by Ilana Garon
year 4
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Benny & Mo
“Idon’t care what anyone tells me—they are the worst tenth-grade class I’ve ever taught!” I yelled, enthusiastically releasing a day’s pent-up frustration now that we were outdoors. Dan, a science teacher who had all the same students as I did, and I were walking to the subway; he always walked with me up to the station after school before continuing on to catch the Bx12 bus down the road. “I can’t deal with it—I’ve never had such a misbehaving class!”
He volleyed it right back. “I know! What the hell! Try teaching them science—I’m afraid to have them in the lab because they just destroy all the breakable stuff and set things on fire!”
“They don’t take anything seriously!” I fumed. “I gave them an assignment, to design an island for Lord of the Flies, and those boys—you know, the group Lawrence is the ringleader of—they made an island that had mountains all around the outside and a big hole in the center, and they called it ‘Vagina-land’!”
That did it. We both burst out laughing.
“Alright, dear, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said after we hugged each other. I turned and stepped into the crosswalk.
I heard a loud screech as a car hit me. I tumbled over the edge of its hood, and then landed on my side in the middle of the crosswalk.
I lay on the asphalt, looking at the tires of the car, which were now eye-level. The wind had been knocked out of me. Everything was quiet. Then I heard Dan yelling.
“Ilana! Are you okay!?”
“Yes, I’m fine!” I yelled back. My voice had little force since the wind had been knocked out of me. I picked my torso up to show that I could and waved at Dan. “I’m okay . . . my leg just hurts!” I motioned as if to move.
“Ilana! Don’t you f—ing move from that spot!” yelled Dan. He and another man, a construction worker in an orange vest who had been working nearby, came to the middle of the street. They helped me up and over to the curb, where they set me down on the grass.
The driver of the car came over to me. By now a crowd had gathered. Behind him, I could see his car—a gray, ’80s-model Toyota. The door had been left open, and it was parked in the middle of the street.
“Hey, I’m sorry—I just didn’t see you crossing,” he said. Later I would be told that he was a young Latino man with close-cropped hair, but to this day I remember nothing of his face.
Everything was throbbing, particularly my leg. I knew I could move, so I figured I wasn’t dying.
I needed to tell the driver that it was not his fault. “It’s okay, man,” I told him. “I should have looked both ways. It’s okay.” I reached up for his hand and shook it. “It’s alright man. I’m okay.”
Dan leaned over me and cupped my cheeks in his hands. “Shut up,” he whispered in my ear, severely. “You’re hurt. You’re not thinking clearly. Don’t say anything else.”
“Oh, Dan!” I cried and started sobbing. Dan looked like he was going to cry, as well. He sat next to me on the ground and held my hands.
Someone had called an ambulance. They came and took my pulse. They put me on a stretcher.
“Where’s the guy who hit me?” I asked Dan. I felt inexplicably groggy.
“He drove away,” said the construction worker in the orange vest, glancing knowingly at a couple of people around us who groaned. “But don’t worry,” he said, grinning sardonically. “I got his license number.”
At some point I was piled into an ambulance and taken to Jacobi Hospital. I don’t remember much of the ride, except that Dan came with me. In the waiting room, a guy who had overdosed on drugs was throwing up on the floor, and a young schizophrenic man had been restrained because he had tried to kill his family, who now waited tearfully beside the stretcher upon which he had been strapped down.
My ailments were comparatively minor. Other than having screwed up the tendons in my knee, I had emerged unscathed. Two hours and several conversations with the police later, I hobbled out of Jacobi with crutches. Dan was at my side, along with my then-boyfriend, Aaron, who had rushed to meet us at the hospital.
We had some trouble hailing a taxi. When a gypsy cab finally slowed down for us, I was relieved.
“Hey Miss,” the cabby yelled.
I looked in the cab and realized it was one of my former students. It took me a second to recognize him, but he patiently jogged my memory—“I’m Mohammad. People called me ‘Mo,’ remember? You taught me that there are really good Jewish people, Miss. I’m Muslim, remember? And I’d never met a Jewish person before you. Now I have a professor who’s Jewish, at Bronx Community College, and he’s totally amazing! He makes me so interested in learning about marketing. . . .”
He prattled on, happily regaling me with the details of his life. I had to smile. Here I was coming out of the hospital in the middle of the Bronx, and who should pick me up but one of my former students—at that, one who was doing something with his life, educating himself, working, and succeeding.
Mohammad stopped at home because it was Ramadan and he needed to pick up his dinner so he could eat at sundown. I lay back in the cab, tucked between Aaron and Dan, nearly falling asleep under the influence of the pain medication. When he got out of his cab at my house to help me out of the car (despite Dan and Aaron’s presence), I tipped him $15 on a $25 fare, kissed both his cheeks, and thanked him for saving me.
The following week I went down to the precinct to file the forms for my police report. They told me they had tracked the license number that the construction worker had taken off the car’s plates.
