by Denise Roig
“It’s about the profile,” said Foster.
“Your guy in Gaza,” said Sandy.
“I think he might be kind of hard to reach right now.”
“Even by e-mail?” Sandy hated e-mail interviews, but in Foster’s case, he could do the whole bloody interview by e-mail. Let’s get this kid on his way, Rip had said before leaving this afternoon.
“And as you can well imagine, Professor McCall, I’m having a bit of a hard time getting out to do interviews these days.”
She hated being called professor. It made what she did — standing up there week after week trying to impart something — seem like even more of a charade. And she sensed with certain students, like this one, who knew she didn’t see herself as “professor,” that there was a nail in there somewhere.
“But I have an idea,” said Foster, and smiled, not sardonically, not dementedly, almost nicely.
“Tell me,” said Sandy, already swooshing together papers from the desk. She was a getaway queen.
“I want to interview you.”
In education workshops they told you to be prepared for anything. But if he’d pulled down his pants and mooned her — here’s what I think of your passive, pacifist, do-good notions — she would have been less surprised.
“You keep telling us to write about what we’re interested in, right? And what we know about, right?”
“That’s one of the things I want people to do.”
“I’m going to write about my brain disorder.”
The new term for mental illness — she’d read it lately. But it missed something, both compassion and accountability. Implied, too, was the idea that a brain could be reordered. She looked at Foster, tried to see inside his skull, tried to decipher the patterns. Something was spinning… Whee! Rollerblades! Some were upturned, wheels spinning in the air; others careened into walls at car speeds; some nonchalantly glided toward a corner. Welcome to my brain. Because it was still her brain trying to picture his brain.
“OK,” she said, trying to slow things down so she could think. “But why do you have to talk to me?”
“You’re kind of an expert,” said Foster.
“Because of my sister and nephew?”
“Don’t forget your ex-husband,” said Foster, and Sandy knew she was going to regret this day, this week, this entire semester. And why stop there?
“Foster,” she said. “I think you’re probably going too far.”
Foster nodded and opened the surprisingly pristine file he’d laid on her desk when he first came in. It was one of those expensive, plastic attachés shaped like a huge envelope and which came in hot, translucent colours — this one was aqua. Sandy connected them to design students or young ad-agency types. She could see manila file folders, precisely aligned, inside.
“I’m sorry to do this to you, Sandy,” he said, and for a moment she didn’t know what he would pull out of there.
It was a sheet of paper. Foster read: “A student enrolled at this university is entitled to the full support of university faculty in the completion of his or her assignments.” He slipped the paper back inside its folder.
“So,” he said. “Full support. If I need something — and really, Sandy, I’m asking for fifteen minutes, thirty, tops, forty-five if you have a lot to say — to help in the completion of an assignment, then it’s your job to give it to me.”
She breathed in as deeply as fury would allow, and on the out breath the phone, an office phone she’d never heard ring in her entire university career, rang.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Take your time,” said Foster. “It’s your time.”
“Sandy.” It was Rip with a wall of kid sound behind him: TV, shrieks, dishwasher. “She knows.”
“Shit.” It was as specific as she could get with Foster watching her. He leaned back in the chair and opened his eyes wider. He grinned.
“Someone from the department called her. She won’t tell me who. Then she searched my desk downstairs and came up with, you know, a receipt.”
“Is she there?”
“Off at her game. She’s imagining me as the ball every time she kicks it or butts it off her head. That’s what she said when she ran out of here.”
Foster examined his nails, chomped on a cuticle.
“She told me she wants to bust this little team up, that we’re heading for opposite goal posts.” His voice was so not cool.
“Did you tell her” — she looked up at Foster who was wiping his glasses on his shirt — “that this isn’t that dire, that, you know, we’re not…”
“I told her it was strictly a dalliance. But she’s so hurt. I never thought she’d be so hurt. She’s such a tough…”
“Cookie,” said Sandy.
“I just wish I knew who ratted. Somebody’s out to get me. You think it was Vonda?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not, tell me why not?”
“Because she complains about you to me the way she always has.” Foster looked at her. She wasn’t being cryptic enough. This kid would run with news like this. Go, bureaucrats!
“Really? Like what?”
“Your general approach to the profession.” She had to get back at him. Dalliance.
“We’ll deal with that,” he said. There was a really long pause. “I told you we needed to be more prudent.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Oh, well,” he said, and hung up.
“Intra-departmental crisis?” asked Foster, looking rejuvenated.
She shook her head, tried to breathe. “Not that big.”
“Do you mind if I make an observation, Sandy?”
“Could I stop you, Foster?”
“You’re a basically good person in a basically nasty world and an even nastier institution. At some point you had big ideas, grand ideas, even revolutionary ideas, but then the world got hold of you. It shook you and broke you and punished you for those ideas.”
“Foster, you could be talking about anyone I know over the age of forty-five. It’s called adulthood.”
“It sucks.”
“It does.” They sat in silence, almost companionable.
“Was your ex completely bonkers?”
