by Nancy Pearl
The third blemish on his otherwise blue-skies childhood was the situation with the Hebrew school bus. This bus picked up all the twelve-year-old Jewish boys after school two days a week and took them to the temple to study with Rabbi Elias and Cantor Ferber in preparation for their bar mitzvahs. Two hours later the lucky boys who lived on the other side of Thirty-First Street got driven home. The talk on the bus, both to and from Hebrew school, was almost exclusively about sex and girls. Generations of Jewish boys in Tulsa learned about sex on the Hebrew school bus. The problem was that George rode the bus only one way, since he could walk home when Hebrew school was over. This meant that he learned only half as much as Michael Minter, say, or all the other boys who got to ride the bus both ways. George worried about this a lot and wondered how he could possibly measure up to them when they started sleeping with girls and all the other boys knew things of which George was unaware.
Lizzie thought this was a perfectly wonderful story and wondered whether there was some kinky sexual practice that occurred among Jewish men bar mitzvah’d in Tulsa at a rate much higher than the national average and that could be ascribed to the erroneous information the boys had exchanged. “In any case,” she told George when they were lying in bed one night, “you don’t seem to have missed anything important.” George was greatly relieved that Lizzie felt that way.
* The Wide Receiver *
Maverick was one of the wide receivers. The other was Loren “Speedy” Gonzalez, probably the worst player on the team, although a lot of the reason for that was genetics, not lack of enthusiasm or desire. Speedy was slim verging on skinny and, under orders from the coaches, he ate constantly and spent a lot of time trying to muscle up in the weight room, to no good effect. Ranger avoided throwing to him as much as possible, but of course the opposing teams would double- and triple-team Maverick. It was discouraging for everyone. When Speedy wasn’t on the football field, in class, or the weight room, he played bass in a rock band. What Lizzie remembered best about Speedy was that even away from his bass he was always tapping his foot to some rhythm only he could hear. During sex too. It was more than a bit distracting.
* Jack McConaghey *
Lizzie overslept the first day of classes spring quarter of her freshman year and, after running across the campus and dashing up four flights of stairs, she was out of breath and already late to her twentieth-century poetry class. It was taught by the best-known poet on the English faculty, Addison “The Terror” Terrell. Keeping his nickname in mind helped Lizzie, and no doubt others, remember that Terrell, who had won or been nominated for the Pulitzer and National Book Award several times in his distant and not-so-distant past, pronounced his name with the accent on the first syllable, Terrell like terror, not like Tuh-RELL. His fellow poets and departmental colleagues knew Terrell as a formidable and ferocious critic who brooked no careless language, who hated loosey-goosey pronouns, who knew exactly what he liked and what was good (very little and nothing by a woman or anyone under, say, the age of forty). No surprise that the same group of poets made up each category. He didn’t hesitate to let you (especially if you were a student) know what he thought, whether you’d asked or not. He was equally venomous in deconstructing a pantoum or a petition to the dean. He delighted (or seemed to, anyway) in using your own words to impale you, then somehow twisting them so that he left a gaping wound in your writing hand, or your head, or your heart. No real writer—although Terrell never actually acknowledged that there was another one besides himself—wanted him to review his (never her: Terrell refused to acknowledge the existence of what he invariably called “poetesses”) new book of poetry, even if a bad review generated the same amount of publicity that you’d get with a good one, or even more, sometimes, if you happened to write a letter back to the editor complaining about the perfidious Terrell’s review.
Lizzie read and wrote a lot of poetry. At sixteen she’d won a contest sponsored by Seventeen, and her poem was published in the magazine. She approached poetry in a careless, loving sort of way. She planned to major in English knowing it would, at the very least, seriously annoy Mendel and Lydia. Hence, the need to spend time with the Terror every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday from eight to nine (that’s a.m.), April 1 to June 24.
“Hah! No foolin’ about that startin’ date,” George would have added, had she known him then.
