The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

  “Is assassination a political act? Or just a violent act that has political consequences?” Ryan, perched on the edge of the desk, leaning forward to indicate intensity, posed this to the fifteen undergraduates in his discussion section. They bit down hard on the question. You could practically see their brains chewing. They were serious young people, all of them very intelligent, or at least they tested well.

  The weather was freakishly warm for March, high eighties, a record, everybody said. The students had rummaged their closets for shorts and tank tops and it was distracting for Ryan to look out on so much unaccustomed flesh, when they’d all started back in January wearing parkas and wool hats. The room was never the right temperature no matter what the season and now it was thick with heat. They’d forced a couple of windows open but that hadn’t helped much, only let in the sound of city traffic, which always sounded like a distant war.

  The heat seemed to slow everyone’s thought processes. Finally Leo Lautner raised his hand. “It would depend on the intention of the assassin. They might have a political aim, or they might be just disturbed, unstable, like the women who tried to shoot President Ford.”

  Ryan nodded. He was pretty sure that Leo Lautner was smarter than himself, and it was just an accident of timing that he, Ryan, was the one sitting at the front of the room at the teacher’s desk. “Good point. Whereas John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald intended political disruption, acted out of political grievances. Also the, ah, Garfield and McKinley assassins.” He was also pretty sure he had that right about Garfield and McKinley. Or that even if he didn’t, no one in the class was likely to know it.

  None of them were old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination. They might as well have been talking about Lincoln. Ryan had been seven years old, and the undergraduates were just being born. That’s what he felt like most of the time, a seven-year-old pulling rank on toddlers.

  A girl had her hand up. “What’s his name, Hinckley, sounds like a true flake.” She was one of the near-naked ones. Her pink bra straps tangled with the thinner straps of her tank top. Some change of decorum or fashion had come about that now made the casual display of bra straps, that previously hidden architecture, acceptable. Still, Ryan felt furtive whenever he found himself looking.

  “Hinckley had a thing for Jodie Foster,” another boy said, in a tone of wonderment. As if, given a choice of obsessions, he would have made a different selection.

  Another student asked if everybody had seen Taxi Driver. Taxi Driver, in his opinion, was one tight, tight film. Someone else said they felt sorry for the other guy, the press secretary, who had been shot in the head. Could you imagine getting shot in the head? They couldn’t. Or rather, they could do so now, but once the damage had been done, the capacity to reflect on it would probably be gone too. They shivered inwardly, thinking of it. They were their heads. Memories, ideas, opinions. What else was there?

  The discussion was wobbling offtrack, and Ryan stepped in before he had to hear any more. “All right, people.” He was a cool, hip instructor, unconcerned with authoritarian rule-making and discipline, except of course when he had to be. “Say the assassins aren’t crazy, or at least, not completely delusional. What might motivate them?”

  It wasn’t a very good question, and the class pondered it to see if there was some trick to it, if something more than the obvious was called for. Megan O’Brien, who had been encouraged to participate more in class, raised her hand. “They were unsuccessful, or frustrated, in their attempts to participate in the normal political process.”

  “Yes, and what does that lead to? What kind of feeling,” he prompted. Megan was looking stricken, her attempt at participation turning around and biting her in the ass. In spite of her name she was Korean, a shy girl with her black hair cut in pony bangs.

  “Alienation?” someone suggested, and Ryan nodded, and Megan O’Brien wilted in a way that he would have to apologize for later, and the rest of the class settled back to blot and fan themselves, the edge taken off their interest, since he was indeed asking for the obvious.

  He wasn’t a good teacher. It was only a discussion section, he was only supposed to go over the lecture material with them, administer quizzes and approve their paper topics. But often enough he stumbled over the lesson plan, asked wooden questions, as he was now doing, failed to excite or even help them. The students liked him well enough because he joked around, chitchatted with them, took an interest.

  They liked him but he was never going to be one of those teachers regarded with awe because they dug deep, stirred something within their students. Instead, he took roll. He reminded them of deadlines, told them what might be on the exams.

