Joanne Dobson - Karen Pelletier 06 - Death without Tenure

by Joanne Dobson

  Graciella Whoevershewas stalked out, moving easily between aghast and goggle-eyed restaurant patrons, not one of whom made the slightest move to stop her. The door curtains closed behind her, and I turned to look at Joe. He was on the floor, leaning up against the bar, his nose bleeding into a wad of cocktail napkins.

  What does it say about me that I didn’t even feel sorry for him?

  Fri. Night 10/2

  From: kpelletier@enfield.edu

  To: charles.piotrowski@army.mil.gov

  Subject: I Miss You

  Charlie, life without you…oh, God! And it doesn’t help that Amanda is on the other side of the world, too. I haven’t heard a word from her since she arrived in Kathmandu. Okay, okay, I know, she’s a grown-up—I should stop worrying about her. But…backpacking in Nepal with a guy I’ve never met! So, they’re seeking spiritual enlightenment? Why can’t she do that at the Episcopal Church across the street from campus?

  Also, speaking of campus, there seems to be a problem at work, but I’ll wait until you call to tell you about that.

  Call SOON.

  I love you! Karen

  Chapter 3

  Monday 10/5

  “Trickster is a shape shifter, a mischief-maker. He’s tricky, bawdy, obscene, disruptive—and a major culture hero of traditional American Indian narrative. As you can imagine, he makes for some unforgettable stories.”

  Except for one beautiful, poised brown-skinned girl wearing a hijab, my American-literature students sat slouched and twisted in their chairs. They’d dragged themselves out of bed in time to get to this nine o’clock Monday morning class, but they seemed somehow to have forgotten their bones. The Enfield College classroom was a large, high-ceilinged space with tall windows and embrasures so deep students sometimes chose to sit on the sills. We were six long weeks into the fall semester, a low-energy time. No one was on the windowsill today.

  I’d come into my office on Sunday afternoon to pack my tenure box. The building had been empty then except for a new janitor, a slender young South American—Peruvian, I thought—who was mopping the hallway floors. His dark-green uniform shirt had “Ricardo” embroidered above the pocket. I stopped and introduced myself, but his English wasn’t up to much conversation.

  Earlene’s pep-talk had calmed my fears—for the moment. I packed the books, journals, offprints of articles, my activity report, and detailed C.V. into the box. Almost done. I still had to put the finishing touches on the manuscript of a quirky essay speculating what Emily Dickinson’s poetic “career” might have looked like had she been born into a family of Lowell millworkers rather than that of a prosperous Amherst lawyer. All I had to do now was spend a few hours in the college library checking quotes and citations and I’d be ready to print it out, pack it up, and close the box.

  But when was I going to do that? My tenure submission was due a week from this coming Friday, and I had a full week ahead of me, including extended office hours for these AmLit students who were in the midst of writing mid-term papers. The following week wasn’t much better, since I had to grade all those papers.

  “So, what do you think about this Native Trickster figure?” I asked my students. “Let’s speculate on his significance to American literature.”

  Dead silence. It’s odd how individual classes have individual personalities. This one was smart and quirky, and, for the most part, I enjoyed them. Cat Andrews was wearing jeans and pajama tops printed with little red and blue boats. She was eating cornflakes from a plastic bowl, and today her buzz cut was tipped with neon yellow. Hank Brody, tall, thin, and disheveled, with matted straw-colored dreadlocks, was barefoot. His eyes were at half-mast. Garrett Reynolds, a brown-haired suburban kid who seemed to major in Abercrombie & Fitch, was busy reading something on his laptop computer.

  I asked my students to turn to the Winnebago tribal story I’d assigned them to read for class. “So, okay,” I said, “here’s Trickster, starving in the wilderness during a brutal winter. He finds a prosperous village whose chief has a handsome son. By means of a pair of elk’s kidneys and an elk’s liver, Trickster turns himself into a beautiful woman.”

  Someone in the class giggled. There was a general clearing of throats.