“Is this your interview? You know, Foster, I never said I would agree to this. My colleagues” — what a jerky word — “might have some problems with this.”
“Complete support,” he said. “I’m entitled. It says.”
“Even if that support costs me more time, energy and sanity than I want to spend? Maybe even more than I have to spend? I have rights, too, you know.”
“Sandy, Sandy,” Foster leaned back, grinning. And in that moment she saw him for who he really was — torpedo all those fine leftist principles and the shrink’s best guess. Foster was that old oppressor: an articulate, self-interested, blinkered male.
The realization made her snort. And this made him glare.
“You’d better not be laughing at me,” Foster said.
“Shoot,” she said, and looked at her watch. It was 6:15. She’d give him till 6:30.
“OK, then. Tell me, please, about your first experience beside this illness. That’s how you put it, isn’t it? ‘I don’t know what it’s like to live inside this disease, but I know what it’s like to live beside it.’”
She resisted the impulse to critique his interviewing tone. “We were really young,” she said. “Steve was almost twenty-two. I was a year younger. He’d already had some incidents, you could say.”
“Incidents?” asked Foster.
“Foster, if you’re not going to take notes, I’m not doing this.”
“It’s here.” He tapped his temple.
She shook her head.
Foster slowly drew a legal pad from his plastic attaché and put it on the desk.
She waited. He wrote down three words, one per yellow line. “Young” she read upside down.
“My ex began hallucinating his junior year at UCL
A. Student Health prescribed Stelazine and Thorazine. This was the year before we met.”
“Thorazine?” Foster’s blue eye bulged. “You’re kidding.”
“It was 1970,” said Sandy. And there it was: The Year in Pictures: Vietnam, Kent State, Cambodia, LBJ. Who wouldn’t need drugs? She’d been caught plagiarizing in a Shakespeare class, but had been spared dismissal because they’d all been let off the hook that spring. Thirty-three thousand UCLA students had been unleashed on the misguided world so they could demonstrate their hopeful little hearts out. Most, of course, stayed home and got stoned. Steve at least was stoned on a prescription.
“What do you mean it was 1970? Could you elucidate, please?”
“Doctors prescribed some really druggy drugs back then, Foster. My ex wasn’t even diagnosed as bipolar, just a disturbed, delusional kid. The student health docs figured the drugs would suppress his weirdness so he’d somehow be able to get back to class.” Sandy was talking perkily at him, but her mind had gotten stuck on that photo, that famous photo of the girl on her knees with the shot-dead boy, the girl’s hair flying backward as if she’d skidded into home. The girl hadn’t even been a student at Kent State, just passing through.
“I guess we’re pretty lucky now,” Foster said. “Drug-wise.”
He’d opened the door wide enough for her to shimmy in. “I know my sis has been on everything under the sun…lithium…Neurontin…I for get the names.” Long pause while Foster stared her down. “What are you taking? If I may ask? I mean, what seems to help?” I mean, I mean.
“None of your fucking business,” said Foster and stood up. She didn’t like the way he looked from this angle. Too big. Not funny.
“I’m trying to help,” said Sandy. Don’t threaten, don’t shout, don’t criticize, don’t bait. Early on in her sister’s illness, the whole family, desperate to educate themselves, had taken a workshop called Managing the Crises of Your Loved One.
“Oh, please,” Foster said. “Spare me.”
“I’m trying to help,” Sandy repeated. Avoid direct, continuous eye contact or touching. Don’t block the doorway.
“Fuck me,” Foster said.
“Sit down, Foster. Now.”
Surprisingly, he did. “I thought you were different,” he said, his visible eye woeful.
“You name one teacher who would have agreed to be interviewed about the mental health of her family. You bet your life I’m different.” He’d gotten her angry enough so she could finally hear herself. And what she heard was crazy and familiar. What else had she expected? If you followed someone onto the Tornado, eventually you’d find yourself hurtling down the tracks with them, going way up and way down, arms in the air, yelling your head off.
“I need to get going, Foster. We’ve been advised to not stick around too late.”
“Oooh, the goblins,” said Foster.
“No, the flyer.”
“Oh, that,” said Foster, and he smiled with a mix of pride and pain. “I might know something about that. But don’t ask,” he said, and she saw he was dying to be asked.
“Let’s go,” she said.
He followed her out, switching subjects a dozen times by the time they reached the parking lot: his man in Gaza, the lack of talent in class, his computer problems, his certainty that someone in class was the person calling late at night making death threats, his need to graduate, the murderous recent actions of Israelis against Palestinians, his parents’ divorce drama, Ted Manley’s dickheadedness. The guy had wide-ranging interests. But when they got to her car, he vaporized with a “Thanks, Sandy. I know you’re trying,” and she stood there, key in hand, trying to make sense of even a piece of the day. The parking lot, after years of clamouring from campus women’s groups, was dark and unattended. She got into her car. Oh, well, as Rip had said.