  And yet today he was trying to work something through in his own mind, take them along with him. What if you hailed from the Great State of Alienation, proud home of the disillusioned, the crazed, the indifferent, the violent? How did it happen that some people lived unquestioning lives, never doubted their place in that enterprise called America, their proprietary involvement, their stake in its successes, while others turned away?

  More obvious answers, more hands struggling to rise through the glassy heat. Some people had been excluded due to race, creed, or national origin. Only lip service paid to equality, all men created equal with equal rights to Life, Liberty, Inc. (All men, sniffed one of the women students. Right there was a problem.)

  Granted, Ryan said. But Squeaky and Sara Jane aside, there had been no legions of women assassins. No black assassins. (No black students in the discussion section either. One could not help but notice.) There had been the Black Panthers, some of whom themselves had been assassinated. Right here in Chicago, the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark by the Chicago police, only a few miles from where they sat. People murdered, ambushed, for their political views, by their own government. Did the students know about this? Well, they should educate themselves.

  From time to time, Ryan tried to imagine himself having these conversations back in Iowa.

  For once he knew something that his students did not. (That is, everyone except Leo Lautner, who pointed out that it was actually the state attorney’s office, assisted by the police and the FBI, who had conducted the raid. Leo, earnest and baby-faced. He had never heard of the concept of piling on.) But most blacks, Ryan went on, demonstrated their view of the body politic not by violent action, but by ignoring elections. They were historically underrepresented. (Leo Lautner one more time, helpfully bringing up the Harold Washington quote. Black voters were “a sleeping giant” that could awaken at any time. Thank you, Leo.)

  Alienation, Ryan suggested, as opposed to disenfranchisement, had more to do with those persons who felt entitled (by birth, ethnicity, economics) to their share of the world’s goods (money, status, recognition) and had been disappointed.

  But surely he had not meant to equate alienation with acts of violence? One leading inevitably to the other? The students shifted in their seats, uncertain and resistant. Because of course they considered themselves alienated. Prided themselves on it. Here he was, making it sound like a tantrum of the overindulged. Alienation was proof of their intelligence, their wised-up perception, their disappointments. They were so young, but already so disappointed. And of course most of them had been born into their share of entitlement, though unlike alienation, this was not regarded as anything cool.

  Oh, no, sillies, he reassured them. He meant nothing of the sort. He wasn’t calling them assassins. Only inviting them to think about how personal experience, personal grievance, expanded outward into the public sphere. From the individual to the group. From birth, the body of the mother, to the body politic. From the inside of the skull to the outside, a distance of what, an inch? Less? The difference between thought and action. The idea taking root in the brain versus the gun in the hand. The difference between an ordinary day, and history.

  The individual and the state, the individual as unwilling participant in the state. The self existed among the great con
fusion of other selves, each of us, all of us, the cells in the body politic. The political animal. A shuffling, shambling, bearlike creature, sometimes lurching forward, at other times gnawing and swatting at its own troubled innards.

  The bell rang. The students gathered their books and papers, anxious to pry their damp skins away from the desks, get themselves gone. He raised his voice above the racket, reminded them to go over chapters seven and eight, they’d catch up next class.

  He’d confused them with his fanciful talk. Bears and such. He hadn’t found the right words. Maybe Leo could help him.

  He checked his mailbox by the department office, nothing. Three o’clock, time for his office hours. He calculated the odds that any students were going to seek him out on such a day and instead took an elevator down and outside, where the sun and heat felt more like a holiday, an occasion for drinking beer at a ball game. Except the season hadn’t yet started, and try as he might, he couldn’t get that excited about the Chicago teams. This was Hyde Park, you were supposed to root for the Sox, the South Side team. A cultural marker. He’d even gone to a few games, cheered when he was meant to, could hold up his end of a conversation about last year’s disappointing season. But he wasn’t really a fan. He guessed he suffered from baseball alienation.