She entered the room just as Terrell finished calling roll and then made her way to the first open seat, which happened to be in the middle of the first row and thus involved climbing over four unhappy pairs of knees. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry” she muttered as she sat down.
“Your name?”
“Uh, Bultmann, Lizzie.”
“Ah,” he said grimly. Did he know her parents? Surely he didn’t. It was a huge faculty and she couldn’t imagine what they would have to say to one another if they had ever met at a cocktail party. To which her parents never went, anyway.
“Well, now that the late Miss Bultmann has arrived, hand her a syllabus, Mr. McConaghey, so we can then begin. This is a class, as I’m sure you’re aware, devoted to the major poets of the twentieth century, the century that is drawing to a close. Ours was a century that produced much remarkable writing, both prose and poetry. But, one could argue, and I do” he smirked “the achievements of the poets far outweigh those of the writers of prose. What else can you can conclude from one hundred years that began with John Betjeman, included Ted Hughes, Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, and Philip Larkin, and will conclude with John Ashbery and W. S. Merwin?”
This was clearly a rhetorical question, but the boy sitting next to Lizzie—the one who’d given her the syllabus—raised his hand. “Yes, McConaghey, what is it?” Terrell asked without any enthusiasm, as though he knew what was coming next and was already finished with it.
“You know, the reading that I’ve done about Eliot and Pound, in preparation for this class . . .”
(In preparation for this class? Lizzie thought incredulously. Who is this guy?)
“Yes?” Dismissively.
“Well, I wonder why we consider them major poets when they were not, in fact, particularly nice men. How can someone who’s—well, ‘evil’ is too strong a term—but at least someone who behaves immorally in significant ways, as well as being slimy in their interpersonal relationships—”
Terrell heaved a dramatic sigh. “Didn’t we go through this last quarter, McConaghey? Didn’t we discuss this for more hours than I, personally, care to remember? When we talked about all those Romantic poets? I’m sure we did. Perhaps you weren’t paying quite enough attention. ‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know’—doesn’t that convey a certain je ne sais quoi when it comes to the treatment of the women in one’s life? And didn’t I argue convincingly enough for you that Byron was a great poet, though you wouldn’t want to leave him and your girlfriend together unchaperoned? Or your boyfriend, for that matter. Do you have such a person in your life, sir?”
Uneasy laughter rolled through the class. Without waiting for an answer, he went on. “And, Mr. McConaghey, don’t I recall from some of our ex parte conversations that at least two of your favorites—Housman, wasn’t it, and Larkin?—were not such upstanding individuals? Hadn’t they a few quirks, shall we call them, here and there? Anti-Semitism and so forth. Nastiness. Yet, in the case of Larkin, who amongst us could not be moved by ‘Dockery and Son’ or ‘Church Going’? Not you. Nor I. But don’t let me get started on Housman, of whom I’m not nearly as fond as you’ve indicated you are. Duh DUH duh DUH duh DUH duh DUH. ‘From Clee to heaven,’ forsooth. Spare me those green hills and dales of Shropshire.” He mimicked the voice of a young woman. ‘Oh, soldier, show me your sword.’ I don’t call that poetry but rather nausea-inducing.”
Lizzie immediately felt offended on behalf of the long-dead Housman, and she suspected that Mr. McConaghey, sitting beside her, did as well. There was more laughter from the class. It seemed that The Terror knew how to command his audience.
&nb
sp; At this point in what could only be termed a rant, Terrell made an amazing face. It somehow combined a leer and a sneer. Lizzie felt sure she had seen both a leer and a sneer before, but never the two together. Assuming someone who was not Addison Terrell could ever duplicate it, it deserved its own name. Perhaps ‘sleer’?
“As for Pound, well, any man who can write that perfect poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’ has no need to fear for his immortal soul. Or any defense by me, particularly in front of a class of undergraduates who can barely distinguish between blank verse, free verse, and bad verse. Now, any more questions before I dismiss class so that you can all begin work on the first assignment?”
