The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Sorry,” he said. “I ache for you. I walk around campus like this all the time. It’s almost a disability. I should get extra time on tests.”

  She returned her hand there out of friendship, but didn’t look, imagining that beneath his pants he had a nest of hair as red and mohairlike as his beard. He was the nicest guy in the world, and she thought this as she moved her hand awkwardly, like the mechanical claw in one of those crane games at arcades. He was much too excited now, and she was much too unexcited. It was a mistake to have done anything with him, and she knew this right away.

  “You can’t sleep here, you know,” she said to him after he had an orgasm on high volume, and they lay together with his chest heaving in recovery.

  “Why? We could talk all night. You could tell me more things. I’d like that.”

  “I don’t want to talk all night, Dog. You are the greatest, you really are. But I am only attracted to girls. It’s the way God made me,” she added uncertainly, though since her bat mitzvah she had pretty much left God in the dust.

  Finally he loped off down the hall and went back upstairs to the room he shared with Kelvin, while Zee lay in bed and felt confused and even a little ashamed. Over time Dog got involved with all kinds of other girls on campus, and his friendship with Zee stayed as strong as it had ever been, and neither of them ever referred to what had happened. Once in a while Zee wondered if she had even dreamed it. Women were it for her, but even so, she knew she had problems with them; something difficult often happened between her and them, but she didn’t know what, or why.

  After college, she had thought it would be great to work with Greer at Faith Frank’s foundation, but apparently that couldn’t happen. She felt rootless and lost at Schenck, DeVillers, her first job after graduation. By winter she knew she had to get out and go someplace where she felt needed. Then, one late night at the law firm, the arachnodactyly guy, whose name was Ronnie, mentioned to Zee that his sister worked for Teach and Reach, the nonprofit that trained recent college graduates and then placed them in jobs in public and charter high schools around the country. The training session for the current batch of teachers had taken place over the summer—a whirlwind six weeks—though now it was the middle of the school year and everyone was in place. But there had been a few dropouts recently, Ronnie explained, and the organization was worried about what to do and getting frantic. Did Zee want his sister’s email?

  It was startling how easy it was to be hired by Teach and Reach. “I’ll be honest. We are looking for enthusiasm as much as anything else,” the woman on the phone told her. So that was how Zee found herself relocating to Chicago in late winter. “I hate not being in the same city as you,” she’d said to Greer, though really the two friends hadn’t seen each other as often as they would have liked. Zee had stayed over in Brooklyn once in a while, but their schedules didn’t often overlap. Zee didn’t spend too much time thinking about why there were openings for teachers now, and why she was so easily welcomed in. She was too desperate to get out of her paralegal job. Instead she allowed herself to feel flattered by the job offer, even though in retrospect there was no reason to feel that way.

  Training was accelerated from its usual six weeks down to two and a half. “We believe you to be a fast learner,” said a guy named Tim, who was in charge of the trainees.

  “Would you please write that in a note and send it to my parents?” Zee said. “They would be very amused.”

  In Chicago Zee lived in a six-flat on which her parents grudgingly paid the rent, because Teach and Reach salaries were laughably low. “You’d need to live on a barge in China in order to be able to afford working there,” Judge Wendy said.

  “And yet the commute would be impossible, Judge.”

  “Franny, you can joke all you want.”

  “Zee.”

  “All right, Zee. But I have to tell you point-blank that I wish you wouldn’t take this job,” said her mother, who had steadfastly disapproved of her move, despite understanding that the job was worthwhile, even noble.

  Zee began teaching history at one of the Learning Octagon™ charter schools after the two-and-a-half-week lightning round of prep in their training center. The Teach and Reach teacher Zee was replacing had quit very dramatically in the middle of a school day, throwing up her hands and asking, “Where’s the learning? And where’s the octagon?” Then there was a substitute for a while, but he hadn’t been trained in the methodology, and all seven schools in the Learning Octagon™ network (it was awkward that there were seven, not eight, but one building had had a lead paint issue and had been indefinitely shut down only days before the start of the term) were contracted now with Teach and Reach. So Zee started at the facility on the South Side, armed with a formal teaching plan.