“Unfortunately, that didn’t help us,” said one of the cops, apologetically. “It’s registered to some chick named Maria Lopez, and the address is a parking lot upstate. Totally bogus. That’s probably why he drove off so fast.”
All the same, they had me look at mug shots to see if I could recognize the guy who hit me. I knew at the outset that I would never be able to, but I tried to give it a fair shake anyway. I clicked through the list of young Latino men, aged eighteen to twenty-eight—the parameters the cops had been given by the bystanders.
I did see one familiar face.
“Benny Rodriguez?” I cried out in surprise. I hadn’t seen him in three years. He had been the boyfriend of one of my former students, Desi, and would come to my English class even though he wasn’t registered for it. Perhaps I would have been more inclined to kick him out if he had not been such an amazing participant—he was always first to volunteer to read aloud, to act, even to write the essays. I had told him multiple times that he was the best student I never had.
The cops near me looked over and chuckled. “Oh, Benny,” said one of them. “Let’s see what we have him on. . . .” He looked at the screen and then crowed, “Breaking and entering!” And he and his partner laughed and called to the other cops, “Look at that! The teacher found one of her students in the mug shots!”
I thought, “He wasn’t exactly my student . . .” But I didn’t bother to correct them. I just sat there, thinking. A face appeared in my mind—not Benny’s, but the face of the kid who hit me with his car. I couldn’t make out the physical details, but I remembered that expression—the anxiety, the confusion. That part was imprinted in my memory, though it would do me no good here.
I had never been angry with him, I realized, because on an unconscious level I had seen kids like Benny in him, kids who were basically cool, and could have turned out just like Mo, were it not for one colossally dumb, life-ruining mistake. He had stood in front of me, frightened, guilty, and unsure what to do. He knew he had f—ed up, and didn’t know how to fix it. So, in a panic, he had fled.
I was sure that if Benny had seen an opportunity for escape during his bust for breaking and entering, he would have done the same thing.
I felt dissatisfied, but I do not think that I would have felt any better if I had been able to pick out the mug shot of the guy who hit me from the database instead of my former student’s. I c
ollected my books, thanked the officers, and left the precinct. You win some, you lose some, I told myself. There would be class in the morning.
I called ten households this week, which really we’re supposed to do every week, but I almost never manage to get done. Some of the kids are really out of control with their rudeness and disrespect for authority. I decided to call their houses after one girl repeatedly told me “Move!” when I was in her way. When I said, “Excuse me?” she said, “My name isn’t ‘excuse me’!” and then muttered “Bitch!” under her breath, I knew it was time.
The mother did not apologize for her daughter’s behavior or even suggest that she would reprimand the girl—rather, she implicitly justified it by citing “problems with other girls” as the logical explanation. This is not the first time I’ve gotten this type of response from parents, and I always find it particularly infuriating (more so, perhaps, than the usual negligence) in that they are enabling their children’s patterns of failure by looking for outside excuses and never correcting the problem.
That said: Teaching is one of those things that gets markedly easier with time. I also think that when I can eventually figure out the right seating arrangement, I will have slightly better control over these giant classes. So hopefully I can manage that next week, in between discussions of the perfect murder weapon (we’re reading Julius Caesar) and making the twelfth graders listen to U2 and Rufus Wainwright during group work. Hell, no one ever said I wasn’t “mad corny”. . . .
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tonya
My cell phone rang while I was shopping for tea in Fairway, an eclectic grocery on Seventy-Fourth Street, a year and a half after I had left teaching to go to graduate school. The phone number wasn’t one I recognized.
“Who is this, please?”
“Miss, it’s Tonya!” my former student announced joyfully. “How’s it going?”
Tonya. I had heard from her only sporadically since I had started graduate school, and she, college. A tiny, beautiful, effervescent black girl with long cornrow braids, she had been best friends with Adam, and herself one of the top students in the small school where I had taught. She was bright and talented, with a 92 grade-point average and consistent participation in youth theater programs, all of which had eventually garnered her a full scholarship to an upstate private school.
Despite these accomplishments, Tonya suffered from deep self-doubt where her relationships with men were concerned. When I was her English teacher, she would come talk to me about various boys for hours after school ended—analyzing their every comment or action. “You know he loves me,” she would insist, when I would question any of their intentions. She would leave only when I finally did.
Her father was absent, and I always worried that she was trying to recapture that lost love in every boy she met (boys who, I always felt, were undeserving and unappreciative of her awesomeness). When she got into a relationship, I noticed, things would become physical quickly; she would immediately regret it, but then do it again with someone new a couple of months later.
In truth, the behavior of “hooking up” a lot was not uncommon for girls Tonya’s age, in any area—when I was tutoring kids in a wealthy suburban area of Westchester, their accounts of weekend activities were punctuated with similar stories. But Tonya was uncommonly sensitive. Each time she was spurned by one of the guys with whom she’d gotten involved, it seemed like that rejection bored into an ever-growing hole in her.