Some poor fool seated right behind Lizzie said, “Uh, Professor Terrell?”
“Yes,” Terrell said with exaggerated patience.
“How do you spell ‘Housman’?”
“Good Lord, who cares? There’s no possible reason you would ever need to write his name down.”
Lizzie, heart sinking as she listened to Terrell’s monologue, had been scanning the syllabus. She raised her hand.
“Ah, it seems that the late Miss—make that Ms., of course, in deference to the feminists that I am sure are amongst us—Bultmann has a question. Or a comment?”
“Question,” Lizzie said. “I don’t see Edna St. Vincent Millay on the syllabus. Are we going to read her this semester?”
Terrell stared at her with interest. “Are you demented?” he asked, sounding genuinely curious. Then, without waiting for her answer, went on, “You’re referring, I trust, to Edna St. Vincent O’Lay? That ‘Oh God, the pain’ girl? I can’t imagine that you would really think I’d include anyone, any poetess, who wrote about burning her candle at both ends.” Wiggling his eyebrows, he went on. “What in the world is that supposed to mean? That she was careless with matches? That she was a pyromaniac? But that’s not the worst of it—the line that makes me blench is ‘He turned to me at midnight with a cry.’ What was that cry? I wonder. ‘Yeeoww!’? ‘Whoopee!’? ‘Man the barricades!’? ‘Up and at ’em!’? Good Lord, the possibilities are seemingly endless.
“You, Jack,” he said, turning to Lizzie’s fellow Housman admirer. “You’re a great success with the girls, I suspect. Correct?”
“Not bad, I’d say, but by no means perfect.”
“Yet surely you can enlighten us: What is that particular cry at midnight?”
It took long enough for Jack to answer that Lizzie thought he might be ignoring the question. Then, with a wicked, knowing grin, he said, “I believe, sir, that it was probably something like ‘Oh, my God, I think I left the iron on.’”
Lizzie giggled, slightly ahead of the whole class breaking into laughter. Terrell chose not to respond to this directly. Instead he turned to Lizzie, who had been hoping that he’d forgotten her. But no.
“You, the O’Lay fan.” He scanned the class list. “Bultmann, wasn’t it?” She nodded.
“Let me hazard a guess in the form of a few declarative sentences. You write poetry. Little rhyming verses about the pain of young love, the agony of adolescence, each packed with trite observations on the beauty of the world and your own personal hell.”
Lizzie heard a sharp intake of breath from the boy—Jack—sitting next to her. He moved restlessly in his chair and she could feel him getting ready to speak.
“Wait a—” he began.
“Well, listen, Ms. Bultmann,” Terrell continued, his voice getting louder and louder. He slammed the grade book on the table in front of him and screamed, “I want no little-girl poets, no O’Lay wannabes, in my class. Do you hear me? Stop writing whatever sloppy verses come out of that head of yours or drop this class. Now.”
He flicked his hand, dismissing them all. “I have no high hopes for any of you. Go, thou, and, if you dare, read some poetry. Not your own poems, Ms. Bultmann. Never your own,” he concluded. “In fact, I’d suggest you burn them.”
Lizzie sat, red-faced and stunned, as the rest of students drifted out of the classroom, a few coming by her desk to pat her back in solidarity, or just smile at her in what looked like sympathy. She knew what Marla would do in a similar situation: she’d march herself to the dean of Arts and Sciences and make a formal complaint about Terrell. She wasn’t sure she had the fortitude to take that step. Jack waited for Lizzie to get up before he stood and spoke to her. “So. Millay. And another Housman fan. I think I just might be in love.”
Lizzie looked at him. All her life she would remember that the perfect response came to her unbidden, as though it were a gift from the gods, a line from a poem they’d been assigned in AP English last year. “Really? ‘Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’ That’s your position, is it?”
