Simple Machines

by Morris, Ian;

  By virtue of being in the relatively empty Zs I moved faster than the Shipper’s Ss and didn’t see him for the rest of the day. At the first table I gave my name and was given in return a large form on heavy paper stock and sent to a second table. At the second table a guy stamped the corner of my form with a red seal and sent me to a third table. At the third table the woman removed the stamped corner of my form along a perforation and placed that card in an indexed file in front of her. She sent me to a fourth table where the guy stamped a different part of the form with a stamp that looked a lot like the first and said, “Now go to your assignment committees.”

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  “Which one?”

  “All of them.”

  He said, “They’re listed in your timetable,” like it was something I should have known.

  “Oh,” I said, because it probably was.

  These days you just call a computer and you’re registered for classes, but it was not all that long ago that registration resembled a scavenger hunt. Once you got your form you had to go to the assignment committee for each class. Each assignment committee was in the department for that class. In the landscape of the university, each of those departments was in its own building, each building like a sovereign country.

  The first class I signed up for was trigonometry. Math was in Van Vleck Hall, a modern high-rise at the end of Charter Street. This Indian guy—Georg, by his name tag, without an e—sat at a table in front of a blackboard with the words “Freshman Math Assignments” on it. He glanced at my form and said, “Do you have the prerequisites?”

  “The what?”

  “Have you completed the classes you needed to complete and received at minimum the lowest grade you are permitted to receive in order to register for Trigonometry?”

  I looked him in the face and said, “Yes, I have.” It turned out that I had, but at the time I thought I was lying, which was a kick. He stamped my form and turned back to the equations on the page in front of him. “Are you my teacher?” I asked.

  Again he looked up from his book, stared for a moment, and said—with obvious relief—“I will not be your teacher.”

  I left Georg thinking that I wasn’t going to like math much.

  While I waited for the elevator I had something of an inspiration. Reasoning that my schoolwork at high school was going to pale in comparison with what I had to put in now, it occurred to me that there was nothing wrong with hedging at least one bet. So I registered for first-year German, figuring I’d keep how much of the language I knew secret until I had to use it for the test.

  Having worked that out in my head, I was feeling pretty proud of myself as I walked from the modern Van Vleck to the relic Bascom Hall to sign up for my history course.

  When I told the girl at the table of the History Department assignment committee that I needed History 105, Survey of History for Majors, she pointed at the blackboard behind her. “Closed,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s full. No more room.”

  “I think I have to take it,” I said.

  “Let me see.” She crinkled her nose and scanned the page I handed her, shrugged, and handed it back to me. “You’re right, you do.”

  “So I can sign up?”

  “Next semester.”

  “You’re telling me I’m a history major but I can’t take a history class?” She stared at me as if to show there was nothing she could do, and then I guess she must have taken pity on me because she said, “You know, I think the professor might actually be in his office. You might ask him for a waiver.”

  I walked down a corridor of checked tile until I found the door with his name on it, ducked my head in and saw a man in a sleeveless white T-shirt, large shorts, and sandals with black socks. He had his feet on the desk and held the string to the window shade to his nose.

  “What am I doing?” he asked in English-accented English.

  “Sir?”

  “Bring your powers of inductive reasoning to bear.”

  “It looks like you’re trying to yank the shade off the window.”

  He considered the shade as though what I’d said had made him think about what he was doing for the first time. “Indeed it does. However, what sense would that make? Why would a sane man pull the shade off a window of a public building with the sun as blinding as it can be at this time of year? He would not. Therefore, although your observation is keen, your hypothesis is flawed. Would you care to try again?”

  “You’re trying to pull the shade up.”

  “Good, yes, and?”

  “And you want the light to come in.”

  “What? Oh yes of course, but no. Perhaps the question was not clear. What I hoped to be able to do was to raise or lower the shade from my chair here. I got up to lower the shade and noticed the cord was rather long and wondered if it would be possible to operate the shade without getting up. I have determined empirically that it is not. Why are you here?”

  “I need my thing signed.”

  “Which thing is that?”

  “My form. See I need 105 for Majors and they said it was full and they told me I couldn’t get in unless you signed my form saying I could.”

  “They did?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who would these sinister forces be?”

  “The assignment committee.”

  “What, would you say, makes you worthy of such a dispensation?”

  “I got a scholarship.”

  “Ah, did you now?”

  “Yes sir, the Ida Singer. It’s a—”

  “I was the judge this year.”

  “Then maybe you read my paper—”

  “It was an honorary position. In an historical sense, what are your interests?”

  “Like do you mean what history do I like best?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t know. I like the old stuff more than the newer stuff. I come from up north. I like that, the trappers and the Indians.”

  “That’s grand,” he said. “It’s a fine thing for a student of history to take an interest in where he’s from, provided.”

  “Provided?”

  “Provided you understand the difference between history and folklore.”

  “So does that mean you’ll sign my form?”

