by Robert Cohen
“Christ,” the principal said at last, “you can’t tell much, can you, reading these things.” His molars, grinding like pistons, gnawed away at a Tums, or perhaps the inside of his cheek. “You could be overqualified, you could be underqualified. For all I know you could be just right. I’ve given up predicting.”
But isn’t that your job? Oren wanted to say.
“Just talk to me about this, in your own words.” Hastings leaned back in his executive chair, his fingers steepled on his chest, his ankles scissored up on his desk, not so much casually as belligerently, as if daring Oren to peek below the cuffs of his slacks, at the rounded calves with their dense, springy fur. “I’m curious. Why would a young man like you wind up here?”
Oren thought for a moment. “I suppose he’d wind up here for pretty much the same reasons I did.”
The principal smiled, or at least his mouth did; his eyes remained steady. On the ledge behind the desk an antique globe tilted sidelong on its axis, its outer regions blurry with dust.
“Okay, look,” he said, “I realize my vita isn’t the most conventional document—”
“Oh, people always think their vitas are unconventional. And yet so few really are.” Hastings yawned good-naturedly. “Though yours is more eclectic, shall we say, than most. It reminds me of a tapas bar I ate at once.”
Despite himself Oren was encouraged by this. At least the man knew what a tapas bar was.
“On the other hand, you’re young, right? What are you, twenty-eight?”
“Thirty-one.”
“Okay, that’s young too. It makes sense to take your time, explore your options. Why get trapped in one place prematurely if you can help it?”
“I’ve been fortunate, it’s true. I’ve had a lot of opportunities, and not too many responsibilities weighing me down. So I’ve been able to experiment a bit. Take my time.”
“It’s good to experiment, up to a point. It’s how we learn.” The bullish intensity of Hastings’s stare, an effect of either the lenses he wore or some turbocharged antidepressant, was disconcerting. “You’ll find that our students here, they’re experimenting too. Trying things out. It’s what makes them so challenging to work with.”
“Yes, I’ve always heard that about junior high.”
“We call it middle school now.”
“Middle school. I’ll have to remember that.”
“Of course when people say challenging,” Hastings observed neutrally, “they don’t generally mean ‘challenging.’ They mean ‘horrible,’ don’t they?”
Oren allowed, with the merest shrug of his shoulders, that perhaps this was generally so.
“Well, it’s true,” the principal said, “they can be horrible. But then so can we, right? The kids mirror back to us our own failings. Take all these terrific new shortcuts we’ve developed. Standards testing, bloc scheduling, Web-based research. They’ll be around for a while and then along will come something newer still. The kids aren’t stupid. They see what’s going on. Their teachers are way overloaded—they can’t fit everything in and also teach critical thinking and writing and also deal with all the state-mandated testing. It’s easier to go through the motions. Pass out the old worksheets and get by. No wonder they’re so bored. I’d be bored too. Wouldn’t you?”
Oren nodded yes, then shook his head no. Having never once been sent to the principal’s office as a student, it seemed a regressive development to find himself sitting in one now. On the other hand he hadn’t eaten since breakfast and was enduring the latest in a series of migraine headaches, so it might have been that.
“It’s not the kids who flatten out,” Hastings went on, “it’s us. We’re lazy, set in our ways, we’ve stuck with burnout teachers it’s impossible to get rid of, and the kids all know it. But they’re not as jaded as they want to be; you can still do good work with them if you try.” Thoughtfully he examined the orange on his desk, turning it this way and that, as if plotting an incision. “Every brain goes through two major growth spurts, according to the research. One as a baby, the other in middle school. So naturally they’re confused at this age. They should be. Their frontal cortexes are going berserk. It’s a jungle in there, see? All those half-formed cells, fighting it out for survival. The ones that get stimulated and fed—they grow and prosper. The rest dry up and die. It’s a Darwinian process and it never ends. Ever been to a jungle, Oren?”
“No.”
“I only ask because of that tattoo on your wrist. What do they call those, tribals, right?”
“I’m not sure what they’re called.”
“I see them on the kids these days. The design if I’m not mistaken comes from Borneo.”
“Does it?” He’d meant to keep his damn wrist covered. But what difference did it make? The world will always unmask your mistakes.
“My daughter tells me these things. They’re popular down at the high school, she says, particularly among the basketball players. I assume that’s why you got one, because of basketball?”
“No.” Now that the salad days of brain growth were officially behind him, there was no reason not to go on and admit, “Actually I’m not sure why. It was just this weird thing I did.”
“I only ask because we’ve got this Wednesday-night pickup game at the municipal center. It’s not too bad, if you don’t mind playing with a bunch of old hackers. Come on out sometime. We could use a little height.”
“That’s a nice offer. But I’m afraid I haven’t played ball in years.”
“Come anyway. Get the blood flowing. Mix it up a little. If you could have, you’d have gone to Borneo, right? That’s what you wanted—something new. Something really rough and different. The tattoo was just a shortcut, am I right?”
Oren shrugged. He was beginning to feel he had gone to Borneo. Hastings’s office felt airless, impenetrable, crowded with knickknacks and orphaned texts and globby misshapen art projects. He no longer cared, if he ever had, whether he got the job or not. Why go back to square one, to the raw Crayola primitivism of childhood?