  The grass on the quadrangle was still winter-brown, the trees bare sticks, the university buildings blank gray stone. Nothing but the temperature spoke of spring. Ryan stopped at a food co-op run by militant vegetarians and purchased bread, cheese, whole-wheat pasta, tomato sauce, mushrooms, salad greens, loading them into his backpack. He made another stop at the Jewel for red wine and hamburger meat and, as an impulse, spumoni ice cream.

  It was another four blocks to the apartment he shared with a grad student in mathematics. Burdened as he was, the heat had him dripping and puffing by the time he reached his building and climbed the three flights of stairs. He hadn’t minded not having money at first; it was an expected part of graduate school, it even served to validate his dedication to knowledge, his indifference to goods and chattel. But you could get tired of it, especially when you were surrounded by undergrads whose parents had the money to pay big-time tuition, who only dressed as if they were ragged and forlorn. He knew that his own family regarded him with dismay because he didn’t seem to be “getting ahead,” which to them meant money. And as much as he didn’t want to agree with them about this, or any number of other things, it would be nice to have a car again.

  He unpacked his groceries. The ice cream had gone soft and he hoped the indolent freezer would be up to the task of reconstituting it. The apartment had a single puny air conditioner and he cranked it to high and set a floor fan running to move the breeze around. He put Miles Davis on the stereo, stripped off his clothes, and padded around until some of the heat left his skin. He took a shower, shaved, put on clean clothes, and by the time his roommate Zev arrived home, he had the salad made and was working on the pasta sauce.

  Zev leaned his bicycle against the wall. It was a Le Tour racer, the most expensive thing he owned, and he humped it up and down the three flights every day. He surveyed Ryan’s dinner efforts and then Ryan himself. “The girl?” he asked. He had an Israeli accent that sounded like fingers were shoved down his throat.

  “Yeah. I’m making enough for you too.”

  “You are big trouble,” Zev informed him.

  “You mean ‘in big trouble.’”

  “No, what I said.”

  Dinner would be at six thirty. Ryan set the dinky table with bamboo mats and plates, rinsed and polished three wineglasses. A Japanese paper lantern covered the lightbulb over the table and it cast a pink-orange glow. He liked the way it looked and he liked the look of the books and albums on their shelves and the old couch covered with an Indian-print bedspread and the fancy picture frame they’d hung over a square of bare wall as a joke. He liked the music making the room seem so much bigger than it really was. The good smell of the cooking made him happy, it all made him happy because this was the life, the world he had constructed for himself and it was a fine thing.

  At six thirty he heard footsteps on the stairs. He opened the door before she had a chance to knock. Megan O’Brien had changed out of the T-shirt and jeans she wore in class. In honor of the weather she had on a sundress, yellow with a print of white flowers, which tied over her shoulders with bows. “Hey, you look nice,” Ryan said, guiding her inside with just the faintest, friendliest touch, the palm of his hand on her small, hard shoulder blade. He was thinking that on an older or a more wanton girl the sundress would have teased you with its childishness, like a costume. Megan just looked like she’d been dressed up for Korean Sunday school.

  “It’s so hot out,” she said, with the kind of overemphasis that suggested a long-rehearsed remark.

  “Yeah, brutal. Want something to drink? Wine?”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . .”

  “I’ll make you a spritzer.” He mixed ice, soda, and wine in a tall glass for her. “Here, don’t get drunk. I don’t want to have to clean up after you.”

  She giggled. She sipped her drink and stood in front of the bookshelves, taking in the titles. This was the third time she’d been to Ryan’s apartment, and on each occasion she seemed to be trying to fathom him, add to her store of worshipful knowledge about him.

  “Hey, I’m glad you said something in class today. That’s exactly what I was talking about.”

  “Yeah, well it wasn’t like I said anything that great.”

  “No, it was fine. Really. It gets easier to speak up, I promise.” She was a girl who needed a lot of reassurance.

  “That Leo guy.” She shook her head. Ryan couldn’t tell what she meant by this, disdain or admiration.

  “Leo sure ate his Wheaties this morning.”