  She walked into her first-period ninth-grade class, which she imagined would be a scene of chaos, but instead the students seemed to have been given a sleeping potion; at 8:20 in the morning they were half-lying across their desks in the drafty third-floor classroom. Most of them were African-American, and several were Hispanic, and a couple were white. None of them looked happy to see her, or happy to be there, or even happy to be awake; she didn’t blame them at all. She remembered feeling this way herself in high school and was immediately sympathetic. So at the very least they would have a sympathetic teacher.

  “Good morning,” she said as she unnecessarily straightened the few belongings on her desk and sat on the unforgivingly squeaking green chair behind it. No one replied. “Well, maybe it’s not such a good morning,” she said. “Maybe this morning sucks.”

  “No shit,” some boy said. There was vague laughter, and some mild surprise that Zee joined in the laughter too, though she hadn’t found his comment funny. When in Rome, she’d thought, followed by: I really don’t know what I’m doing here.

  “You will feel uncertain sometimes in the classroom, maybe a lot of the time in the beginning,” Tim had told her. “That’s totally normal.” She thought of this now as she looked out over the class. “I’m Ms. Eisenstat, and I’ll be your teacher tonight,” Zee impulsively said. “May I tell you about our specials?”

  They looked at her with unimpressed faces.

  “What do you mean, tonight?” a girl asked.

  “And what do you mean, specials?” asked another girl in the back.

  Zee was mortified at her own joke; what was she thinking—they did not go to pretentious restaurants, or probably to restaurants at all. Most of them received free lunches. She realized that any kind of bonding she might do with them wouldn’t be around her pathetic attempts to amuse them or to seem starkly different from their previous teacher, who had abandoned them. She wanted them to need her, or at least tolerate her. She didn’t want them to overwhelm her and make her feel that she too had to leave her job in the middle of the year, in the middle of the day.

  Being in the world as an adult meant that you didn’t just quit. Things couldn’t necessarily be “gotten out of.” Sophomore year at Ryland, Zee had initially had a roommate, Claudia, who smelled of B.O. and had no comprehension of the importance of good hygiene. Judge Richard Eisenstat had made a telephone call to the dean after Zee had been curtly told by the dean’s secretary that she had to suck it up; there was absolutely no way she could switch dorm rooms. Somehow, though, when the judge called, a new room was found: a single. Things could be gotten out of—apparently many things, most things. But she didn’t want to get out of this thing. These students, she decided, needed her. She looked out over their unreadable faces and got started with that day’s prepared lesson on the Second World War. Almost immediately the classroom became a place of indifference, with occasional spurts of anarchy. Some days, no one listened. She found herself begging them to listen, trying to bribe them. A couple of kids were outright menacing, including a large girl who said in an incongruously babyish voice, “I’m going to fuck you up,” in response to a request to
put down her pencil at the end of an exam, before immediately crying and apologizing. Always there were trips to the principal, and sometimes visits from Big Dave in Security, who made things worse, escalating whatever in-room squall was taking place.

  Greer called and said, “Quit! Quit!” but Zee, almost in tears, said, “I can’t do that to them. I won’t.” Most days weren’t about fear, they were about unbelievable frustration, even rage—her own. But she also felt nearly ill with sympathy over what her kids didn’t have, didn’t know, and couldn’t do. One boy had the worst breath, and finally he shyly revealed that he didn’t have a toothbrush or toothpaste, and had no money to buy them; so she bought them for him. At Zee’s request, Greer sent cases of her parents’ protein bars, and Zee went out and bought packs of thick socks and gloves, always gloves. There was a sense that nothing did anything, that she was just another clueless person armed with supplies, throwing them into a volcano.