  “Trickster then marries the chief’s son and bears him three sons. So, through the use of magic, he takes advantage of the village hierarchy and of the handsome son. Power and sex, right? In the end his magic fails—the supposedly female Trickster jumps over a fire pit and drops ‘something very rotten.’”

  That musical giggle again. I looked around. I thought I knew where it was coming from.

  “And Trickster is revealed as the mischievous, masculine, shape shifter. What purpose do you think such a tale might serve?”

  Blank stares. There’s nothing quite like classroom resistance. It has an energy all its own, an impenetrable cloud of negative ions charging the air between the professor and students. Stephanie Hart studiously drew manga characters in the margins of her American literature anthology. She was the class nodder, the student who bobbed her head in affirmation to any point I made. Every class has one. I always fall for them at first, thinking I’ve found a terrifically brilliant kid. Until about the third day of class. But I wasn’t getting much feedback at the moment—even from her.

  I cleared my throat, ostentatiously. “Okay, boys and girls, I do understand. A frank discussion of this scene requires vulgar language and images, and you guys are just not used to talking dirty. Right?” Cat Andrews grinned sheepishly and nudged Stephanie. “Well, at least not in the classroom. Is that the problem?” A little smile. Eyebrows raised in inquiry. Hmmmmm?

  Garrett Reynolds, the kid with the laptop, was the first to break. “I don’t know what to think about it,” he blurted out. “In fact, I don’t even know why we have to think about it. This is supposed to be a course in American literature, and there’s nothing American or literary about these…tales.” His tone was querulous, as if he suspected he wasn’t getting sufficient value for his high-end tuition dollar. “They’re just primitive and crude.” He looked back down at his laptop and typed a few words; I’d distracted him from his e-mail.

  Hank Brody, still slumped in his chair, hazel eyes half shut, spoke without sitting up, as I’d known he would. His dreads hung over pale cheeks covered lightly with the scars of past acne. “Of course it’s American literature. How could you get any more American than this? These stories go way back, before the arrival of the European invaders.” He and Garrett had been feuding since the first day of class, and I suspected his languid, not-worth-the-effort, posture was designed to infuriate his antagonist.

  “Colonists,” Garrett corrected him. If it was possible for a six-foot-three football player to sound prissy, he did. “Not invaders—colonists.”

  “Invaders,” Hank insisted, almost deigning to open his eyes. “There’s a huge body of preconquest Native narrative—mischievous, magical tales like this one, creation stories, heroic epics, historical narratives. It’s the real thing—American literature.”

  “Preconquest? You’re way overboard with this political-correctness stuff, Brody. None of these so-called narratives were ever written down until the Europeans came. How can you say they’re American? America only began in 1776.”

  In the classroom, heads turned back and forth to follow the argument. Cat Andrews peeled a banana and let the peel fall next to her sheepskin slipper. Stephanie nodded.

  Hank responded to Garrett without raising his hand. “The United States began in 1781, Reynolds—that doesn’t mean America began then.”

  I seized the opportunity—a teachable moment if I ever saw one. “If you remember, the first day of class I asked you a couple of questions. I said those questions would problematize everything we learned in this course. What were they?”

  Garrett paged though his notebook, but Ayesha Ahmed, my one Muslim student, the dignified girl in the head scarf, raised her hand. “The questions were: ‘Who is an American?’ and ‘What
is literature?’”

  “This story isn’t literature, for sure.” Garrett twisted his lips. “I think it’s just plain silly. Magic? Hah!”

  Ayesha laughed out loud. So she was the source of the musical giggle. “Yes, isn’t it silly—gloriously, magically silly.” The daughter of a Moroccan diplomat to the United Nations, Ayesha looked so modest in the lace-edged hijab, stark white against her dark skin, that I sometimes forgot how smart and funny she was. “That’s what makes it so brilliant—”

  “Brilliant?” Garrett snorted.

  Ayesha gave him a stare befitting a queen. “Well, I think this tale is hilarious, low comedy at its best. Very much in the folk tradition. I know African stories like this.”