  Zev came out of his room, making his usual beeline for the refrigerator. “Hello, Meg-Ann.” And, to Ryan, “Show me dinner.”

  “Hi Zev,” Megan said. She was especially shy around Zev, although Zev disagreed with this characterization.

  “Not shy,” he pronounced after first meeting her. “A crying baby.” Ryan said Zev should stick to the language of mathematics.

  “Spaghetti with mushroom sauce, salad, garlic bread. Get out of there,” Ryan told him. “Wait until I put it on the table.”

  “Can I help?” Megan asked, drifting over. It was the kind of thing girls said when they could see there wasn’t anything left to do. Ryan told her to sit down and say yummy.

  Three weeks ago, when it was still winter, Megan O’Brien had come to see him in his office. She was worried about her grade. The students who came to see him were all worried about their grades. Megan was a music major, piano. She was taking poli sci to fulfill a requirement and she understood politics, or at least, some of it, but it was the science part she didn’t get, the ideas, the language that was used to talk about the ideas. She knew she hadn’t done well on the quizzes or the midterm.

  Ryan pretended to consult his gradebook. He already knew where Megan O’Brien stood, somewhere in that great, gauzy territory of B. And not a high B. He told her this. She shook her head and her limp black hair fell against her neck. “I guess I’m a B kind of a person,” she said hopelessly. Ryan said he bet she was a pretty good piano player and she said no, she kind of sucked at that too.

  By now he was used to students who moped their way into his office to complain about the crushing burdens of being nineteen, by now he knew enough to keep Kleenex on his desk. He told her that she could earn extra points for class participation, and that she could submit a draft of her paper ahead of time so he could give her suggestions.

  She didn’t cry, just looked wistful. “You must really, really love this stuff, you’re lucky, you know what you want to do with your life, pursue your dream, I don’t have a dream, I just kept taking piano lessons because my parents wanted me to have, you know, an interest. An accomplishment. I wish there was any one thing I was really good at and people would respect m
e for it. How does it feel to be respected?”

  They went to one of the noisy coffee shops that catered to students, students in lumpy hats hand-knit in the Andes, students in cowboy boots, striped mufflers, navy peacoats acquired at thrift stores, all of them hunched over books and intensely reading. Ryan thought he understood what Megan O’Brien was up against. She wasn’t unconventional enough to pass for an artist or a scholar around here. She wore Shetland-wool sweaters over cotton shirts, a parka from L.L. Bean. It was unclear if she had been outfitted by her parents or had no particular taste or aesthetic of her own. She had a small, puzzled, inexpressive face. She told Ryan she had been adopted as a baby, she’d grown up in Philadelphia, and she had no memory at all of Korea. Supposedly she’d been in an orphanage, but there were stories of parents who’d sold their children, particularly the girl babies, due to poverty. For all she knew, her family, her Korean family, was still back there, peasants grubbing around in rice paddies. She’d never eaten Korean food as a kid and didn’t like it when she’d tried it. She’d grown up as Megan O’Brien, and when she was old enough to ask questions, her parents explained that she had been specially chosen to be a part of their family, that she was a special, special girl and they loved her very much, etc. For the longest time, she thought that Korean and adopted meant the same thing.

  Ryan said he could see how all that would be confusing. She asked him where he was from and he said Iowa. Darkest Iowa. What he always said, a joke to deflect any further inquiry. He didn’t care to discuss his family. They had been bewildered by sadness, by tragedy, and he was no help to them; there was no way to feel good about any of that.

  Fortunately, Megan O’Brien wasn’t inclined to stray far from the topic of herself. She said again that she wished she was really, really focused, like he was, committed to what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Ryan was aware that some grade-prospecting might be going on here, some strategic flattering, but that was all right, he had a handle on it. She asked about his thesis, which had yet to take any satisfactory shape, according to his adviser, but in his own mind, and in his recounting of it to Megan O’Brien, it became a magisterial document, a searching examination of identity as experienced by the individual versus political legitimacy as conferred by the state. Wow, said Megan O’Brien. You really are good at this stuff.