  And then one morning that spring, when Zee was waiting for the train, a text came from Greer, saying, “Are you available? It’s an emergency.” Soon they were on the phone, and Greer in a guttural explosion told her the most terrible news: Cory’s little brother had been run over by his mother’s car and killed. You didn’t have to have met a child to know that his death was the worst thing you’d ever heard. At age twenty-two, Zee could imagine the death from the point of view of the child and the parent and the sibling, all at the same time. Greer was sobbing, and Zee wished she had something to say to her, some way to soothe her. But they were in different cities and lives now, so the best Zee could do over the next few weeks was text her frequently, saying, “How are you doing?” despite already knowing the answer.

  At lunchtime each day, after a rough or maddening morning, Zee sat alone in the teachers’ lounge, mostly listening to tales of other classroom experiences—small tragedies or tense near-misses, or else anecdotes about bureaucratic stagnation, and unrelated references to weekend activities such as online dating or bowling.

  She sometimes took special note of the guidance counselor, Noelle Williams, because she had been particularly unfriendly from the first day. She never spoke to Zee at lunch, but sat in a small group of administrators, daintily eating a cup of yogurt, her plastic spoon knocking against the bottom and sides, her posture freakishly straight. When she was done eating, she put her trash into a neat little bundle, her hands practically compacting it. She never left traces of herself behind. Noelle Williams was twenty-nine years old, her hair cut close to her head, revealing her skull’s perfect, pleasing shape. Her delicate ears sprouted many tiny rings, and her outfits were immaculate, never creased. Zee had always felt stylish, in her own way, but Noelle’s perfection was a reproach.

  One day at noon, Zee nervily planted herself on the sagging couch beside the guidance counselor, whose lack of interest in getting to know Zee was obvious, though this in itself made Zee want to win her over. What had Zee done to piss Noelle Williams off? Zee asked her, “How long have you been working in Chicago?”

  The woman looked at her directly, appraisingly. “Three years,” she said. “I was here at the inception of this school.”

  “Oh great.”

  “And before that I was getting my master’s. And then working in a school out in the suburbs.”

  “That must have been pretty different from this place.”

  “Yes,” said Noelle, and she didn’t smile with bitter irony, or add any details to show that while working here was unmanageable, they were both in it together, and the only way to try to manage it was to be ironic. She wasn’t being ironic, nor was she welcoming.

  “I’m just getting my feet wet,” Zee went on. “Any tips about the teaching? It’s hard to sustain anything in there.”

  “Do I have any tips about how you should teach your classes?” asked Noelle. “First of all, I’m not a teacher. But also, I imagine that you were given all the tips you need, were you not?”

  Were you not? Zee almost mimicked her words back to her. What a cunt, she thought. “Well, I was given a crash course in teaching history,” Zee said, “but teaching actual high school students is something else entirely. And teaching these kids—it’s just barely happening. Too many crises, and too much tuning out. I get pretty despondent.”

  “I understand.” Noelle didn’t say anything more.

  There was a moment of cool silence, during which Zee ate the sandwich she had sloppily made that morning in her tiny kitchen. Now the innards were falling out of the soft and floppy thing, a spill of dissonant ingredients that should never have been put together: apple slices, and a few whole baby carrots on their way out of this world, and a stiff Elizabethan ruffle of kale, all of it vaguely pasted together by a spackle of miso and a squirt of low-fat mayo from a squeeze bottle purchased at the bodega around the corner on the first lonely night she had moved to this city, knowing no one.

  Noelle watched as vegetables tumbled onto Zee’s lap, and was that actually a smile? A slightly unpleasant smile as she saw Zee get slimed by her own lunch? Zee dabbed at her shirt with a rough brown paper towel from the dispenser, leaving an oblong of oil behind, and when she looked up to say something else to Noelle, she saw that the door of the faculty lounge was pneumatically closing, and Noelle was already on her way to deal with some new problem.

  It might have gone on like this for quite a while, the guidance counselor being rude and unfriendly, and Zee continuing to try to win her over, and perhaps one day Noelle would’ve said to her, “Zee, what are you doing? Why don’t you stop? Can’t you see I just don’t like you?”