  “What’s one more student more or less, eh?” I slid the form across the desk. He signed it, like a ballplayer signing an autograph, scrawling quickly and smiling as he slid the form back across the desk. Then he motioned me closer and took my right hand in his and looked through narrowed eyes at my fingernails. “Did you know that during the French Revolution the Jacobins went around looking at people’s hands to see how dirty they were?”

  “No, I didn’t, sir. Why?”

  “To determine whether or not they would be guillotined.”

  “Which was good, dirty or clean?”

  “Dirty,” he said and winked.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He pointed to the window. “Pull that shade down on your way out, would you?”

  The next afternoon Howie got the guys from the floor and the girls from downstairs in Kleine. We tossed caps and shirts on the grass to mark the boundaries and we chose up teams for touch football and had a great time of it. There had to be at least twenty on each side, way too many for a proper game. Play got rough among the boys, with everyone smacking into each other. As the afternoon went into the evening, the game took a more definite form. People left, the teams reformed, and the personalities and skills of the players revealed themselves. I caught a couple of passes, once getting knocked hard to the ground and came up with grass stains and a split lip, feeling like I’d passed a test. Shipper took a beating. Some of the guys took it as their personal duty to flatten him whenever he got close. Ship took his beating like a man, though it was clear he wasn’t having any fun. Finally some of the girls took pity on him—“Come on, guys, quit it.”—helping him up, brushing the grass o
ff his shirt, which would have brought humiliation on your average young man of eighteen, but Ship was not your average young man of eighteen.

  The game broke up when it was too dark to see. Somebody got a broken nose and had to be taken up to the health center with a T-shirt pressed to his face. The rest of us limped back to our rooms smelling of sweat and dirt.

  On the way up to the room, I saw Ship sitting in the TV lounge with a baggie of ice on his eye. “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “You did good out there,” I told him.

  “Did I?”

  “Sure.”

  He made a face like he didn’t believe me. “Howie shouldn’t let them just hit people whenever they feel like it.”

  “I guess nobody meant anything. You coming up?”

  “I’m staying down here.”

  “Good thinking,” I said, “maybe some of those Kleine girls’ll come through. They love a man with a black eye.”

  He lifted the ice off his face to look at me through a half-closed lid. “You think?”

  “I know it.”

  With Ship downstairs, I called Pop as soon as I got into the room. The phone rang a couple of dozen times before someone picked it up. It was Trudy. “Hello?” she said.

  “Hello? Is Ernst Zimmermann there, please?” I said, like that, because I didn’t recognize her voice right off and I thought maybe I had a wrong number.

  “Tom? Honey,” the voice said, “it’s Trudy Schmidt. How are you doing?”

  I flopped on Ship’s bed and twirled the phone cord with my finger. “Good, I guess. Can I speak to Pop?”

  “Let me see if he’s around—” There’s a long silence and I’m thinking where does she think he’s going to be if he invited her over. “He’s not, honey, can I have him call you?” she said, and I knew she was lying for him.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll try again.”

  Well, if that wasn’t a kick in the teeth. In fact, I thought I’d trade places right now with Ship sitting down there with the ice on his face. I couldn’t tell what made me madder, that I had to talk to Trudy or that Pop wouldn’t talk to me. Maybe, I figured, he was finding out how hard it was to keep the shop going on his own and that had him pissed off. One thing was sure, I wasn’t going to call him again. I called Grey’s house and got to talk to everybody.

  Agnes answered. “What are the students like?”

  “Kind of all different.”

  Jack said, “Make us proud, son.”

  Grey said, “Hey, fuckface.”

  Callie said, “Bring me a sweatshirt.”

  Dewar Dooley’s class met in a three-hundred-seat lecture hall of flaking white walls and high windows that on cold days were fogged by the steam that leaked from the corroded radiators. Knowing it was going to be full, I showed up a good fifteen minutes early to an empty room, took a seat up front figuring the better to hear, and sat pretending to read until it was time for class to start. When the hour struck, the seats around me were still empty and I thought maybe I had the wrong room, until I looked over my shoulder and saw every seat from two rows behind me on back filled. I was going to get up and move but then Dooley came in and crossed the dais to the lectern, and I was left sitting stupidly alone. Even from the front row, he looked small, standing in front of the map of the world that stretched from one wall to the other. He tapped the microphone and two speakers hanging on each end of the front wall squelched.

  “Can you hear me in the back?” he asked, his breath rumbling through the woofers.

  “We can hear you in Milwaukee,” some kid shouted and the floor rumbled with laughter.

  “Growing up in Galway,” he began, “there was a sign scrawled in a drunken hand on the wall of the pub in my town that said, ‘Will the last man off for America please turn out the lights.’ One by one they left, the men of our town. I had no desire to go, until I came to realize I had even less desire to stay. That was twenty years ago—stowed away on a hay barge at the age of seventeen, to tell the truth of it, just to see what all the fuss was. As you might imagine, I held the States in low regard. You seemed an unnecessarily hard country to an immigrant boy. Well, here I am still.”

