathed deeply, slowly, asleep. I turned back to my book.

  “I know I’m not the only one you’ve loved,” she said. Her eyes were still closed, her voice a whisper, like she was talking to herself. I lowered my book again.

  “You’re the only one I’ve ever really loved,” I said. I placed a hand on her shoulder then slid it to her rising and falling ribs.

  She didn’t reply for a while, and then she spoke again. “You know that’s not true.”

  She could have been talking in her sleep, for all I could figure. Her face was slack, the fine wrinkles that have started to appear around her eyes smoothed away. I went back to my book, but my eyes just ran over the words, taking nothing in. I turned off the light and settled in next to her. Beth slung a leg and arm over me and nuzzled into my neck. “You’re not off the hook,” she said, close, into my ear. “I’ll expect a better answer next time I ask.”

  And so I’ve been thinking about love, which brought me back to Jennifer Mecklenberg and Señora Nuborgen. I actually comprended what Señora Nuborgen was saying muy bien or mucho bien, or whatever. I had loved Jennifer Mecklenberg unrequitedly for better than two years at that point. All through high school we’d been in the same classes, parallel lines that never intersected because since even before I’d loved her she had an older boyfriend, Andrew Collins, the son of an airline CEO, the kind of kid who was loud in the hallways, tall, broad-shouldered, confident and showy. He had matured, and I had not. He would come up behind her in the halls and grab her shoulders and give her a little shake. “Jenny Meck!” he’d shout, turning her to face him, staking his claim. He was the only person I’d ever heard call her “Jenny,” and whenever he said this, I swear I saw her cringe a little. She was not a Jenny. Maybe a “Jen” to her girlfriends, but a Jennifer to the rest of us.

  I remember her as beautiful, but when I dug out my senior yearbook recently, the picture I found showed a girl who was merely pretty, with brown, shoulder-length hair, a string of pearls over her navy sweater and white turtleneck. I didn’t remember the braces, but there they were. I couldn’t imagine that Jennifer Mecklenberg still had braces senior year. Even I’d managed to shed them by October. I turned to my own picture, looking sidelong at the wiry hair sculpted into a helmet just long enough for a single snap. I couldn’t bear to look long enough to decide if I really was as out of her league as I felt at the time. I ask myself why I loved her, and I honestly don’t know. I didn’t even really know her—my biggest success wooing her was in a group project in European History the previous year, when I’d made some crack and she playfully punched me in the arm, saying, “You’re so funny!” which was something, but not very much.

  But as I remember her, the feeling returns, not with its full force, but stronger than I’d think it should or could, having been blunted by twenty years.

  I could go to Facebook, but this requires exposure, and Beth would see, and there is something about making it a detective game that appeals to me. Class reunion websites are a treasure trove of information. Some of the profiles are free to peruse and I spent hours virtually catching up with my former classmates. Julie Vandenbosch is deceased, killed by a drunk driver. Marcy Bobcheck is now Mark Bobcheck. (Neither I nor her former softball teammates should be surprised.) Richard Pendarvis made a fortune in dot coms and apparently exclusively wears Hawaiian shirts. Most everyone is or at least has been married. Many are bald or balding. All these factoids are both surprising and not. Who would have figured that Tim Penn would be arrested for allegedly spying on his fifteen-year-old neighbor with a remote video camera planted in her room? But then again, it sort of makes sense if you knew him back in the day.

  She is on one of the websites as Jennifer Mecklenberg Schmitz, but her information is labeled as “private,” and the icons next to her name indicate that she has posted a full biography and pictures available for anyone willing to pony up the $19.95 annual fee. I wouldn’t know how to explain the charge to my wife.

  I googled her name and read tidbits about at least twelve different Jennifer Schmitzes, all of whom or none of whom could be her. She could be the leading real estate salesperson of Greensboro, North Carolina, or someone concerned about faulty playground equipment on the tot lots in Dowagiac, Michigan. She may not be either of these people. She’s probably not both.

  There are bulletin boards on these sites where we are told to post our most memorable moments and then others can comment on them. I scroll through the list, and I remember none of those posted by others, but then again no one would remember mine, either.

  The next day in Señora Nuborgen’s class I stayed alert to the clock, ready to jump into the middle of the line filing so as not to be cornered again, but a minute or so before the bell was due to ring, just as Quixote convinced Sancho Panza to be his squire, Señora Nuborgen clicked on the lights, saying, “That’s a good stopping point. Have a good weekend, everyone. We’ll finish up next week. Remember that attendance matters, and Josh Z., I need to speak to you for a moment.”

  When the bell rang I stayed seated at my desk. Señora Nuborgen and I were alone inside thirty seconds, the student stampede over, leaving rows of crooked desks in its wake. She advanced from the front of the room and grabbed a nearby seat, turning it to face me.

  I fumbled for the right words. “Que hice mal?”