  But instead one afternoon, a month into the job, Zee’s student Shara Pick said, “Miss Eisenstat?”

  Zee was at the whiteboard creating a timeline that stretched from 1939 to 1945. A few people seemed very interested; one student in particular, Derek Johnson, knew everything about the war already and was contributing a lot to the discussion. “Yes?” Zee said.

  “Can I go to the bathroom?” Shara asked, and then she stood up and wobbled in front of her desk. She had to go, and she had to go now. She was a bumblebee-shaped white girl, and wherever she went a cloud of chaos accompanied her. Crumpled sheets of paper, pens that leaked, little plastic microbeads from some unknown source. She was generally ignored in the class, seen as trashy and pitiable, and she didn’t seem to fit in anywhere. During lunch she sat alone, staring into the middle distance as she ate a bag of Doritos and called it a meal. Zee had been informed by the assistant principal that Shara was considered “at risk.” Her parents were meth addicts in and out of recovery, and she and her sisters had recently moved in with their kind but half-blind grandmother.

  The year before, the parents had both shown up for curriculum night, high out of their minds. “It’s a mess,” Zee had been told, and she had kept an eye out for Shara, who always wore a coat to class that had one of those Eskimo hoods that reminded Zee of the cover of the old Paul Simon album that her parents had listened to during her childhood. Shara dozed frequently, which worried Zee, who was on the lookout for signs of drug use in this vulnerable girl. But whenever there was an in-class essay Shara would hunch down over her desk with her elbows and tongue out in a posture of deep, touchingly childlike concentration, and would turn out something that was surprisingly impassioned. Maybe there was a hidden interest there, a hidden possibility.

  “Sure, go,” Zee said, and she stayed at the whiteboard, writing up a list of factors that had led to war. She wrote and wrote so much in a tiny hand that the board appeared covered in wire mesh, though only some students were taking any of it down in their notebooks. Others were gazing out at her in comprehension or incomprehension or daydream, and a boy in front named Anthony was doodling extravagantly in his notebook, the detail work of skulls and devils impressive, if evidence of an extreme interest in Satanism that should probably be reported to the administration.

  A girl in the last row was doing her acryl
ic nails on top of her notebook, the strong smell wafting up toward the front of the room. The smell spread, the felt pen that Zee dragged across the board uttered its occasionally shrill report, and the teenagers in the room shifted and settled and resettled. Someone howled like a wolf, at length, for laughs. The afternoon had a low-blood-sugar quality, with only thirteen minutes left until class ended. Zee would have had them write in their journals for a few minutes, and maybe let one of them play a song on the phone, which tended to focus the entire room. But then an awareness came over her, as strongly as the smell, that Shara hadn’t returned from the bathroom. Zee sent Taylor Clayton out to check on her, and while Taylor tended to be a hesitant girl, only moments later she banged back into the room, knocking against the door frame and saying, “Something’s wrong with Shara!”

  Shara was curled up on the floor of her stall in the bathroom, and somehow Zee and Anthony, who’d been pressed into service, got her down to the nurse’s office. “It hurts so bad,” Shara was crying, and she held her stomach and rocked back and forth.

  The nurse, as it happened, was showing a drug film to another class, and only her aide sat at the desk in the small green room, putting tongue depressors into a jar one by one, thud thud, thud, and looking terrified when Shara was half-carried and half-dragged in and was then laid down on the bed.

  “I’ll get Jean,” the nurse’s aide said as she ran from the room, scattering tongue depressors.

  “Tell him to leave too,” Shara said, gesturing toward Anthony.

  The boy ran out, relieved, and then Zee sat beside Shara, rubbing her arms and saying whatever she could think of. “It’s probably appendicitis,” she said, talking rapidly and idly. “My brother had that once. He screamed all night. But when they took it out he felt better, and you will too. Did you know that the appendix serves absolutely no function?” she added, because she couldn’t think of what else to say, and she wanted to distract Shara from her pain.