He laughed and took her arm. “Yes, Christopher Marlowe and I are more alike than you might think. Let’s get coffee and be poetry lovers together. You can bind my wounds, and I’ll bind yours. Do you have another class right now?”
At that moment Lizzie would have gladly given up the rest of the quarter’s classes to spend time with Jack. “I have anthro at eleven but nothing until then.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
As they walked, Jack said, “I’m really sorry you went through that with Terrell. He’s always been pretty nasty, but that was much farther than I’ve ever heard him go with a student.”
“What does he have against Millay, or me, for that matter?”
“It isn’t you, or Millay. It’s just that he’s a miserable human being. My guess is that he resents being regarded by the critics as second-rate, plus he has to teach a bunch of undergraduates whose idea of poetry is probably nursery rhymes. He’s stuck with this life he hates.”
“That all may be true,” Lizzie said, “but it doesn’t give him a special dispensation to be nasty.”
“No, of course not. But there’s a line by Housman that I’ve always felt applied to Terrell: ‘The mortal sickness of a mind / Too unhappy to be kind.’ That helps me deal with him.”
They walked to Gilmore’s, one of the many coffee shops close to the quad that sprang up, shut down, and shortly reopened under a different name with amazing regularity. It was, as usual, packed with other students.
“Um,” Lizzie said when they finally found an empty table. “Do you think you could empty that ashtray? I’ll get sick if I look at it.”
“Ah, there’s a contradiction, a poetic sensibility and yet lacking a love of smoking to complete the very picture of a dissolute soul.”
“Hardly dissolute. My parents are serial smokers and when I was little I used to go around hiding all the ashtrays and hoping that would make them stop. I thought it was disgusting. And, as you can see, I still do.”
“I take it they never did.”
“Nope. Probably even as we speak one or both of them are lighting up. And they don’t have a speck of poetry between them. They like it that way.”
Jack grabbed the full ashtray and went up to the counter. When he came back with their coffees and a lemon poppy seed muffin for them to share, she said, “I know I’m probably irrational about this, but did you wash your hands after emptying the ashtray?”
“Wow. You’re just a little intense, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes, I guess so. About this, anyway.”
“I’m awfully glad I don’t smoke,” Jack said, sitting down. “We almost certainly wouldn’t be here together.”
He held out his hands for her inspection. His nails were short and very clean. His black hair fell into his eyes and she wanted more than anything to brush it off his forehead. She could smell the shampoo he must have used that morning; it contrasted sharply with Mendel’s, which was tangy and unpleasant, something to keep dandruff at bay. Oh, why was she sitting here with this gorgeous, smart (and poetry-loving!) guy and thinking about her father’s shampoo?
“Me too,” Lizzie assured him. “Otherwise I’d probably get up and leave.”
“You’ve never smoked? Not even to see what it’s like?”
> “Well, not cigarettes, anyway. ‘I neither smoke nor drink, but I have my memories,’” she said, mock tendentiously.
Jack laughed. “Did you make that up? Is it true?”
“No,” Lizzie told him. “I read it somewhere. And the drinking part is definitely not true. I do love beer.”
“Really? Beer? You don’t look like a beer girl to me.”
“What does a beer girl look like?”
Jack thought about it for a while.
“Well, where I come from, the beer-drinking girls are fast and loose, with loud laughs and big voices and big hair.”
She laughed and then sighed and thought of all those Friday nights, all those boys, during the football season and afterward. “I guess I’d have to say that being fast and loose doesn’t come in one style. Hey,” she said, changing the subject. “Did you really suffer through a different class with Terrell?”
“I did. Honestly, he’s not so bad. He’s a bully, of course, and just a little full of himself. But he has this sly sense of humor.”
“Ha ha,” Lizzie said dryly. “Save me from whatever sly sense of humor he might have. And don’t for a moment think I didn’t get the oh-so-not-humorous implications of ‘you bind my wounds,’ et cetera.”