  She smiled. “Very good. You said that correctly. You haven’t done anything wrong, at least in regards to class.”

  I went to my go-to phrase, “No comprende.”

  “Back to that, are we? You can drop the Spanish bullshit. It’s sort of painful for us both, and you’re not going to remember any of this by the time you start college in the fall anyway.”

  I swallowed hard. I don’t remember being scared, more like unsettled. Teachers were not supposed to speak to students like this and the party line for four years had been that everything was important because we’d have to know it for college. Señora Nuborgen looked at me steadily, blocking my exit with her desk. I would’ve had to literally leap over her to get out. “Why am I here?” I said.

  “You never answered my question from yesterday.”

  “What question?”

  “How long have you loved her?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Josh,” she said, sitting heavily back in the desk. “I’ve been teaching here thirteen years and during that time I’ve seen a lot of love on the faces of you kids. I’ve seen the look someone has when they’re in love, and I see it on your face when you look at Jennifer Mecklenb
erg. I don’t blame you, she’s cute, but then everyone’s cute at your age.”

  At the sound of her name, my heart filliped against my chest.

  “Aha!” Señora Nuborgen said, sitting up straight and slapping the desk. “There it was again. I knew it. So, how long?”

  There was something kind in her eyes, so I decided to tell as much truth as I could stand. “I dunno, a while.”

  “A while, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s a while?”

  “A couple of years, maybe?”

  “I bet that feels like a long time,” she said. She angled her head a little, looking at me more closely.

  I said nothing, and Señora Nuborgen looked away and then up at the ceiling, like she might find more questions there. “Have you been enjoying the movie?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Liar.” She smiled briefly at me before looking back at the ceiling. “Do you know what Don Quixote is about?”

  I’d read the Cliffs Notes like everyone else. “I dunno, some crazy guy?” I said.

  “You kids always phrase your answers as questions, not that I blame you. I wasn’t sure if I knew anything at your age either, but you know more than you think, believe me. Some crazy guy, huh? I suppose that’s right.” She gripped the desk and pulled herself back upright, leaning across the desk’s surface and toward me. “Do you know what I think it’s about?”

  “What?”

  “Doing what you think is right, even if it’s wrong.”

  She gave her biggest smile of the afternoon, but I must have been looking at her like she was Don Quixote because it quickly fell. She lowered her head to the desk and rested it across her folded arms. “You can go now, if you want,” she said into the crook of her elbow. The sound of the squeaking chair echoed around the room as I stood. I moved quietly as I could to the door, holding my breath. At the threshold I glanced back to see her still with her head down, unmoving.

  I’ve been doing most of my thinking about love during my “runs.” I am not a natural runner, but I have reached the age where activity is a near daily necessity if I want to live a life of a reasonable duration. The first ten or so minutes of each session involve a cataloguing of that day’s aches and pains—the creaking in my arthritic big toe, the shooting sensation down the inside of my left arm that I’ve come to ignore because it is apparently not a heart attack, the tightening cramp in the upper right abdominal. In order to escape this litany I make an effort to think about anything else, and lately I’ve been thinking about why my wife might be thinking about love.

  Maybe it is because we recently acknowledged that it is very likely that we will not be having children. We are not too old, but we are getting there, and if the window of opportunity feels like it is not shut completely, it is at most cracked, and as it closes, neither of us feels any real urgency to wedge it open. We have agreed that while our home is perhaps a hospitable place for a child, the world, increasingly, is not. This seals our fates only to each other. This is a scary thought for sure, but as creaky as I feel some days, it seems distant enough that it doesn’t cause me any particular worry. It is something inevitable, and maybe not even for me since I will likely be the first to go.

  To me, what we have together feels complete enough for this lifetime; at least that’s my sense of things and has been from just about the moment we met. Truthfully, I’m not sure about Beth’s. You’d have to ask her.

  A couple days after the bedtime episode she asked me again after dinner as I loaded the dishwasher. “Do you love me?” she said.

  “Of course,” I replied, shooing one of the dogs from the dish rack. They both liked to “preclean” whatever we left behind.

  “That’s what you said last time,” she said, handing me the next rinsed plate.

  Because of my preparations, I was ready for this. “It happens to be true. My love for you is like a reflex, like breathing, something you just have to do, always there, even when you’re not thinking about it.”

  “Are you saying you don’t think about me?” I frowned down at the row of dirty dishes and nudged the dog away a little harder than necessary. My wife is not a lawyer, but she could play one on TV.

  “That’s not what I’m saying at all. I think about you all the time.”

  “What is it that you think about me?” Beth shut off the faucet and snapped the dishtowel over the sink before hanging it across the rack on the counter. The other dog immediately tugged it free and ran with it to his bed.

  “This sounds like a quiz,” I said. I shut the dishwasher door and hit the start button. It whirred into life.

  “Maybe it is,” she replied. “Maybe it is.”