  I practically purred at her. “You mean to say, Ayesha, that these American Indian tales connect not only to the concept of ‘American,’ but to an even more universal literature?”

  “Yes, of course. Just think about how complex the story is—it toys with our assumptions—deconstructs them, right, Professor? Nothing is what it seems to be. The categories we think of as being absolutely fixed—man/woman, animal/human—aren’t…dependable. An elk’s kidneys can become human breasts. A man can have babies. In the next story, Trickster defecates so much he almost suffocates in it. Think about the imagination that went into conceiving that scene!” She giggled. “It makes you laugh from your belly instead of from your brain.”

  Garrett scowled at her. Then he turned abruptly back to his laptop and began typing in short bursts.

  Hank Brody, not one of the computer-privileged, was writing at top speed in his notebook. In fact, this small-town, working-class boy didn’t seem to be privileged in any way but in brains, and of those he had plenty; he was the kind of student for whom full scholarships had been invented. Now he ran thin fingers through his mop of cornhusk braids and ventured a glance at Ayesha. He adjusted his posture; when speaking to Ayesha he always sat up straight. “It is a unique folk tradition, like you said.” In the blatant disregard for style affected by some high-minded students—whose style is to be beyond style—Hank wore his matted dreadlocks hanging halfway down his back, and his usual washed-out blue sweatshirt and frayed khaki shorts. “If it problematizes such fundamental categories as who is a man and who is a woman, what is natural and what is magical, why can’t it also problematize other categories. Who is an American? What is literature?”

  “Yes, right—it’s the same kind of thing, isn’t it?” It was as if the two of them were having a private conversation. Their eyes held a second too long. Then Ayesha turned to me and tittered. “Trickster even carries his penis in a box! Think of the psychosexual implications of an image like that?” Everyone laughed, and the classroom atmosphere lightened up. My one Muslim student may have been religiously observant, but she was no prude.

  Class was almost over. Stephanie’s head bobble was beginning to slow. I began to sum up. “Stories are central to all cultures—they meet primal needs. Think about how cruel and meaningless life would be without the stories that offer meaning, purpose, and healing, that provide political and cultural cohesion for the tribe. Any tribe. The kind of physical comedy that characterizes these tales has a long, and literary, tradition, often in the theater. Remember how bawdy Shakespeare can be—and Molière. These Native narratives may not have been written down, but, like European drama, they were performed.

  “We are physical beings, the Trickster reminds us, with all the powers and limitations of the physical body. But we can rise above hunger, cold, physical danger, even gender. Like Trickster, we can transform ourselves, only we do it through stories. During the hungry, dark, cold winters in the longhouse, the storyteller would have told this crude comic tale with his whole voice—its pace, rhythms, tones, shouts, and whispers. His body would have taken on different poses as Trickster changed shape. For this story…well, you can imagine the postures.”

  “Uggh,” Garrett said.

  “Hmm, performance…That’s interesting.” Ayesha said. “Sounds to me like it’s very up-to-date. Sounds like spoken-word poetry—like a poetry slam.”

  Hank stared at her openly. “That is so brilliant. It’s just like a poetry slam.”

  She looked at him, then dropped her gaze. What was going on between those two?

  “Exactly,” I concluded. “Performance of the word, not just the reading of it in print. And unlike European drama, the tales were passed orally from one generation to the next. So when we study Native stories in an American literature course…” I turned my attention to Garrett, “it’s not as if we depart from the categories of ‘American’ and ‘literature’—we simply broaden and enrich them.” The wall clock ticked to nine-fifty and books slammed shut.

  Hank Brody zipped up his battered green backpack and grinned as he passed me. “Bye, Doc. Great class.”

  “Terrific insights, Hank,” I replied. I did wish he’d get a decent haircut.

  ***

  When I entered my office and caught sight of the black-and-white speckled file box containing my tenure materials, I recalled Miles’ warning and felt a brief pang in my heart. Was it possible all that work would be for nothing? What would I do if Enfield College denied me tenure? Where would I go? Would I have to leave Charlie behind?