“Anyway give it some thought,” Hastings said briskly, looking at his watch. “The basketball I mean. But the job too. It may not be what you’re looking for. I know you’ve done some TAing, but believe me you’ll find this more rigorous. You’ve got the federal assessment tests to teach to. The state mandates. The parents’ expectations. And then of course there’s the kids. The thing with the kids is to stay honest. Otherwise they’ll shred you to pieces. Don’t sell them short. They’re still highly adaptable. Whatever they learn at this point, the connections they make—some of those are going to last forever.”
“Great,” Oren said. “I’m all for adaptability.”
“I know.” Hastings had begun to tear the skin off the orange in his hand, digging into the flesh with his thick fingers. Juice spritzed in the air. “I can see that from your vita.”
Oren flushed. “I don’t regret any of those fields I studied. It’s just, I’m tired of working on an abstract plane. I want to do something actual for a change. Get down in the trenches.”
“Of course the actual can get old.”
“I realize that. But so can the other.”
Hastings nodded. Suddenly he looked rather glum behind his corrective lenses, as men his age do, Oren thought, when considering how old things get. “Want some of this orange? It’s tasty.”
“No thanks.”
Hastings frowned; apparently this was the wrong answer. In fact the orange did look tasty. Why was Oren withholding himself? He watched the man wolf it down, then toss the rind in the trash. “It’s funny, you don’t seem like the kind of guy who’d go out and get a tattoo for no reason. It raises the issue of stability.”
“Look, if you’re worried that I won’t stick around, let me assure you: I’m fully prepared to sign a contract for as long as you say. A year. Two years, if you prefer.”
“The board will insist on one. For protection.”
“I don’t need protection.”<
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“Not yours,” Hastings said. “Ours. According to Janis Lee, the teacher you’ll be replacing, she’s coming back next year, baby or no baby. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t. Babies change things, don’t they?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well believe me, they do. Babies, wives, houses. The whole catastrophe, as they say.”
Oren laughed. “A little catastrophe,” he said, “might be good for some people.”
“Maybe so. Anyway listen, bottom line?” Hastings pushed back his chair. “I’d like to say we’ll think about your application and get back to you, but frankly we’re in real need here, so if you want the job, it’s yours.”
“Great.” In a small way Oren felt disappointed: he’d been hoping for greater resistance, the friction of a formidable challenge. But perhaps that would come later.
“You’ll be a long-term sub to start. The certification requirements you’ll have to deal with over the summer. There are special arrangements we can make. You’ll have some pretty boring dues to pay next year, frankly. That is, if you’re still here.”
“I’ve got no other plans.”
“Plans change. Take a day or two to think it over. I’ll hunt up a copy of this year’s curriculum. It won’t be hard: it’s pretty much the same as last year’s. You’ll find your worksheets and benchmark goals laid out for you there. A man of your potential should have no problem following along.”
Oren nodded. Was he being teased? “I’ll do my best.”
“And if the actual turns out not to be your speed? What then?”
“I’ll adjust my speed,” he said.
Not twenty-four hours later, Oren was offered a much better job at the state Historical Society, with a higher salary, greater freedom, and more flexible hours. He turned it down at once. The last thing he wanted was more free and flexible hours. He’d had too many free hours already and spent them too meagerly, too wastefully, too unwisely, too unwell. His faith in freedom was broken; he wanted to be bound by other people’s schedules, live the unfree inflexible life, like everyone else. So he said no to the better job, and yes to the duller one, because that, he seemed to recall, was how you went about the maturity business, by saying no to some things and yes to others. The greater the refusal, the fuller the reward. To say no was the key. To say no, and go on saying it, until yes sprang open like a magic door, like a lover’s thighs, a parting sea…
Nowadays he had it pretty much perfected. Now he awoke each morning in a bed with no partner, in a house with no character, read a paper with no news, consumed a glass of juice with no pulp and a bowl of yogurt with no fat, kissed no one good-bye, spent his mornings addressing students with no interest in a subject with no parameters and for which in any case he had no training, and his afternoons wandering the hallways with no particular purpose, making no plans, no decisions, no mistakes, all in the service of fulfilling his duties as an acting assistant principal in a middle school with no principal.
“Hey, how you doin’, Mr. Pierce.”
“Hey, Mr. Pierce, they’re looking for you in the office.”
Strange: for all his expeditions over the years, his peripatetic yo-yoing across the country, Oren had never actually landed in America before, never docked, unloaded, and established a colony in the heartland. And now here he was. Enfolded by forests and mountains, in a town with eight churches, one movie theater, four restaurants, one supermarket, and two state-run liquor stores. So much for creature comforts. And yet comfort-seeking creatures flocked up here regardless, to stay at the inns and watch the leaves fall and browse for antiques. And discomfort-seeking creatures too, hikers, hunters, skiers, fly-fishers, kayakers, people practiced in the arts of outdoor extremity, who put on cumbersome clothes and endured painful trials of endurance so as to remember—or was it forget?—what it felt like to be fully alive.