“I wish I hadn’t done it,” she told me once, referring to a boy in her grade. “It makes me feel bad now.” She was perched on top of the desk in my empty classroom. I was in the rear of the room, shelving books.
“Why do you think you feel bad?” I asked her, not turning from my closet.
“I don’t know. I just wish I hadn’t.”
“Were you ‘into it’ at the time?” No response. “Did he pressure you?”
“Not really. I mean . . . I knew he wanted to, but he didn’t force me or anything.”
“What made you feel you had to do it, then?” I was conscious to keep my voice as neutral as possible.
“I don’t know.”
I sat down across from her. “Do you want to know what I think? I think you hooked up with him because you felt it would make him emotionally closer to you. And you wanted that closeness. But it doesn’t really work like that. . . .”
“That’s stupid!” she interrupted, her eyes flaring at me.
I knew I was on thin ice; my amateur psychology tended to have mixed results. “But Tonya . . . why is it stupid?” I persisted. “Why are you ashamed that, like any of us, you just want to be loved?”
“Shut up! I hate you! You don’t know anything about me!” she screamed. She jumped off the desk and sprinted out the classroom door, slamming it behind her, leaving me more unsettled than I wanted to admit.
Tonya ignored me completely for two days. Then she came to me after class at the end of the week. “I’m ready for you to apologize,” she announced.
“Hon, I’m sorry your feelings are hurt, but I think the reason you’re upset is because you know what I said has a kernel of truth to it.”
She looked like she was about to argue with me, but then she stopped. “You have a lot to learn about young people!” she told me, mustering some venom. Then she seemed to give up and spent the next twenty minutes regaling me with the details of a humorous incident that had taken place in her chemistry class.
That tended to be our relationship—disclosure from her, attempts at advice from me, followed by the silent treatment, and then a reunion. It was exhausting sometimes. During winter vacation of her senior year, I awoke one morning to find a message on my cell phone: “Ms. Garon—it’s Tonya. Angel and I took it to the next level. We didn’t use protection. Don’t call back. Bye.” After a couple of moments of confusion, I remembered that “Angel” was a twenty-five-year-old (the same age I was) whom she had met at her job. I tried to call her despite her orders. Her ringer was off.
So now, standing in the tea aisle at Fairway nearly two years later, I wondered what bomb she was about to drop. As it turned out, her call was benign. “I’m writing a poem for class,” she said. “It’s about a boy I like. But I think something is missing. Can I email it to you?”
I read her poem in the privacy of my bedroom that night:
The touching of your face brings a certain intimacy you never heard of. It’s like getting your palm read by a psychic....
I need to feel your face so that I can feel as special as I am suppose to feel.
Like I am a part of that exclusive country club that everyone wants to join, ’cause of the beautiful people and expensive water, even though I don’t play golf.
I read the last line about the country club, cracked up, and then instantly hated myself for finding humor in what was clearly an emotional outpouring. What kind of teacher was I?
“Hon,” I said to her on the phone when I called to give her feedback. “I think what your poem needs is . . . well . . . more risk.”
“Risk? Like, how?”
“Well, we have this ‘ode to a boy’ here—but your reader doesn’t really know what the stakes are. Does he love you back? Is he going to reject you? How would you feel if you lost him?”
“Those are stupid suggestions,” she told me, laughing.
“Well sor- ry, missy! You asked my opinion, remember? Take it or leave it.”
“I’m just not going to write about my feelings,” she said, suddenly severe.
Ah. So we were at this point again.
“Tonya, that’s your prerogative—but I think poetry has to be at least somewhat about your feelings. You said something’s missing, and that’s what it is.”
“Ugh, forget it! I’m not turning in this poem after all! Goodnight!” she said, slamming down the phone.
I went to bed feeling frustrated. By the time I got up in the morning, I already had two messages on my cell phone, which had been turned to silent.
The first one said, “Miss Garon, it’s Tonya. I’m turning in that poem I wrote senior year of high school, about how my mom’s house smells like popcorn. I’m not writing anything emotional. Okay, bye.”
I deleted it, and went on to the second message. “It’s me again. Tonya. You know what? I realized I hate that boy from the poem! And I’m so angry I can’t even think straight! I hate him so much! That’s why I can’t write the damn poem! I’m furious!” Click.
I was about to call her back, but I stopped myself. She’s nineteen, I told myself. She’s got to figure this out for herself.
In subsequent years, she would prove more than capable: She would graduate from college and go on to get an MFA in poetry, becoming one of our small school’s first students to get a graduate degree. She would leave the east coast, meet new people, and fulfill every expectation I or anyone else could ever have had of her. But neither of us could know that yet. And right now, as I stood there holding my cell phone in my hand, I felt we’d come to a make-or-break moment wherein it was crucial for each of us to disentangle from the other.
You can’t keep going there with her forever.
So instead, I wrote her a short email. “Sorry you’re having a tough time,” I told her. “You’re strong. I know you will be okay.”
I put the phone on vibrate in case she called back. Then I went into the kitchen to make some tea. It seemed like the only sure thing to do.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Callum