Cookie would be home now, having scored a trillion goals off her cute hard head and twinkly little feet, and she and Rip would be having the kind of sex you only have in the first month or what might be the last. Rip and Cookie would go on because they had to. There were four kids and a house and reputations. And love, she guessed.
She put the key in the ignition, though it seemed like too much effort to make the thing go. Foster would graduate this year if she had anything to do with it. But he’d use up his fine mind negotiating mental health benefits, checking himself in and out of hospitals, driving a lot more people to distraction, though not nearly as crazy or unhappy as he would make himself.
Their student-teacher collision hadn’t proven as witty, or as illuminating, as the characters’ in Oleanna. She was no Mamet, just a mother, teacher, mistress, writer of cautionary tales — Is your kid on drugs? — a watcher of plays.
Steve, her ex — she hadn’t gotten around to telling Foster this — wasn’t watching anymore. On a freezing night eight years ago he’d swallowed enough lithium to kill three Steves. A note for Danny, a note for her, a black-and-white Polaroid of what seemed to be the inside of his kitchen cabinet and another of the snow, just snow, outside his basement apartment, and he was gone.
She still watched Danny for signs of his father’s glittering, bouncy mind, but Danny, so far, so thank-you-God far, was a plodder, an earnest kid who liked hockey, not reading, who loved her and his grandparents and his friends and possessed not an iota of strangeness. Or originality. It depended on how you looked at it.
Once, on vacation in Cape Cod — good to get away, Steve’s psychiatrist had advised — she’d held her emaciated husband on her lap while he cried and shook at the end of a whopper high. Her arms and legs did what was necessary: stroked, rocked, soothed, because the rest of her had stopped working. There was not one comforting thing left to say, nowhere she could take him with words. He sobbed all through the night, occasionally landing a punch on her. The next day he didn’t remember any of it.
A figure emerged from the dark a few cars away, and the surprise of it forced her to finally put the car in reverse and back up. She needed to get home, even if there was only cheese and bread to eat and no one to talk to and pages of bad writing to make better. Sandy watched the figure — a young man it looked like — from her rear-view mirror. He was standing next to a parked van now, waiting.
She wasn’t in the best shape herself, true. Plenty neurotic, anxious around the edges, and this mess with Rip made her feel like she was going nowhere at all. Just her history with men was enough to keep a therapist in business for years, and then there was her stalled writing career. She so missed writing, real writing. It felt like homesickness.
But as Sandy drove out through the gate, it came to her, as it hadn’t in all the years of dodging the minds of those closest to her, that her own mind was a strangely marvellous thing. She could lean into it, and out would come song lyrics, what she had to do on Saturday, lesson plans, something to remind Danny about, a funny moment from third grade — all in some kind of order. Her own personal think-tank! Every now and then, too, it opened onto a place that was an absence of place. Water, sky, not even. Her mind, such a smart mind, gave her a place away from itself. And in this unexpected clearing, she drove herself home.
Just Drive
The Road Somehow Solid
Backing out of the convent’s too-narrow driveway Clément clipped the nuns’ Rose of Sharon bush as he usually did. At least no blossoms pressed themselves accusingly against his window. It was early December and bare branches scraped the glass. “Heard that,” said Georgette from the back seat.
“Sister Joan’s going to come after you with her spade,” said Odile, laughing, also from the back seat. She’d had a girlish giggle about a million years ago; now his wife’s laugh was a weak growl. “Sexy,” Clément called it.
He almost said so now, stopped himself because Georgette, long-widowed, didn’t like him “talking dirty.” She didn’t like knowing that he and Odile, her older sister, sometimes still got it on, as the kids called it. Things had to be just right for them: no arthritis business for her, no bad
gas for him, no worrying calls from the kids, or bad news on TV, or a snowstorm. So much could come between people, but sometimes it was like old, yelping good times.
“Remind me to get Maddy to give me back my coral sweater and that book I lent her. She’ll start thinking they’re hers,” said Odile.
“What book?” Georgette asked.
“Oh, that one. You know.”
Clément heard the new vagueness again. “The one about near-death experiences,” he prompted.
People were still coming out of St. Mary’s: old mémés in dark wool coats and silk scarves cupped around crisp dos. He saw Benoit and Alexandrine, old friends, and gave them a salute. Benoit held up both arms, sent back the victory sign.
“That Benoit,” Clément said. “They don’t make them like that anymore.”
“Near-death experiences? I call those things near-death disasters,” said Georgette. “I swear if I see any of our dead relatives heading my way down some blue tunnel, I’m turning back right then and there.”
“And going where, chérie?” asked Clément, as he accelerated gradually. Odile had begun complaining lately: “You used to be such a smooth driver.”
“Well, not there,” said Georgette.
“This could be the one time where your indomitable will won’t count for much,” said Clément. As he turned onto East Street, he felt the tires of the Camry lose it for a second. First frost and already the roads were something you had to think about.
“I hate winter,” he said.
“Indominable…whatever. You and your big words,” Georgette said. “Why don’t you just call a spade a spade? I’m bossy.”