Oren had spent that first year in Carthage wandering up and down the same five blocks on Main Street, his brain burbling like a fountain with the novelty of it all. Here he was, he’d think, going to the quaint little store, where the pies and the fudge were made in back and the bell over the screen door jingled when he walked in. Here he was driving right up to the quaint little post office to mail a letter, parking in a space with no meter, standing in no line. Here he was depositing his monthly check at the quaint little bank, where the teller, with her teased blond hair and woolly sweater, greeted him by name, as if just by opening an account he’d become personally endeared to her. Here he was, venturing out into the bug-infested woods, cycling on the nonexistent shoulders of winding, treacherous country roads, diving into the bone-cold, shadow-drenched, seemingly bottomless old marble quarry, and then coming home at the end of the day to gaze dreamily at the sunset from an actual Adirondack chair on an actual wraparound porch with a view of, unless he was mistaken, the actual Adirondacks, drinking a glass of dark, sediment-heavy local beer and feeling, if not inner peace, some of the precarious calm of a truce. Around him the creatures were tuning up their instruments. The mournful coo of doves in the driveway, the demented warbling of blackbirds in the locust trees, the phlegmatic bellows of the cows, shackled and stoic in their decrepit stalls, from the dairy farm across the road…what a ruckus the world made! You’d think all that noise must have meant something. But what?
True, there were no museums, the restaurants were awful, the movies crap, the bookstore a joke, and the local gene pool, in its doughy, homogenous whiteness, a less than inviting place to swim. But though he regretted the losses he did not regret them entirely. Losses after all were what he’d stayed for. Losses were what he’d hoped to gain.
It was difficult to admit, even to himself, how relieved he was to have slipped free of the city’s net. All his life he’d been learning the best things; how good it felt, how weirdly necessary, to learn the other ones. To drink bad coffee, eat abysmal food, see terrible mainstream movies, hear vile, tinny, amateurish music…unshackled at last from the surface discriminations, that tyrannical train of knowingness and connoisseurship he’d been riding for years, mistaking scenery for experience along the way. Now other forms of transport would have to be found. Other scenery. Other experience.
“Hey, Mr. Pierce.”
“Hey, Mr. Pierce.”
His dreams that first year were a frolic through space. They vaulted up from his austere little futon, profuse, fantastic. In his loneliness and displacement he’d felt like a jailhouse philosopher gazing up at the stars. They’d been there all along, of course, but he hadn’t seen them—the city’s brightness had lain over them like a veil. You had to turn off the power to get a clear view. It was the absence of light, not the presence, that stirred his imagination. The vacancy that must be filled up from the bottom, in a new way.
And then in time the dullness set in. The team meetings. The parent conferences. The “conversations” over lunch in the teachers’ lounge, in which he pretended to care who won the seventh-grade basketball game or who had seen what television show the night before. Soon he was no longer quite so enlivened by his new circumstances. For one thing they were no longer new. No longer could it be said that he was in flight from a previous life. From now on he was in flight not from, but to. But to what? And on what wings?
“Dude, my locker won’t open.”
“I’m like so dead.”
“Me too.”
Onward he went, down the hallway, past the faculty lounge, the special ed room, the band room. In the language lab kids were hunched in their cubicles, stiffly parroting back the blockish, unwieldy expressions. Il est quatre heures et demi. Everywhere he looked he saw the child he had been. The curse of the profession: you were forever being reminded of how for all your travels you had only made a circle.
Like most young men he had sought to build from his yearnings a great tower. But the babble of competing voices in his head had halted construction. Too many days and nights had sifted through his fingers. Unrecoverable.
“Hola, M
r. Pierce.”
“Bonjour, Mr. Pierce.”
“Guten Tag, Mr. P.”
The girls in home ec were baking lemon scones. The smell of rising sugars had taken over the hallway, infiltrated the rooms.
Of course without Sabine he was lonely up here, massively and spectacularly lonely: he’d be the first to concede that. His prospects were limited. Unmarried women his age were few. There weren’t many unmarried men his age either. When old friends visited from the city, he’d enjoy a brief boost, but by Sunday some of the novelty would fade, and they’d pack up their strollers and skis and whatever maple products and artisanal cheese they’d bought to boost the local economy and head for the Thruway. Beautiful place you’ve got here, they’d say. You’re lucky you found it. And yet he sensed their impatience to get out of here already, away from beauty’s thin consolations and into something more vital, more dense.
Poor Oren, he imagined them saying to each other on the drive home. He should get a dog. He’s got the space.
Somehow I can’t see Oren with a dog.
We couldn’t see him moving way up here either, but he did, didn’t he?
For no good reason.
No good reason.
No good reason.
“Ah, just the man I’m looking for.”
He’d been standing at the school’s back door, gazing out at a sky stretched thin, at a lawn bleached stiff. Already the kids wore ski coats in the morning to wait for the bus, breathing clouds of hoarfrost in the spectral light. Men were stalking the foothills for deer. The woods were full of bleeding creatures caught in unseen traps. You took your life in your hands, Oren thought, just going out.
He turned to face Zoe Bender, bearing down on him in her black knee-length toreador pants and her sensible flat shoes.