  Then I heard the e-mail click announcing a new message. Amanda? But, no, nothing from my daughter. Just another note from an anxious student. Where was Amanda? It was a week now since she’d called from the hotel in Kathmandu, and I was becoming more and more concerned by her silence. I fired off an e-mail: call me! Then I checked through the 27 >new messages I’d received since last evening: announcements of meetings and deadlines; the inevitable penis-enhancement and work-from-home opportunities. Then there was an e-mail from the mother of one of my freshman students explaining in detail that Melody-Ann was an extraordinarily sensitive young woman who suffered painfully when called upon in class. I responded that I would be mindful of the situation, meaning…virtually nothing. I call on all my students. It’s a part of academic life. Get over it.

  Now here was a message whose title read: Catherine Andrews invited you to join Facebook. After class, Cat must have scuffed in her sheepskin slippers right to her dorm-room computer and sent the message. I didn’t have a Facebook account, so I simply deleted the message. Next time I saw her I would explain that it was nothing personal, but, for reasons of privacy and time-management, I avoided any involvement with social networking sites.

  Then the phone rang. “Karen?” A woman’s voice.

  “Yes?” But I knew instantly who it was, and my nerves seemed not to jangle but to congeal. Especially in my stomach. “Connie?” My sister. I hadn’t heard from her in weeks.

  I walked the receiver on its long cord over to the door, which I closed for privacy. “Is Mom okay?”

  For the past five years our mother had been living with Connie in Lowell. It was the best arrangement. Mom was comfortable in a neighborhood she knew. She got confused a lot, our mother did, but she felt at home at Connie’s.

  “That’s why I’m calling, Karen. I need your help.” Her voice sounded strained, as if this were a difficult conversation for her.

  “Sure,” I said, “how much?” I send her five hundred dollars a month for our mother’s expenses.

  There was a long, cool silence before she said, irritated now, “That is just so like you, Karen.”

  “What? You asked for help.” I sat in the green vinyl chair.

  “And, of course, you offer money—Ms. Gottrocks.” Connie had worked at WalMart ever since it came to Lowell. A few years earlier she’d been promoted to manager of the electronics department. So she was doing okay financially, for a woman with a community college degree, but she had this perception that because I was teaching at a wealthy school, I must be rich myself.

  “I’m so far from being Ms. Gottrocks, Connie, you can’t even imagine it. I’m stretching my budget as far as it’ll go, sending what I do send. What more do you want?” Why do our conv
ersations always turn into squabbles.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I want.” She cleared her throat. “You’re going to have to take Mom for a couple of weeks.”

  “What!” My mother was increasingly disoriented. Because Connie lived right in the middle of a familiar town, she could leave Mom alone during the day when she went to work. But out here in the woods? No. Mom would wander off and be eaten by bears. And as for taking her onto campus with me? I shuddered. The academic bears were even fiercer. Especially now.

  “Connie, I can’t do it. I’m up for tenure. I have to watch every move I make.”

  “Is that so?” Her tone was dry. “Well, Sister, let me tell you something. You may be up for tenure, but I’ve been invited to Bentonville.” She said this with a reverent emphasis on the final word, as if she were announcing that she’d been invited to the White House or the Vatican.

  “Oh?” Where the hell was Bentonville? What was it?

  “Yes, Bentonville, WalMart headquarters in Arkansas. I’m a finalist for store manager. They want me out there for interviews and—if all goes well—training.”

  “Oh, Connie. That’s marvelous! Congratulations! I wish you the best of luck.” I was genuinely happy for her. Just because Connie and I have never gotten along doesn’t mean I wish her ill.

  “Thank you.” A pause. “So you’ll take her.”

  “No!” I could imagine the look on Sally Chenille’s face if she met my poor, stooped, confused mother in the English Department hallway. “No, I can’t possibly. Not now. Maybe later.”

  “Later’s too late.”

  But what would I do with Mom when I was teaching? Seat her in the back of the class? “What about Denise?” Our other sister.