  That next Monday in class I lingered purposefully behind, hovering at Señora Nuborgen’s desk, pretending to make sure I had everything I needed in my stack of books. The movie continued to run behind me. She hadn’t bothered to turn it off, sitting silently at her desk as the post-bell rush blew past her. She seemed to be staring down at her hands in her lap. I cleared my throat.

  “What can I do for you, Josh?” she said without looking up.

  “Last week…” I’ve always been at a loss for words, not able to find the right ones without significant planning and preparation. Even with the weekend to ponder everything she’d been saying to me, I still couldn’t figure out what to say.

  “Yes?” Her eyes were red-rimmed, like she’d been crying.

  “Last week when I said, estas en amor instead of estoy en amor, you said that was true, that you weren’t in love…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, what I was wondering is, what about Señor Nuborgen?”

  “What about Señor Nuborgen?” Her eyes sparkled. I wondered if I was being teased.

  “Don’t you love him?”

  “Señor Nuborgen,” she said, “is a very nice, thoroughly boring man who was eminently available, and given the current situation, I’m infinitely grateful that I met him.”

  “What current situation?”

  “I’m not talking about that,” she said.

  Not knowing what to say, I lapsed into Spanish, maybe hoping that whatever came out was nonsense. “Esta guapo?”

  “No, Señor Nuborgen is not handsome, but then I’m not particularly bonita, am I?”

  I shrugged. She wasn’t. What teacher was? But I wasn’t going to say so.

  “No,” she said. “I’m no Jennifer Mecklenberg. I guess I never was, but there was a time when I wasn’t so bad, if you can believe that.”

  I remember trying to really look at her, at who she might’ve been, but all I saw was what we saw in just about every teacher. Someone old. Someone tired, someone weary. They were like a different species. To us they all looked beaten, defeated, bags under the eyes, living on endless cups of break-room coffee, dragging themselves toward the summer break when they could recharge at least a little, and Señora Nuborgen was no different, though she’d declined more than most over the year.

  I tried to look her in the eye. “I can,” I said. Just then the film ran out; the end slapped against the uptake reel. Señora Nuborgen came out from behind her desk and went to the projector. “You’re a sweet boy, Josh. Jennifer Mecklenberg would be lucky to have you, particularly compared to that braying ass Andrew Collins.” Switching off the projector, she quickly threaded the end back through the sprocket on the original reel and switched the machine to reverse.

  “You know,” she continued, “she and Andrew are having problems.”

  “Huh?”

  “I heard her crying about it to one of her friends in the bathroom. Seems like he’s been stepping out on her at college.”

  “Stepping out?”

  “He’s having sex with other girls.”

  It took me a moment to digest the implications of this, the multiple meanings. Andrew Collins and Jennifer Mecklenberg were having problems. Andrew Collins was having sex with other girls. Other girls. Jennifer Mecklenberg had had sex. With Andrew Co
llins.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” Señora Nuborgen said. “Lots of you are having sex.”

  I suppose this was true, but I was not among them, and during class periods as I gazed one row over and two seats ahead at Jennifer Mecklenberg’s lovely legs, at the small bones of her wrist, and I imagined gaining the privilege of touching her in those places, my thoughts about her never turned to actual sex. Kissing, of course, maybe a hand on the outside of her cheerleading sweater (maybe even inside), but sex? Ridiculous. Jennifer Mecklenberg was not someone you had sex with. Unless you were Andrew Collins, apparently.

  Señora Nuborgen placed a hand on her hip and cocked her head at me. “Not you, though. That seems clear enough.” The movie finished rewinding, and Señora Nuborgen snapped the projector off. She came toward me and rested a hand on my cheek. There was a faint wisp of rubbing alcohol at her wrist.

  “We’re running out of time, son,” she said.

  I have been looking for these love looks on the faces of my students, but I do not see them there. Maybe it’s because I teach college instead of high school and these kids are already skilled at masking these things from the likes of me, or maybe my influency at expressing love makes me equally poor at reading it in others.

  It’s strange even to think of them being in love, real love, because they do seem like children to me, especially now that I’ve realized I’m old enough, biologically anyway, to be their fathers. Of course, some of them must be in real love, since they’re about the age I was when I met Beth. Maybe it’s different for them because these kids do not date; they “hang out” until “hanging out” turns into a relationship. If you ask them, these are their stories. We were just hanging out and then one day we hooked up.

  In our time there was no “hanging out.” There was predator and prey, pursuer and pursued, and while sometimes women were the pursuers and men the pursued, it was usually the traditional way around. Beth likes to tell people how I was dating someone else at the time I started pursuing her, which is shamefully enough true, though I haven’t felt any shame over it in a long time. It depends on her mood how she tells it. One version is meant as flattery, a confirmation of our shared destiny together. The other is offered as evidence of my theoretical inconstancy, a floating of the possibility that because I’ve jumped ship once, I may do it again. She has quizzed me about this other girl, asking me if I loved her.