  Dooley never read or looked at a note card and ignored the chapters assigned in the syllabus altogether. His lectures (like that first one on the Rise of European Puritanism) jerked from one event to another. This country’s history, which in the hands of Mrs. Furst, my fifth-grade teacher, was a storybook that stretched heroically from the day the first Furst set foot on the New World, was transformed by Dooley into a bloodied quilt of bad ideas and great delusions, all leading to vast catastrophes, which themselves changed absolutely nothing.

  It was like being in church, listening to a man tell stories that had no clear point.

  After class, as the hall emptied, I passed Dooley at the stair leading down from the dais. He stood listening to some student who wanted him to read a paper he’d written. “The part about the hay barge wasn’t true, was it?” I asked him.

  He looked up from the paper like I’d reminded him of something he had to do. “Zimmer?” he said.

  “Zimmermann.”

  “What was your question?”

  “I said the part about the hay barge, you made that up.”

  “Why would you presume that?”

  “Well, I was thinking who’s going to pay to haul hay from Ireland when you’ve got so much of it here.”

  He raised an eyebrow, as though he was trying to decide how to answer.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it. I just thought you might be putting us on.”

  “Right you are,” he paused. “Zimmermann.”

  “Sir,” I said.

  “What do you do for money?”

  I didn’t know what he was getting at. “I have a nest egg.”

  “Then never mind.”

  “What?”

  “I have an opening for work-study. But if you’re fixed.”

  “I’m not,” I said, “fixed. I mean who couldn’t stand to make a little money?”

  That night, I called Callie and Grey when I got home to tell them about Dooley’s class and the job and everything. We talked for hours on the phone that night and the next and almost every night for weeks. That was until the school sent a $300 phone bill to my home address. Pop opened it, hit the ceiling, and told Jack, who, Callie said, was similarly steamed because the Reeds’ bill was just as big. Jack got Grey and me on the line, made us promise to quit, and talked to us for a long time on The Lost Art of Letter Writing, this being back when people wrote letters.

  While that advice was lost on Grey, I became a prodigious letter writer—“prodigious,” (meaning here something closer to “voluminous” than “colossal”) being the sort of word I used a lot in my letters of that era, since I took Ship’s advice and bought a thesaurus. “I read somewhere that word power means people power,” he said. It was the sort of thing he said a lot. “A thesaurus, that’s the thing to use if you have to write a letter.”

  I wrote Pop twice a week, then less after a couple of months went by and he hadn’t written back even once. I wrote Aunt Berthe every Tuesday and could always expect a reply by the following Monday. Callie and Grey I wrote three or four times a month, though only Callie wrote back. She always wrote in purple ink, with big curling girl letters, circles over the i’s, and doodles in the margins. They were mostly the local news, the same stuff we talked about on the phone: Who was going out with who (“Dianne Ellis and Alvin Deere, can you believe it?”) and who was grounded and who was driving on a ticket, who thought I was cute now that I was out of town and they were free to confess, and later there was more and more about Grey and what she called “his whole boat thing.”

  He hadn’t bought the sloop from the guy called Natch, but landed a wooden sailing dinghy, clearing two hundred on the deal, after more than a hundred hours of work. “His whole boat thing is keeping him busy as you might have expected. He told me to say that bus
iness is likely to pick up. And he said to tell you that you sounded like a fag in your last letter. I know that’s his way of saying he misses you.”

  It was hard work, writing letters home. I wrote to Pastor Brad and the Reverend. I sent postcards of the capitol dome at night to Hilde and Uncle Karl, and even sent a note to Todd with a brochure for an engineering exhibition they were having. I sent a letter to Ashley, too, trying to sound neutral, folksy—collegial. The letters to Mr. Reed were the hardest, and I wrote him more often than anybody else, mostly because he wrote to me the most and sent me back-issues of the Star every week. Looking at the paper from far away, it seemed thin and unimportant. Usually I just skimmed the pages for names I knew and tossed them in the bin next to the mailboxes. The letters I kept. And a lot of what he said I hung onto, as well, and called it wisdom.

  My mental clock stayed set on island time. I woke up before six every morning and rolled my bike out of the courtyard and struck out across the soccer fields, the grass, turned brittle with frost, crackling under my tires. Usually I rode south or west, out of town into rolling pasture land, corn fields, and dairy farms, getting lost and finding my way again. On these rides I thought about the future or nothing at all pretty much equally, never about the present or past, and came home after Ship and everyone else on the floor had gone down to breakfast. I’d skip the cafeteria for coffee at the student union, where the walls were covered with murals of Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe. Painted in oils, the plaque said, back in the thirties by an artist of the WPA, they are all muscles and heavy boots and rolled shirtsleeves. And I liked them—particularly the one that showed the great fistfight between Paul and Big Swede, so rugged a brawl that it is said to have gouged out the Great Lakes. Here was a creation myth I could relate to, more local than the Bible and the flood and born out of the kind of struggle I understood.

  Before I knew it I was living two lives, a solitary morning life and a school life: my classes and my job with Dooley and everything that came after, dinner in the clattering dining hall, the library at night with its hum of muffled conversation between carrels, and the beer parties in neighboring rooms, where I came to know my floor mates through a spreading web of acquaintances.